Our plans for Code Jam

Posted by Bartholomew "Ruberik" Furrow, Technical Lead

What do you do if you've got a head full of good ideas, and nothing interesting to do with them? You might need a good dose of competitive programming. During a programming competition you contort your brain, trying desperately to figure out that tiny trick that will let your program run a thousand times faster, or searching for the elusive mathematical fact that will lead you to the solution. Then you tell your computer what to do, and watch it solve that torturous problem faster than you can blink. If you're like me, you eagerly participate in every coding competition that comes along.

Since 2003, we have supported the fun and intensity of competitive programming around the world by offering code jams powered by TopCoder. Contests like the ACM ICPC, the TopCoder Open and our TopCoder-powered code jams have formed a great community of contests and contestants; now we're excited to join that community in our own right, by producing a Google Code Jam of our own! There aren't too many details to share yet, but we have some big plans: there are quite a few super-competitive programmers here, and we've put them to work preparing challenges for you.

So start brushing up with a couple of practice problems -- and it's well worth checking out some old problems from the ACM ICPC and TopCoder too. We're also excited to hear what you think would make for a great Google-run programming contest, so send us your feedback -- and get ready for a challenge.

Find a needle in a feedstack with Google Reader

Posted by Ben Darnell, Google Reader Engineer

The fundamental problem with information is that there's too much of it, and this is probably why we all go to our trusted sources to learn what we really need to know. Your sources filter out the noise and present the most interesting bits to you in a useful way. For many of us, these sources include newspapers, magazines, and of course blogs. We built Google Reader as a way for you to see all of your online sources in one place.

So if you want to keep up with the chatter about the new iPods or Superbad, now you can. We've added a familiar search box to the top of Google Reader so you can search across all the blogs and sites to which you're subscribed.



See if this doesn't help with your information overload. And by the way, if you want to learn more about feed readers, here's a great explanation:

Collect, share, and discover books

Posted by Adam Mathes, Product Manager

Books often live a vibrant life offline, and through digitization Google Book Search tries to help them live an even more exciting life online through full text search. Today we're launching some new features that go beyond search so you can collect, share, and discover new books.

To start, you can create your own personal collection on Book Search, and use it to help find just the right book from your collection for any occasion. Other people can view your library, so you can share your collection as Bethany has done. Or take a look at some other interesting collections.

Digitized text is useful beyond search, too. It enables us to infer connections between books through shared passages. For example, Sir Isaac Newton once said:

I know not what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to
have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

This quote has resonated and been used in hundreds of books from the early 1800s to 2007. You can discover connections between books through quotations like this in a feature we call "Popular passages." Read more and dive into the meme pool.

We've also launched a way to let users, select, copy and embed segments of public domain books (like the Newton quote) in any web page. We hope to make it as easy to blog and quote from a book as it is from any web page. Like many innovations at Google, a stellar summer intern worked on this .

We hope these new features help you discover, collect, and share some of the great truths just waiting to be discovered (or maybe re-discovered) in the great ocean of books before us.