Sessions and snacks at Google I/O

Posted by Andrew Bowers, Product Manager

We hosted Google I/O at the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week, with 3,000+ developers in attendance. They took advantage of nearly 100 in-depth technical sessions, on-site massage therapists, and 3,500 pounds of assorted snacks (including 395 pounds of M&Ms and 190 pounds of Gummi Bears).

While we can't embed snacks or massages directly into this browser -- we're hoping the Gears team will make this possible next year -- presentations will be posted to Google Code shortly. In the meantime, feel free to check out the Google I/O keynote:

Happy birthday, Google Gears!

Posted by Chris Prince, Software Engineer

It has been a year since the launch of Google Gears, and we wanted to offer a glimpse into what's changing, and what's ahead.

First of all, to better reflect the open nature of this project, we've decided to rename ourselves. Henceforth, the project will be simply "Gears." We want to make it clear that Gears isn't just a Google thing. We see Gears as a way for everyone to get involved with upgrading the web platform.

Our first year focused on offline-enabling applications, but that was only the beginning. Our broader goal has always been to close the gap between web apps and native apps by giving the browser new capabilities. There is no shortage of web application pain points to be addressed! In its second year, Gears will begin to tackle some of these problems.

On the applications front, there have been a number of exciting developments. Today, MySpace is launching enhanced functionality for MySpace mail using Gears. They are using the original Gears Database API with Full Text Search to enable fast and easy search and sort capabilities. The latest build of WordPress also integrates Gears, to improve performance, and to let users manage their blogs offline. And as many of you know, the Google Docs team added offline capabilities just a few weeks ago.

Gears remains a completely open source project. We strongly support web standards, and we continue to work with the W3C and WHATWG committees to help define standards for browsers.

Finally, we want Gears to be available to everyone, regardless of platform or browser. To that end, we are currently adding Firefox 3 and Safari support. And Opera is working to support Gears on both desktop and mobile. These new platforms will nicely complement our current set: Internet Explorer and Firefox, across Windows, Mac, Linux, and even Windows Mobile.

We're very excited about our progress this past year, and we have even bigger plans for 2008. All of you are welcome to jump in and join our fledgling community -- we're helping to push the web forward, and it's a lot of fun! :)

Mini Hear, Mini Do

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Product Manager, Google Enterprise

The Google Mini has been making its way across the globe, reaching thousands of businesses that have taken to our little blue box, and along the way picking up suggestions for improvement from devoted users. As a result we've just introduced to the Mini three greatly requested features that can make search inside businesses even more powerful. Finding the most up-to-date and authoritative document within your company has never been easier now that you can search for documents filed in shared drives and weight documents by date or value. We've also added support for six new languages (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Hungarian, and Polish).

We're listening, so keep those suggestions coming.

Read more about the new Mini features on the Google Enterprise Blog.

Treasure Hunt - week 3

Posted by Phillip Grasso, Manager, Engineering/Operations

We're now entering the third week of Google's Treasure Hunt competition, a puzzle contest designed to test your knowledge of computer science, networking, and low-level UNIX trivia. Last week we posted the second puzzle. This week's puzzle is set to be released on Tuesday, May 27 at 10 a.m. PDT. We'll also be featuring our brand-new San Francisco office along with it.

We'll be giving out a few prizes for the fastest contestants to complete each question. There will also be a grand prize for the contestant who correctly answers all four questions in the shortest cumulative time (time is defined as the time between the question's release and the submission of the correct answer). The previous puzzles will still be accessible off of the main page.

The treasure is within reach, so grab yer shovels and keep on diggin', mateys!

San Francisco office rides the wave

Posted by Todd Curtiss, Director of Engineering, Site Reliability (SRE)

San Francisco has been attracting freethinking writers, artists, instigators, and entrepreneurs for more than 150 years. The people who built, experienced, and created this diverse place have all shared a passion for innovation and extending beyond the conventional. San Franciscans kicked off the gold rush and made the first pair of jeans, received the first transcontinental telephone call in 1915, came together for the Summer of Love and the original Burning Man, and played a major role in the dot-com and Web 2.0 booms. The City always seems to blaze new trails.

Sure, our summers are cool and foggy, our hills are steep, and our streets are twisty. But SF Googlers think this is the perfect place to work. Earlier this year, our own "Father of the Internet" Vint Cerf launched the office by inspiring the assembled engineers to think about today's challenges at scale, speaking about the challenges of interplanetary IP communication, the future of the Internet, and who's to blame for IPv4's limited address space (Vint says it's him).

We in the SF office contribute to a broad cross-section of the Google world in a number of ways: we write software for managing big computing clusters and keeping them efficient; we analyze vast piles of data to understand how the web works; we engineer reliability, scalability, and security into the apps many people rely on; we share our tools and methods with the open source community; we create internal productivity apps to support our engineers.

And that's just in engineering. The SF office also supports ad agency customers, local markets and classifieds. We're home to our philanthropic arm Google.org, and we make time to participate in community volunteer programs through our employee-created Google Cares-SF program. We have an active green committee, access to the GFleet car-share program, and we're the first plastic-bottle–free office among all of the Googleplexes.

Here's what some of us have to say about working here:



While we may be new, Google SF is growing fast. With close proximity and access to Mountain View and the rest of the Silicon Valley, we span the best of worlds: local and global, campus and city, 'burbs and urban, highways and dirt roads. We're always looking for talented and passionate people to join our team, so if you want to be part of building the next big thing, we'd love to hear from you.

And in case you need another reason to come visit us in Shaky Town, Google I/O, our largest developer conference to date, takes place at the Moscone Center on May 28-29. It's not too late to register -- we hope to see you there.