Google has been very involved with this election. They’ve released tools for voters to find out voting information. They’ve released a tool for volunteers to help recruit voters.
Google Helps Kids Get Messages to Next President
Google (specifically Google Docs) has teamed up with the National Writing Project to sponsor a program that lets students around the U.S. write letters to the presidential candidates in a program appropriately titled: Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future.
Google Expands Another API
As mentioned previously, Google is spending a lot of time "in the clouds" so to sepak. They’ve been emphasizing cloud computing a lot lately, even going so far as to make a 99.9% guarantee with regarding to up-time for Google Apps.
Google Upgrades Apps APIs
Yesterday Google guaranteed 99.9% reliability for Google Apps like Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. This stemmed from a similar guarantee the company made for Gmail.
Google and Others Provide Halloween Fun
For those of you sitting around this evening either avoiding trick-or-treaters, or just simply looking for some ghostly entertainment to celebrate All Hallow’s Eve, Google has some special content set aside for you. Not only are they featuring some Halloween Books on the front page of Google Book Search:
Google: We’ll Take The AOL Journals Users
AOL has recently decided to go for a more open and social approach, not unlike Yahoo. They’ve opened up their homepage to third party content, and are allowing users to update social network profiles right from there as well.
Big Celebrities: Use Google to Find Voting Info
Google has a site where you can find your local voting information through Google Maps by searching for your home address. In an effort to get as many people to take advantage of this as possible (and ultimately vote), a lot of big stars have come together in a public service announcement video to encourage viewers to do so.
Google Indexing Scanned Text
Google is now indexing scanned documents in search results. In other words if you scan a page of text and post it to the web, it will be treated like an actual page of text rather than the image that it truly is (theoretically at least).
Google, Yahoo Ad Deal Unlikely
Google and Yahoo may abandon their planned search advertising deal as early as next week.According to the online edition of the Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, reported that Google and Yahoo met with the Justice Department Thursday, and have not been able to reach an agreement to move forward on the deal.
Google Helps Volunteers Recruit Voters
Recently Google launched a couple tools for helping people find out the information they need to vote on November 4th. They created a site based on Google Maps, and a Google Gadget supplying essentially the same info. To use these, you would search for your address, and then you would be provided with information like how to register to vote in your state, your state’s election website, and the location at which you are supposed to vote.