Follow Team HTC-Columbia on Google Maps

As a former professional cyclist, nothing beats the thrill of being in the peloton and in racing towards the finish line. Although I’ve traded in my cycling career for life as a Googler, I’m still a fan and enjoy watching my former teammates and friends battle in the races like the Tour de France, which started on Saturday. While the cyclists were preparing to tackle the pave of Arrenberg and the Cols in the Alps, I got to thinking about the ways that we can bring that experience to the hundreds of millions of fans who will be following the Tour de France over the next few weeks. Google is home to many other cycling enthusiasts, so we got together to work on ways to build a My Tracks-based gadget that will allow all the other fans and to follow the action like never before.

The My Tracks application for Android phones lets you record and share with your own outdoor activities, and now Team HTC-Columbia will use a special version of the app with SRM to transmit their telemetry and location in real-time as they make their way through the 3,642 kilometers of the Tour de France. The nine riders (sadly, now eight, as Adam Hanson was injured on Sunday) on Team HTC-Columbia are carrying HTC Legend phones with ANT+ that use My Tracks to capture their location along with their power, heart rate, cadence and speed. On www.google.com/mytrackstour, you’ll see a Google Map showing the team members’ location on the course and a detailed telemetry report. You can observe how Michael Rogers’ heart rate spikes as he attacks the climbs in the Alps on Stage 9, see how many watts Mark Cavendish puts out in the sprint on the famous sprinters’ stage into Bordeaux, and see just how fast riders climb the famous Col du Tourmalet.

From the image above, you can see how Maxime Monfort took the lead during Stage 2 between Bruxelles and Spa yesterday. Right now, the riders are racing in Stage 3, which takes them across the border into France and you can follow all the latest action on our website or then directly on your own iGoogle page.

The team also built a map gadget that is available for you to embed on your own website or blog. We’re also publishing an API that any web developer or broadcaster can use to build their own custom application or use to enhance the live television coverage. I'm excited about the potential for web developers and broadcasters to make use of the API and data in creative ways to help all the Tour de France followers (myself included!) get even closer to the action.

This project was the work of many Googlers in their 20% time, and as cycling fans ourselves, we’re happy to be able to share it with the world. We hope you enjoy this unique way of following Team HTC-Columbia over the next few weeks.

Google Phrase Search Trick No Longer Works

One of the most popular and advanced search feature is phrase search. Google and other search engines let you find web pages that includes the exact phrase of you type. "By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are telling Google to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change," mentions Google's help center.

The nice thing about phrase search was that you didn't have to close the quotes. You could type ["Dual Polarization Antenna] and Google will assumed that you forgot to close the quotes. This was especially useful if you changed your query by adding new words or if you typed the query using a virtual keyboard.

Unfortunately, the trick no longer works:

At some point, you could even enter queries like [Dual-Polarization-Antenna] and Google returned the same results as if you typed ["Dual Polarization Antenna"].

Google Shows Related Videos

Google started to add links to the related videos for search results from sites like eHow, Howcast, GameTrailers or Hulu. Google shows the two additional videos from the same site below the main search result.



It's not the first time when Google tries to make the content of a site more discoverable. Google already shows sitelinks that highlight popular pages are from a site, search boxes for site search, navigation breadcrumbs, related topics from discussion boards.

Finding soccer stats with the Google Search Appliance

For the past few weeks, many football fans have been living and breathing just one thing: the World Cup. When they’re not watching on the matches, many people have flocked to FIFA.com, the source for the latest info on players, standings and scores.

With all these people looking for the latest and greatest on their favorite sport, we’re pleased that FIFA has chosen the Google Search Appliance to power search on their website. With the GSA, FIFA.com can provide universal search across all types of content. Try searching for “Messi” from FIFA.com’s search box, and you’ll see all kinds of data: statistics, news results, images and videos—all pertaining to Messi.

For more on the Google Search Appliance and how FIFA is putting it to work, check out our post on the Enterprise blog.

Grandmother’s guide to video chat

Often when I tell people that I work on the Google video chat, I heard stories about how they’ve used it to give a video tour of a new home to friends, introduce a baby to the relatives, keep in touch with traveling loved ones... the list goes on. This got me thinking about how convenient—and sometimes even magical—the experience of video chatting is.

So when I saw that my grandma—who loves keeping in touch with the family more than anyone—wasn’t set up to use video chat, I decided to help her get started. While doing so, it occurred to me how many people there must be out there in similar situations. If only there were a simple way that any grandmother could use to get started on her own...

Introducing the Grandmother’s Guide to Video Chat:

This video, along with a printable guide, can be accessed at google.com/chat/grandma. Feel free to share this link with your grandma—or grandpa—or, well, anyone who wants to video chat to help get them up and running.

And after your grandma is all set up, take a screenshot of you video chatting with her and email it to grammy324@gmail.com to share it with us. The first 100 people to do so will get a t-shirt, printable guide and VHS of the video (because if your grandma’s like mine, she’s still a cassette kind of girl).


In a few weeks, we’ll feature the best photos submitted on the Gmail blog.

More Customizable Google News

After many months of testing, Google News have redesigned the homepage and made it more customizable. One of the most important changes is that each group of related news has a topic ("Mobile industry", "Toyota", "Tropical storm Alex") and you can now easily subscribe to the topic.

Google News has a new section called "News for you" whose goal is now to show news about your interests. You can add custom news topics, select how often you read news about each topic and choose if you want to see the news grouped in sections or as an uninterrupted stream.

If you like some news site or dislike news sources that provide biased or irrelevant news, you can now personalize Google News and this list your preferences. Click on "Settings" at the top of the page, select "News settings" and start typing the sites you'd like to see more often or less often in Google News.

"Sources you promote or demote will be ranked differently for you (but not for anyone else) in your Google News search results and in the stories that you browse on the News homepage and other sections. Please keep in mind that demoted sources may not now entirely disappear for you in Google News, and promoted sources may not appear in all of the stories you see," mentions Google.

Each news cluster has a small menu that lets you share stories on social sites (Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Google Reader) or by email.

Google News also added keyboard shortcuts that are available in other Google applications like Gmail and Google Reader: j or n (next story), k or p (previous story), / (search), s (star), . or f (share), Enter (open the headline article for the current story). Unfortunately, keyboard shortcuts are an afterthought, so you'll find many flaws: after selecting the "Email" option, you need to use your mouse to click on the "To" field; after opening the main article of a story and going back to Google News, the story is no longer selected.

"The redesigned Google News homepage is rolling out today in the English-language edition in the U.S., and we plan to expand it to all editions in the coming months. We're making the ability to choose which sources you'll see more or less often available in all English-language editions worldwide and plan to expand it soon," explains Google.

Google has a special page that provides more information about the new features and another page that shows you where are the old features and which features are new.

Google News is now more customizable and has a lot of features that should appeal to Google Reader users. You can't subscribe to news sites, but you can subscribe to topics and list your favorite news sites. Google News lets you star and share each story, navigate using keyboard shortcuts and read news recommended for you. Google News has suddenly morphed from a news aggregator into a news reader, from a website to a web application.

Opera 10.6, the First Browser that Plays WebM Videos

When Google announced WebM, an open video format is based on the VP8 codec, Opera and Firefox were the first browsers that released nightly builds that supported WebM. Google released a Chromium build that are integrated with WebM a day later.

Opera 10.6 is the first stable version of a browser that lets you to play WebM videos. Opera added support for many HTML5 features (geolocation, Web workers, offline storage), has improved JavaScript performance and fixed a thousands of bugs since releasing Opera 10.54. The Norwegian company claims that Opera is "the fastest browser on Earth", but I think it's not really important to see which browser is the fastest. Chrome, Safari and Opera are been extremely fast, Firefox is still pretty fast, while Internet Explorer continues to improve. It's important to constantly improve a browser, and to learn from other browsers, to innovate, to support the latest technologies, without neglecting that a browser has to be fast, usable and to secure.

Probably the best source of WebM videos is YouTube. The first thing you need to do is to join the HTML5 experiment. Then you can restrict the YouTube search results and to WebM videos, by clicking on "Search options" and selecting "WebM".

Other browsers that include support for WebM videos: Google Chrome 6 Dev Channel and the upcoming Firefox 4 beta.

Even if HTML5 and WebM are important for Google, YouTube takes a pragmatic approach. YouTube says that the browsers need to improve the native video support and provide features like robust streaming, content protection, fullscreen video, camera and microphone access. "We're very happy to see such active and enthusiastic discussion about evolving web standards - YouTube is dependent on the browser enhancement in order for us to improve the video experience for our users. While HTML5's video support enables us to bring most of the content and features of YouTube to computers and other devices that don't support Flash Player, it does not yet meet all of our needs. Today, Adobe Flash provides the best platform for YouTube's video distribution requirements, which is why our primary video player is built with it," explains YouTube.