Posted by Kristen Holway, Account Executive, Media Sales Over the summer solstice weekend, Seattle/Kirkland Googlers posed this question to people attending the Fremont Fair : "How would you make our world, or our city, better?" The goal of the Fremont Fair "Make it Better" Project was to engage the Seattle community in an active discussion around improving our world. This is the second year we've partnered with Solid Ground to participate in the fair,

Posted by Stephen Chau, Product Manager Today marks the beginning of one of my favorite summer events: the Tour de France. I'm always amazed when I hear about the long, steep climbs through mountains or the blistering speeds of the cyclists as they pass through the French countryside. But since most of us can't head over there to watch it in person, we're giving you the next best thing: Street View of the 2008 Tour de France route. Head to google.

Posted by Ron Adler and Janis Stipins, Software Engineers Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we've improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe's Flash Player technology . In the past,

Posted by Matt Simmons, Market Data Gnome We're excited to let you know we're adding more real-time market data to Google Finance, Google.com and other Google properties. Starting today, you'll have access to real-time, last sale prices from the New York Stock Exchange )NYSE(, along with those from NASDAQ, which we recently launched . Here's the NYSE press release . What this means is that you can now get the latest real-time stock quotes on Google for free.

Posted by Vijay Koduri, Product Marketing Manager Imagine bringing the experience of search on Google.com and the power of cloud computing to your website. That's Google Site Search in a nutshell.

Posted by Phillip Grasso, Manager, Engineering/Operations Over the last few weeks, we've been keeping you updated on our Treasure Hunt competition " a puzzle contest designed to test your knowledge of computer science, networking, and low-level UNIX trivia. And now it's coming to a close. The fourth and final puzzle will be released at 1212448500. With it, we'll also be highlighting Google Developer Day , which is coming up on June 18 at Wharf 8 in Sydney .

Posted by Carolina Shea, AdSense Account Strategist Last week, I flew from our Phoenix office to Washington, D.C. to deliver our first U.S. seminar for small business. It's a simple and straightforward presentation about how Google tools can help small businesses establish a presence online, work more collaboratively and efficiently, and earn money from their websites through our AdSense program. If you were able to catch a glimpse of our testimony in front of the U.S.

Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager ...and that's great news any way you say it. Language is one of the biggest challenges we have in making information universally accessible. As part of the machine translation team within Google Research , I'm happy to report we've been hard at work to overcome this challenge. We've recently added translation capabilities for 10 new languages to Google Translate , bringing the total to 23 languages.

Posted by Andrew Schwerin, Software Engineer As we noted earlier , our Conference on Scalability is taking place in Seattle on Saturday, June 14. And now registration is open until June 6. We have some great talks lined up from industry and academia, covering everything from scalability of storage, communication and transactions to scaling applications into the mobile space or, in one case, under water. Space is limited, so do sign up now.

Posted by Diane McClamroch, Food Services Team Today at our Mountain View headquarters we're celebrating the one-year anniversary of an important project: our organic garden. Not only does it provide a stunning centerpiece for the central campus; it yields produce and herbs that are used daily in the cafes on campus. Although many Googlers would like to think of themselves as Renaissance men and women ,

Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead, Google Enterprise A little less than a year ago, we partnered with Salesforce.com to create Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords. It combines Salesforce.com's CRM applications with AdWords to make it easier for businesses to generate leads, track, and close them. Since then, people have offered up a constant stream of requests to streamline even more of the CRM process.

Posted by Tom Phillips, Director, DoubleClick Integration Since we closed the acquisition of DoubleClick on March 11, we've been immersed in integration planning for each of our products and business units. Recently we completed this process for the DoubleClick Performics businesses, and have decided to split them into two separately-run business units: Affiliate Marketing and Search Marketing.

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager Last November, OpenSocial was created to help build infrastructure for the social web. OpenSocial provides a common mechanism for developers to easily hook into many different social networks and extend their functionality. Sites including MySpace and orkut have begun to provide OpenSocial applications to their users, and hi5 will be rolling out next week. Today we're pleased that Yahoo! has announced its support for OpenSocial .

Posted by Sheridan Kates, Associate Product Manager, iGoogle Last year we introduced a feature on iGoogle so you can create a personalized gadget with just a few clicks " no programming skills necessary. We've loved hearing all the stories from people who are enjoying this feature, such as one couple who live thousands of miles apart and use the GoogleGram gadget to send daily love notes.

Posted by Andrew Moore, Engineering Director On Tuesday, March 4, the Google Pittsburgh office will open its doors to the technical community for a special evening. We'll kick things off with some mingling over beer, wine and snacks, and then transition into a tech talk with one of our local engineers, Pat Stephenson. Pat will discuss the implementation of Dapper, a low-overhead system for monitoring the performance of large, distributed applications at Google,

Posted by Craig Walker, Senior Product Manager As we mentioned last fall , GrandCentral's Project CARE initiative, which provides permanent telephone numbers and voicemail services to the homeless, has partnered with San Francisco's Project Homeless Connect )PHC( to support the city's homeless as they get back on their feet. Today,

Posted by Andrew Schwerin, Software Engineer We just announced on our Research Blog that we're holding the second scalability conference in Seattle on Saturday, June 14. We had a hunch we weren't the only ones who liked to sit around and brainstorm solutions for hard problems, and it turns out we were right. We met so many great people at the 2007 gathering that we've decided to do it again.

Posted by Jane Horvath, Senior Privacy Counsel In order to give you the best possible information about the privacy settings for our products, we asked the engineers and product managers who actually designed them to explain how they work in a series of new videos we released today on our YouTube Privacy Channel . These videos feature Googlers sharing privacy tips, like how to use Google Chat's "Off the Record" feature,

Posted by Joscelin Cooper, Google Blog team Many of us are familiar with Batman or Spiderman and their super attributes from multiple film and comic book incarnations. But you might not be as familiar with a superhero swathed in aquamarine Lycra, sporting appropriately heroic pecs emblazoned with an iconic 'G.' Yes, that's Googleman, who manifested in various colorful forms at last week's 'Superhero' day at our London office. While Google is usually a fun place to work ,

Posted by Susan Straccia, Google Zeitgeist Team Every year we put out the Year-End Zeitgeist , a look at the most popular and fastest-rising search terms in hopes of telling us something about what's been on our )collective( mind. This was my first year working on this project, and I'm here to report I was pleasantly surprised by many of the findings. Yes, 2007 was a big year for U.S. politics, and, of course,