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• Transliteration goes global

  Most of us use a keyboard to enter text; it's one of the most basic activities we perform on a computer. However even this simple activity can be cumbersome in many parts of the world. If you've ever tried to type in a non-Roman script using a Roman keyboard, you know that it can be difficult to do. Many of us at Google's Bangalore office experienced this problem firsthand. Roman keyboards are the norm in India, making it difficult to type in Indian languages. We decided to tackle this problem by making it very easy to type phonetically using Roman characters and we launched this service as Google Transliteration. Using Google Transliteration you can convert Roman characters to their phonetic equivalent in your language. Note that this is not the same as translation — it's the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other. For example, typing "hamesha" transliterates into Hindi as: , typing "salaam" transliterates into Persian as: and typing "spasibo" transliterates into Russian as . Since our initial launch for a single Indian language, we've been hard at work on improving quality, adding more languages and new features. Today we are pleased to introduce a new and improved version of Google Transliteration, available in Google Labs or at http://www.google.com/transliterate. In this new version, you can select from one of seventeen supported languages: Arabic, Bengali, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. You can also compose richly formatted text and look up word definitions with our dictionary integration. If the default transliteration is not the word you wanted, you can highlight it to see a list of alternatives. For even finer-grained control, we provide a unicode character picker to allow character-by-character composition. Google Transliteration is integrated into several Google properties and we have an API and bookmarklets to extend this capability to other websites. A solution we initially built to solve a problem we saw here in India is now being used in many other parts of the world as well - one small example of the scale and leverage that technology can bring in today's increasingly globalized environment. As with all labs products, we will continue to improve the technology and try out new features. We would love to hear from you, so do let us know what you think. Posted by Nilesh Tathawadekar and Mohammed Aslam, Software Engineers

• Browser Size: a tool to see how others view your website

  In a newspaper, the most important story is featured on the front page. If it's a really important piece, then it's placed "above the fold," which means you can find it on the top half of the first page — the bottom half is folded behind and isn't readily seen when you first look at the newspaper. The same concept applies to browsers as well. There's no clear line for "above the fold" on a browser — there are many different sizes of monitors, browsers are not always full screen and other things like toolbars can take up space. Consider a "Donate" button on a non-profit site. If it's far down the page, you may not see it when you first view the page. You can of course scroll downwards, but many people don't scroll and will miss it entirely. For example, on the download page for Google Earth, the install rate increased by 10% when we moved the "Download" button 100 pixels upward. We can attribute that increase to users who wanted to try out Google Earth, but didn't see the button before. To help you understand how everyone sees your website, we created a tool called Browser Size in our 20% time. Browser Size is based on a sample of data from visitors to google.com. Special code collects data on the height and width of the browser for a sample of users. For a given point in the browser, the tool will tell you what percentage of users can see it. For example, if an important button is in the 80% region it means that 20% of users have to scroll in order to see it. If you're a web designer, you can use Browser Size to redesign your page to minimize scrolling and make sure that the important parts of the page are always prominent to your audience. We hope people will use this tool to make their websites better, in turn making the web better for everyone. If you're interested in learning more about Browser Size, check out our post on the Google Code Blog. Posted by Bruno Bowden, Senior Software Engineer

• More great news sources to discover in Fast Flip

  Three months ago, we launched Google Fast Flip, a service that seeks to make reading articles online as fast and simple as flipping through a magazine or newspaper. It's still early in this experiment, which is why Fast Flip remains in Google Labs. But so far our initial thesis has held up: If you make it easier to read news online, people will read more of it. Users have told us they like being able to browse content so quickly, and we've been pleased with the amount of time they have spent reading articles in Fast Flip. We've also received good feedback from the three dozen publishers who joined us for the launch, as well as a lot of interest from others. Today, we're excited to be adding articles from another two dozen publishers representing more than 50 newspapers, magazines, web outlets, news wires and TV and radio broadcasters. Some of the new sources include Tribune Co. newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, McClatchy Company newspapers such as the Miami Herald and the Kansas City Star, the Huffington Post, Popular Science, Reuters, Public Radio International, POLITICO and U.S. News & World Report. Now you can use Fast Flip to engage with content from even more of your favorite news outlets in an innovative way, and continue to explore topics covered by a diverse group of sources. And, through the mobile version, you can flip through all these new articles on your Android-powered device or iPhone. While we're encouraged by the positive feedback about Fast Flip, it's just one of many experiments you'll see us try in partnership with news publishers. Our goal is to work with the industry to help it continue to innovate and build bigger audiences, better engage those audiences and generate more revenue. We're looking forward to innovating and iterating with all these new partners in Fast Flip. And if you have more suggestions for ways we can improve Fast Flip, please let us know. Posted by Jack Hebert, Software Engineer