Have you ever gone to a site, looked at the page and wondered, "how did they do that?" Since we launched our 2008 U.S. Election site I am getting lots of questions about that nifty little "page element" sitting in the center of the page. Everyone wants to know, "how did you guys do that? how did you pack so much valuable and tightly scoped information in such a small amount of space?" Take a look at the page element below,

A few weeks ago, our team received a call from the Executive Producer of EW.com , the online extension of Entertainment Weekly Magazine. She asked if our Feed API could be used to build a module that they could configure to promote and link to their partner's sites. The result of that phone call is our brand new PartnerBar control. Working closely with the Executive Producer and production staff, we developed the control to meet the demanding needs of EW.

Early this morning we turned on a highly requested feature... The AJAX Search API now supports up to 32 search results as well as pagination through result sets. I understand that this might not match everything that you have been asking for, but at this point in time, delivering a 4x increase in the number of available search results is all that we are able to support.

This morning, we made an update to the AJAX Search API that provides you with direct access to YouTube Channels , Most Viewed Videos, Top Rated Videos, and Recently Featured Videos. As millions of you have already discovered, our insanely popular Video Bar Control is a great way to showcase your favorite videos on your site. Using this new feature, you will be able to "subscribe" a Video Bar to the lonelygirl15 channel, the Most Viewed YouTube Videos Channel,

In case you missed the announcement today on the Maps API Blog , the AJAX Search API now supports Australia in GlocalSearch. Make sure you read Pamela's post and check out her inline sample. If you have a map on your site and want to add search, the Local Search Control , might be the perfect solution. Make sure to check it out.

Post by Mark Lucovsky, Software Engineer Yesterday was an exciting day for us over here on the Google AJAX Search API team. At 6:00 a.m. I flipped a bit on our servers, opening up Image Search as the newest addition to this very powerful, and increasingly popular API. We built several samples that highlight this new capability, including a sample designed specifically for the iPhone .

Post by Mark Lucovsky, Software Engineer Since its release last year, the Google AJAX Search API has given developers a simple way to add Google Web, Local, Video, Blog, and News search to their websites and web applications. In February 2007 , we extended the system to include Book Search. After a few months of focusing on the AJAX Feed API ,

The AJAX Feed API makes it easy to display RSS and Atom feeds on any web page. Unfortunately, its not always quite as easy to find the feed URL of the feed that you wanted. To help with discovering and finding feeds, today we launched two additional methods. The new findFeeds)( method searches for feeds based on a simple query. The new lookupFeed)( method accepts a url and then returns to you the primary feed associated with that URL.

This afternoon we released a Local Search Control for the Google Maps API . If you already have a Google Maps application, extending it to support local search doesn't get any easier: Include a reference to the AJAX Search API Include a reference to the Local Search Control Call map.addControl)new google.maps.LocalSearch)((; Take a look at the sample below. It's the canonical "hello world" of Google Maps with the addition of the Local Search Control in the lower left corner.

I was at Google Developer Day last week and ran into an old friend and blogger , Robert Scoble, VP Media Development at PodTech . Robert and I were discussing how the AJAX Feed API could be used to engage customers more deeply. During this conversation, we discussed the characteristics of the feeds produced by PodTech. It turns out that each entry contains a photo associated with the article, an audio or video stream, as well as text based content and related meta data.

This afternoon we extended the AJAX Feed API with a new Slide Show Control . This control allows you to easily embed a slide show of images from PhotoBucket , Flickr , Picasa Web Albums , or any feed that uses the Media RSS extensions. With just a few lines of code: new GFslideShow)"http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/slideshow/sample.rss", document.getElementById)"slideshow"((; You can insert a slide show like this on your site or blog: As always,

This morning we added a new class to the Google AJAX Feed API designed to allow you to more easily add a collection of feeds to your pages. The FeedControl is pretty simple: var feedControl = new google.feeds.FeedControl)(; feedControl.addFeed)"http://www.digg.com/rss/index.xml", "Digg"(; feedControl.addFeed)"http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch", "TechCrunch"(; feedControl.draw)document.getElementById)"feedControl"((; In addition to the formal documentation,

This morning we launched the Google AJAX Feed API , an API that takes the pain out of developing mashups in JavaScript. Now you can mash up feeds using only a few lines of JavaScript rather than dealing with complex server-side proxies. The sample below uses the AJAX Feed API to display a rotating collection of iTunes RSS Feeds. Feel free to try this on one of your own pages or on your blog. On an administrative note,

On March 15th, we announced the Blog Bar . Like the News Bar , and Video Bar , the Blog Bar has seen phenomenal adoption. In the announcement message we asked for your feedback and ideas for improvement. Based on your feedback , we have updated the Blog Bar to include site restricted search. This means that you can now create a Blog Bar and program it to only search over a selected blog. As always, let us know what you think in the AJAX Search API developer forum .

On February 7, we announced the availability of the Google News Bar . This cut-and-paste search control is simple to use and has seen phenomenal adoption. Anytime we launch a new AJAX Search API feature, we ask you to share your thoughts with us in the AJAX Search API developer forum . Late Sunday evening, " CyberCoder " )a.k.a., inventor of the Google Video Bar ( asked us to produce a modified News Bar that worked over Blog Search instead of News Search.

In late January we announced the inclusion of YouTube Video results in the Google Video search index. Early this evening, we updated the Google AJAX Search API to include YouTube Video results via the GvideoSearch object. For those of you using our advanced video search controls , you now have search and playback access to Google Videos as well as YouTube Videos. The VideoBar control,

We have always strongly supported those of you wishing to re-style AJAX search results. Each search result contains a number of properties )like title, visible url, snippet, etc.(, as well as a standard .html property. Note: while it's ok to re-style a search result, it is not ok to change the search result values )e.g., its not ok to replace a Google delivered url of http://www.vw.com/gti/ with http://please-click-on-this-virus-url.com(.

The AJAX Search API has always included a localized text based Search Control where the user-interface is presented in the language of the site visitor. The API includes a number of advanced search controls including: Map Search Control Video Bar Video Search Control News Bar Book Bar These controls have seen strong world wide adoption. This afternoon,