"Search" for us at SES New York!

If your company runs a website, you already know the importance of search engine marketing and optimization. But are you confident that your website is providing the very best user experience possible? If you haven't added or improved your search function yet, you could be missing out on conversions, sales, and repeat visits.

Next week, we're hitting the road to help spread the message about Google Commerce Search and Google Site Search. Visit us at Search Engine Strategies New York, held March 22 to 26th at the Hilton New York. Stop by the Google booth (#1007) to ask questions and learn how to bring visitors to your site, optimize their experience, and convert them into loyal customers.

On Thursday, don't miss our lunch session on Increasing Conversions with Google Site Search Solutions. Nitin Mangtani, Senior Product Manager on Google Enterprise, will explain how improving your site's search engine – whether you run an e-commerce or any other type of site – is key to stretching your SEM dollars and converting each and every visitor.

We'll have a few fun Google schwag giveaways too, so we hope that you'll join us. All conference registrants are welcome and no additional sign-up is needed.

Hope to see you next week in the Big Apple!

Posted by Anna Bishop, Google Enterprise Search team

Working on a more collaborative writing process with Google Apps Edu

While feedback and revision are crucial steps to successful writing, it’s not always easy to do in practice. Keeping track of revisions, deciphering edits, and arranging reviews can keep us from repeating this editing cycle more often.

The collaborative nature of Google Apps can help evolve the writing process with easy sharing and anytime, anywhere collaboration. Add in built-in reference tools, autosave and revision history, and ready-made templates, and Google Docs – part of the Google Apps suite – becomes a powerful platform for writing.

We’ve developed our first Google Apps Topic Review to highlight some of these features and stories from teachers in the classroom, and we shared and revised this paper using the same principles of collaboration.

If you’re attending this year’s ASCD Conference (held from March 6-8 in San Antonio, Texas) we invite you to hear presentations from Google Certified Teachers, Google Apps Education Edition customers, and Google Apps Education team members about other ways Google Apps can help in the classroom. View our teaching theater schedule and stop by to visit us in Booth #626.

For more information about how to start using Google Apps Education Edition at your school, visit www.google.com/a/edu

Posted by Dana Nguyen, Google Apps Education team

Join us at America's Small Business Summit

Small business owners often ask us how Google Apps can help improve the way they work. We'll be sharing some answers in May when we join the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at this year's America's Small Business Summit.

Every day, thousands of businesses of all sizes sign up for Google Apps to help save money, reduce IT hassles, and improve collaboration. For small business owners, Google Apps provides a familiar set of easy-to-use Google business applications with minimal setup and maintenance costs, so that you can stay focused on more strategic elements of running your business.

We hope that you'll join us at this upcoming summit, and, in the meantime, we invite you to take a look at how a few small businesses are using Google Apps today to help improve they way they work.



Posted by Shaluinn Fullove, Google Apps team

Calling All SaaS ISVs: Don't forget to sign up for Google I/O!

This year's Google I/O will play host to a number of sessions and events aimed specifically at helping Software as a Service companies integrate with and monetize Google Apps, including:

• Add Single Sign On to your app using OpenID
• Connect your app with Google Docs and Sites
• Learn how Google architects its own GWT applications for production
• GWT + HTML5 can do what?!
• Making Freemium work - converting free users to paying customers - VC panel

Plus:

• Learn how to acquire additional customers using the Google Solutions Marketplace
• Network with Google Apps Resellers and find new channel opportunities
• Network with other ISVs in the Developer Sandbox that are already selling to Google Apps customers

We are planning several more sessions that we'll be announcing in the coming weeks that you won't want to miss. We'll also be hosting a mixer event just for the enterprise developer community that'll take place just before the After Hours party at I/O.

Google I/O is our biggest developer event of the year, and it's also the best chance you'll get to learn about the technologies that can help you build a thriving business extending Google Apps. We hope you'll register today!

Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead

Enterprise developers: See you at Google I/O!

As you may have heard from our announcement yesterday, registration for Google I/O is now open! This year's Google I/O will focus on building the next generation of applications in the cloud, using Google products like App Engine, Google Web Toolkit, and Google APIs, with particular emphasis on Android, Chrome, and Enterprise.

Here are just a couple of Enterprise sessions that are already listed on the I/O website (many more are in the works!):

• Making freemium work for you: VC panel
• Untangling Auth

We'll be adding much more Enterprise (and Google Apps) content to the I/O website over the next couple of months. For updates on new content, follow @googleio on Twitter.

Today's registration opens with an early bird rate of $400, which applies through April 16 ($500 after April 16). Last year's I/O sold out before the start of the conference, so we encourage you to sign up in advance.

Google I/O

May 19-20, 2010

Moscone West, San Francisco

To learn more and sign up, visit code.google.com/io.

We hope to see you in May!

Posted by Joyce Sohn, Google Developer team

"Check out" Google Commerce Search at NRF's BIG Show

The holidays may still be wrapping up, but retailers around the globe are already thinking about the coming year. While final numbers for the 2009 holiday season are being tallied, early estimates suggest growth in e-commerce sales, which grew 15.5% over the 2008 holiday season – quite a contrast compared to 3.6% growth for the overall retail industry (see MasterCard Advisors Spending Pulse, reported in Wall Street Journal, December 28, 2009).

Here at Google, we're looking closely at how Google Commerce Search, our recently-launched retail-specific website search service, can help online retailers use search to improve the online shopping experience.

Next week, visit Google Enterprise at the National Retail Federation's BIG Show, held in New York, New York from January 10 – 13. If your organization plans to attend the show, be sure to visit Google in Booth #365, and in the adjacent Cyber Lounge, to learn how tools such as Google Commerce Search, the Local Business Center, and the Google Maps API can help you build a strong 2010.

Posted by Anna Bishop, Google Enterprise Search team