Accessible Search now has advanced search features

Posted by T.V Raman, Research Scientist

Ever since we launched Google Accessible Search in July, one of the most oft-requested features has been the addition of advanced search capabilities similar to those available on the main Google Search page. In response, we've added an advanced search link at http://labs.google.com/accessible in order to refine your searches in various ways. The order of results will continue to take the accessibility of the search results into account.

Here are the types of advanced queries you can perform:

• restrict search to portions of a page, e.g., the title
• restrict search to results in a given language
• restrict searches to web pages found during a given time period
• restrict searches to content in a given file format

And a lot more that won't fit on the margin of this page --- for complete details, see our Advanced Search Tips.

The Literacy Project

Posted by Dr. Brij Kothari, Founder and President, PlanetRead & BookBox, Inc.

In India, a country saddled with one-third of the world's literacy problem, there are nearly 300 million people who are illiterate and 400 million who have only a rudimentary knowledge of the alphabet. That's 700 million people who cannot read even a newspaper headline.

As I wrote in December, PlanetRead employs Same Language Subtitling (SLS) to give subconscious reading practice for 30 minutes a week to more than 200 million early-literates in India, operating via 10 TV programmes in 10 languages. We’re hoping to take this project internationally, as well as collaborate with literacy organizations in other parts of the world. That’s why we’re so excited about The Literacy Project -— the initiative announced today by Google, the Frankfurt Book Fair literacy campaign (Litcam), and the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning. (There's also a German version of the Google page.)

The project enables people to find everything -- from videos, books and scholarly articles about literacy to reading groups and literacy-related blogs. PlanetRead is one of the many organisations that is contributing. We’ve uploaded our subtitled videos (take a look!) and are sharing our own literacy research. And the site’s map of world literacy organisations also make it easier for us to connect with partner agencies who want to make literacy a way of life for everyone on this planet.

The idea that others around the world will be able to see what we’re doing —- and in turn, that we’ll be able to see what other people are doing and saying about literacy -— is thrilling, and at the very heart of PlanetRead’s mission to make its projects available to everyone. With each new person that we reach, we come one step closer to solving this truly global problem.

Yes, you can have a pony

Posted by Adam Sah, Software Engineer

It's crazy over here -- in the last few months, we've had thousands of gadgets submitted for the Google Personalized Homepage. If you've used it, you've seen them -- those useful little units you can add, remove, and move around on your page. We have old-school games, clocks, calendars, and horoscopes. We've got a VAT calculator. We've got a pony.

We've extended these gadgets to work on Google Desktop and Google Pages, but it occurred to us that these would be slick on other people's web pages, too.

Today we're opening up our gadget inventory for your viewing and cloning pleasure. In other words, now you can copy and paste some simple HTML to add the Google Gadgets you like to your own webpage. Check out our directory of Google Gadgets for your webpage to see all the options. And as always, if you can't find one like the one you had in mind, you can always write a gadget yourself.

Create web apps on top of Google search

Posted by Tom Stocky, Product Manager

We just launched a new version of the Google AJAX Search API, which is designed to make it easier for webmasters and developers to do two things:

• Add a search box to your site that displays Google Web, Video, News, Maps, and Blog Search results without taking users to a separate page.

• Build powerful web apps on top of Google search. (See some samples.)

Read more about this release on the Google AJAX Search API Blog.

Discount with Checkout

Posted by Dror Shimshowitz, Product Marketing Manager

Here's another way it pays to use Google Checkout: there's a $10 bonus on purchases of $30 or more at participating stores.

Beautiful Taiwanese Annie Yi

Annie Yi is a popular actress and singer in Taiwan. She was born on 4 March 1969 in Taipei, Taiwan. This 161cm beauty has done several TV serial and movies in Taiwan. She has also got a book to her name.

Popular Hong Kong Singer / Actress Theresa Fu

Theresa Fu was born on 22 September 1984. This cutie is a Cantopop artist in Hong Kong and she belongs to the popular girl group band Cookies, together with Stephy Tang. She was introduced by Talent Bang model agency in order to become a pop star. She is also a popluar actress in Hong Kong with a few movies to her name.

Picture taken from Maxim, Hong Kong.