Froogle Britannia

Just in time to find a decent pair of wellies for the winter, we've launched Froogle UK. More Britons than ever are shopping online, so we wanted to offer the broadest possible shopping selection with merchants large and small who sell throughout the U.K. With unbiased price comparisons and free listings for all participating merchants, now Froogle can assist with retail therapy on both sides of the pond.

-- Karen Padham
Froogle Product Manager

Get the 411 with 46645

SMS stands for Short Message Service, and Europe and Asia have thoroughly embraced this text messaging technology. Using your phone to send and receive text messages is a newer phenomenon in the U.S. Now we're getting into the fray with Google SMS. It's a way to access Google for precise information from your mobile phone or handheld device (like a BlackBerry).

Google SMS is a handy way to, say, get a listing for a nearby restaurant, find the definition of a word, or look up the price of a product, an area code or Zip code. You can even use Google SMS to calculate a tip. If your phone is enabled for text messages, just send your query to this 5-digit US shortcode: 46645 (GOOGL on most phones). Your query results are sent as text messages, not links. Learn more about using Google SMS on our help page or by sending a text message with the word 'help' to 46645.

-- Benjamin Ling
Product Manager, Google SMS

Dublin go bragh

A year ago, Dublin became the first location for Google's regional operations outside the U.S. We designed it to serve Google customers across multiple time zones and languages spanning Europe, the Middle East and Africa. There were just five of us in 2003. Today we've built a team of 150, and their passion, energy, and tech savvy enliven our new Barrow Street HQ. It's about as polyglot as we could hope for, too: this lot of Googlers come from 35 countries and speak 17 languages.



To mark the opening of the Dublin office, we were honored to have a visit by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who joined Mary Harney, An Tanaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) to formally open the office. As Ms. Harney's appearance demonstrates, we've had incredible support from the Irish government.

We're in the heart of Dublin in a state of the art facility. If you're fluent in European languages, if you're motivated, focused and ready for a fast ride, come join us!

Angus Kelsall
Head of Dublin office

Bookmark this site

We talk a lot about our mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and we think we've made a reasonable start on corraling the information that's roaming around the web. Unfortunately a lot of very useful information is not online, and books, journals and other forms of printed communication stubbornly refuse to spontaneously digitize themselves to make it easier for you to find them. So we've decided to help.

Google Print is an ongoing initiative to scan printed material and put it online where it can show up in Google search results. We've expanded the program, and we're now inviting publishers to send us books that we'll scan and put online for free. There are many, many books out there, and the process of scanning takes time, but depending on your areas of interest, it's likely you'll soon be seeing more Google Print results when you use Google.

-- Adam M. Smith
Google Print product manager

Made in the shade

You've probably wondered why there's never been a Google domain in Norway. As it turns out, our name means "sunglasses" in Norwegian, and, well, even the non-lawyers can see where this sort of problem leads.

But now the Great Norwegian Sunglasses Crisis is history, and this week we were able to launch Norway and Kenya, our 102nd and 103rd domains, respectively. Check them all out-- and hey, anyone got an up-to-date atlas we can borrow?

-- Sean Knapp
Software engineer

Pencils down, people

Posted by Alan Eustace, VP Engineering & Research

We're a little obsessive about digging into hard computing problems, and we love finding more people like us. One way we find obsessive smart problem-solvers is by using a standardized test. Now standardized tests can suck, especially since you usually take them to become a broke student for years on end. Which can lead to starting a career that, if you're lucky, might eventually lead to a really cool job.

But what if there were a standardized test that led, like, immediately to the really cool job? What if, for instance, there was a Google Labs Aptitude Test?

There is. We enjoyed writing it, and if you're our kind of uber-geek, you'll enjoy taking it, and maybe you'd enjoy life as a Googler. Give it a try. The GLAT is four pages long; you can print them out below.

When you're done, send your completed test to:
Google Labs Jobs
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043-1351

Good luck. Take your time, especially with the essay questions. And no, on this one guessing doesn't help.

Cover:


pg. 1


pg. 2


pg. 3

China, Google News and source inclusion

There has been controversy about our new Google News China edition, specifically regarding which news sources we include. For users inside the People's Republic of China, we have chosen not to include sources that are inaccessible from within that country.

This was a difficult decision for Google, and we would like to share the factors we considered before taking this course of action.

Google is committed to providing easy access to as much information as possible. For Internet users in China, Google remains the only major search engine that does not censor any web pages. However, it's clear that search results deemed to be sensitive for political or other reasons are inaccessible within China. There is nothing Google can do about this.

For last week's launch of the Chinese-language edition of Google News, we had to decide whether sources that cannot be viewed in China should be included for Google News users inside the PRC. Naturally, we want to present as broad a range of news sources as possible. For every edition of Google News, in every language, we attempt to select news sources without regard to political viewpoint or ideology. For Internet users in China, we had to consider the fact that some sources are entirely blocked. Leaving aside the politics, that presents us with a serious user experience problem. Google News does not show news stories, but rather links to news stories. So links to stories published by blocked news sources would not work for users inside the PRC -- if they clicked on a headline from a blocked source, they would get an error page. It is possible that there would be some small user value to just seeing the headlines. However, simply showing these headlines would likely result in Google News being blocked altogether in China.

We also considered the amount of information that would be omitted. In this case it is less than two percent of Chinese news sources. On balance we believe that having a service with links that work and omits a fractional number is better than having a service that is not available at all. It was a difficult tradeoff for us to make, but the one we felt ultimately serves the best interests of our users located in China. We appreciate your feedback on this issue.

-- The Google Team