Google Friends Newsletter - June 2011

[Google Friends Newsletter]

Hello Google Friends. We hope you enjoy this month’s update on our
newest products and services.

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POWER TIP

Voice Search on Desktop

You can now speak your web searches instead of typing them by clicking
on the microphone icon on the right side of the search box. This can
be particularly useful for hard-to-spell searches like [spaghetti with
bolognese sauce] or complex searches like [translate to spanish where
can I buy a hamburger]. Voice Search is currently available for Chrome
users in U.S. English only.
http://www.google.com/insidesearch/voicesearch.html

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NEW PRODUCTS & UPDATES

Search by Image

You now have the option of searching with a photo instead of words at
images.google.com. Click the camera icon in the search box and upload
a photo from your computer or paste the URL of an image from the web.
You can also drag and drop pictures from websites or your computer
into the search box. You’ll get relevant results about your image as
well as similar images or the same image in different sizes or
resolutions.
http://www.google.com/insidesearch/searchbyimage.html

New Mobile Search features

Discovering places nearby just got easier with new shortcuts for
commonly searched local categories, like restaurants, coffee shops and
bars on the Google mobile homepage. You can also now add suggested
phrases to the search box and “build” longer, more complex searches
piece by piece. These features are available on www.google.com from
the mobile browser for Android (2.2+) and iOS (4.0+) devices.
http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-new-features-to-mobile_14.html

My Places on Google Maps

Keeping track of all the locations you care about and memorizing which
places you starred or rated isn’t easy. To help, we released the new
My Places tab on Google Maps, which helps you quickly view and
interact with your saved maps, starred locations and rated businesses.
The My Places tab replaces the My Maps tab in the Google Maps toolbar.
http://maps.google.com/maps/myplaces

Inside Search

We recently launched Inside Search, a one-stop shop for all search-
related features, tips and tricks. Whether you’re a beginner to web
search or a search master, you’ll find all the search shortcuts you
need under the Features section of the site. You can also use the
under-the-hood section to get a look at the technology behind Google
Search. There are interactive diagrams with information on how far
every query has to travel to get an answer back to you, how often we
run experiments (we ran over 6000 in 2010 alone), how much time has
gone into developing the algorithm and more.
http://www.google.com/insidesearch/

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MISCELLANY

So much for a sleepy summer—this June we made several big
announcements. We added the +1 button to websites so you can recommend
content all across the web. We broke all previous Doodle records with
our playable guitar doodle in honor of Les Paul. Chromebooks went on
sale to the public and we announced a series of design improvements
across all our products, including Google Search, Google Maps and
Gmail, taking place over the next few months. Finally, we launched
Google+, a project that brings the nuance and richness of real-life
sharing to the web. Currently, Google+ is in an invitation-only field
trial but we hope when you’re invite arrives, you’ll choose to join
the project.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/1-button-for-websites-recommend-content.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/doodle-for-instrumental-inventor.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/evolving-google-design-and-experience.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-project-real-life.html