Google updates apps and blog search

Internet search giant Google has added new features to its online documents and blogging services.

In some good news for businesses, features added to Google documents now allow businesses to add company logos to documents and utilise specific presentation styles and templates.

Valerie Blechar, software engineer on the Google Apps team, wrote on the company’s blog that these templates can be saved and shared privately over a network of users, and can be used for documents, presentations spreadsheets and forms.

“Since we launched the public template gallery last year for Google Docs, people who use Google Apps have been asking if they could have their own template galleries to share templates (everything from branded presentation designs to document letterhead to spreadsheet templates) with their co-workers.”

“Today, we’ve enabled these template galleries for Google Apps Premier and Education Edition customers.”

Additionally, companies using the Google Blog search tool, which allows users to read several ‘feeds’ from blogs without subscribing to specific sites, can now enjoy some new features.

Instead of using the Google Blog feed reader, the company now offers the ability for users to embed information into the iGoogle homepage.

“You can browse topics and drill into stories from within the widget, and you can customise the gadget to choose which topics you want to follow,” wrote Google software engineer Akshay Patil on the official blog.

“There’s a lot of great, fresh content being published in blogs every day. We hope these new features help you discover more of it, faster,” said Patil.

Jim Stewart, head of SEO firm Stewart Media, says the new changes are an attempt by Google to take another step towards cloud computing.

“For businesses or an organisation that has remote offices or remote workers, these changes to Google templates and documents allow standardisation across the business from wherever they are. If I want to put a logo on a document or use a template, then I don’t have to download anything on to my machine.”

“It just makes things easier, and it’s just another step in the direction of the cloud computing environment without needing a massive file server or anything like that.”