Google Updates On Labs Product City Tours

6 months ago, Google launched City Tours into Labs. It is basically a virtual tour guide, offering suggestions for walking tours of various cities or whatever search term you’ve entered. It’s not perfect. There is no way to recommend people walk down Google-recommended McDowell street in downtown Raleigh when they can and should take Fayetteville Street. But hey, it is still in Labs.

Now, City Tours is getting a few updates:

Show complete walking directions- In earlier times, Google estimated the time it takes to get from one destination to the next. Now, the directions offer entire routing information, taking into account such things as bridges, bodies of water, etc.

Import a My Map as a tour - Create a map of the things you desire to see. Then import it into City Tours, which will attempt to schedule a visit to all places on your map.

User interface improvements- These were designed to make City Tours perform more like Google Maps.

Google to boost up speeds with "Caffeine"

The holidays are not over just yet: Google has another special gift lined up for users this holiday season.

To bring in the New Year, Google will finally be implementing a latest update to its search algorithm, code-named "Caffeine," which is designed to considerably improve the speeds at which search results make it to the user's screen. For searches regarding larger multimedia files, like photos and videos, users will most likely notice the biggest difference.

A few people are saying they are already noticing faster load times, even though Google promises that the update will not roll out until after the holidays.

As for the actual results, not too much must be affected, though we can probably expect Google to go on giving more weight to social media. Less than a month ago, Google began including real-time updates (drawn from social networking sites similar to Facebook and Twitter) in its search results. An actual box appears in the results with an up-to-the-minute posts fading in and pushing older posts down.

While Google has been extensively testing out "Caffeine" since August, a latest survey concludes that users cannot notice the speed jolt. Most Web sites are not even optimized to take benefit of the update, according to SEO Marketing firm Irbtrax, which recently performed an indiscriminate study of 50 business and consumer Websites.

Still, Google has some serious stakes in its search engine, which has received a few slight competitions from Microsoft's Bing. Speed plays a central part in which search engine users decide to follow.

The Year in Review Captured On a Google Wave

From the same folks at Whirled Interactive who brought us the wonderfully funny “Pulp Wave Fiction” comes one more intelligent use of Google Wave as a video production medium — this time it is used to encapsulate the year in news and social media.

In “Waving Goodbye to 2009,” embedded after the break, we see a Google Wave rendition of the year’s most unforgettable moments. From the Obama inauguration to the Iran elections, from Susan Boyle to Kanye West, the video highlights the best and worst moments of 2009.

Check it out below and let us know what you think. Were any massive stories omitted you would have liked to see included (were we blind or did we miss an appearance from Balloon Boy, e.g.)? You may also check out a few other novel use cases for Google Wave, too.

The year in Google Doodles

Christmas Google Doodle is newest decorative logo to adorn search site logo.

Google on Monday unveiled its newest Google Doodle, a festive tropical Christmas postcard that overlays the company's logo on its main search page and the company will be rolling out a sequence of additional Christmas Doodles between now and the holiday, and is archiving them at this web page.

Google Doodles turn out to be so popular that scammers have started latching on the topics and planting malware-infected pages designed to trap those looking for more information on certain Doodle subjects.

It's been a fun also varied year for Google Doodles, some of which are seen in all countries, some in just a portion.

Translate a site, preview PDFs and page templates location released in Google Sites

In Google Sites you can now:

- Translate a site you visit that is not in your default language for Google Sites. This can be used by international co-workers to view the project site of a remote office if that project site is in the local language of that office.

- PDF files attached to pages and file cabinets can now be previewed with the Google Docs viewers therefore no need to download the file.

- You can now set a default location in your site for page templates.

Editions included:

Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions

Languages included:

All languages that are supported by Google Sites

How to access what's new:

- If you visit a site that is not in your chosen language for Sites, there is now a 'Translate' link at the bottom right of the page which will translate the site for you using Google Translate.

- For a PDF file in Sites, clicking on 'View' rather than 'Download' now previews that PDF in Google Docs viewer.

- While saving or modifying a page template, choose 'Default location' to specify a location in your site structure. If a page is then created with this template, then the default location will be what you have specified.

Useful Google Docs Updates

Over the last 10 days Google has released a few updates that must be of interest to educators who use Google Docs. First, last week Google announced new options for searching and sorting your documents. In the past the only way to arrange your documents was chronologically according to the time of the last edit. Even though you put your documents into folders still the only way to sort was chronologically. Now you can arrange your document search by relevance or time stamp.

The 2nd enhancement to Google Docs announced previous week is a new option for exporting all of the contents of your Google Docs. You can now export all of your documents (up to 2GB, around 100,000 pages) at once.

At last, on Monday of this week Google announced a new co-editor option for Google Docs Presentations. The co-editor service permits users to simultaneously edit a presentation without stepping on each other's toes. When you use the co-editor for presentations you can see which slide(s) your co-editor is working on.

Applications for Education

The new "export all" option might be useful for students and teachers who would like to create offline copies of their documents with just a single click. The new co-editor for presentations might be useful for students who are developing group presentations. Students can collaborate without the frustration of trying to work on a slide that somebody else is trying to edit at the same time.

Google Labs updates transliteration tool

Have you ever wanted to type something in English and have the tool you are using spit that same message out in Hindi? What about Greek? With the aid of Google's transliteration feature, you can.

The search giant's Bangalore office wrote that typing on Roman keyboards makes it "difficult to type in Indian languages." In an attempt to find a fix, the team in India released Google's Transliteration offering. And on Thursday it announced an update to the feature.

The new and enhanced Transliteration permits users to select from one of 17 different languages includes Arabic, Gujarati, Kannada, and Punjabi, to name a few. Once that's chosen, they can type a message in English and have it instantly transliterated to the selected language. Users can also search for word definitions in the included dictionary.