Customize your results snippets with structured data

Custom Search themes make it easy for you to customize the look and feel of your search results pages. And if you want to take the customization gig further, you can also customize the result snippet—a small sample of content that gives search users an idea of what's in the webpage—by using structured data.

When you are reading a webpage that reviews a film, you can figure out what the title is, what reviewers thought of the film, and how they rated it. You can even search for stores with the best prices for the DVD. Structured data can convey the meaning of such key information to computers.

Structured data formats—such as microformats, RDFa, and PageMaps—are semantic markup that you add to your HTML page. Structured data make web content more meaningful to machines. These attributes do not change the formatting of your website, they just make the text enclosed within the XHTML tags "understandable" by computers and influence what shows up in the result snippets.

When you tag your webpages with structured data, Custom Search indexes them and sends the metadata back in the XML results for your page. You can then take this XML feed and transform it into HTML results that showcase key information—such as image thumbnails, summaries, dates, authorship, ratings, and prices. Having the most relevant information in your search results makes the webpages in your site more compelling to your users.

You can, for example, create the following kind of rich snippets:


You can even add thumbnails and actions that let your users download files or make purchases.


To learn more, read the Custom Search Developer's Guide.

By Kevin Griffin Lim, Custom Search Team

Customize your search results page with themes

If you can select headgear for your LEGO ® action figures, your search engine should let you customize the theme for your search results page, right? Darn tooting!

True, Custom Search already lets you customize the look and feel of your search results page, but we're making it easier. You can now go to the control panel and select one of the predefined themes that broadly matches the look and feel of your website.

If the standard themes are not quite what you want, you can make further changes. You can tinker with the page layout (Why stick with a single column of results, when you can have two?) and play with the font colors and types. The standard themes paired with the "Compact" layout option are optimized for mobile devices, so they work well on iPhone, Android devices, and Pre.

If you want a greater level of control than that, you can download the CSS, tweak it in a text editor, and host the CSS in your website. You can make your search results page blend with the style of the rest of your website.


To learn more, read the Custom Search Developer's Guide.

By Kevin Gnome Lim, Custom Search Team

Who's @ Google I/O

We frequently hear that developers want to hear from peers who've built interesting applications. That's why we're excited that this year's Google I/O (May 27th - 28th in San Francisco) will involve more developers from the community at large. Today, we're raising the virtual curtain on some of the developers who'll be participating in Google I/O this year.

These developers represent a wide range of companies and apps - all of which are strong examples of Google developer products and open web technologies in action. They'll be presenting technical sessions and demoing their apps at the Developer Sandbox, a new addition to Google I/O featuring demo station "pods". With so many developers at Google I/O, this is a great opportunity for event attendees to check out their apps, ask questions, exchange ideas, and meet new people.

Given the recent App Engine launch, we thought it'd be fitting to introduce a subset of the App Engine developers who will be demoing or presenting at Google I/O:

• Salesforce.com
  Force.com is the enterprise cloud computing platform offered by Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com is committed to letting developers take advantage of the web as the ultimate platform. Force.com developer evangelist Ron Hess will lead a session outlining how to connect the Force.com SOAP Web Services API to Google App Engine for Java. The project includes an open source Web Service Client that has been completely ported to App Engine. The session will discuss the porting effort, how to use URLFetch to achieve cross- cloud communication and demonstrate a sample integration between App Engine and the Force.com SOAP API.


• ThoughtWorks and SpringSource
  Guillaume Laforge is the official Groovy Project Manager for SpringSource, and the spec lead of JSR-241, the Java Specification Request that standardizes the Groovy dynamic language. Ola Bini of ThoughtWorks is the creator of the language Ioke and has been one of the core developers for JRuby since 2006. Guillaume and Ola will be speaking about running Groovy (and Grails) and JRuby on top of Google App Engine for Java, respectively.


• Walk Score (a project of Front Seat)
  Walk Score uses App Engine for the Walk Score API that serves Walk Score data to millions of real estate listings daily. The Walk Score website also uses Google Local Search for their scoring algorithm and Google Maps API for displaying walkability of addresses and heat map views of neighborhoods and cities. The three developers behind Walk Score will be leading a session, AppEngine Nitty-Gritty: Scalability, Fault Tolerance, and Integrating Amazon EC2, outlining their experiences scaling on App Engine and combining App Engine with external services including EC2. They'll also be on hand at the Developer Sandbox.


• Best Buy
  Giftag, Best Buy's browser add-on for clipping, saving, and sharing web page snippets, launched on App Engine just before Black Friday last year. Using the hProduct open standard and App Engine's datastore API, Giftag enables users to add items to one or more wishlists, then share these via the App Engine-hosted front-end or Facebook. The engineers behind Giftag will be at the Developer Sandbox. (Check out their blog post and video where the team talks about migrating to App Engine)


• BuddyPoke
  BuddyPoke uses App Engine for fluid and cost effective scalability to handle a rapidly growing user base of over 36 million OpenSocial users. Dave Westwood, founder of BuddyPoke, will be part of the Developer Sandbox. (Check out Dave's video talking about scaling on App Engine)


• 3scale networks
  3scale provides a Python plug-in that integrates seamlessly to App Engine so that developers can put all their resources into their API's core functionalities. User management, access control, billing and payments can be easily externalized with 3scale for those APIs that run on top of App Engine. The 3scale team will be part of the Developer Sandbox.

To check out speakers, visit the speakers page. To see who'll be demoing at the Sandbox, check out the Developer Sandbox page.

Keep in mind what you see currently on these pages is still 'in progress'. Over the next few weeks, we'll be regularly updating the I/O website with more sessions, speakers, and Developer Sandbox demos, so keep checking back. And each week on the Code Blog, we'll give you a closer look into who these developers are, including guest blog posts authored by them that share their development experiences and tips. (The AJAX API team's gotten a headstart on this)

Finally, we can't end a blog post about Google I/O without a (shameless) plug for actually signing up for the event, so here it is:

<shameless plug>
Early registration for Google I/O ends May 1, so if you're thinking of attending, now's a good time. Sign up at code.google.com/io. We look forward to meeting you!
</shameless plug>

*You can also follow our tweets: @googleio.

By Christine Tsai, Google Developer Products

Playing around with Google's AJAX APIs

By Ben Lisbakken, Developer Programs Engineer

For me, documentation isn't always enough to learn about APIs; I need examples that I can play with. That's why I started a fun project recently--a tool for teaching developers how to use Google's JavaScript APIs: the AJAX API Playground. I have been working on this in my 20% time and today I am proud to announce that we are launching the AJAX API Playground as the official way that Google will show JavaScript samples!

The AJAX API Playground is currently loaded with over 170 samples for 8 Google JavaScript APIs (Maps, Search, Feeds, Calendar, Visualization, Language, Blogger, Libraries and Earth) that you can edit and run to help you explore what Google's APIs have to offer. There are also save and export features. The save feature allows you to hold onto an edited sample so you can continue working on it later, while export lets you modify a sample and publish the code to a permanent url.

As the AJAX API Playground is built on App Engine, you can create your own App Engine instance to show off your code samples. The code is open sourced under an Apache 2.0 license and uses several open source libraries and tools, including jQuery, jQuery UI, YUI Compressor, and CodeMirror. You can find the code on Google Project Hosting and learn about adding samples on the project wiki.

Stay tuned for more samples for more APIs. Enjoy!

Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series: Raph Levien

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

On Monday, June 25th, Raph Levien will join us to present Lessons from Advogato. Raph, Advogato's founder, will give us insights into attack-resistant trust metrics and the other mechanisms used to build the website's user community.

Like all sessions of the Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series, Raph's presentation will be open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 PM at our Mountain View campus; guests should plan to sign in at Building 43 reception upon arrival. Refreshments will be served and all are welcome and encouraged to attend. Raph's presentation will also be taped and published along with all of the public Google Tech Talks.

For those of you who were unable to attend our last session, you can watch the video of Bob Lee's recent presentation Java on Guice: Dependency Injection the Java Way.

The Ubucon Boulder

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Last weekend, Google's Boulder, Colorado engineering office hosted the first Ubucon to be held in Colorado. Around twenty Ubuntu developers, users and enthusiasts came together in unconference style to discuss topics from Launchpad to the new Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded project. You can find more details, including an awesome group photo and links to session notes, in the Colorado LoCo team's Ubucon Boulder write-up.

Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series: Bob Lee

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Bob Lee will be joining us on Tuesday, June 5th, to discuss Java on Guice: Dependency Injection, the Java Way. Guice, an open-source dependency-injection framework for Java 5, is already in use in several Google projects. Come listen to the framework's creator explain how Guice can help make your applications simpler and easier to test!

As with all sessions of the Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series, Bob's presentation will be open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 PM at our Mountain View campus; guests should plan to sign in at Building 43 reception upon arrival. Refreshments will be served and all are welcome and encouraged to attend. Bob's presentation will also be taped and published along with all of the public Google Tech Talks.

For those of you who were unable to attend our last session, you can watch the video of Amit Singh's recent presentation on MacFuse.

Joomla!Day USA West at Google

Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Last weekend, Google hosted the first Joomla!Day to be held in the United States. Nearly 100 Joomla! developers and users came together in true unconference style, as participants led small group discussions based on attendee feedback prior to and the beginning day of the conference. Topics ranged from migrating a website from the CMS' 1.0 to 1.5 release to effective template creation. On Sunday afternoon, we had a lot of fun with our speed-geeking session, where attendees shared knowledge with one another about anything and everything, like using Joomla! to power non-profit websites to ergonomics to keep you coding for life. We ended the day Sunday with a group photo and plans in the works to start a Bay Area based Joomla! Users Group.

For those who weren't able to make it to Joomla!Day USA West, we've heard you can expect news about other Joomla!Days coming sometime later this year in Austin, Texas and New York, New York.

Many thanks to all of our guests for joining us, sharing their collective knowledge and making the weekend a useful and inspiring experience!

Photo Credit: T. J. Baker

Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series: Amit Singh

Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

For the next installment of the Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series, we will welcome Amit Singh, software engineer on our Mac development team. On Thursday, May 24th, Amit will present on "MacFuse," an open-source Mac port of the FUSE mechanism for Linux. Much like FUSE, it enables developers to implement a fully functional file system in a user-space program.

As with all sessions of the Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series, Amit's presentation will be open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 PM at our Mountain View campus; guests should plan to sign in at Building 41 reception upon arrival. Refreshments will be served and all are welcome and encouraged to attend. Amit's presentation will also be taped and published along with all of the public Google Tech Talks on Google Video.

For those of you who were unable to attend our last session, you can watch the video of Andrew Morton's recent presentation on The State of the Linux Kernel.

Java at Google

Posted by Chris Schalk, Google Developer Programs

As we mentioned in our post Gearing up for JavaOne 2007, Google is proud to be participating in JavaOne again this year!

In order to help JavaOne attendees get up to speed with what Google is doing with Java technology, we put together a Java developers guide to Google technology.

Also, feel free to stop by the Google booth and chat with our engineers!

Java™ is a trademark of Sun Microsystems.

Open Source Awards nominations - final call

Posted by Zaheda Bhorat, Open Source Team

In the past two years, the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards have been presented to some very worthy candidates. The selection process for 2007 started this year when we opened up the the awards nominations to anyone in the open source community.

You may have seen the announcement a few weeks back via Nat's blog post on O'Reilly Radar, and thought you still had plenty of time. If you haven't already sent in your submission, we'd like to remind you that all entries must be received by end of day PST, April 30th 2007.

Your nominee can be an individual you work with closely or one you have observed who stands out as a leader in open source. This may be someone who has contributed significantly to the code, the health and well-being of the community or made a difference in a way that should be recognized by the open source community at large.

Please be sure to include the person's name, email address, the project(s) impacted and more importantly the reason why you are selecting the individual to receive the coveted Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award for 2007. Nominations are to be sent to osawards at oreilly dot com. Google and O'Reilly employee are not eligible for nomination.

The five winners will be announced at OSCON 2007, Portland, Oregon, July 24, 2007.

And finally, we'd like to thank everyone who has already participated by sending in nominations; the members of the award committee have their work cut out for them this year!

Any feedback on the Hall of Fame page is also welcome!

Mike Pinkerton on Camino & More

For those of you who weren't able to attend the last Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series session, you can check out the video of Mike Pinkerton's talk on Camino.

And if you should find yourself in the Mountain View, California area this evening, please do stop by for Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick's presentation on "How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too)."

We Want You to Write More Tests. Yes, You.

Post by Michelle Levesque, Google Software Engineer

Today we're unveiling the public release of "Testing on the Toilet": one of Google's little secrets that has helped us inspire our developers to write well-tested code. We regularly write flyers about everything from dependency injection to code coverage, and then plaster the bathrooms all over Google with each episode, almost 500 stalls worldwide.

We've decided to share this secret weapon with the rest of the world to spread our passion to other developers, and to provide a fun and easy way to educate yourself (and the rest of your company) about these important tricks and techniques.

We'll be posting episodes on the brand new Google Testing Blog on a regular basis and providing PDFs so you can print them out and put them up in your own bathrooms, hallways, kitchens, moon bases, secret underground fortresses, wherever. Send your photos and stories to TotT@google.com and let us know how Testing on the Toilet is received at your company.

And meanwhile, keep writing those tests.

Introducing pactester

Post by Manu Garg, Google Systems Administrator

I'm pleased to announce that we've just released pactester, a tool to test the proxy auto-configuration (PAC) files used by browsers to identify the correct proxy server for a given URL. Since the PAC file evaluation mechanism is generated inside the browser and cannot be accessed from outside, the only way to tell which proxy your browser will use for a specific URL is manual inspection of the PAC file. Unfortunately, this approach is error prone and quickly becomes impractical for large and complex PAC files. Enter pactester, which resolves this issue by simulating browser behavior.

For more on pactester, check out the project documentation.

Google and the Imara Project

Post by Jonathan Proulx, MIT CSAIL

Thanks to a generous grant from Google's Open Source Program Office, the Imara Project at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) was able to provide computers based on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for each elementary school in Fiji's rural Taveuni school district. (note that this project is separate from OLPC)

We chose laptops for the project, both for shipping concerns (shipping PCs to developing nations tends to be prohibitively expensive) and because electrical power isn't available at all the school locations. We used Lenovo Thinkpad R52s due to their large screens, low cost, and Linux-friendly components. Three members of the CSAIL community took the 10 laptops as carry-on luggage, and held training sessions for the teachers once they arrived in Fiji.

The FOSS component is central to the sustainability and adaptability of the project. Since it's free, there's no additional software cost when the project expands, or if community groups wish to further leverage the technology. Since it is Open Source, once the userbase becomes sophisticated enough it will be simpler to adapt the software to meet local needs, such as adding Fijian language support.

Edubuntu (a Debian GNU/Linux-derived operating system specifically tailored for educational environments) was chosen as the laptops' operating system. Edubuntu provides virtually all the packages required for a good K-12 classroom environment, with minimal configuration. The only program we added outside Edubuntu was GeoGebra, a dynamic interactive mathematics application for exploring geometry, algebra, and calculus.

Configuration included creating a privileged "teacher" account as part of the basic install process, and adding an unprivileged and password-less "student" account. We configured the desktop environments with icons for the most relevant applications (office/productivity applications for teachers, and educational programs for students), and set the window system to automatically log in the "student" account on startup, and that was that!

Here are the applications we selected for the student desktops:

• GCompris
• TuxMath
• TuxTyping
• TuxPaint
• The GIMP
• KTouch
• OpenOffice
• GeoGebra
• KBruch (math with fractions)
• KPercentage
• KTurtle (turtle logo programing)
• KStars
• Calculator

Imara volunteers provided initial training in two day-long sessions, graciously hosted by Maravu Plantation on Taveuni Island, Fiji.

Follow-up activities are also in the planning stages, including a 20-seat Edubuntu installation at one of the larger schools, and further developing local expertise by sponsoring a Fijian teacher's travel to spend time at CSAIL with members of Project Imara.