It was exactly two years ago at the EDUCAUSE conference that we first announced our free Google Apps offering for educational institutions. We've kept pretty busy in that time, working closely with thousands of schools to reach 2.5 million students, staff, and faculty actively using Google Apps on campuses across the globe. As part of this mission,

When I moved to the Bay Area last year, everything was new to me. I didn't know Los Altos from Los Gatos, good eateries in my neighborhood, or how to get to where I wanted to go. Whether you're moving to a new area, traveling to a new place, or simply exploring a new part of town, this may sound familiar to a lot of people. There's a simple solution: turn to Google Maps to find local information .

As we promised , here's an update on the search patterns we observed during last night's presidential debate . While a few lucky citizens were able to ask the candidates questions directly, millions of others used Google to find their answers. Similar to last Thursday, people sought to understand the meaning of several words mentioned in the debate: morass , commodity , junket , cynicism , and cronyism to name a few.

When you view a YouTube video with a great soundtrack, you often see comments from YouTube users asking about the name of the song and where they can download it. Or when users watch the trailer for an upcoming video game, they want to know when it will be released and where they can buy it. Today, we're taking our first steps to providing YouTube users with this kind of instant gratification,

We've just posted the first three videos in the Google Technology Roundtable Series . Each one is a discussion with senior Google researchers and technologists about one of our most significant achievements. We use a talk show format, where I lead a discussion on the technology. While the videos are intended for a reasonably technical audience, I think they may be interesting to many as an overview of the key challenges and ideas underlying Google's systems.

Did you know that millions of bloggers around the world write new posts each week? If you're like me, you probably read only a tiny fraction of these in Google Reader . What's everybody else writing about? Our Blog Search team thought this was an interesting enough question to look into. What we found was a massive mix: entertaining items about celebrities, personal perspectives on political figures, cutting-edge )and sometimes unverified( news stories,

Now that we're a decade old, we figured we're long overdue for some spring cleaning. We started digging around our basement and found all kinds of junk: old Swedish fish , pigeon poop , Klingon translation books. Amazingly enough, hidden in a corner beneath Larry's and Sergey's original lab coats, we found a vintage search index in mint condition. We dusted it off and took it for a spin, gobsmacked to see how different the web was in early 2001.

As an Internet company, Google is an active participant in policy debates surrounding information access, technology and energy. Because our company has a great diversity of people and opinions - Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, all religions and no religion, straight and gay - we do not generally take a position on issues outside of our field, especially not social issues. So when Proposition 8 appeared on the California ballot,

Our corporate blog network is more than four years old now. We offer blogs about Google products and initiatives, local blogs )for 11 countries(, blogs for advertisers and publishers, and a stable of blogs for developers. We hope you find the contents to be informative, timely, and, on occasion, fun. To help you keep track of our news and updates more easily,

Some people have questions about our advertising agreement with Yahoo! and there are some misconceptions about it. So today we are putting facts about the deal on a new website to provide more information on the agreement and why it is good for consumers, advertisers and publishers. We'll be updating the site regularly, so check back when you have additional questions. Posted by Karen Wickre,

The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of. Which got us to thinking, what's going to happen in the next ten years? How will this phenomenal technology evolve, how will we adapt, and )more importantly( how will it adapt to us?

The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of. Which got us to thinking, what's going to happen in the next ten years? How will this phenomenal technology evolve, how will we adapt, and )more importantly( how will it adapt to us?

A little over two years ago, we launched Picasa Web Albums to make publishing photos online easy. Now Picasa Web Albums hosts billions of online photos from around the globe, with users adding millions of new snapshots every day. Each of these photos records a different moment, or a different perspective, but one thing they all have in common is that in each case, the person behind the camera wanted to share their experience with a friend, their extended family,

As this post goes live, five Googlers are on their way to Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost inhabited location on the North American mainland. What brings us to such a far-off place? We're visiting three rural school districts to show teachers and students how Google Earth and Maps can be powerful tools in the classroom. There has been a lot of interest in the 49th state of late, but our trip has actually been months in the making.

We love getting your feedback, and one of the themes that has cropped up in the Google Desktop Help group is that you want a lighter, faster product. We heard the message loud and clear and decided that the Google Desktop 5.8 for Windows release would be based entirely on performance. In true Google fashion, we took a data-driven approach: Measure, then analyze, fix the most important issues and lowest hanging fruit, then rinse, lather and repeat. First,

In yesterday's post on Google Chrome, we promised to let you know when it would be available for everyone to try - and that time is now. Visit http://www.google.com/chrome to download and start exploring. )For the moment, it's available only for Windows users, but you can sign up on the download page to learn when the Mac and Linux versions are available.( Posted by Brian Rakowski,

For more than 200 years, matters of local and national significance have been conveyed in newsprint - from revolutions and politics to fashion to local weather or high school football scores. Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written. And it's our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily.

Back in May, we introduced a site called Google for Non-Profits , to showcase the tools organizations can use to raise funds and collaborate easily and efficiently. These tools, we hoped, would enable non-profits to focus less on creaky email systems or lost documents - and more on their missions. For at least one non-profit, this was old news. Months before we unveiled our non-profit site, Marianne Clauw, who chairs CASA Washtenaw ,

At a time when more and more digital technologies are becoming indispensable to millions of people, the field of computer science )CS( is in trouble. Enrollment and retention of CS students, particularly those historically underrepresented in the field )women, African-Americans, Native-Americans, and Hispanics( has declined sharply. According to the Computing Research Association , CS enrollment in the U.S. was at its peak in 2000, with 15,958 undergrads. By 2006,

In my previous post , I described the components of your web search experience and the principles behind creating a great search experience. There are complex algorithms underlying simple features such as spelling correction and the two line snippets that describe each search result. We figure out what works by running experiments - tiny tests for a small number of users which help us determine whether that feature helps or hurts. Experimentation is a very powerful tool,