The illuminated continent

Posted by Michael Jones, Google Earth CTO

Have you ever dreamed of Africa while reading National Geographic? The exotic photographs and thoughtful articles take you there with a magical sense of place. Today we embraced that magic by releasing Google Earth data layers that index National Geographic stories, images, journals, and even a live webcam in Africa.

Just start Google Earth, enable the National Geographic layers, and begin exploring.


Across Africa, you will see the familiar yellow National Geographic logo. Zoom in to see the title of each feature article or photograph. Click the icon and a pop-up balloon shows a photo and description along with links to the content. Follow those links to read the entire story right where it happened. Not only will you learn about Jane Goodall's Fifi, you'll see her home. Joining the stories and images are layers for National Geographic Sights & Sounds multimedia resources, a live WildCam in Botswana, and a collection of Mike Fay's Megaflyover images.

The Megaflyover images are stunning. Mike spent more than a year taking 92,000 high resolution photographs of the continent. That project is described in Tracing the Human Footprint, an article in the September 2005 National Geographic. He selected 500 of his favorite scenes of people, animals, geological formations, and signs of human presence and annotated them in Google Earth. Look for the red airplane icons as you fly over Africa. Each of these marks a spot where a high resolution image awaits your own personal voyage.

Read More

Googlebombing 'failure'

Posted by Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products

If you do a Google search on the word [failure] or the phrase [miserable failure], the top result is currently the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush. We've received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part. I'd like to explain how these results come up in order to allay these concerns.

Google's search results are generated by computer programs that rank web pages in large part by examining the number and relative popularity of the sites that link to them. By using a practice called googlebombing, however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush's website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases. We don't condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don't affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.

Read More

Job requirement: Food must taste great.

Posted by John Dickman, Food Service Manager

We put the word out that we needed more chefs to come to Google's Mountain View campus and cook lots of food, and lots of kinds of food, for thousands of daily meals. There's been no shortage of candidates. Hundreds of chefs from all over the world sent resumes, and we invited a number of them to come and audition for a discerning group of employee-tasters.

We thought you might enjoy a sampling of the incredible range of dishes that have impressed our hiring/tasting committee. Happy cooking!

Edamame Hummus
Shelled edamame (soy beans) can be found in all natural food stores, Asian grocery stores and the natural food sections of most supermarkets. Tahini is sesame paste and can be found in the same places. The crushed ice keeps the mixture cool while processing and allows less oil to be used.

2 cups frozen shelled edamame
1 pound (13 oz. can) chick peas, drained and rinsed
4 cloves peeled garlic
2 T. fresh, grated ginger root
1/2 c. sesame tahini
3 tsp. lemon juice
3/4 c. extra virgin olive oil
1/4 c. sesame oil
1/2 c. crushed ice
1 T. hot sauce
1/3 c. chopped fresh cilantro
Kosher salt to taste

Boil or steam the edamame for 10 minutes until tender. Rinse under cold water and drain. Place in a food processor or blender. Add all the remaining ingredients and process until smooth, but still a little chunky. If you like a bit more texture in your hummus, reserve about 1/3 cup of the whole edamame and fold them in at the end.

Serve with flat breads, crudites or crackers. Serves 12-16 as an appetizer.

Read more about this chef's visit.
_________________________________________________________________

Thai Red Curry Dragon Fly Noodles
1 T. toasted sesame oil
¼ c Andouille sausage, sliced
¼ c. 6-8 shrimp
1 T. red onion, diced
1 T. garlic, minced
1 T. fresh ginger, minced
1 T. red curry paste
1 T. shrimp paste
4 T. dry white wine
1 c. coconut milk
1 c. organic chicken stock
½ c. jumbo lump crabmeat
Pinch Cayenne pepper
¼ tsp Jalapeno pepper, minced
¼ c. baby corn
½ tsp. salt
Fresh cracked pepper to taste
¼ c. fresh cilantro, chopped
½ c. scallions, sliced
16 oz. Chinese egg noodles, cooked

Heat oil in a wok. Sauté andouille and shrimp for 2 minutes. Set aside. In separate pot, cook noodles, drain, and set aside.
Add red onion, garlic, ginger, red curry paste, shrimp paste and sauté in wok for 1-2 minutes. Deglaze with white wine. Add coconut milk and chicken stock. Bring to a low boil, simmer for 5 minutes.
Add andouille, shrimp, crabmeat and all remaining ingredients. Simmer 2 minutes until heated through.
_________________________________________________________________

Dungeness Crab Cakes w/ Black Pepper-Lemon Aioli

2 lbs. Fresh Dungeness crabmeat
½ red bell pepper, diced small
½ yellow bell pepper, diced small
2 celery stalks, diced small
6 eggs
1½-2½ c. bread crumbs
2 c. Panko bread crumbs
3 T. Italian parsley, chopped
1 lemon zest
Kosher salt to taste
Black pepper to taste
2 c. all-purpose flour

Squeeze excess water from crab meat; set aside in a colander to drain.
Sauté red and yellow bell peppers. Sauté onion and celery separately from bell peppers; let cool.
Chop parsley and zest the lemon; set aside.
In a medium bowl mix crabmeat, all vegetables, one egg, regular bread crumbs, parsley, lemon zest, salt and pepper to taste.
Form crab into 1 oz. balls. If the balls don't stay together, if add more bread crumbs.
Put 3 bowls in a row: one with whisked eggs, the second with flour, the third, with panko crumbs.
Put crabcake ball first in flour, then egg, and finally the panko crumbs and set each crabcake aside until all have been breaded. In canola oil heated to 375˚, deep fry crabcakes for 2-3 minutes.

Black Pepper-Lemon Aioli
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1 lemon zest
2 lemons, juiced
3 c. canola oil
Kosher salt, black pepper to taste

Combine egg yolk, whole egg, lemon zest in a food processor and start machine.
Very slowly drizzle canola oil into food processor until egg becomes thick.
Stop processor and add lemon juice, salt and pepper; pulse until combined well.
Serve a dollop on crabcakes.

Read More

Adding a few sprinkles

Posted by Jessica Ewing, Product Manager

We launched our first version of the Google personalized homepage in May. It started as a project on Google Labs in response to numerous requests from people who wanted to add at-a-glance info by the Google search box. Today we're thrilled to "graduate" from Labs and add a Personalized Home link on the Google homepage. Though we realize that many love the vanilla Google, there are those who might want to add a few sprinkles.

Read More

Find out what's happening with Blog Search

Posted by Jason Goldman, Blog Search Team

Every day millions of bloggers use the web to express themselves - sometimes to just a few friends, sometimes to a worldwide audience. We wanted to create a better way to allow people to find out what's being written in blogs, as it's being created.

Today we are launching Blog Search - the easiest way to search for blog content. Blog Search includes content from blogs all over the web (in other words, not just from our own service, Blogger). And we're continuously adding new content, very nearly in real time. That way you can find commentary on breaking news as it's being created by millions of individuals. Or get the latest take on the premiere of a new TV show.

No matter what you care about, there is likely someone writing a blog post on it right now. With Blog Search you can find out what folks are saying about what's interesting to you. For example, I wonder what people are saying about Blog Search.

Read More

Judge clears way for Dr. Lee

Posted by Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel

A Washington state judge ruled today that Dr. Kai-Fu Lee can immediately begin working for Google. (There's a profile of Dr. Lee in today's San Francisco Chronicle.) We're thrilled, and he's excited to get right to work on several big things, including recruiting, building our Chinese R&D center, and related government relations.

You may remember that in July, right after we hired Dr. Lee to build and head our new China R&D center, Microsoft sued both of us. They argued that Dr. Lee was going to do work at Google that was competitive with what he had been doing at Microsoft - which they said would violate the one-year non-compete agreement that Microsoft requires employees to sign. (They sued even before knowing what Dr. Lee was going to be doing here. Hmmm...) At first, the judge in the case decided temporarily to limit what work Dr. Lee could do at Google until he learned more about the dispute.

But after listening to evidence at a two-day hearing last week and reviewing various documents and court briefs, the judge decided today in his ruling on Microsoft's request for a preliminary injunction to allow Dr. Lee to work on a much broader range of things for Google. There are some restrictions, but the ruling basically allows Dr. Lee to do what we've wanted him to be able to do. The judge said that Microsoft had "not sufficiently shown that it has a clear legal or equitable right to enjoin Dr. Lee, pending trial, from Establishing and Staffing a Google Development Facility Center." A trial is still set for January to get a final decision.

And we filed suit against Microsoft in California to stop them from enforcing a Washington state non-compete against an employee who wants to work for us in California and China. The first court hearing on that will be Oct. 14.

A lot of legal process, but the bottom line is Dr. Lee is going to get busy. Chinese speakers note: Dr. Lee has a website, and there's also a blog about this case.

Read More

Two new Katrina search tools

Posted by Bret Taylor, Product Manager

We've launched two new search features designed specifically for finding information about the hurricane's aftermath more quickly. With the ongoing help of the American Red Cross, Microsoft, Yahoo and many other organizations, we've indexed a large number of public Katrina databases, including KatrinaSafe.com.

The new Katrina People Search helps people to search across all of these databases at once to find information on friends or family who may have been affected by the hurricane.

We also built a special search index that only returns results from Katrina-related web pages, so you can search on any keyword and know all the results will be relevant.

Read More