Women and engineering

Posted by Jen Fitzpatrick, Engineering Director

I've represented Google at many events for women in engineering, and I'm always asked the same thing: "What's it like to work there?" I certainly don't mind discussing the subject, but I often think it would be great if more people could see it for themselves. Well, now you can. We invite you to take a sneak peek inside Google and hear straight from some of our female engineers what life here is really like.

Of course, our goal of recruiting as many gifted female engineers as we can also means encouraging young women who are still in school. So I'd like to issue a hearty congrats to the winners of this year's Anita Borg scholarships.

Just the facts, fast

Posted by Jonathan Betz, Google Q&A Tech Lead

Have you ever needed a piece of info right now? Today we're excited to introduce Google Q&A. We've pulled together facts from all over the Web to help give you the fastest possible access to the quick bits of information you need every day; just type a query into the search box, and you'll get back the answer at the top of your search results. Q&A knows about a lot of areas: celebrities, countries of the world, the planets, the elements, electronics, movies, and anything else we've thought of so far (including enabling you to get answers on your mobile device). Try it out, and keep checking back. This is only the beginning.

The migration habits of peacocks

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Google Enterprise Product Manager

Do you find that it's easier to find the migration habits of peacocks on Google than to find last week's sales presentation? Between blogs, wikis, file shares and other easy publishing methods, organizations are generating a lot of new content. So to keep up with this content explosion, we've upgraded our website and intranet search products. The Google Mini, our hardware-software search solution for small and medium-sized businesses, now supports up to 100,000 documents (and is dirt cheap at $2,995). And the entry-level Google Search Appliance, designed for large businesses, now supports up to 500,000 documents for $30,000. So blog away -- we're ready for you.

Getting wordy

Posted by Vlad Denisov, Google Definitions Engineer

What's an iwi? What does spiel mean? Google Definitions is one example of how we work to make the world's information more accessible: ask us what a word means, and we'll try our best to get a good variety of definitions from all corners of the Web. So I'm happy to say that a handy feature just got handier; as of this week, Google Definitions is multilingual, and is indexing more sources than ever. Enjoy the peace of mind of knowing that the definition of voip is just one click away.

A bird's-eye view

Posted by John Hanke, GM Keyhole

Have you ever wished you could see what someplace looked like before you got there? A house? A hotel? A freeway exit? We thought you might find it useful, so we've incorporated Keyhole technology into Google Maps and Google Local. Now when you type an address into Google Maps, you can click the 'Satellite' link and see a view of the area. You can zoom, move the view by dragging, and even resize the window just like the normal 'Maps' view. Looking for a new apartment or house? Type in an address you're considering, get a view from the air and, with a quick local search, find out if you can walk to your favorite Saturday morning cup of coffee. Thinking about spending time at the shore this summer? Search for hotels with Google Local and check out the "beach" in "beachfront." You can even see driving directions with real images. We can't promise you'll never miss another freeway exit, but we do think that Google Maps + Keyhole gives you a great way to see and explore your world. But take a look for yourself and let us know what you think.

We' re turning 1....

Posted by the Gmail team

...and to celebrate our birthday, we're giving all Gmail users another gigabyte of space, and then some. And yes, we're serious. Sort of.

Drink up

Posted by the Google Gulp team

Granted, for an online search company a beverage line constitutes a bit of a departure. But at Google we try never to lose our focus on the user, and this year we got to thinking that the one thing missing from the perfect web-surfing experience was a cool, refreshing smart drink.

Cheers!