Google Public Alerts is a new service that displays public safety alerts on Google Maps. Alerts will now come up in Google Maps searches as well as on the Google Public Alerts homepage. Find out more at the google.org blog.

If a major weather event is headed for your area, you might go online to search for the information you need: What’s happening? Where and when will it strike? How severe will it be? What resources are available to help?

The Google Crisis Response team works on providing critical emergency information during crises. Our goal is to surface emergency information through the online tools you use everyday, when that information is relevant and useful.

Thanks to Google Street View, you can now take a virtual tour inside the B&H Photo Video superstore in New York City.

See Previously: B&H Photo Video

via PetaPixel & ISO 1200 Magazine

“Search by Image, Recursively, Transparent PNG, #1″ by German artist Sebastian Schmieg is a mesmerizing algorithm-generated video created with Google’s Search by Image service. The video is part of Schmieg’s Search by Image series.

via MetaFilter

Google is rolling out Search, plus Your World, an advanced Google search that pulls in tips, photos and posts from the “content and social streams” of you and your friends when signed into Google+. The search results are personal and private to you when signed into Google+ and are marked with a distinctive icon.

Search has always brought you information from across the web. Now, search gets better by including photos, posts, and more from you and your friends. When signed in with Google+, you’ll find personal results and profiles of people you know or follow. You can even expand your world by discovering people related to your search.

Google is has a special Google Doodle celebrating the 100th birthday of cartoonist Charles Samuel Addams, best known as the creator of The Addams Family.

Google Zeitgeist 2011 features data visualizations of the top searches of the year, from “Steve Jobs” to “Google+.” Google has also released a companion video that reviews the year in photos and video. The video was produced by creative agency Whirled.

As we leave the year behind, we’re taking a look at the biggest events, news, and people who shaped the year. We analyzed the billions of queries that were typed into Google over the year to give you a glimpse of 2011 as seen through the lenses of Google searches.

We previously wrote about Google Zeitgeist 2010.

via Google

Google has released the new Google Currents, a new mobile app for Android and Apple phones and tables that is optimized for magazines and online content.

Google Currents is a new application for Android devices, iPads and iPhones that lets you explore online magazines and other content with the swipe of a finger. It brings together this content in a beautiful and simple way so you can easily navigate between words, pictures and video on your smartphone or tablet.

Laughing Squid is one of the inaugural publications on Google Currents. You can find us in the Entertainment section.

Google Maps is now starting to show maps of indoor locations with the release of Google Maps 6.0 for Android.

Detailed floor plans automatically appear when you’re viewing the map and zoomed in on a building where indoor map data is available. The familiar “blue dot” icon indicates your location within several meters, and when you move up or down a level in a building with multiple floors, the interface will automatically update to display which floor you’re on. All this is achieved by using an approach similar to that of ‘My Location’ for outdoor spaces, but fine tuned for indoors.

Tom Jenkins of film and production company, The Theory, created Address is Approximate as a personal stop-motion animation project. This beautifully made film short uses images from Google Maps with Street View to follow the automobile adventures of a toy figure with a bad case of wanderlust.

A lonely desk toy longs for escape from the dark confines of the office, so he takes a cross country road trip to the Pacific Coast in the only way he can – using a toy car and Google Maps Street View.

via Doobybrain.com

Google has just launched their new Google Music service for “discovering, purchasing, sharing and enjoying digital music in new, innovative and personalized ways”.

Google Music helps you spend more time listening to your collection and less time managing it. We automatically sync your entire music library—both purchases and uploads—across all your devices so you don’t have to worry about cables, file transfers or running out of storage space. We’ll keep your playlists in tact, too, so your “Chill” playlist is always your “Chill” playlist, whether you’re on your laptop, tablet or phone. You can even select the specific artists, albums and playlists you want to listen to when you’re offline.

Yesterday Google launched their new Google+ pages for companies and brands.

Here are our new Google+ pages for Laughing Squid and Laughing Squid Web Hosting.

Google has just launched Google+ Pages, which lets businesses and brands setup a presence on Google+. Danny Sullivan takes a look at the new Pages feature on Search Engine Land.

Here are the Google+ pages for Laughing Squid and Laughing Squid Web Hosting.

The Muppets are one of the first brands to setup a page and they are having a Google+ Hangout today at 4:30pm PST.

These clever Google easter eggs are a reference to the barrel rolls in the video game Star Fox 64.

via Newsweek

Google Maps with Street View has gone off-road to show city parks across the world including The High Line in New York City, a beautiful elevated park in Manhattan’s West Side created out of a reclaimed railway line.

View Larger Map

via Google Blog & The High Line

Google has just rolled out a brand new design for Gmail, which includes new elastic density options Comfortable, Cozy and Compact. The new look will be coming to everyone soon, but you can switch to it now using the link at the bottom-right of Gmail.

In celebration of Halloween, the front page of Google is featuring a time-lapse Google Doodle animation of their logo being cared out of giant pumpkins on the lawn of the Google campus in Mountain View, CA.

To celebrate Halloween this year, the doodle team wanted to capture that fascinating transformation that takes place when carving a pumpkin. Instead of picking up a few pumpkins from the grocery store, however, we decided to work on six giant pumpkins, specially delivered from nearby Half Moon Bay (some weighing well over 1,000 pounds). What you see is a timelapse video of the approximately eight hours we spent carving in the middle of our Mountain View, Calif. campus.

Here’s a behind the scenes video that shows how they were made.

Google+ has released a cool new new Ripples feature that shows how posts are shared and spread.

Here’s a recent examples of the Ripples on our Zombie Pumpkins post after it was shared by Felicia Day.

via Google Blog & Geekosystem

Google has launched Good To Know, a comprehensive overview of their privacy and security features and policies.

via Pulp Tech by Violet Blue

URKontinent is a limited-edition beer created from suggestions from Google employees around the globe. Dogfish Head Beer brewed this draft-only beer and recently debuted it at their Dogfish Head Brewings & Eats Brewpub in Delaware’s Rehoboth Beach. URKontinent is not currently available for purchase outside the Dogfish pub but it may go into full production if the demand is present, though Google states they are not looking to make money on this project.

URKontinent is brewed in the style of a Belgian Dubbel. It begins with Pilsner, Munich and Chocolate Malts and Belgian Dark Candi syrup. Then we add unique ingredients from around the world. Wattleseed from Australia imparts a chocolate, coffee, and hazelnut taste to the beer. Toasted Amaranth from South America gives it an earthy, grainy flavor and a little additional roast flavor. Green Rooibos from Africa contributes a floral aroma and slight astringency. Myrica Gale from Europe supplements the bitterness from minimal hopping. Hive Plex Honey from California adds a subtle sweetness while maintaining the dry finish.The careful combination of all these ingredients creates a complex dark Belgian style ale with wonderful coffee and chocolate covered cherry flavors. The roastiness of the malt and wattleseed melds with the fruity esters from the yeast, the floral notes from the rooibos, and the malty yet dry signature of a Belgian Dubbel. Perfect to enjoy with friends as the weather begins to cool.

Craft-brewing aficionados at Google and the Dogfish Head crew collaborated on this project using a variety of Google products including Google+ Hangouts, Google Docs, Google Moderator and Google Apps for business.

With an ABV (alcohol by volume) content of 8.1%, URKontinent is about twice as strong as a standard beer.

In a related note, in 2009 we reported that Dogfish Head Brewery is the permanent home to the Steampunk Treehouse.

via Caroline McCarthy

The Israel Museum has partnered with Google to bring the Dead Sea Scrolls online as interactive, searchable, high resolution documents (see Google’s blog post and video on the project). The scrolls were discovered in caves near the Dead Sea from 1947 to 1956 and include the oldest known biblical manuscripts. So far five of the scrolls are online of the 972 texts recovered from the caves.

The tipmasters over at Lifehacker have posted an easy way to track any package: just Google the tracking number.

Not Google Plus by CollegeHumor

via CollegeHumor

Google has announced Google Wallet, a new service that lets you pay for things using an Android app on a phone.

Google Wallet has been designed for an open commerce ecosystem. It will eventually hold many if not all of the cards you keep in your leather wallet today. And because Google Wallet is a mobile app, it will be able to do more than a regular wallet ever could, like storing thousands of payment cards and Google Offers but without the bulk. Eventually your loyalty cards, gift cards, receipts, boarding passes, tickets, even your keys will be seamlessly synced to your Google Wallet. And every offer and loyalty point will be redeemed automatically with a single tap via NFC.

Google has just launched their new Flight Search feature that helps you explore air travel options to plan trips.

via Search Engine Land & Geekosystem

Google Takeout is a new “data liberation platform” by Google that allows users to export their data from a number of Google products. The platform is by Google’s Data Liberation Front, an internal engineering team tasked with ensuring that users can easily import and export their data from Google’s products. Google Takeout was launched in June with a tongue-in-cheek revolutionary video by the Data Liberation Front.

Today the platform has been expanded to include Google Voice, Google’s phone and voicemail management service (see the announcement video by the Data Liberation Front).