Get movie trailers and more with Google Search for mobile

Heads up, movie fans — today we’ve launched a mobile version of our new Google Search results for movies, which makes it easier to plan a trip to the movies. Just go to google.com in the web browser on your iPhone, Palm WebOS, or Android-powered device, search for “movies”, and then tap on the “More movies” link. From there, you can either browse a list of movies or select the “Theaters” button to browse a list of theaters near you.

Our new movie listings page now includes buttons to play trailers right on your phone, ratings and categories, movie posters, upcoming showtimes, and a concise list of the nearest theaters and their distances from you. We keep information on this page succinct so you can quickly browse through shows and showtimes to help you decide which movie to see. If you want more details about a specific movie, just touch the poster or movie title and you’ll see our new movie details page that has a synopsis of the movie, a more detailed list of showtimes, the cast and crew, and pictures. Watch our trailer for a quick demo:

When you browse by theater, you’ll see a map of the theaters nearest to you. Then, just tap on the link to any particular theater to see what shows are playing there and what times they’re playing. Of course, you can also search for specific movies or theaters and see their listings right away. Try searching for recent movies like “New Moon” or “Where the Wild Things Are” or search for “glendale 18 los angeles”.

If you enjoy searching for movies with Google nearly as much as we have during testing, then this will be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Our new search results for movies are available in English in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. As always, let us know your feedback. This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.

Posted by Nick Fey, User Experience Designer, Google mobile team

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Get movie trailers and more with Google Search for mobile

Happy Thanksgiving Travels: Google Maps Navigation now available for Android 1.6

A few weeks ago we launched Google Maps Navigation (Beta) as a free feature of Google Maps on Android 2.0 devices. Today we’re expanding availability of Google Maps Navigation to devices running Android 1.6 (Donut) and higher, such as the T-Mobile myTouch 3G and the G1.

Google Maps Navigation is an internet-connected GPS system with voice guidance and automatic rerouting, all running on your mobile phone. Using Google services over your phone’s data connection brings important benefits to GPS navigation users, like using Google search (typed or spoken) to enter your destination; fresh map, business, and traffic data; and satellite and Street View imagery along your route.

This release also includes the new Layers feature, which lets you overlay geographical information on the map. View My Maps, transit lines, Wikipedia articles about places, and more.

So if you’re traveling this Thanksgiving, you’ll be able to enjoy the benefits of an internet connection, whether it’s free Wi-Fi at the airport or Google Maps Navigation in your car.

If you have a phone running Android 1.6, you can download an updated version of Google Maps from Android Market to use Navigation today. Google Maps Navigation is in beta and is currently available in the United States. Some features of Android 2.0 are not available on Android 1.6, for example, the ability to use the “navigate to” voice command as shown in our demo video. However, you can still create a shortcut that will allow you to launch Navigation and start getting directions to a specific place from your current location with just a single touch from your home screen. For example, you can create a “Home” shortcut to quickly navigate home, no matter where you are. Just use the “Add” menu item from the home screen, then choose “Shortcuts”, then “Directions.” Please visit our forum to give us feedback, or our Help Center to get help using Google Maps Navigation.

Posted by Michael Siliski, Product Manager

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Happy Thanksgiving Travels: Google Maps Navigation now available for Android 1.6

An update to Google Earth for the iPhone

Cross-posted from the Google Lat Long blog

Just over one year ago, we unveiled Google Earth for the iPhone and iPod touch. Google Earth quickly became one of the most popular applications in the App Store, and after only six months, was the second most-downloaded free application overall. A big thank-you to the over 220,000 users have taken the time to write a review!

Today, we’re proud to announce version 2.0 of Google Earth for iPhone. We’ve added some exciting new features, including the ability to view maps that you create on your desktop computer right from your iPhone, explore the app in new languages, and improved icon selection and performance.

View your maps wherever you go
Have you ever wanted to view a custom map with Google Earth on your iPhone? Well, now you can. By logging in directly to your Google Maps account, you can view the same maps that you or others have created, using the My Maps interface. Maybe you’re on a trip and want to see where Tony Wheeler, the co-founder of Lonely Planet, most likes to travel. Or perhaps you’re walking around looking for a restaurant and you want to see where world-famous chef Ferran Adrià likes to eat. All you have to do is click “Save to My Maps”, open Earth on the iPhone, log in with the same account information, and voilà, you have your same collection of My Maps right in your pocket.

It’s fun to create and view your own maps as well. Here’s an example of a map that I created that shows the two attempts my friends and I made to summit Mount Ritter in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. As you can see, we didn’t quite make it (the red line is the intended route, and the blue and green lines are our 2008 and 2009 attempts, respectively). Next year we’ll get it for sure! I created this map by using the desktop version of Google Earth to read the tracks directly out of my GPS device, saving the resulting tracks as a KML file, and then importing into My Maps in Google Maps. You can learn more about My Maps here.

We’ve also included new languages in this release, bringing the total to 31 languages from the original 18. The complete list of languages is: English (U.S), English (UK), French (France), German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Arabic, Thai, Czech, Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian, Malaysian, Romanian, Slovak, and Croatian.

We hope you enjoy our latest release. Please note that the app will be rolling out around the world over the next twenty-four hours - if you don’t see it immediately, be sure to check back soon. You can download Google Earth for iPhone here.

Posted by Peter Birch, Product Manager, Google Earth

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An update to Google Earth for the iPhone

Google Latitude, now with Location History & Alerts

Since the launch of Google Latitude earlier this year, we’ve been getting a lot of feature requests. One of the most popular ideas was for Latitude to keep track of location history, allowing you (but not your friends) to see where you’ve been at any point in time. Another popular idea was to notify you when you’re near your Latitude friends so you can easily meet up or grab lunch. Today, we’re happy to introduce both Google Location History and Google Location Alerts (beta) to let you do even more with Latitude.

Google Location History
Whether you’re taking a road trip across the country, backpacking across Europe, or just going out for a night on the town, it’s fascinating to look back at where you went, and for how long you stayed. Enable Google Location History to store, view, and manage your past Latitude locations. You can visualize your history on Google Maps and Earth or play back a recent trip in order. Of course, you can always delete selected history or your entire location history at any time. While working on Location History, I found myself going back in time to discover things that would have otherwise been impossible. For example, I stopped at an awesome BBQ place on my way back from Lake Tahoe this summer, but I couldn’t remember the name when my friend was asking about it a few months later. I pulled up my location history for that weekend, found where I was stationary on the drive home, and the restaurant name showed up in Google Maps: Drooling Dog Bar BQ. Check it out below:

Google Location Alerts (beta)
People also want to know when their friends were nearby, but it’s not always convenient to keep checking Latitude to see if a friend has recently shown up near you. After working on this for a while, we realized it wasn’t as straightforward as sending a notification every time Latitude friends were near each other. Imagine that you’re Latitude friends with your roommate or co-workers. It would get pretty annoying to get a text message every single time you walked in the door at home or pulled into work. To avoid this, we decided to make Location Alerts smarter by requiring that you also enable Location History. Using your past location history, Location Alerts can recognize your regular, routine locations and not create alerts when you’re at places like home or work. Alerts will only be sent to you and any nearby friends when you’re either at an unusual place or at a routine place at an unusual time. Keep in mind that it may take up to a week to learn your “unusual” locations and start sending alerts.

To enable these features, go to google.com/latitude/apps. You must first be an existing Google Latitude user; if you’re not already, sign up here. You must explicitly enable each feature, and of course, you can disable it at any time. Learn more in the Help Center about Location Alerts and Location History, suggest and vote on ideas in the Mobile Product Ideas page, or report problems in the Mobile Help Forum.

Posted by Chris Lambert, Software Engineer, Google Mobile

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Google Latitude, now with Location History & Alerts

Escape to Paradise on Your Phone

Today we’re excited to announce the launch of new imagery in Street View. Now when you’re daydreaming about exotic vacations (or even planning them!), you can pull up Street View in Google Maps for mobile and explore new locations in Hawaii and Mexico. Hawaii marks the inclusion of all 50 states in the US for Street View coverage. You can check to see where there’s parking by Sunset Beach, find benches as you’re walking on Waikiki Beach for a peaceful end to your day, or explore Playa del Carmen without a passport. To learn more about this update, and about how to vote for the next location our Street View trike will visit, check out the blog post on Google LatLong. The latest Street View imagery shows automatically in all clients, but to get the latest version of Google Maps for mobile visit m.google.com/maps from your phone. For help with Street View on Google Maps for mobile, check out the Help Center.

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Escape to Paradise on Your Phone

Google Search by voice travels the world, finds Nokia, learns Chinese

(cross-posted with Official Google Blog)

Google Search by voice has grown up quickly. Some might say that search by voice has matured from a toddler to a tween. It’s certainly been traveling across the English-speaking world and getting better at understanding a range of accents, from the US, UK, India, and Australia. Today it’s taking another big step — we’re happy to announce that Google search by voice is available for Nokia S60 phones, and now understands Mandarin Chinese.

Nokia S60 phones are popular around the world. If you have an Nseries or Eseries phone such as the N95 or E71, you’re using S60. Many of these phones have 12-digit keypads — good for making calls, but not so easy when you need to type a few words. Many of you have asked if we could build our search by voice feature for these phones, and we’ve been working on this feature for a while.

The new version of Google Mobile App places a shortcut to Google search on your Nokia phone’s home screen, allowing you to search using your voice or by typing. You can search for anything — from “movie times”, to “fish ‘n chips”, to “masala dosa.” It doesn’t matter if you’re in London or Bangalore: we’ll use your location to give you nearby results. And Google Mobile App shows search results in the application, so you don’t have to wait for a web browser to launch to get an answer.

Although it has taken a little while to get this release ready, we have been planning the launch for some time as you can see from this footage from the archives.

Up until now voice search has only been available in English, but the new version of Google Mobile App for Nokia S60 devices works for Mandarin speakers, too. We’re really proud of the work we’ve done with Mandarin speech recognition, both because it’s the most spoken language in the world, and because of the engineering challenge. To get Mandarin speech recognition to work, we had to learn a lot about this fascinating language — the differences between traditional and simplified Chinese, its tonal characteristics, automatic segmentation of text into words, pinyin representations of Chinese characters, sandhi rules, the different accents and languages in China, unicode representations of Chinese character sets…the list goes on and on.

Mandarin speakers can now search by voice for complex queries like 清华大学附近的水煮鱼 (which translates to “water-boiled fish near Tsinghua University”). Although this only works on the Nokia S60 at the moment, we’re working on adding support for Mandarin speech recognition to our products on other mobile platforms, such as Android and iPhone. And bear in mind that this is a first version of our system in Mandarin, and it might not be as polished as our English version. For example, if you have a strong southern Chinese accent, it might not work as well as for people with a Beijing accent. However, our system will improve over time, so please give it a try!

Google Mobile App in Mandarin Chinese

Note that the application is for version 3 of Nokia S60 - more recent phones running version 5 (touch screen) are not yet supported.

To download the new version of Google Mobile App on your Nokia S60 phone, visit m.google.com from your phone’s browser. For questions and support, visit our Help Forum.

Posted by Elke Michlmayr, Software Engineer

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Google Search by voice travels the world, finds Nokia, learns Chinese

Announcing Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0

(cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

Since 2005, millions of people have relied on Google Maps for mobile to get directions on the go. However, there’s always been one problem: Once you’re behind the wheel, a list of driving directions just isn’t that easy to use. It doesn’t tell you when your turn is coming up. And if you miss a turn? Forget it, you’re on your own.

Today we’re excited to announce the next step for Google Maps for mobile: Google Maps Navigation (Beta) for Android 2.0 devices.

This new feature comes with everything you’d expect to find in a GPS navigation system, like 3D views, turn-by-turn voice guidance and automatic rerouting. But unlike most navigation systems, Google Maps Navigation was built from the ground up to take advantage of your phone’s Internet connection.

Here are seven features that are possible because Google Maps Navigation is connected to the Internet:

The most recent map and business data
When you use Google Maps Navigation, your phone automatically gets the most up-to-date maps and business listings from Google Maps — you never need to buy map upgrades or update your device. And this data is continuously improving, thanks to users who report maps issues and businesses who activate their listings with Google Local Business Center.

Search in plain English
Google Maps Navigation brings the speed, power and simplicity of Google search to your car. If you don’t know the address you’re looking for, don’t worry. Simply enter the name of a business, a landmark or just about anything into the search box, and Google will find it for you. Then press “Navigate”, and you’re on your way.

Search by voice
Typing on a phone can be difficult, especially in the car, so with Google Maps Navigation, you can say your destination instead. Hold down the search button to activate voice search, then tell your phone what you want to do (like “Navigate to Pike Place in Seattle”), and navigation will start automatically.

Traffic view
Google Maps Navigation gets live traffic data over the Internet. A traffic indicator light in the corner of the screen glows green, yellow or red, depending on the current traffic conditions along your route. If there’s a jam ahead of you, you’ll know. To get more details, tap the light to zoom out to an aerial view showing traffic speeds and incidents ahead. And if the traffic doesn’t look good, you can choose an alternate route.

Search along route
For those times when you’re already on the road and need to find a business, Google Maps Navigation searches along your route to give you results that won’t take you far from your path. You can search for a specific business by name or by type, or you can turn on popular layers, such as gas stations, restaurants or parking.

Satellite view
Google Maps Navigation uses the same satellite imagery as Google Maps on the desktop to help you get to your destination. Turn on the satellite layer for a high-resolution, 3D view of your upcoming route. Besides looking cool, satellite view can help you make sense of complicated maneuvers.

Street View
If you want to know what your next turn looks like, double-tap the map to zoom into Street View, which shows the turn as you’ll see it, with your route overlaid. And since locating an address can sometimes be tricky, we’ll show you a picture of your destination as you approach the end of your route, so you’ll know exactly what to look for.

Since there’s nothing quite like seeing the product in action, we made this video to demonstrate a real-life example:

The first phone to have Google Maps Navigation and Android 2.0 is the Droid from Verizon. Google Maps Navigation is initially available in the United States. And like other Google Maps features, Navigation is free.

Click here to learn more and browse a gallery of product screenshots. Take Google Maps Navigation for a spin, and bring Internet-connected GPS navigation with you in your car.

Posted by Keith Ito, Software Engineer

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Announcing Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0

The Iterative Web App: Auto-expanding Compose Boxes

On April 7th, we announced a new version of Gmail for mobile for iPhone and Android-powered devices. Among the improvements was a complete redesign of the web application’s underlying code which allows us to more rapidly develop and release new features that users have been asking for, as explained in our first post. We’d like to introduce The Iterative Webapp, a series where we will continue to release features for Gmail for mobile. Today: Auto-expanding compose boxes

by Casey Ho, Software Engineer, Google Mobile

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The Iterative Web App: Auto-expanding Compose Boxes

Google Custom Search for mobile

Google Custom Search makes it easy for web site owners to add Google-powered search boxes to their sites. Since a rapidly growing percentage of web search traffic originates from smartphones, we’re pleased to announce that Google Custom Search now formats search results for mobile phones.

If you own a web site and add a Google Custom Search box to it, when your users access the site on an Android-powered phone, iPhone, iPod Touch, or Palm Pre, they will can see optimized search results formatted for these devices. When they search on your web site, they are can be redirected to a Google-hosted Custom Search mobile results page created specifically for your Custom Search engine. If you’d like to serve these mobile results from your own web site, you can host your own version of the mobile Custom Search home page.

You can test this out on your phone right now. Here are a few samples: search for user-generated content (e.g., search for “zakumi”) from sites like Wikipedia or Knol, or look for more information on Custom Search (e.g., search for “promotion”). As you can see, Custom Mobile Search results can match the look and feel of your own website, and we’ve enabled interactive features, such as label tabs for navigation, as well as promotions. Look for more features coming soon, too. For more information on Custom Search, and more details on the mobile configuration, visit the Custom Search blog.

Let us know how this works on your favorite smartphone.

Update on 10/23 @ 9:06 AM: Note that some configuration is required for the mobile-formatted results to be shown.

Posted by Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Search

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Google Custom Search for mobile

Layers come to Google Maps for BlackBerry

We’re excited to announce that version 3.2 of Google Maps for mobile is now available for BlackBerry. This release contains many of the same features we recently launched on Windows Mobile and S60, including Layers.

Layers make it easy to view various types of information on your map and are especially helpful in situations when you’re traveling somewhere new. For example, you can turn on the Wikipedia layer to read entries about nearby places, then use the transit lines layer to help map out a route. Or you can use the My Maps feature of Google Maps to create a collection of places you’re planning to visit on your trip and then use Google Maps for mobile to access it from the road. You can also turn on the Google Latitude layer to see your friends’ locations.

My coworker Mat is a big fan of Layers and made the below video to show you how he uses the feature. Check out the video, and get the latest version of Google Maps for your phone by visiting m.google.com/maps from your phone’s browser.

Posted by Michelle Chen, Software Engineer

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Layers come to Google Maps for BlackBerry