By Kevin Gargoyle Lim, Custom Search Team

If you have a custom search engine, you can jazz up the customization gig by integrating Subscribed Links into your search engine. The Subscribed Links API enables you to create custom result snippets, as well as define the keywords or queries that would trigger them.

For instance, users who want to search for information about the comic book character Asterix might do the following: Type the search query in the search box, scan the search results for the most promising website, click the link to that website, wait for the website to load, and—finally—skim the page for pieces of pertinent information. However, if your custom search engine has a subscribed link for comic book characters, users can just type "asterix" in the search box and immediately get your custom result at the top of the results page. They don't have to scroll, scan, or click anything else to get the answer to their query.

Subscribed Links can directly answer questions, display links to services, provide news and status information, and calculate quantities, among other things. To get an idea of what you can do with Subscribed Links, read the developer guide and check out some live examples in the Google Subscribed Links Directory.

As if that's not cool enough, you can also integrate subscribed links created by other developers with your search engine. To learn more, read the Custom Search Developer's Guide.

By Detlev Schwabe, Software Engineer

Many developers and partners use the Picasa Web Albums Data API to enable users to upload photos to Picasa from web sites and desktop applications. Now, we are excited to announce the same PWA Data API can be used to upload videos to Picasa Web Albums as well!

The API commands for uploading videos are similar to those you may already use to upload photos. You can upload videos up to 100MB in AVI, QuickTime, MPEG4, WMV and other formats. The system will automatically create a thumbnail image to represent the video, or you can choose one yourself at any time.

There are many ways you can use video uploading, including enabling users to upload all the content from their cameras — including still images as well as videos — all to Picasa Web Albums at the same time. And, of course, the Video Uploader API is the perfect way to integrate dedicated webcams with Picasa!

The Video Uploader API is part of the standard Picasa Web Albums Data API. You can find the updated documentation here.

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

It has been an exciting couple of days. Google Chrome launched along with a new blog for Chromium the underlying open source project. Whenever you see an internal project go live to the world, and see the source become open it feels great. We've reposted the blog's first post below, by Ben Goodger:

Today, Google launched a new web browser called Google Chrome. At the same time, we are releasing all of the code as open source under a permissive BSD license. The open source project is called Chromium - after the metal used to make chrome.

Why did Google release the source code?

Primarily it's because one of the fundamental goals of the Chromium project is to help drive the web forward. Open source projects like Firefox and WebKit have led the way in defining the next generation of web technologies and standards, and we felt the best way we could help was to follow suit, and be as open as we could. To be clear, improving the web in this way also has some clear benefits for us as a company. With a richer set of APIs we can build more interesting apps allowing people to do more online. The more people do online, the more they can use our services. At any rate, we have worked on this project by ourselves for long enough - it's time for us to engage with the wider web community so that we can move on to the next set of challenges.

We believe that open source works not only because it allows people to join us and improve our products, but also (and more importantly) because it means other projects are able to use the code we've developed. Where we've developed innovative new technology, we hope that other projects can use it to make their products better, just as we've been able to adopt code from other open source projects to make our product better.

How will we be working with the open source community?

To begin with, we are engaging with the WebKit community to integrate our patches back into the main line of WebKit development. Because of Chromium's unique multi-process architecture, the integration of the V8 JavaScript engine, and other factors, we've built a fairly significant port of WebKit on Windows, and are developing the same for Mac OS X and Linux. We want to make sure that we can find a productive way to integrate and sync up with the WebKit community in this effort as we move forward.

Today, you can visit our project website at www.chromium.org, where you can get the latest source code or the freshest development build. If you're interested in keeping track of what's going on, you can join one of our discussion groups, where you can participate in development discussions and keep track of bugs as they're filed and fixed. Maybe you'll want to fix a few, too! You'll also find information on reporting bugs and all the various other aspects of the project. We hope you'll check it out!

This is the Chromium blog. The posts here will be of a mostly technical nature, discussing the design theory and implementation details of work we've done or are doing. Over the next few weeks there'll be a number of posts that give a high level tour of the most important aspects of the browser.

Finally, if you've not yet done so, take Google Chrome for a spin. You can download it from http://www.google.com/chrome/.

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

Code Review is produced in a variety of formats, from text to audio (iTunes) and video.



The last several days have been exciting. We are seeing great new technology that can enable us to do new things, and have old things run a lot better.

Mozilla announced TraceMonkey, which promises large JavaScript performance improvements based on their trace based JIT technique. This, which backs on to the earlier SquirrelFish announcement from Apple and the WebKit team, and IE8 beta 2 arriving today with performance improvements too.

Running a new browser and seeing Gmail get a lot faster is just as good as buying a new computer to get a speed up!

Gears 0.4 has been released and people have picked up on the main points.

One side is Geolocation, and the two new ways to access location data through Gears and the Ajax APIs.

As an experiment, I wrote a shim that would bridge the W3C Geolocation API that Andrei Popescu of the Gears team is editing, and the other APIs. This is shown via a simple Where are you? sample application.

Giving you access to location information is fantastic, but this isn't all Gears 0.4 has to offer.

The new YouTube multi-file upload page gives you the ability to upload many files, with progress on the upload, and the ability to resume uploads after a connectivity problem. Brad Neuberg wrote a sample that ties together the new APIs (Blob, HTTPRequest improvements, Desktop API file system addition) and shows how you could create the experience too.

For more of this content, you can follow our two new series: Open Web Podcast, and the State of HTML 5.

Mobile News

A much awaited SDK update from Android that includes the new Home screen and many UI changes. New applications are also added (Alarm Clock, Calculator, Music player, etc) and new APIs and developer tools.

We also continue to add iPhone-friendly views of the Google world. THe latest is the Google Translate view.

Been playing with Google App Engine? If so, you should be aware of datastore updates that give you the ability to do batch updates, and discussions of indexing improvements. It is fascinating to watch cool new applications: from mini-services, to full applications, to platforms themselves, giving App Engine a go.

Open Source

The Google Summer of Code is moving along, and since we are now in August we get to see the progress that the students that have been flipping bits and not burgers this summer. One example is the work of 6 students working on the Git version control system.

Steve Weis has released Keyczar, a "toolkit that makes cryptography safer and easier to use". We all commonly make mistakes including the wrong cipher modes, bad algorithms, or working with keys incorrectly. Keyczar has got your back, is there to help keep your code secure.

Speaking of security, Thomas Duebendorfer of our Swiss office gave a talk titled Are internet users at risk? that delves into the practices of browsers and plugins, and how they update themselves. This just reaffirmed my desire to have silent updates getting pushed to me to keep me more secure!

Another video that we published that caught my eye was Where the hell is Matt?. Matt Harding is the guy who you may have seen on YouTube dancing badly around the world. We got him to the office and he chatted on his adventures. If you find yourself waiting for a compile (or a Map Reduce) this Friday, give it a watch while you wait.

Finally, registration opened up for the Google Developer Day events in India, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Russia. These join the first wave of events in the UK, France, Germany, and Spain. I really hope that we get to see you at one of those locations!

As always, thanks for reading, listening, or watching, and let us know if there is anything that you would like to see.

By Elizabeth Yin, Google Developer Programs

We are excited to open registration for four more Google Developer Days in October in India, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Russia.

• October 18th -- Bangalore, India
• October 21st -- Milan, Italy
• October 24th -- Prague, Czech Republic
• October 28th -- Moscow, Russia

(Please note we have moved Google Developer Day India to October 18th.)

As with the other 2008 Google Developer Days, we'll discuss the latest with our APIs and developer tools, diving into topics such as App Engine, OpenSocial, and Maps. We'll have some cool new topics in store, and there will be plenty of time to socialize with fellow developers and Google engineers.

If you are in western Europe, registration for the September Google Developer Days (UK, France, Germany, and Spain) is still open, though we expect to run out of space very soon. We hope you can join us for one of these upcoming eight events.

Update: We've also just opened registration for Google Developer Day Italy.

By Nir Bar-Lev, Product Management

Here at the Google Visualization HQ we focus hard on making the Visualization API the easiest and simplest platform for visualizing and reporting data on the web.  We're always excited to see the community uptake and develop our product, making it even more useful and accessible to other developers. One such initiative is the PHP wrapper class that Thomas Schaefer wrote for the Visualization API.

The class wraps the API and enables PHP application developers to quickly integrate visualizations into their code. Thomas even published reference applications that enable you to  get started even quicker.

We love your work Thomas, keep it up!

By Dan Peterson, Product Manager

With the fall semester rapidly approaching at universities all over, we're happy to share that we've recently made more content available on Google Code University. In case you're not familiar, Google Code University is a repository of educational material including tutorials, lecture slides, and videos focused entirely on computer science. Not only is it a collection of high-quality educational materials, but most of the course materials are Creative Commons licensed, to enable reuse and modification by educators and students alike.

This recent update includes materials covering:

• Intro to CS Algorithms from Princeton and Stanford
• More content about the foundations of web security
• New Distributed systems materials from the University of Waterloo, Swarthmore, and Rutgers University
• A broad set of additional resources for teaching CS

We hope you find these new materials interesting and useful. If you have suggestions or materials you'd like to share, please discuss on the forum.

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

This week has seen two new series to cover Open Web technology. One of the messages from Google I/O was explaining how Google believes in, and is frankly betting on the Web as its platform. You should expect to see increasing examples of how we are putting our money (and effort) where our mouth is on this.

Since the Web is so decentralized, we have a deep need to communicate and discuss where we, as a collective are heading.

I have the pleasure to be joined by Alex Russell, notably of the Dojo Foundation, and John Resig, both creator of jQuery and employee of Mozilla Corp, for a new Open Web Podcast that focuses on news, events, and opinion on the state of the Open Web.

In the first episode, which you can either download directly or subscribe to, we delve into a lot of topics including new APIs and specifications, the new charge behind Firebug, the Open Web Foundation, and much more.

The early part of the podcast actually discusses the other series that started this week. Mark Pilgrim, a team-mate of mine at Google, kicked off This Week in HTML 5. Mark is taking the time to keep track of the myriad of changes to the specification, and will keep us abreast of the important features and decisions that are made by the group, head by our own Ian Hickson.

Mark discusses the big additions of Web Workers (Gears Workers standardized), and the clarification of alt tag usage in the img tag to have you using alt="{diagram}" and the like.

If you are interested in keeping up to date on HTML 5, you can subscribe to the WHATWG feed which is where Mark is doing his work.

If there is anything else that you would like to see from us, please drop us a comment below!