Google’s new search index: Caffeine Today, we’re announcing the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible...

Fun on the Autobahn: Google Maps Navigation in 11 more Countries There’s nothing quite like driving through Europe in the summer. In the past week, I’ve seen the beautiful Val d’Aosta, the Swiss Alps, the Cathedral in Chartres, and travelled through the Channel Tunnel as I road-tripped from Milan to Geneva, Zürich to Stuttgart, and on through Paris to London. Why the burst of mileage? Well, I’ve been testing Google Maps...

Crawl Errors now reports soft 404s Today we’re releasing a feature to help you discover if your site serves undesirable “soft” or “crypto” 404s. A “soft 404″ occurs when a webserver responds with a 200 OK HTTP response code for a page that doesn’t exist rather than the appropriate 404 Not Found. Soft 404s can limit a site’s crawl coverage by search engines because these duplicate URLs may be crawled...

Follow your football team in South Africa, wherever you are Whether you’ll be in South Africa in person this month, or simply cheering your team on from back home, our new tools for football fans can help you soak up the atmosphere and follow your team wherever you are in the world. You can check out the brand new Street View imagery for South Africa which includes amazing pictures from seven of South Africa’s new football...

Searching for gold during the Games From The Google Official Blog - During the past two weeks, athletes from around the world competed at the Games in Vancouver. While these thousands strove for gold, millions around the world searched for 2010 Winter Olympics, 밴 쿠버 동계올림픽 (Korean for “Vancouver Winter Olympics”), and Juegos Olimpicos de Invierno 2010 (Spanish for “2010 Olympic Winter Games”)...

Google has acquired Picnik From the Google official Blog - More than ever before, people are sharing and storing their photos online. But until recently, you had to edit your photos using client software on your computer. Today, we’re excited to announce that Google has acquired Picnik, one of the first sites to bring photo editing to the cloud. Using Picnik, you can crop, do touch-ups and add cool effects to your photos, all ...

Is your site hacked? New Message Center notifications for hacking and abuse From Official Google Webmaster Central Blog - As we crawl the web, we see bad content inserted on to thousands of hacked sites each day. The number of sites attacked is staggering and the problem is only getting worse. Hackers and spammers target and successfully compromise any sites they can – small personal sites, schools and universities, even...

Refine your searches by location From The Official Google Blog - Location has become an important part of the way we search. If you’re a foodie looking for restaurant details, food blogs or the closest farmer’s market, location can be vital to helping you find the right information. Starting today, we’ve added the ability to refine your searches with the “Nearby” tool in the Search Options panel. One of...