Finding the right place when you need it

Over the past few months, we have launched several new mobile search features for iPhone and Android-powered devices that make it easier to find local businesses. In the US, we launched an “open now” feature which lets you filter local search results to show only businesses that are open right now, based on their listed hours. When you’re hankering for pizza at 1 o’clock in the morning, this can be really handy:
Other local search options available globally include filtering by star ratings (find a highly-rated restaurant for your first date) and by distance (especially handy when you’re on foot).
You may have noticed other improvements as well, like the addition of images, reviews from around the web and bigger buttons for viewing a map or calling a business directly. Each business’s open hours are also shown in the result snippets.

If you haven’t used local search recently, now is a great time to try it out. Just go to www.google.com in your browser, tap on the “Places” link at the top of the page, and do a search. You can also access these features when searching for businesses on Google Maps for mobile on Android devices.

Posted by Yoshi Matsumoto and Keiji Maekawa, Software Engineers

Join us on the bridge for International Women’s Day 2011

I lead a global team at Google and travel extensively. When I speak about my work, the questions I get are often about the efforts we make to bring more women into engineering and how I maintain my work/life balance with two young children. These are very important questions, but I’m acutely aware that they reflect a certain amount of privilege when it comes to issues of women’s equality. Despite the incredible advances women have made in the last century, many around the world are still struggling to provide for their families and keep them safe amidst violence and instability.

For the past several years I’ve been part of a sponsorship program administered by Women for Women International, an organization dedicated to helping women survivors of war rebuild their lives. Every time I receive a letter from a woman I sponsor, each of whom is determined to improve her life despite the terrible odds she faces, I’m reminded of why it’s so important that we all—women and men alike—recognize the challenges women continue to face around the world.

That’s why I’m so excited to celebrate the centenary of International Women’s Day on March 8, 2011. This year Google is collaborating with Women for Women International on their “Join me on the Bridge” campaign. Originally conceived of by women from Rwanda and Congo as a sign of solidarity between women in two conflict-ridden countries, last year’s campaign brought together thousands of women and men at more than 100 bridge events on four continents.

This year we’re making it simple for you, your friends, your classmates and your colleagues to participate in bridge events on International Women’s Day by offering new online resources.

To attend a bridge event, check our map to see all the events that have already been planned. Or you can use our event toolkit to plan your own event on the bridge of your choice. You’ll see that there are two kinds of events—physical and online; if you’re not able to attend a bridge event in person on March 8, you can lend your support online by virtually attending an event via Street View in Google Maps.

Finally, on our International Women’s Day 2011 site, you can to donate to Women for Women International and more than 40 other incredible organizations working in the fields of women’s economic security, education, empowerment, equality, health and safety.

See you on the bridge on March 8!

Chrome Developer Tools: Back to Basics

It’s been an exciting past few months in the Google Chrome Developer Tools world as we keep adding new features, while polishing up existing ones to respond to your feedback.

One of the areas we have focused a lot of our energy is on network instrumentation. Recently we’ve made many improvements that will hopefully improve your experience when using Chrome Developer Tools. These improvements include:

  • Network aspects of your web page are now inspected in the Network panel. This gives you access to even more information at a single glance. You can sort and clear data, preserve log information upon navigation and even export network data into HAR format.
  • All the timing information about your resource loads now comes from the network stack, not WebKit, so timing information now adequately represents raw network timing. You can see detailed timing for different phases of the loading by hovering over the log entry.

  • We now push raw HTTP headers and status messages into Chrome Developer Tools. As a result, you now see precisely what the browser received from the server and not just how the rendering engine interpreted that information.
  • Similarly to the old Resources panel, you can see syntax-highlighted resource contents.

We’ve also made CSS editing a whole lot easier. In particular, you’ll now find separate fields for property names and values instead of a single field for both. As you type, you will see suggestions of available keywords for property values.


But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Similar to the changes in the network panel, the CSS sidebar now shows the raw information that the browser gets from the server – not the rendering engine’s interpretation of the information. As a result, you can use Chrome Developer Tools to see CSS properties that are not recognized by WebKit (e.g., engine-specific or simply erroneous properties). This finally puts an end to the nightmare of disappearing invalid properties.


For a more complete reference on working with the Chrome Developer Tools, check out our new home page. The CSS improvements that we implemented upstream in WebKit are further described in our WebKit blog post. And for even more tips on how to use Chrome Developer Tools, watch the new video below.