This week in search 10/8/10

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

While we’re always working on making search more precise, comprehensiveness and interactive, you can also count on us to bring you enhancements in speed and language. This week, our updates include releases that will help you get the information you’re looking for fast—and in many different languages.

Flu facts in search
Just in time for flu season, we’re again collaborating with the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services (HHS), their flu.gov collaborators and the American Lung Association to help you easily find nearby locations to get the flu vaccine. When searching for flu-related terms, information will appear at the top of your search results, including tips from flu.gov and a flu vaccine finder box with an expanding map that displays locations where you can receive vaccine. You can also visit www.google.com/flushot for the flu vaccine finder. While we’re all hoping for a relatively tame flu season, preparation is always necessary. We hope this enhancement will make it easier.


Example searches: [flu] and [flu shot]

Google Alerts for video now in 40 languages
Google Alerts has been helping English speakers discover new videos related to their interests for years. Last week, we added support for video alerts in 39 additional languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish. This means that all of you around the world can now monitor the web for new videos, as well as for news, blogs, web results and real-time updates. Visit www.google.com/alerts and try it out.

A new addition to Google Translate
It is with great linguistic pleasure that we’ve added Latin to as an alpha language in Google Translate. Although considered a “dead language” by many, Latin is still studied by hundreds of thousands of students worldwide and is the predecessor to many modern tongues. If you are looking for something to translate, check out our post announcing the feature (written entirely in Latin!). While this may not be popular for translating YouTube captions or emails, we hope it will help unlock the many ancient documents that are written in Latin.

The week in searches
Want to know what was hot on Google Search in the U.S. this week? Check out the Google Beat, where we give you the scoop on what got people clicking on Google. This week, we cover the Rick Sanchez/Jon Stewart comments as well as the buzz around the Ryder Cup golf competition.

We hope you find these updates useful. Stay tuned for more next week.

Posted by Ben Ling, Director of Search Properties