Hey all readers of IGoogle Watch, from now on I would be posting the monthly Google friends newsletters on IGoogle Watch. Subscribe to the IGoogle Watch RSS feed to get instant updates. We hope you enjoy this month’s update on our products and services.
POWER TIP
New Search Options on search results
We recently announced Search Options, a new feature in Google Web
Search. You can now slice and dice your search results using a variety
of filters, which generate different views of your results page to
more easily and quickly find what you need. To try it out, click the
“Show options…” link on top of your search results to display the
Search Options panel. Watch this short video to learn more.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtirDMfcOKE
NEW PRODUCTS & UPDATES
Import mail and contacts to Gmail
You can now easily migrate existing email and contacts from Hotmail,
Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail and other webmail providers into Gmail. Imported
emails will be appropriately sorted by date, and existing folders will
become labels. You can have your messages forwarded from your old
account for 30 days, giving you time to take Gmail for a test drive.
This new feature is available in all newly-created Gmail accounts, and
it is slowly being rolled out to all existing accounts. You’ll know
it’s available in your account when you see the “Accounts and Import”
tab under Settings.
The bells and whistles behind Google Search
We put together two series of videos giving you a closer look at
various features of Google Search. The first is a set of 15-second
tips on how to check the weather, get the latest sports scores, find
word definitions, and more. In the second series, our search engineers
get up close and personal, sharing stories about the features they’ve
created and the challenges they face in making Google Search better.
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=B3A7CCFD7CD5CF09
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=396574970FFD6E31
A speedier Google Chrome
We just released a faster version of Google Chrome. Web pages with a
lot of JavaScript now load about 30% faster than in the previous
stable version, thanks to improvements to V8 and an updated version of
WebKit. We’ve also fixed hundreds of bugs and made changes in response
to many of your top requests, including full screen mode, ability to
remove thumbnails from the new tab page, autofill and more.
Doodle for Google winners
Christin Engelberth of San Antonio, Texas was the national winner of
our second annual Doodle 4 Google contest in the U.S., which concluded
this month. Her doodle “A New Beginning” was selected out of more than
28,000 entries. Christin won a $15,000 college scholarship, a laptop
computer and a $25,000 technology grant for her school. In addition,
all of the regional winners’ doodles are currently on display at the
Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City
until July 5. If you can’t make the trip to New York, view all of the
finalists’ doodles on the Doodle 4 Google website.
http://www.google.com/doodle4google
MISCELLANEOUS
You may already know that we’re real believers in the power of data-
driven decisions. If you have information based on your website’s
traffic patterns, you can learn what people like best (or least) about
your site, ad campaigns or video — and use that information to make
your product better and attract more consumers. Being able to measure
the success of different strategies can help you more efficiently use
your resources to the maximum effect — no small thing in this economic
climate. But even on blogs or small sites, you can use data to improve
a great deal, like designing a better webpage or producing a
compelling YouTube video. Google offers a variety of tools that can
help you harness the power of measurement to be more successful with
your online business or product. To help you out, we’re collecting
tips and tricks for how to use Google Analytics, Website Optimizer and
other measurement tools in an ongoing series of posts on the Official
Google Blog. Here’s to the metrics!
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/measurement
