We've officially acquired Postini

Posted by Dave Girouard, Vice President & General Manager, Google Enterprise

As of today, Postini becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of Google, and we couldn’t be happier about it. (Here's the FAQ.) Since July 9, when we announced the agreement to acquire Postini, plenty of businesses have told us how much they respect Postini and how the acquisition makes sense for customers of both companies.

We view this as welcome news, but also a sign of things to come. With the more than 100,000 businesses on Google Apps, 35,000 businesses and more than 10 million users of Postini products, we see great potential on both sides. We're committed to continue to deliver the type of innovative and useful business products our customers have come to expect. And we plan to announce even more product offerings in the very near future.

Separately, both companies shared a vision for what the world of hosted applications can become for businesses of all sizes. Together, we look forward to achieving it.

Fly me to the moon

Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior VP of Engineering

In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to go into space and orbit the Earth. Two years later, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space (she orbited the earth 48 times -- take that, Yuri). By the end of the decade, the Apollo teams, rising to President Kennedy's challenge, made Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin the first human beings to walk on the Moon.

Great things can happen when you reach for the stars. That's why we're thrilled to be sponsoring the Lunar X-PRIZE, which will award a total of $30 million to teams competing around the world to land privately funded spacecraft on the Moon.

Why does Google love space? Well, for one thing, we just think it's cool. More seriously, space exploration has a remarkable history of producing technological breakthroughs, from ablative heat shields and asteroid mining to invisible braces and Tang; the X-PRIZE, too, could lead to important developments in robotic space exploration, a whole host of new space-age materials, precision landing control technology, and who knows what else.

Finally, we hope the contest will help renew public interest in fields like math, engineering and computer science, especially among the young people on whom we'll all be depending to tackle tomorrow's technical challenges, whether they're on the web or among the stars.

As Neil Armstrong famously pointed out, small steps lead to giant leaps. We hope that our sponsorship of the Lunar X-PRIZE is one of those small steps, and we can't wait to see what giant leaps result. By the way, just so the teams can scout locations and plan accordingly, Google Moon just went live. For more information, visit the Google Lunar X-PRIZE site.

Get your cricket scores here

Posted by Sadeesh Duraisamy, Software Engineer, and Alok Goel, Business Product Manager

With the start of the Twenty20 world championship, cricket fever is upon legions of enthusiasts. To make it easier for you to indulge your interest in a game John Fowles characterized as "chess made flesh," we've simplified your search for cricket scores. Just type [cricket] in a Google search box and you'll see a brief score of all the current cricket matches. A single click will also give you access to a detailed cricket score card.

If you're a diehard India fan, then type [cricket india] or [cricket score India England] to get results for Indian matches. Of course, feel free to replace India with the country of your choice for country-specific results.

A new Google.org RFP

Posted by Kirsten Olsen, Project Manager, Google.org

Today, Google.org has issued a request for proposals to the tune of $10 million in order to advance sustainable transportation solutions. We're inviting entrepreneurs and companies to show us their best ideas on how they can contribute to this important cause. We need catalytic investments to support technologies, products and services that are critical to accelerating plug-in vehicle commercialization.

There's more about this on the Google.org blog.

Our plans for Code Jam

Posted by Bartholomew "Ruberik" Furrow, Technical Lead

What do you do if you've got a head full of good ideas, and nothing interesting to do with them? You might need a good dose of competitive programming. During a programming competition you contort your brain, trying desperately to figure out that tiny trick that will let your program run a thousand times faster, or searching for the elusive mathematical fact that will lead you to the solution. Then you tell your computer what to do, and watch it solve that torturous problem faster than you can blink. If you're like me, you eagerly participate in every coding competition that comes along.

Since 2003, we have supported the fun and intensity of competitive programming around the world by offering code jams powered by TopCoder. Contests like the ACM ICPC, the TopCoder Open and our TopCoder-powered code jams have formed a great community of contests and contestants; now we're excited to join that community in our own right, by producing a Google Code Jam of our own! There aren't too many details to share yet, but we have some big plans: there are quite a few super-competitive programmers here, and we've put them to work preparing challenges for you.

So start brushing up with a couple of practice problems -- and it's well worth checking out some old problems from the ACM ICPC and TopCoder too. We're also excited to hear what you think would make for a great Google-run programming contest, so send us your feedback -- and get ready for a challenge.

Find a needle in a feedstack with Google Reader

Posted by Ben Darnell, Google Reader Engineer

The fundamental problem with information is that there's too much of it, and this is probably why we all go to our trusted sources to learn what we really need to know. Your sources filter out the noise and present the most interesting bits to you in a useful way. For many of us, these sources include newspapers, magazines, and of course blogs. We built Google Reader as a way for you to see all of your online sources in one place.

So if you want to keep up with the chatter about the new iPods or Superbad, now you can. We've added a familiar search box to the top of Google Reader so you can search across all the blogs and sites to which you're subscribed.



See if this doesn't help with your information overload. And by the way, if you want to learn more about feed readers, here's a great explanation:

Collect, share, and discover books

Posted by Adam Mathes, Product Manager

Books often live a vibrant life offline, and through digitization Google Book Search tries to help them live an even more exciting life online through full text search. Today we're launching some new features that go beyond search so you can collect, share, and discover new books.

To start, you can create your own personal collection on Book Search, and use it to help find just the right book from your collection for any occasion. Other people can view your library, so you can share your collection as Bethany has done. Or take a look at some other interesting collections.

Digitized text is useful beyond search, too. It enables us to infer connections between books through shared passages. For example, Sir Isaac Newton once said:

I know not what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to
have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

This quote has resonated and been used in hundreds of books from the early 1800s to 2007. You can discover connections between books through quotations like this in a feature we call "Popular passages." Read more and dive into the meme pool.

We've also launched a way to let users, select, copy and embed segments of public domain books (like the Newton quote) in any web page. We hope to make it as easy to blog and quote from a book as it is from any web page. Like many innovations at Google, a stellar summer intern worked on this .

We hope these new features help you discover, collect, and share some of the great truths just waiting to be discovered (or maybe re-discovered) in the great ocean of books before us.