The +1 button launches in Australia

Back in March, we announced the +1 button on search results in English on Google.com - a way for you to recommend content to your friends, contacts and the rest of the world directly from Google search results and ads. Today, 1+’s will start appearing on Google’s search results in Australia for some users, and will start showing for most logged in users by the end of the week.



Just like on Google.com, the +1 button allows you to recommend a news article, your favourite brand of sandals or an attraction you visited with a single click.

The +1 button will appear next to each search result

After pressing the +1 button, you have the option to undo the action immediately

Say, for example, you’re planning a trip to London. If you are searching for a hotel, we may show you +1’s from your globe-trotting friend. Or if you’re looking for things to do on a sunny day, we may show you +1’s from your food-loving cousin next to the result for a gourmet market.





But +1s aren’t only for search results. You will also see +1 appear on sites large and small across the Internet. From today, you can +1 local businesses on Truelocal, holiday accommodation at Stayz, vehicles at Mitsubishi, daily deals on Spreets and electronics at Kogan. In the next few days sites like Trading Post, The Australian and News.com.au will also be adding +1 to their sites. Website owners can implement the +1 button on their site within minutes.



How do we know which +1’s to show you? We use many signals to identify the most useful recommendations, including the people you are already connected to through Google (your chat buddies and contacts, for example).



To get started +1’ing the stuff you want to recommend, you’ll need to create a Google profile. You can use your profile to see all of your +1’s in one place, and delete those you no longer want to recommend. To see +1’s in your Google search results you’ll need to be logged into your Google Account.



We believe that +1, combined with all of the social content we’re now including in search globally, will mean even better, more relevant results than you get today.



Posted by Kate Conroy, Product Specialist

An Aussie’s Take on Google I/O

I spent last week at Google I/O, Google’s annual conference for developers held in San Francisco. This conference is all about making the web a better place -- the nuts and bolts of software development that most folks don’t ever think about when they add apps to their Android phones or when they log into their Gmail. What’s interesting about all these developers getting stoked about building the apps of the future is that they take one thing for granted: high speed Internet connectivity. That’s not to say they don’t recognise that sometimes connectivity is slow or erratic -- they do, and we’re all trying to find ways to make sure our apps can work in those situations. What I mean is that their starting assumption is that high speed connectivity is fast becoming like electricity or running water -- never far away when you need it, and plenty of it. I love this optimism -- and it’s this optimism that is bringing the National Broadband Network to Australia.

Out of all the exciting announcements that came out of Google this week, every single one of them relies on high speed broadband. YouTube movie rentals -- tick. Syncing your music library and movies from Android Market across your PC and your Android tablet and phone -- tick. Using a Chromebook, where your apps, games, photos, music, movies and documents will be accessible wherever you are and you don't need to worry about losing your computer or forgetting to back up files -- tick. These products will run on the networks we we have now, but just imagine their potential -- and the potential of the ideas of all the developers in Moscone Center and those around the world watching Google I/O streamed over YouTube -- when we have high speed Internet everywhere.

Most of us in the Sydney office wish we had a dollar for every time someone asked us about the NBN, “Yeah, but what are you going to do with all that speed?” or “What’s Google’s vision for how to use all that bandwidth?” I think we saw a taste of it at Google I/O.

Posted by Alan Noble, Engineering Director, Google Australia

Explore museums and great works of art in the Google Art Project

This is a cross-post from the Official Google Blog.

One of the things I love about working Google is that you can come up with an idea one day and the next day start getting to work to make it a reality. That's what happened with the Art Project—a new tool we're announcing today which puts more than 1,000 works of art at your fingertips, in extraordinary detail.



It started when a small group of us who were passionate about art got together to think about how we might use our technology to help museums make their art more accessible—not just to regular museum-goers or those fortunate to have great galleries on their doorsteps, but to a whole new set of people who might otherwise never get to see the real thing up close.

We're also lucky here to have access to technology like Picasa and App Engine and to have colleagues who love a challenge—like building brand-new technology to enable Street View to go indoors! Thanks to this, and our unique collaboration with museums around the world, we were able to turn our 20% project into something you can try out for yourself today at www.googleartproject.com.



You’ll find a selection of super high-resolution images of famous works of art as well as more than a thousand other images, by more than 400 artists—all in one place. And with Street View technology, you can take a virtual tour inside 17 of the world’s most acclaimed art museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York, The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Tate Britain & The National Gallery in London, Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Officer and Laughing Girl, Johannes Vermeer (The Frick Collection, New York - U.S.)

Here are a few things you can do:

Dive into brushstroke-level detail: On top of the 1,000+ other images, each of the 17 museums selected one artwork to be photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution or “gigapixel” photo-capturing technology. Each of these images contains around 7 billion pixels—that's that’s around 1,000 times more detailed than your average digital camera—and a specially-built “microscope view” uses Picasa to deliver these images at amazingly high resolution. You can zoom in to see Van Gogh’s famous brushwork or watch how previously hard to-see elements of an artwork suddenly become clear—such as the tiny Latin couplet which appears in Hans Holbein the Younger’s “The Merchant Georg Gisze.”

The bedroom, Vincent van Gogh (Van Gogh Museum)

Explore inside the museums: the Street View team designed a brand-new vehicle called the “trolley” to take 360-degree images of the interior of selected galleries. These were then stitched together and mapped to their location, enabling smooth navigation of more than 385 rooms within the museums. We also created a new clickable annotation feature, so you can jump from being inside a museum one moment to viewing a particular artwork the next. Once inside an image, an info panel lets you read more about an artwork, find more works by that artist and watch related YouTube videos. Gallery interiors can also be explored directly from within Street View in Google Maps.

Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy—with a view on Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”

Create your own collection: With the “Create an Artwork Collection” feature, you can save specific views of any of the artworks and build your own personalised collection. Comments can be added to each painting and the whole collection can then be shared with friends, family or on the web using the integrated goo.gl URL shortener.

We’re incredibly excited about this project—it’s our first step toward making great art more accessible, and we hope to add more museums and works of art in time. So whether you’re a student, an aspiring artist or a casual museum-goer, we hope the Google Art Project gives you a fun and unusual way to interact with art—and hopefully inspires you to visit the real thing.

Posted by Amit Sood, Head of Google Art Project