Customize your results snippets with structured data

Custom Search themes make it easy for you to customize the look and feel of your search results pages. And if you want to take the customization gig further, you can also customize the result snippet—a small sample of content that gives search users an idea of what's in the webpage—by using structured data.

When you are reading a webpage that reviews a film, you can figure out what the title is, what reviewers thought of the film, and how they rated it. You can even search for stores with the best prices for the DVD. Structured data can convey the meaning of such key information to computers.

Structured data formats—such as microformats, RDFa, and PageMaps—are semantic markup that you add to your HTML page. Structured data make web content more meaningful to machines. These attributes do not change the formatting of your website, they just make the text enclosed within the XHTML tags "understandable" by computers and influence what shows up in the result snippets.

When you tag your webpages with structured data, Custom Search indexes them and sends the metadata back in the XML results for your page. You can then take this XML feed and transform it into HTML results that showcase key information—such as image thumbnails, summaries, dates, authorship, ratings, and prices. Having the most relevant information in your search results makes the webpages in your site more compelling to your users.

You can, for example, create the following kind of rich snippets:


You can even add thumbnails and actions that let your users download files or make purchases.


To learn more, read the Custom Search Developer's Guide.

By Kevin Griffin Lim, Custom Search Team

Customize your search results page with themes

If you can select headgear for your LEGO ® action figures, your search engine should let you customize the theme for your search results page, right? Darn tooting!

True, Custom Search already lets you customize the look and feel of your search results page, but we're making it easier. You can now go to the control panel and select one of the predefined themes that broadly matches the look and feel of your website.

If the standard themes are not quite what you want, you can make further changes. You can tinker with the page layout (Why stick with a single column of results, when you can have two?) and play with the font colors and types. The standard themes paired with the "Compact" layout option are optimized for mobile devices, so they work well on iPhone, Android devices, and Pre.

If you want a greater level of control than that, you can download the CSS, tweak it in a text editor, and host the CSS in your website. You can make your search results page blend with the style of the rest of your website.


To learn more, read the Custom Search Developer's Guide.

By Kevin Gnome Lim, Custom Search Team

Who's @ Google I/O

We frequently hear that developers want to hear from peers who've built interesting applications. That's why we're excited that this year's Google I/O (May 27th - 28th in San Francisco) will involve more developers from the community at large. Today, we're raising the virtual curtain on some of the developers who'll be participating in Google I/O this year.

These developers represent a wide range of companies and apps - all of which are strong examples of Google developer products and open web technologies in action. They'll be presenting technical sessions and demoing their apps at the Developer Sandbox, a new addition to Google I/O featuring demo station "pods". With so many developers at Google I/O, this is a great opportunity for event attendees to check out their apps, ask questions, exchange ideas, and meet new people.

Given the recent App Engine launch, we thought it'd be fitting to introduce a subset of the App Engine developers who will be demoing or presenting at Google I/O:

• Salesforce.com
  Force.com is the enterprise cloud computing platform offered by Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com is committed to letting developers take advantage of the web as the ultimate platform. Force.com developer evangelist Ron Hess will lead a session outlining how to connect the Force.com SOAP Web Services API to Google App Engine for Java. The project includes an open source Web Service Client that has been completely ported to App Engine. The session will discuss the porting effort, how to use URLFetch to achieve cross- cloud communication and demonstrate a sample integration between App Engine and the Force.com SOAP API.


• ThoughtWorks and SpringSource
  Guillaume Laforge is the official Groovy Project Manager for SpringSource, and the spec lead of JSR-241, the Java Specification Request that standardizes the Groovy dynamic language. Ola Bini of ThoughtWorks is the creator of the language Ioke and has been one of the core developers for JRuby since 2006. Guillaume and Ola will be speaking about running Groovy (and Grails) and JRuby on top of Google App Engine for Java, respectively.


• Walk Score (a project of Front Seat)
  Walk Score uses App Engine for the Walk Score API that serves Walk Score data to millions of real estate listings daily. The Walk Score website also uses Google Local Search for their scoring algorithm and Google Maps API for displaying walkability of addresses and heat map views of neighborhoods and cities. The three developers behind Walk Score will be leading a session, AppEngine Nitty-Gritty: Scalability, Fault Tolerance, and Integrating Amazon EC2, outlining their experiences scaling on App Engine and combining App Engine with external services including EC2. They'll also be on hand at the Developer Sandbox.


• Best Buy
  Giftag, Best Buy's browser add-on for clipping, saving, and sharing web page snippets, launched on App Engine just before Black Friday last year. Using the hProduct open standard and App Engine's datastore API, Giftag enables users to add items to one or more wishlists, then share these via the App Engine-hosted front-end or Facebook. The engineers behind Giftag will be at the Developer Sandbox. (Check out their blog post and video where the team talks about migrating to App Engine)


• BuddyPoke
  BuddyPoke uses App Engine for fluid and cost effective scalability to handle a rapidly growing user base of over 36 million OpenSocial users. Dave Westwood, founder of BuddyPoke, will be part of the Developer Sandbox. (Check out Dave's video talking about scaling on App Engine)


• 3scale networks
  3scale provides a Python plug-in that integrates seamlessly to App Engine so that developers can put all their resources into their API's core functionalities. User management, access control, billing and payments can be easily externalized with 3scale for those APIs that run on top of App Engine. The 3scale team will be part of the Developer Sandbox.

To check out speakers, visit the speakers page. To see who'll be demoing at the Sandbox, check out the Developer Sandbox page.

Keep in mind what you see currently on these pages is still 'in progress'. Over the next few weeks, we'll be regularly updating the I/O website with more sessions, speakers, and Developer Sandbox demos, so keep checking back. And each week on the Code Blog, we'll give you a closer look into who these developers are, including guest blog posts authored by them that share their development experiences and tips. (The AJAX API team's gotten a headstart on this)

Finally, we can't end a blog post about Google I/O without a (shameless) plug for actually signing up for the event, so here it is:

<shameless plug>
Early registration for Google I/O ends May 1, so if you're thinking of attending, now's a good time. Sign up at code.google.com/io. We look forward to meeting you!
</shameless plug>

*You can also follow our tweets: @googleio.

By Christine Tsai, Google Developer Products

Playing around with Google's AJAX APIs

By Ben Lisbakken, Developer Programs Engineer

For me, documentation isn't always enough to learn about APIs; I need examples that I can play with. That's why I started a fun project recently--a tool for teaching developers how to use Google's JavaScript APIs: the AJAX API Playground. I have been working on this in my 20% time and today I am proud to announce that we are launching the AJAX API Playground as the official way that Google will show JavaScript samples!

The AJAX API Playground is currently loaded with over 170 samples for 8 Google JavaScript APIs (Maps, Search, Feeds, Calendar, Visualization, Language, Blogger, Libraries and Earth) that you can edit and run to help you explore what Google's APIs have to offer. There are also save and export features. The save feature allows you to hold onto an edited sample so you can continue working on it later, while export lets you modify a sample and publish the code to a permanent url.

As the AJAX API Playground is built on App Engine, you can create your own App Engine instance to show off your code samples. The code is open sourced under an Apache 2.0 license and uses several open source libraries and tools, including jQuery, jQuery UI, YUI Compressor, and CodeMirror. You can find the code on Google Project Hosting and learn about adding samples on the project wiki.

Stay tuned for more samples for more APIs. Enjoy!

Giving yourself to the schedule

There was an interesting New York Times article this week about a family who had trouble of keeping track of their cars. To resolve the issue, the mother, writing the story, adopted Google Calendar to resolve the situation:

That’s all they would need to create personal calendars that they could share online with a master family calendar, which would display all appointments in color-coded text blocks. Another thing that set Google apart was a recently beefed-up spreadsheet tool that enables me to create a monthly budget chart that might trick my husband into confronting the truth about our finances. I also had big plans to use the documents tool to make a grocery list everyone could edit.

Turns out that she had mixed success.

For that family, giving themselves over to the need for a group schedule appears to have happened late. For us, it happened a few years ago. The parties escalated (and as regular readers know that is a big problem for us), the after school activities grew in number, there were events at school and just many amendments to a normal weekly schedule. Add into the mix that on certain evenings or on certain days one or both of us might have work commitments or travel and just keeping up became a nightmare.

Our initial pass was to agree to put all events on the calendar on our iMac in the kitchen. The idea being, if it is not there, it does not exist. That was a good solution but sometimes you find out about something at work and don't have access to the home machine. Also, you might need to commit to a work event but can't consult the schedule.

After much angst about whether we could rely on an internet-based means of scheduling, I moved us over to Google Calendar. What a marvel it is. It is so easy to consult, put schedules in, and even link to maps of where to go. We have separate calendars for all five of us and am teaching the two eldest to put parties and the like in the schedule themselves. That way we can train them early before it is seen as an imposition. Big Brother serves best when they are young.

Many people have reacted in horror to this outcome that we use IT to communicate rather than some personal touch. Well, those people do not understand the magnitude of the logistical problem we face. More often than not they have a single person responsible for where the children are. We can't rely on that and so we track them on Google. If we could get some GPS locators on them and tie that back in we will be set. It might seem impersonal but there is nothing less personal than a lost child. Can you imagine the conversation with police?

"So can you tell us where you last saw your child?"

"Well, this morning but her mother apparently dropped her off at a party at 10."

"It is 2 now, who picked her up?"

"It was supposed to be me but it turned out that I was taking another child to Taekwando."

"So the mother stepped in ..."

"Well, she had to take the youngest to another party."

"Have you checked at the 10am party?"

"Well, the invitation went with the child and we have no record at the moment of whose party it was or where it was held."

"Have you thought of putting this on Google? It's free."

I mean, we all want to avoid that.