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Google Friends Newsletter - December 2006

Holiday greetings to all our Google Friends! We hope you enjoy this
month's update on our products and services.

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POWER TIP

Search for Santa

Even if you don't have a reindeer team of your own, you can still use
the Google Earth Santa Tracker to follow Santa's fabled flight from
rooftop to rooftop in glorious, satellite-imaged 3-D. First, you'll
need to download the latest version of Google Earth, and then the Santa
Tracker file. Open the file on December 24th to start watching St. Nick
in real time. On, Donner, on, Blitzen!
http://earth.google.com/santa

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NEW PRODUCTS & UPDATES

Holiday offerings through Picasa

We've updated Picasa Web Albums, Google's photo sharing site, to make
this season of photo sharing even more merry and bright. Now you can
upload videos to the web and share them with family and friends just as
you do with photos. You can also search through all the photos and
videos you've uploaded, and tag your photos for easier browsing and
searching. And two of our partners, Shutterfly and PhotoWorks, have
special offers when you order through Picasa Web Albums.
-- Take 20% off all PhotoWorks products when you use code:
C850-38-5124-11 during checkout; valid until 1/17/07.
-- New Shutterfly users get 15 free, film-quality prints. Click "Learn
More" for details after you select Shutterfly.
http://picasaweb.google.com

The new Blogger

Blogger is more powerful than ever, and still easy to use. Customize
the page elements of your blog's design; create a private blog and
control who sees it; add a feed for all your comments; manage multiple
blogs from the re-designed dashboard; label posts to group related
entries -- all without any HTML or CSS knowledge.
http://www.blogger.com

Google Toolbar for Firefox

When we released the latest Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer,
Firefox users wanted to know when they'd see new Toolbar features in
their favorite browser too. Now there's a new Toolbar beta for Firefox
that lets you access your bookmarks from any computer, add custom
buttons to your Toolbar, and share web pages via Gmail, Blogger and
SMS. There's even a nifty feature only available in the Toolbar for
Firefox: you can open document and spreadsheet files right in the
browser using Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/toolbar/FT3/intl/en/

Google Patent Search

With the new beta release of Google Patent Search, you can discover the
fascinating ideas behind products you use every day -- from adhesive
tape and contact lenses -- to obscure inventions you may have never
heard of before. You can search the full text of over 7 million U.S.
patents, and as with Google Book Search, scroll through pages or zoom
in on text and illustrations.
http://www.google.com/patents

New features on Google Finance

There are quite a few improvements to Google Finance: a newly designed
homepage, currency information, sector performance for the U.S. market,
and a listing of top market movers along with the relevant and
important news of the day. See which companies are the day's Top Movers
in the market by price, market cap, volume, and popularity as
determined by our own Google Trends. Track U.S. stocks on more
comprehensive charts, which now display up to 40 years of data. And
Google Finance has richer capabilities for importing your other online
portfolios, using different views, and adding transactions. You can
also add and view your Google Finance portfolios on the Google
Personalized Homepage.
http://finance.google.com

Domain registration with Google Apps for Your Domain

When we launched Google Apps for Your Domain in August, we made it a
lot easier for companies to offer private-labeled email, instant
messaging and calendar accounts to their users for free. Now we've
partnered with GoDaddy.com and eNom, two leading domain registration
services, to offer companies and individuals without their own website
domain a way to register one for as little as $10 a year, including
private registration. You find a domain name that you like, register
it, and automatically configure everything so it works with Google Apps
for Your Domain right away.
http://www.google.com/a

Google Earth's Geographic Web layer

If you've pondered what it's like to walk in someone else's shoes, now
you can. The Google Earth Geographic Web layer uses the rich data of
Wikipedia, Panoramio and the Google Earth Community to bring you the
writings, photos and postings of travelers who have circled the globe.
Just launch Google Earth and click on the new icons -- the Wikipedia
globe, the Panoramio star, or the information "i" from the Google
Earth Community.
http://earth.google.com

Multi-point driving directions on Maps

With the latest addition to Google Maps, you can plan your road trip
from one stop to the next, all in one sweep. When you go to Google
Maps, get directions between any two places as you normally do and then
just click on the "Add destination" link below to add more stops. You
can add as many destinations as you'd like, and to re-order your trip,
just drag and drop the destinations in the left panel.
http://maps.google.com

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MISCELLANY

+ Google Zeitgeist 2006 +

These days, all the major search engines send out a year-end list: what
were the most popular search queries of the year? Scads of magazines,
TV shows, newspapers, and blogs pick up on this theme also, either by
picking their own or reporting on what the big sites and search engines
say. It''s a real staple of year-end coverage to revisit the biggest
celebrity names, trends and oddities that characterize the year just
ending. Rather than tell you the most-frequently-searched words -- many
of which are constants throughout the year -- we like to contrast which
search terms grew significantly this year over last year. As a result
our main lists enumerate queries about social networking sites
(MySpace, Bebo), significant world news (Hezbollah, North Korea,
Darfur), scandals (Duke lacrosse, page), and lots more. What's all
mean? We think it gets interesting to look over periods longer than a
single year, and that's what Google Trends aims to do. (It's also fun
to compare the top lists for years past and ask, where are they now?)
However much significance you give to year-end lists, December is an
excellent time to look back. We hope you enjoy the view.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2006.html


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The Google Blog offers frequent updates and insights about our technology and products, and the company at large.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com

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