Cool Tool for News Use

Posted by Hicham Alaoui, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Our friends at the Toolbar team recently launched Google Toolbar 5 for Internet Explorer out of beta in 40 languages. To celebrate this occasion and Toolbar's upcoming eighth birthday, we upgraded our Google News Toolbar gadget: You'll now find tabs with different Google News sections embedded directly into the toolbar, so you can read the news as soon as it breaks, browse top news headlines and images, all without having to leave the site you're on:

You can click through the different categories to see the top stories in the U.S., World, Entertainment, and Sci-Tech domains. When you find something you want to read, you can click on an article to open it in a new tab, or click "all news articles" to open the Google News page containing all related items on that particular topic.

To learn more about the different features on this new release of toolbar, visit toolbar.google.com/features.

Election results in real-time

Posted by Robert Leland, Software Engineer

Today, Americans all across the country are voting, and the results will soon be tallied. We'll make sure you can stay abreast of the election returns on the same Google News pages that already bring you current election news. We'll be providing results from the presidential, Senate, House, and gubernatorial races as they are reported by the Associated Press.

On the front page of Google News, you'll find a Google Map gadget showing real-time popular and electoral vote counts. On the Elections section page, you can see more detailed results. At the top of the right column we have summaries of the presidential race, and the races for majority control in the Senate and House. Beneath the summaries you can select a state in the pull-down menu. For each state we display the breakdown in votes for the presidency, governor (where there is a race), and for each Senate and House seat that's being contested. You can also follow the presidential election, and see a summary of the popular and electoral votes by visiting news.google.com on your iPhone or Android-powered mobile phone.

For more Google election tools, be sure to check out our 2008 Elections page. It features some useful Google Maps, including one which can give you the location of your polling place. So keep up with the results as they're reported, from wherever you are -- and be sure to add your vote to the tally!