Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty wins Celebrity Big Brother

Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty was voted the winner of Celebrity Big Brother in the UK.

Miss Shetty was the firm favourite to win the contest, considered the most controversial in the show's history, after she became the victim of alleged racist bullying by fellow contestant Jade Goody.

Miss Shetty beat the other last remaining contestant singer Jermaine Jackson, the 52-year-old brother of Michael Jackson, with 63 per cent of the vote.

Bookies had placed her at 1/6 odds-on favourite to win.

Google Mini turns 2

Posted by Ryan Pollock, Product Marketing Manager

Our blue box is now two years old! To commemorate the Google Mini's second birthday, the enterprise team has developed an upgrade with greater security features and the ability to search across various business applications, all from the same search box. We've also made the Mini a better fit for public sites by integrating Google Analytics and adding the ability to generate Google Sitemaps. There's more about how the Mini is growing up on the Google Enterprise blog.

Our Seattle-Beijing collaboration

Posted by Feng Hu, Software Engineer

The one and only Dr. Kai-Fu Lee visited our Seattle office last week to speak with some 150 Googlers and guests about everything from future plans between our Beijing and Seattle offices to the way the Internet is used in China. Watch the video [warning: 53 mins]--and consider joining our pan-Pacific collaboration.




Update: The video of the talk is now also available on YouTube [due to it's length the video is in six parts].

Find and compare local businesses

Posted by Ronojoy Chakrabarti, Product Manager

Many people come to Google.com to navigate the web, but are you aware that you can use it to navigate the real world as well? Over the past few months, we've been hard at work making it easier to find and compare local businesses and services right from the standard web results page. Here's what we've come up with:
From now on, you'll see this every time you search for a place, business, or other local information. In addition to providing the basic contact information and map locations for several choices at the top of the page, we also show ratings and provide one-click access to reviews on the search results page so that you can make more informed decisions about where you want to go.

Here are a few specific examples of how you can use Google to search and compare local businesses and services.

• Find the location of and driving directions to the Googleplex (or any specific address).
• Find and compare Mexican restaurants in Pasadena, CA
• Get directions to and read reviews about a local eatery in Pittsburgh.
• Find movie showtimes for films that are playing in your neighborhood.

We're really excited to offer this easier access to qualitative information about local spots. We find the reviews and ratings generated by others in the know to be quite useful when we want to head to a restaurant, catch a movie, or stay at a hotel -- and we hope you will too.

SMS on orkut

Posted by Pedram Keyani, Software Engineer

While orkut users love having an online social network, we understand that a good deal of your social life happens offline. We wanted orkut to enrich the offline social life of its members, so we thought we could either give you computers with really long cords or we could bring orkut to the device you carry around in your pocket: the mobile phone. Thus the idea for an orkut SMS service was born.

With orkut's new SMS feature, you can scrap your friends, look up their contact information and receive scrap notifications. Now you can send scraps from the bus, bar or bathroom, and your friends can get notified of those scraps when on bicycle, beach or bed. Along with the standard orkut features, we've included a few hidden goodies for the adventurous to find.

This week, orkut SMS will become available to orkut members in Brazil who use Claro as their mobile service provider. When the feature becomes available to you, a message will be displayed when you sign in to your account. We hope to expand soon to other mobile service providers in Brazil and around the globe.

So next time you want to scrap your friend Sergio about a party, just text message orkut with "scrap Sergio it's party time man!"

New sunrise layer on Google Earth

Posted by Clint Stinchcomb, EVP & GM, HDTV & New Media, Discovery Networks U.S.

Many of us aren't lucky enough to experience one of nature's most glorious sights—the beauty of the sunrise—every day, let alone on demand. That is, until today. Now there's a Google Earth layer that brings the sun's ascent right to your computer screen, and Google Earth aficionados can also see video vignettes drawn from Discovery HD Theater's "Sunrise Earth" program.

To view the videos, open Google Earth and select the Sunrise Earth layer under Discovery Networks. Follow the links in the pop-up window to experience the sights and sounds of one of nature's most beautiful phenomena. Watch dawn rise over Stonehenge, Mayan pyramids, and Buddhist temples as it has for thousands of years. See the Katmai Bears emerge from their seven-month slumber to greet a new day. Witness the sun's light bringing life to natural habitats around the world, from the forests of Costa Rica and the coast of New England, to the foothills of Turkey and the glaciers of Alaska.

Whether you catch Sunrise Earth on Discovery HD Theater or via Google Earth, you'll see the world in a whole new light.

Beautiful Newsmakers January Pick

At the end of each month, we will feature the Top 9 babes that have been featured here on beautiful newsmakers over the month. So here we go... for the first month, here's our Top 9 babes and models;

Weekend babe: Gravure Idol Yuko Ogura

WooHoo! It's the best day of the week! Don't you agree? Our weekend babe today is... Yuko Ogura. This Japanese Bikini Idol typically aims for the cute and innocent look.

We've featured her as our weekend babe once before and I must say, we can get enough of her here in beautiful newsmakers.

Fun with robotics

Posted by Glenn Trewitt and Albert Bodenhamer, Software Engineers



We believe that getting kids interested in science, computers, and technology early on is very important, so we were honored last weekend to receive the "FIRST LEGO^® League Outreach" award at the Northern California FLL championship tournament. FLL is a program encouraging fourth- to eighth-grade kids to study science and technology. Each fall, student teams (who compete at the local, national and international level) build autonomous LEGO^® robots to tackle a set of challenge missions -- and finish as many as they can in 2-½ minutes! This year's challenge: called Nano Quest.

We hosted a couple of FLL meetings and put on our own Google Qualifying Tournament (beta) in December. We loved hosting these events -- they are a great way to reach out to the community, and putting on the tournament was fun! We had a couple of dozen Google volunteers, several FLL volunteers, and 16 student teams -- about 150 people in all. (The winning team from our Northern California region will go on to the World FLL Festival -- 104 teams from 38 countries -- to be held in April in Atlanta.)

So we thought that was that, until next season. Neither we or our partners at Playing@Learning (who coordinate regional FLL events in Northern California, along with the FIRST Vex Challenge, a more ambitious program for high school students) expected what happened next: other Silicon Valley companies took notice, and are now planning to get involved. That's a great kind of viral marketing -- the more outreach, the better.

FLL teams form between May and September, with qualifying tournaments in late November or early December. So if you're between 9 and 14, and robotics and a LEGO^® challenge sound like a lot of fun -- there's bound to be a competition for you.

Controlling how search engines access and index your website

Posted by Dan Crow, Product Manager

I'm often asked about how Google and search engines work. One key question is: how does Google know what parts of a website the site owner wants to have show up in search results? Can publishers specify that some parts of the site should be private and non-searchable? The good news is that those who publish on the web have a lot of control over which pages should appear in search results.

The key is a simple file called robots.txt that has been an industry standard for many years. It lets a site owner control how search engines access their web site. With robots.txt you can control access at multiple levels -- the entire site, through individual directories, pages of a specific type, down to individual pages. Effective use of robots.txt gives you a lot of control over how your site is searched, but its not always obvious how to achieve exactly what you want. This is the first of a series of posts on how to use robots.txt to control access to your content.

What does robots.txt do?

The web is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you might think it's a lot of work maintaining your website, but that's just peanuts to the whole web. (with profound apologies to Douglas Adams)

Search engines like Google read through all this information and create an index of it. The index allows a search engine to take a query from users and show all the pages on the web that match it.

In order to do this Google has a set of computers that continually crawl the web. They have a list of all the websites that Google knows about and read all the pages on each of those sites. Together these machines are known as the Googlebot. In general you want Googlebot to access your site so your web pages can be found by people searching on Google.

However, you may have a few pages on your site you don't want in Google's index. For example, you might have a directory that contains internal logs, or you may have news articles that require payment to access. You can exclude pages from Google's crawler by creating a text file called robots.txt and placing it in the root directory. The robots.txt file contains a list of the pages that search engines shouldn't access. Creating a robots.txt is straightforward and it allows you a sophisticated level of control over how search engines can access your web site.

Fine-grained control
In addition to the robots.txt file -- which allows you to concisely specify instructions for a large number of files on your web site -- you can use the robots META tag for fine-grain control over individual pages on your site. To implement this, simply add specific META tags to HTML pages to control how each individual page is indexed. Together, robots.txt and META tags give you the flexibility to express complex access policies relatively easily.

A simple example
Here is a simple example of a robots.txt file.

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /logs/

The User-Agent line specifies that the next section is a set of instructions just for the Googlebot. All the major search engines read and obey the instructions you put in robots.txt, and you can specify different rules for different search engines if you want to. The Disallow line tells Googlebot not to access files in the logs sub-directory of your site. The contents of the pages you put into the logs directory will not show up in Google search results.

Preventing access to a file
If you have a news article on your site that is only accessible by registered users, you'll want it excluded from Google's results. To do this, simply add a META tag into the html file, so it starts something like:

<html>
<head>
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">
...

This stops Google from indexing this file. META tags are particularly useful if you have permission to edit the individual files but not the site-wide robots.txt. They also allow you to specify complex access-control policies on a page-by-page basis.

Learn more
You can find out more about robots.txt at http://www.robotstxt.org and at Google's Webmaster help center, which contains lots of helpful information, including:

• How to create a robots.txt file
• Descriptions of each user-agent that Google uses
• How to use pattern matching
• How often we recrawl your robots.txt file

We've also done several posts in our webmaster blog about robots.txt that you may find useful, such as:

• Using robots.txt files
• All about Googlebot

There is also a useful list of the bots used by the major search engines: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/active/html/index.html

Next time...
Coming soon: a post detailing the use of robots and metatags, and another on specific examples for common cases.

Update: Added a sentence to paragraph 9 on access-control policies.

New life for network equipment

Posted by Urs Hoelzle, Senior VP, Operations

We take the Internet for granted throughout the U.S. and the westernized world; these days we expect to be "always on." But in large parts of the globe, this isn't yet so.

The Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC), a non-profit organization based at the University of Oregon, is working to change that, by bringing potential recipients of computing and networking hardware together with potential donors. By coordinating these donations, the NSRC undertakes projects to connect Internet-neglected areas in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, the Caribbean and elsewhere--and they've done so since 1992. (Read about their accomplishments.)

Over the years they've found that the most difficult--and most useful--equipment to obtain is routers, switches and wireless equipment. In many cases, a single, relatively inexpensive piece of hardware is the critical factor preventing a network from becoming operational, but in developing areas, networking hardware can be difficult or prohibitively expensive to obtain. We're pleased to support the NSRC by donating our decommissioned networking hardware. Thus far, we've heard that some of our retired switches have been sent to universities across Africa and in Guyana and Thailand. More will be shipping out in the coming months to universities and research institutes in, among others, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Afghanistan and Vietnam.

If your company would like to give financial assistance or hardware, or if you want to look into volunteering, please get in touch. It will truly help connect the world.

Show us your university campus in 3D

Posted by Allyson McDuffie, Google SketchUp Education Program Coordinator

Today the Build Your Campus in 3D Competition begins. This spring, you and your (presumably equally artistic) friends can honor your campus turf as you hone your 3D design skills just by modeling your school's campus buildings in Google SketchUp, geo-reference them in Google Earth, and submit them through the competition website to earn lasting online glory. And the winners get a visit to Google, all expenses paid.

You're eligible if you're a higher education student in the U. S. or Canada. You can team up with other students, or take the project on yourself. (To do the best work possible, we suggest you have a faculty advisor.) The deadline for entries is June 1, and the winning entries will be posted to the 3D Warehouse by July 10.

We’re pretty jazzed that our panel of judges includes Bobby Brooks from Walt Disney Imagineering, Ken Harsha from Electronic Arts, Janet Martin from Communication Arts Inc. Paul Seletsky from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Gary Smith from Green Mountain Geographics LTD, and Ken M Tse from HKS Architects, Inc.

We hope to see your stomping grounds soon.

A look ahead at Google Video and YouTube

Posted by Salar Kamangar, Vice President, Product Management

In November, we officially closed our acquisition of YouTube, and since then we've received a number of questions about what will happen next. The summary is that Google Video and YouTube will continue to play to their respective strengths. But here's a bit more detail:

Google's strength -- and its history -- is grounded in search and in innovating technologies to make more information more available and accessible. YouTube, meanwhile, excels at being a leading content destination with a dynamic community of users who create, watch and share videos worldwide.

Google search results already include links to content that's hosted on YouTube. Starting today, YouTube video results will appear in the Google Video search index: when you click on YouTube thumbnails, you will be taken to YouTube.com to experience the videos. Over time, Google Video will become even more comprehensive as it evolves into a service where you can search for the world's online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted.

This is part of Google's overall goal to give you the highest quality search results possible. For example, some users who do a Google search for Martin Luther King, Jr. may want to find websites about him. Others may want to see images of him. And others may want to watch video footage...

YouTube, as we've stated previously, will remain an independent subsidiary of Google, and will continue to operate separately. Google will support YouTube by providing access to search and monetization platforms and, when/where YouTube launches internationally, to international resources. YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen and the rest of the YouTube team will continue to innovate exciting new ways for people to "broadcast themselves."

Earlier this week, we announced one example of innovation in monetization and distribution with a new AdSense video test. We'll be working with a wide set of content providers, grouping together high quality video content from providers with high quality ads and offering them as playlists which publishers can select from and display on their AdSense sites. (There's more about the test on the AdSense blog.)

Today represents just the first step in our plan to bring you a comprehensive video search and content platform. We'll provide ongoing updates as they unfold.

Korean Singer / Actress U;Nee (1981 - 2007)

South Korean pop singer and actress Heo Yun was found dead in her apartment Sunday morning (Jan 21), an apparent suicide, local police announced. Police said the 25-year-old singer was found by her grandmother hanged in her Incheon apartment.

Heo, who went by the stage names U;Nee and Lee Hye-ryeon, was about to release her third album, 'Honey,' on the Synnara Music label later this month. She made her debut as an actress in 1996 in a television drama, and her first album was released in 2003.

Looking back on her career, Heo was known for her sexually provocative image throughout her short music career. Due to declining music industry in Korea, her record label decided that album sales alone was not enough to produce profit, and chose to market her as a sexy singer.

Heo, who was soft-spoken and reserved in real life, found this difficult to bear.

Let's get together

Posted by Griff Hazen, Software Engineer

Online groups have become a great tool for managing and sharing activities and ideas for a defined group of people. Back in October we introduced a new version of Google Groups (in beta) in the hopes that it would help people work together better. We received tons of feedback, and today we're dropping the "beta" and unveiling a number of new features in more than a dozen languages. If you're already in a Google Group, you'll be transitioned automatically, and if you're new to a group, welcome!

Now you can customize the look of your group, create and edit web pages, upload and share files (including photos), and view member profiles. And for your discussions, there's no need to struggle to follow interrupted conversations, as Google Groups now includes the same style of organization that Gmail users love. Take a tour to learn more.

And if you're wondering how you might use a group, how about:

• coordinating your class reunion (or make it private for a family reunion)
• learning about Greenhouse Hydroponics and participate in discussions
• finding the group you're looking for, or create one of your own
  

We hope you enjoy Google Groups; we really enjoy working on it, and it's been very rewarding to see all the useful things you and so many others have done with it.

Our New York speaker series

Posted by Marcus Mitchell, Engineering Director, Google New York

Google New York is sponsoring a speaker series that will bring technology industry leaders in to our offices to share their unique perspectives. Speakers will come from Google and beyond to cover topics ranging from the history of software development to the future of the Internet. With this series, we hope to create a collegial atmosphere where members of the technical community can learn from and get to know one another.

To start the year off, you're invited to a talk called "Physics, Speed, and Imprecision: What Works and What Doesn't in Software, and Why," given by our very own Adam Bosworth on Monday, January 29th.

Over beer and wine, Adam will discuss why machine learning and natural language seem to work today when they didn't in the 90s, and why Ajax is successful now when it wasn't earlier. The reasons lie in the realm of physics and customer psychology, particularly in our need for speed and limited tolerance for imprecision.

Please join us, but registration is limited, so hurry.

Vivian Hsu

Sexy and Beautiful Taiwanese: Vivian Hsu

Aki hoshino

Japanese Gravure Idol Asaki Yoshida

Asaki Yoshida was born on 1 June 1986 in Tokyo, Japan. This 167cm babe is a gravure idol in Japan. She's got 3 photo album and 7 DVDs to her name.

I reckon she's cute!

Weekend Babe: Beautiful Japanese Model Azusa Yamamoto

Yikes! We're already halfway though January 2007! Time flies doesn't it? Scary!

Our weekend babe this week is the beautiful Azusa Yamamoto! Yup, she has been featured here before and I reckon she's a real hottie! We'll probably see more of her in the near future.

Have a good one guys!

Patsaya Kauesuwansiri

Patsaya Kauesuwansiri

Peak - Patsaya Kauesuwansiri

Peak - Patsaya Kauesuwansiri

Peak - Patsaya Kauesuwansiri

Peak - Patsaya Kauesuwansiri

Peak - Patsaya Kauesuwansiri

Peak - Patsaya Kauesuwansiri

Peak - Patsaya Kauesuwansiri