(Cross-posted from the Official Google Reader Blog)Today, we’re launching two changes to Google Reader to help you discover more interesting content faster. Just as the launch of Personalized Search improved search results based on your search history, these changes use your Reader Trends to improve your reading experience.

• Explore section - We’re always trying to help you discover new stuff in Reader, and today we’re introducing Popular items and Recommended sources, two ways to find interesting content from all over the Internet…

A couple of weeks ago we introduced Artist Themes for Google Chrome. We asked leading designers, artists, illustrators and musicians to use the browser as their personal canvas for designing interesting themes.Since then, we’ve enjoyed hearing your thoughts on these designs and how you’ve used them to personalize your browser. We’ve also been intrigued by the ways in which these themes have had interesting and unusual cultural resonance with people around the world…

At Google, our goal is to create the most comprehensive, relevant and fast search in the world. In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged — real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results…

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see — tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful.The most recent release of Android 1.6, a.k.a. Donut, introduces accessibility features designed to make Android apps more widely usable by blind and low-vision users. In brief, Android 1.6 includes a built-in screenreader and text-to-speech (TTS) engine which make it possible to use most Android applications, as well as all of Android’s default UI, when not looking at the screen…

People use all kinds of tools to help them get stuff done — paper to-do lists, messages with a certain label or stars in Gmail, notes in Google Calendar, a couple different iGoogle gadgets and so on. Late last year, we added a lightweight way to help you keep track of what you need to do in Gmail Labs — tasks.Since then, it’s graduated from Labs, and you can manage your tasks not only in Gmail, but also in Google Calendar, iGoogle and from your mobile phone (by going to gmail…

The Google Search Appliance (GSA) is getting an update today, with a bunch of new features aimed at making enterprise search easier for everyone inside a company. One of our favorites, the Self-learning Scorer, learns from employees’ searches to tune itself and improve over time. If employees repeatedly choose, say, the fourth result for a given query the GSA will learn that’s probably the most relevant one and bring it up to the top the next time the query is searched for…

As we’ve previously posted, one of our aims is to improve display advertising on the web. Three simple principles guide our approach: simplify the system for buying and selling display ads; deliver better performance that advertisers and agencies can measure; open up the ecosystem by making it accessible to more participants.So how can you better measure the impact of your display ad campaign? At the moment, you can measure how many clicks your display ads achieve, measure conversions that result from those clicks, compare results with industry benchmark data, and use “View-through conversion reporting” to measure visits to your website from users who saw your display ad in the past…

We know the holiday season seems to come earlier every year (sorry, Halloween), but before you make your final travel plans, we’re excited to let you know that we’re partnering with Virgin America to provide free WiFi on every Virgin America flight between November 10, 2009 and January 15, 2010.The holidays can be full of dates and details to remember, and it’s easy to get stressed out somewhere between planning a long distance, multi-generational family gathering and combing the Internet for the latest impossible-to-find furry contraption for your toddler…

Each day, thousands of companies choose to “go Google” — that is, switch to Google Apps. Over two million business and 20 million users in over 100 countries and more than 40 languages have adopted Apps for their workplace, and we’re happy to welcome companies around the world such as Konica Minolta, Rentokil Initial and TOTO that have just decided to go Google. These companies no longer have to deal with the hassles of managing email servers or rolling out software updates, and their employees now enjoy the convenience of shared documents and calendars, Gmail and more…

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label “This week in search” and subscribe to the series. - Ed.This week, we made a few improvements to help webmasters better understand how their pages interact with Google search. Here’s an overview:Fetch as GooglebotAs a webmaster, have you ever wondered what Google “sees” when we visit your site? Our understanding of your web page affects which searches your page is returned for and its relevance rank…

Information access is at the core of Google’s mission, which is why we work to make the world’s content available to people with disabilities, such as blindness, visual impairment, color deficiency, deafness, hearing loss and limited dexterity. Building accessible products isn’t only the right thing to do, it also opens up Google services to very significant populations of people. According to the United Nations, 650 million people live with a disability, which makes them the world’s largest minority…

With Street View on Google Maps, you can take a virtual drive over the Golden Gate Bridge or see the bustle of Times Square from the comfort of your own home. But some of the country’s most interesting and fun places aren’t accessible with our Street View car. What if you want to tour the campuses of prospective universities, scout a new running trial, or plan the most efficient route to your favorite roller coasters in a theme park?I first started thinking about this question around two years ago…

(Cross-posted on the Webmaster Central Blog)A few years ago I couldn’t wait to get married. Because I was in love, yeah, but more importantly, so that I could take my husband’s name and people would stop getting that ridiculous picture from college as a top result when they searched for me on Google.After a few years of working here, though, I’ve learned that you don’t have to change your name just because it brings up some embarrassing search results…

Today, we’ve added 285 new languages to Google Translator Toolkit, bringing the total number of languages supported by this product to 345 — and making it possible to translate between 10,664 language pairs. Google Translator Toolkit is a language translation service for professional and amateur translators that builds on Google Translate and makes translation faster and easier.In addition, we’ve made the Translator Toolkit interface available in 35 languages, so that more people can access the service in their own language…

We’re always delighted to introduce new design flair to our user experience, especially through the personal expression of iGoogle themes. As a canvas for artists to express themselves and reach Google users around the world, we’ve shared more than 125 iGoogle Artist themes since May 2008. Today, I’m excited to announce ten new artist themes, all from talented up-and-coming fashion designers you may not have already heard of…

We care about a clean energy future and that’s a commitment that starts at home. In honor of Blog Action Day 2009 and this year’s climate change theme, we wanted to walk you through some of the green features of our global headquarters here in sunny Mountain View, California.

• Getting to work: We’ve got a shuttle service that brings employees from around the Bay Area to the Googleplex every day…

We first launched Promoted Videos as a search advertising program on YouTube, allowing content creators to drive viewership of their videos by targeting the hundreds of millions of searches that happen on YouTube every day. But in the past year Promoted Videos has evolved into a much broader discovery vehicle, appearing on search, the YouTube homepage, video watch pages and recently across the AdSense network…

(Cross-posted from the Google Voice Blog)Since the debut of Google Voice, our early users have shared lots of feedback that has led to some exciting new features, like the ability to receive SMS messages via email and the option to change your Google Voice number. But one of the most frequent requests we’ve received is for the ability to share Google Voice with friends and family.Starting today, we’re beginning to give out invitations to Google Voice users…

(Cross-posted on the Google Lat Long Blog)Some of us here at Google spend almost all of our time thinking about one thing: How do we create a three-dimensional model of every built structure on Earth? How do we make sure it’s accurate, that it stays current and that it’s useful to everyone who might want to use it?One of the best ways to get a big project done — and done well — is to open it up to the world…

We thought we’d let you know that our largest developer conference will be returning to Moscone Center, San Francisco on May 19-20, 2010. Find out more details on the Google Code Blog!Posted by Joyce Sohn, Google Developer Team

…

Today, we are happy to launch one of the most requested Google Docs features — the ability to share folders. Shared folders make it easy for a team of people to collaborate on projects that require multiple documents, spreadsheets or presentations. If you have a group of items you want to share, all that you have to do is put them into one folder and share it.Once you’ve shared a folder, all of the items in the folder will be accessible to the group…

As part of our “Go Mobile” week of tips and tricks, we’re recapping some of our latest Google Search for mobile features. All of these new features either make mobile search more complete, easier to use or more local.CompleteWhen you enter a query on Google.com on your phone, you access the same comprehensive index of the web as when you use Google.com on your computer — including universal search results such as images, local listings, news, blogs, videos, products and more…

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label “This week in search” and subscribe to the series. - Ed.This week we made many small improvements to the functionality and usability of our search results. Here’s an overview:Quick, in-browser viewing of Google DocsWe’ve incorporated the “Gview” tool from Google Docs on search results…

Today we’re launching a number of improvements to the amount and quality of information you can find with Google Squared, as well as new tools to sort and export the data.As we explained when we first launched Squared in Labs this summer, the product takes on a difficult technical challenge. It’s a first step towards automatically extracting useful facts from all over the web and presenting them in meaningful way…

The fundamental reasons why the electric car has not attained the popularity it deserves are (1) The failure of the manufacturers to properly educate the general public regarding the wonderful utility of the electric; (2) The failure of [power companies] to make it easy to own and operate the electric by an adequate distribution of charging and boosting stations. The early electrics of limited speed, range and utility produced popular impressions which still exist…

If you’re like us, you’re probably thinking a lot about how this year’s flu season might affect you and your community. To help you out, we at Google.org are excited to announce the expansion of Google Flu Trends to 16 additional countries, including much of Europe. We’ve also made the site available in 37 languages. Flu is a global threat, affecting millions worldwide each year, so we’re pleased to make this tool available in more regions and languages…

My cousin is in first grade and sometimes she writes short stories for class. I try to share the stories with her grandparents, but because Japanese is their first language and they don’t speak English very well, it’s been tough. Today we’re releasing a feature for Google Docs to make this kind of multi-lingual sharing easier — you can now automatically translate documents into 42 different languages…

We’ve just concluded our fifth Google Summer of Code, our flagship global program to introduce college and university students to open source development. Once again, the results this year have been impressive. Nearly 2,000 mentors from 64 countries participated in the program. They worked to bring 1,000 students from 69 countries into the communities of 150 free and open source projects. We’re particularly excited this year to have introduced several students to open source development that has a direct impact on social causes, from microfinance software to global educational initiatives to making government data more transparent and accessible…

Try doing a search for [Hamlet] on Google Books. The first few results you’ll get are “Full View” books — which means you can read the full text. And, because the book is in the public domain, you can also download a copy of Hamlet in PDF form.Starting today, you’ll be able to download these and over one million public domain books from Google Books in an additional format. We’re excited to now offer downloads in EPUB format, a free and open industry standard for electronic books…

I only followed a handful of blogs when I first started using Google Reader, but was always on the lookout for more great stuff to read. Over time, I discovered that my friends followed lots of interesting sites, and my reading list grew from 4 to 34 sites and blogs as I incorporated their recommendations.Since then, Reader has launched several sharing features that make it easier to find and subscribe to feeds that your friends like, and we thought that recommendations could make finding good stuff to read even easier…