Google Shopper 1.3 adds search filters and featured lists

When we launched Google Shopper in February, I never expected that my 20% project would quickly become one of Google’s most popular Android applications. With over 2.5 million downloads in just 9 months, many Android users are using Shopper to help them shop on the go.

Today, we’re excited to announce the next version of Shopper. In addition to existing, popular features like local availability, fast barcode scanning and voice search, version 1.3 includes new search filters like “price” and “brand” to help users refine their searches to find the perfect product.

For example, if you’re looking for a new Blu-Ray player and you want to match it to your existing Denon receiver, you can filter by price and brand:


In addition, version 1.3 includes new “featured lists” - lists of products to help you shop during the holidays. When you have a spare moment, you can browse through suggested gifts and then click through to find the best place to buy them.

To get Shopper, Android users can go to Android Market for the free download. If you’re an iPhone user, you can use Mobile Product Search (m.google.com/products from an iPhone or Android device) to get many of the same great features.

Posted by Daniel Switkin, Senior Software Engineer, Google Shopper

Voice Search in underrepresented languages

Welkom*!

Today we’re introducing Voice Search support for Zulu and Afrikaans, as well as South African-accented English. The addition of Zulu in particular represents our first effort in building Voice Search for underrepresented languages. We define underrepresented languages as those which, while spoken by millions, have little presence in electronic and physical media, e.g., webpages, newspapers and magazines.

We believe that the speech research community needs to start working on many of these underrepresented languages to advance progress and build speech recognition, translation and other Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. The development of NLP technologies in these languages is critical for enabling information access for everybody. Indeed, these technologies have the potential to break language barriers.

Check out the Google Research Blog for more details.

Salani kahle!**


* “Welcome” in Afrikaans
** “Stay well” in Zulu

Posted by Pedro J. Moreno, Staff Research Scientist and Johan Schalkwyk, Senior Staff Engineer

Enhancements to Google News for smartphones

(Cross-posted from the Google News Blog)

Last November, we redesigned Google News for mobile access on smartphones including Android, iPhone and Palm Pre. Today, we’re globally rolling out new usability and visual enhancements that we hope will make browsing news on your smartphone easier.

We expanded the story space to make tapping on articles easier and more accurate. Tapping anywhere on an article headline or snippet opens it up, and clicking on a section heading opens up that topic section on your screen.

In addition, the default view of stories is now collapsed, to reduce scrolling time. You can ‘expand’ a story by tapping ‘More sources’, which brings you to related stories from other sources. The screenshots below show the collapsed and expanded view of a story.




So, pick up your smartphone, point your browser to http://news.google.com, and catch up on news on the go.

Posted by Arun Prasath, Tech Lead, Google Mobile News

Google Search app for Windows Phone 7 - in the Marketplace now

Searching with Google on your Windows Phone 7 device just got easier. The Google Search app for Windows Phone 7 provides quick and convenient access to a rich set of search results, allowing you to search the web, images, local, news, and more.

This initial release of the Google Search app includes several features that help you to search faster - suggestions appear automatically as you type, you can choose to repeat a query from your search history, and your current location is used to provide more relevant results.

The Google Search app is a free download for all Windows Phone 7 devices and languages. Just search the Marketplace for “Google Search”, download, pin to Start, and the power of Google Search is only a click away.

Update: here is a link to the app in Zune Marketplace. You'll need to be using a Windows Phone 7 device or Internet Explorer for the link to work.

Posted by Jon Skeet and Nick Radicevic, Google Mobile Team

The power of Google Instant, now in your pocket

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog.)

Google Instant makes search faster by displaying not just predictions but actual search results as you type. This saves valuable time on a desktop browser, but wouldn’t it be great to have Google Instant on mobile devices, where each keystroke and page load is much slower and you frequently have just a moment to find the information you need?

In September we announced that we were working to bring Google Instant to mobile, and today we’re making a beta version available to most iPhone and Android devices in the U.S. To try it out, go to google.com in your phone’s browser and tap the Google Instant “Turn on” link beneath the search box (if you don’t see the “Turn on” link, try waiting a moment and then refresh the page).

Like the desktop version of Google Instant, when you type on your mobile device you’ll see predictions of what you might be searching for. If you type [anse], for example, you should see [ansel adams] along with other predictions. Results for the first prediction appear automatically, and tapping on the other predictions will display those results. Pressing the enter key or the search button skips the predictions and will display results for exactly what you’ve typed. Check out our demo video:



With Google Instant on mobile, we’re pushing the limits of mobile browsers and wireless networks. You will probably notice a big improvement in speed when you search thanks to a new AJAX and HTML5 implementation for mobile that dynamically updates the page with new results and eliminates the need to load a new page for each query.

Google Instant for mobile works best on 3G and WiFi networks, but since the quality of any wireless connection can fluctuate, we’ve made it easy to enable or disable Google Instant without ever leaving the page. Just tap the “Turn on” or “Turn off” link.

We hope you’ll enjoy using Google Instant for mobile as much as we enjoyed making it. It’s currently available for Android 2.2 (“Froyo”) devices and iPhones and iPods running iOS 4 in the U.S. in English. We’re working to support additional countries and languages and more devices in the coming months, so stay tuned.

Posted by Steve Kanefsky, Software Engineer

Find your polling place and follow the US Election on the go

The United States midterm election is on Tuesday, November 2, and we encourage all eligible US citizens to get out and vote. We’ve made it easy to find your polling place and follow election news by visiting our Election Center mobile site at m.google.com/elections on your Android-powered phone or iPhone.

Enter the address where you’re registered to vote, and we’ll show you a Google Map of your polling place. The Election Center site also has information about candidates running for office in your area.

So come Tuesday, let your mobile phone guide you to your polling place, and let sanity guide your vote!

Posted by Ryan Pollock, Product Marketing Manager

Top Three Web Based Image Editors

If you are using a computer that doesn't have a decent image editor program, then you can make use of a variety of web-based image editors. Having surveyed those that are freely available, I present a list of the top three. Each of these alows you to perform a variety of simple tasks upon an image, such as cropping and resizing. Each also includes the usual drawing tools as well as supporting layers. Please try them out and leave a comment to share your experiences.

Editor by pixlr.com
Editor enables you to create new images or open image files from your computer or from the web in the following formats: bmp, gif, jpg, png, psd and pxd (Editor's own format). You can save images as bmp, jpg, png or pxd to your computer or to Facebook. It offers a good selection of tools and filters.


Sumo Paint 2.0
Sumo Paint also lets you create new images and open files from your computer or the web. You can open files in gif, jpg, png and its own sumo format, and you can save as jpg, png and sumo. It has the best selection of filters and tools of the three here.


Splashup
Splashup will open bmp, gif, jpg and png files not only from your computer and the web, but also from Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket and Picasa. You can save files back to each of these in jpg, png, and the somewhat obscure fxo format. It has the most limited selection of tools and filters of those listed here.