The Webby Awards has posted a video from their archives of TV news anchor Sam Donaldson interviewing Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin after they won a Webby Award in 2000.

The 16th annual Webby Awards hosted by Patton Oswalt takes place Monday, 21st and will be streamed live in HD starting with the Red Carpet at 4:30 ET and the ceremony at 5:30 ET.

Knowledge Graph is a new feature for Google search that will provide additional info, context, and helpful links when searching about people, places, or things (video). For instance, a search for “Vincent van Gogh” will bring up a short bio on the artist, images of his famous paintings, and related people. Knowledge Graph will be rolling out in the next few days.

When you search, you’re not just looking for a webpage. You’re looking to get answers, understand concepts and explore.

The next frontier in search is to understand real-world things and the relationships among them. So we’re building a Knowledge Graph: a huge collection of the people, places and things in the world and how they’re connected to one another.

This is how we’ll be able to tell if your search for “mercury” refers to the planet or the chemical element–and also how we can get you smarter answers to jump start your discovery.

Story of Send is a new webiste by Google shows what happens when you send an email using Gmail.

If you’re anything like me, you send and receive a lot of emails every day. But have you ever wondered where your message goes after you hit “send?” How does an email travel from your computer to your friend’s smartphone across the country or around the world?

We’re answering those questions with Story of Send, a new site that gives you a behind-the-scenes look into how all that virtual information makes its journey through the real world—from your Internet service provider to our data centers and beyond. Along the way, you’ll discover everything from where we filter for spam and scan for viruses to how we’re minimizing our impact on the environment through energy efficiency and renewable power.

via Gmail Blog

Google Maps has gone inside Seattle’s Archie McPhee store for a Street View tour. In the past, we have posted photos from inside their headquarters and inside their previous location in Ballard. I even got the chance to serve up Fluffernutters at their Wallingford location.

via Archie McPhee

“Betsy” is the name of the KegDroid beer dispensing system created by Googler and longtime homebrewer Paul Carff. In this video, Paul describes its mechanics and gives a rundown on how it works. It operates on a touch screen Android tablet.

via The Next Web

images via Paul Carff

Yesterday the Google Maps team introduced photo tours, 3D tours of famous world landmarks that are generated from public photos on Panoramio and Picasa (intro video). Browse the more than 15,000 photo tours here, or take a look at Shoshone Falls in Idaho.

via Google Lat Long Blog

The Google Earth team recently announced they are incorporating aerial imagery from an unusual source—the balloon- and kite-borne cameras of volunteer mappers from The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science. The Public Laboratory is a grassroots science community that is developing DIY tools for scientific measuring, monitoring, and exploration. The DIY aerial mapping systems cost 100 to 200 dollars to assemble (plus the price of an inexpensive digital camera), and can be used by non-experts.

image of Stanford University campus by Jeffrey Warren and Stewart Long

Google has begun rolling out Google Drive, an online file storage service that will allow users to store up to 5 GB for free. It is available for use on PC and Mac computers, Android devices, and soon for iPhone and iPads. Upgrades are available for increased storage: 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or 1TB for $49.99/month. Upgrades also increase Gmail account storage to 25GB.

Today, we’re introducing Google Drive—a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all of your stuff. Whether you’re working with a friend on a joint research project, planning a wedding with your fiancé or tracking a budget with roommates, you can do it in Drive. You can upload and access all of your files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond.

Google has started rolling out a new design on Google+ that is cleaner and more functional for its users. Some of these updates include expanded navigation capabilities, the ability to post much larger photos and videos, a dedicated place for Hangouts, and a new Explore page that highlights top trending stories. Details of the changes are laid out on the Google blog.

Google+ now includes a dynamic ribbon of applications on the left-hand side. Simply drag apps up or down to create the order you want. You can also hover over certain apps to reveal a set of quick actions, and show/hide apps by moving them in/out of “More.”

via Vic Gundotra

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The Google Street View team recently created a Street View tour of the interior of the White House. The Google Art Project team was also on hand to create high resolution images of 139 artworks in the White House art collection (video). To browse the art collection, see the Google Art Project tour of the White House.

via Google Lat Long Blog

Yesterday Google announced Project Glass, their technology-in-development for Android-based augmented reality glasses. They created a video showing how the technology could work in real life. In no time, Tom Scott made Google Glasses: A New Way to Hurt Yourself, a parody video poking fun of the original one.

Here’s the original video by Google for comparison:

via Jamillah Knowles

Google has announced Project Glass, a technology-in-development that will allow users to wear Android-based display glasses to stream information right in front of their eyes. They are asking the community for input and have released photos and a video. In February 2012, The New York Times Bits blog wrote an in-depth story about this augmented reality project and reported that “the glasses will send data to the cloud and then use things like Google Latitude to share location, Google Goggles to search images and figure out what is being looked at, and Google Maps to show other things nearby.”

A group of us from Google[x] started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment. We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable you to do.

Google has just released an 8-bit version of Google Maps for Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). When it hits the Google Store it will be the first NES cartridge to be released in almost 18 years. Here’s a trial version.

With Google Maps 8-bit, you can do all the things you already do on regular Google Maps. Search for famous landmarks and sites around the world. Take an epic journey with 8-bit Street View. Get detailed directions to avoid dangerous paths, and battle your way through a world of powerful monsters and mystic treasures.

via Google Lat Long Blog

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Last August, Google sent a team to Brazil to create Street View maps of some of the waterways, forests, and villages of the Amazon Basin (video).

The beginning of everything worth doing.

Whether it’s exploring a new city, checking out a friend’s movie recommendations, or just finding new activities for your weekends, Schemer lets you discover new things to do, share schemes with friends, and make the most of your day.

We started out as a scrappy team of Google engineers who wanted to help people do fun stuff in the real world. So we went ahead and built Schemer! We hope you like it.

Schemer is currently in beta but find us at http://www.schemer.com to learn more.

I have had an opportunity to play around with Schemer and it’s been a lot of fun so far:

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.