(Cross-posted from the Lat Long Blog)What do Alex Trebek, teachers and Googlers have in common? Last week, these individuals and groups all came together at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA to celebrate exploration and learning.Google hosted its first Geo Teachers Institute, an intensive two-day workshop in which 150 educators received hands-on training and experience with Google Maps, Google SketchUp and Google Earth, including features like Mars, Moon and SkyMaps…

This is part of our summer series of new Search Stories. Look for the label Search Stories and subscribe to the series. -Ed.Having been a new dad for six months now, I’ve quickly come to learn two valuable parenting lessons. First, being a father is truly a full-time job—and second, sleep is completely overrated. Whether buying the latest bottles, binkies, blankets and bibs, or just blogging about the whole magical journey, becoming a father has been the most invigorating and moving experience of my lifetime…

Humans have always been fascinated by the night sky. And Googlers are no exception. Over the years, Google engineers have used their 20 percent time to create Google Sky, Moon, Mars and most recently Google Sky Map for Android. This handy app, built by engineers in our Pittsburgh office, turns your Android-powered phone into a live map of the night sky. You just point your phone to the sky and it gives you information about the stars and planets that you’re looking at…

Last November, we added legal opinions to Google Scholar. Legal opinions consider serious issues and help refine the laws that govern our country—but they can also be surprisingly entertaining. We’ve shared some of these for your summer reading pleasure on the Google Scholar blog.Rimes v. Curb Records, Inc., 2001 the opinion is written as a series of songs to be sung to tunes by LeAnn Rimes. It starts:LeAnn RimesA very rich and famous starWasn’t so rich in times afarBut what a talent she had!Read the rest on the Google Scholar blog…

Today we’re excited to announce a new edition of Google Apps. Designed with guidance from customers like the federal government, the City of Los Angeles and the City of Orlando, Google Apps for Government includes the same great Google applications that people know and love, with specific measures to address the policy and security needs of the public sector.We’re also pleased to announce that Google Apps is the first suite of cloud computing applications to receive Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification and accreditation from the U…

[Cross-posted on Google Public Policy Blog] 

Bending, walking, breathing, hearing, seeing and sleeping are simple things that are often taken for granted, as are thinking, learning, and communicating.

Twenty years ago today, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law. This milestone legislation bans persons or companies from discriminating against anyone with limited abilities…

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. – Ed.As we seek to expand the most comprehensive search experience on the web, we’ve made a number of recent enhancements to your search results. Ultimately, what you’re looking for isn’t limited to text websites; you may be looking for a tweet, a video or a place—and we want to make sure you can find all of it…

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)On behalf of Ridley Scott, Kevin Macdonald, LG, the Sundance Film Festival and all of us at YouTube, thank you to everyone who took part in “Life in a Day.” Using the footage you shot, Kevin will now begin to build the world’s largest user-generated documentary, capturing what it was like to be alive on July 24, 2010.Remember that even though filming day is over, you have until July 31 at 11:59 p…

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)What are you doing today? Something routine like cooking breakfast or taking the dog for a walk? Or is it something extraordinary like your child’s first soccer game or your wedding day?Whatever it is, big or small, we hope you’ll capture it on video and take part in “Life in a Day”, a user-generated documentary that will tell the story of a single day on Earth, as seen through your eyes…

This year we held the third edition of the Google Online Marketing Challenge — a global university competition that gives students hands-on exposure to online marketing. Each team receives the equivalent of $200 to work with a local company and create an online marketing campaign. Teams have three weeks to mastermind a strategy before submitting a campaign report to an international judging panel of professors…

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)For artists, YouTube is a 21st century canvas. Since the YouTube Play project was announced last month, more than 6,000 videos ranging in genres, topics and budget have been submitted from 69 countries, and the YouTube Play channel has received over 2 million views.Today, we’re unveiling the jury for YouTube Play, which includes some of the world’s leading artists, from international film festival winners and renowned photographers to performance and video artists on the cutting edge of art…

Back in June, our Zurich engineering headquarters welcomed 100 of EMEA’s brightest computer science students to our annual Europe, Middle East and Africa Scholars’ Retreat. Recipients of the Google Europe Scholarship for Students with Disabilities joined Anita Borg Memorial Scholars and Finalists for three days of workshops, technical talks, poster sessions, networking events and, of course, lots of fun! Check out our video below to hear from scholars and speakers in their own words:Our academic scholarships are designed to support a new generation of talented, diverse computer scientists from all backgrounds…

This is part of our summer series of new Search Stories. Look for the label Search Stories and subscribe to the series. -Ed.My sister is my best friend in the world. But that wasn’t always the case. When we were young, my sister and I always had our sibling rivalries. Quarrels over who got more (or fewer) birthday presents, ongoing debates around whose week it was to walk the dog and your average diary lock-picking weren’t uncommon…

When you think about “information,” what probably comes to mind are streams of words and numbers. Google’s pretty good at organizing these types of information, but consider all the things you can’t express with words: what does it look like in the middle of a sandstorm? What are some great examples of Art Nouveau architecture? Should I consider wedding cupcakes instead of a traditional cake?This is why we built Google Images in 2001…

When we decided in 2007 to voluntarily become carbon neutral, our intent was to take responsibility for our carbon emissions and promote sustainable environmental solutions. We approach this goal in three ways. First, we minimize our energy consumption; in fact, we’ve built some of the world’s most energy efficient data centers. Second, we seek to power our facilities with renewable energy, like we did in Mountain View, CA with one of the largest corporate solar installations…

Over time we’ve improved search by deepening our understanding of queries and web pages. The web isn’t merely words—it’s information about things in the real world, and understanding the relationships between real-world entities can help us deliver relevant information more quickly. Today, we’ve acquired Metaweb, a company that maintains an open database of things in the world. Working together we want to improve search and make the web richer and more meaningful for everyone…

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “Google Apps highlights” and subscribe to the series. – Ed.Over the last couple of weeks we rolled out some nice updates in Gmail, improved on Google forms, added new mobile device security features and celebrated many new applications recently added to the Apps Marketplace. Enjoy!Rich text signatures in GmailYou’ve been able to add plain text signatures to your messages in Gmail for some time, but last Thursday we stepped it up a notch by adding rich text signatures, one of our most requested features…

Last weekend, Spain won the 2010 World Cup. For the month leading up to the final, Googlers joined the world in cheering for their favorite teams. Around our campus, games were watched on computer screens and on cafe video screens. Code went unwritten. Emails went unanswered.Throughout the world, real life also slowed during World Cup matches. Which teams had the most loyal fans? Which game captured the attention of world the most? To answer these questions, we looked at counts of queries using Google…

This week I sent a note to Googlers about some of the Chrome team’s favorite extensions. So many of them asked if they could share the note with people outside the company that I thought I would just do it for them, so here it is.We’re proud of the Chrome browser and the great extensions that its developer community has created, and we hope you enjoy them! They can all be found at chrome.google…

We recently told you about CS4HS, our workshop program for high school and middle school computer science teachers in the U.S. We now have some additional news to share: our 2010 EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) CS4HS awardees have been selected!The CS4HS program provides funding to European, Middle Eastern and African universities which work in tandem with local high schools and middle schools to engage pre-university students in computer science…

We introduced the Google Fellowship program last year in the United States to broaden our support of university research. The students who were awarded the 2009 fellowships were a truly impressive group, many having high profile internships this past summer and even a few with faculty appointments in the upcoming year.Universities continue to be the source of some of the most innovative research in computer science, and in particular it’s the students that they foster who are the future of our field…

(Cross-posted from the Google Translate Blog)We believe that translation is key to our mission of making information useful to everyone. For example, Wikipedia is a phenomenal source of knowledge, especially for speakers of common languages such as English, German and French where there are hundreds of thousands—or millions—of articles available. For many smaller languages, however, Wikipedia doesn’t yet have anywhere near the same amount of content available…

In recent months, I’ve got to know a group of people in the Hague who are working on an ambitious project to make the rich fabric of Dutch cultural and political history as widely accessible as possible – via the Internet.That team is from the National Library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), and as of today, we’ll be working in partnership to add to the library’s own extensive digitisation efforts…

(Cross-posted on the Google Research Blog)It can’t have been very long after people started writing that they started to organize and comment on what was written. Look at the 10th century Venetus A manuscript, which contains scholia written fifteen centuries earlier about texts written five centuries before that. Almost since computers were invented, people have envisioned using them to expose the interconnections of the world’s knowledge…

In February we announced our plans to build experimental, ultra-high speed broadband networks. Over the past several months, our team’s been hard at work reviewing the nearly 1,100 community responses to our request for information—not to mention the nearly 200,000 responses from individuals across the U.S.Throughout this process, one message has come through loud and clear: people are hungry for better and faster Internet access…

While many IT departments spend the second Tuesday of the month patching the operating systems on their servers, Google Apps customers running their business in the cloud have some free time to evaluate and roll-out new applications. Lucky for them, today there are 10 new apps available today in the Google Apps Marketplace.Several of the new applications help you manage communications more effectively, from tracking contact with customers and partners to de-cluttering your inbox:

• Bantam Live: Bantam Live provides easy CRM and team collaboration to track contacts, prospects, deals and organize projects, tasks and events…

App Inventor is a new tool in Google Labs that makes it easy for anyone—programmers and non-programmers, professionals and students—to create mobile applications for Android-powered devices. And today, we’re extending invitations to the general public.For many people, their mobile phone—and access to the Internet—is always within reach. App Inventor for Android gives everyone, regardless of programming experience, the opportunity to control and reshape their communication experience…

In the past two weeks of World Cup action, 16 teams have been narrowed down to just two—Spain and the Netherlands—who will face off in the World Cup final tomorrow. For both countries, there are high stakes: not only are the two sides contending for the title of best football team in the world, but this will be the first-ever Cup win for either team and Spain is in the finals for the first time…

(Cross-posted from the European Public Policy Blog)We’re always looking for opportunities to partner up with organizations that promote diversity and encourage women to excel in technology. Girl Geek Dinners is a world-wide initiative that does exactly that—it helps build communities of women who have a passion and interest in science, technology and other traditionally male-dominated fields by hosting social events around the world…

Every day, 6.7 billion people view the world through their own unique lens. Imagine if there was a way to collect all of these perspectives, to aggregate and mold them into the cohesive story of a single day on earth.Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of “Life in a Day,” a historic cinematic experiment that will attempt to do just that: document one day, as seen through the eyes of people around the world…