Drag and drop search for Go Daddy websites

Wouldn’t it be nice to just drag and drop a Custom Search box onto a website?

We thought so, and so did Go Daddy, the world’s largest domain name registrar and top web hosting provider. Website owners using Go Daddy’s WebSite Tonight product can now easily drag a search widget onto their web pages, and instantly turn on high-quality website search powered by the Custom Search platform.

WebSite Tonight is a do-it-yourself service that lets users create, design, update and publish websites without requiring any knowledge of HTML. The product offers 1,500+ design templates and enables users to very easily add widgets to their web pages. WebSite Tonight was named for its ease of use – users can create a website as quickly as one night.

Here’s how you add Custom Search to your website in WebSite Tonight:

Step 1: Select “Google Custom Search” from the list of available widgets


Step 2: Select a predefined search theme to match the style of your website

Step 3: Drag and drop the Google Custom Search box to the desired location on your website

Step 4: Search! Google search results appear within the Go Daddy website


Go Daddy also integrates with Google Webmaster Tools as part of the Google Services for Websites program. As Go Daddy automatically submits Sitemaps to Google, changes to websites are quickly discovered and indexed by Google’s crawlers, thereby improving search quality on both the individual website as well as Google.com.

Ease of use plus better performance — we like that combination. We hope you also like the concept of drag and drop search. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback.

An important update for SketchUp 8

Sometimes a haiku says it best:

new SketchUp version
shadows work much better now
farewell artifacts!

You’ll want to download today’s free update for SketchUp 8 as soon as possible. It contains (among a great many other things) fixes for for raster image export at high resolutions on Windows, and for the dreaded Shadow Bug. If you listen carefully, you can hear the sound of millions of modelers uncorking Champagne to celebrate. Believe me – we’re thrilled, too.

Here’s an overly-dramatic video that shows the Shadow Bug fix in living color.

The newest version of SketchUp 8 (free and Pro) is available today in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Traditional Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese. Stay tuned for Russian, Dutch and Simplified Chinese; they’re coming soon.

Here’s how to get the latest version of SketchUp 8:

Windows: Choose Help > Check for Update

Mac: Choose SketchUp > Check Web for Update

Please feel free to express your own euphoria in the form of a haiku in this post’s comments thread.

Google URL Shortener gets an API

When we launched Google’s URL shortener externally back in September, there was no accompanying API to allow people to integrate goo.gl into their applications and web pages. However, we said that we were working on one, and today we’re happy to announce that we’ve launched the goo.gl API in Google Code Labs. The documentation can be found on the Google Code site, with example code in the Getting Started section.

With this API, developers are able to programmatically access all of the fast, sleek goo.gl goodness that we currently provide via the web interface. You can shorten and expand URLs using the API, as well as fetch your history and analytics. You could use these features for a wide variety of applications, enabling behaviors ranging from auto-shortening within Twitter or Google Buzz clients to running regular jobs that monitor your usage statistics and traffic patterns. You can check out the Google APIs console to get started.

We’re very excited to be able to offer you this API to access one of the fastest URL shorteners out there. We’re continuing to work on several usability improvements and to make our auto-detection of spammy or malicious content even more robust. We hope that with the new API, you’ll find goo.gl to be even more useful in your future shortening endeavors! If you’re an application developer, check out the goo.gl API documentation and see how it looks.