ISEdb.COM

Earlier today, Google announced a new and easier way for webmasters to integrate many of its products such as Google News, Maps and others into their websites. The new platform, called “Web Elements”, was demonstrated today at the Google I/O conference held in San Francisco.

“Google Web Elements bring Google products to people’s web pages using copy and paste,” said technical manager for Google’s developer relations team DeWitt Clinton. “We’ve seen this for years with YouTube videos, with AdSense. But what we’ve done with this launch is do this across a broader range of products,” he said during the presentation.

While it has been possible for webmasters to embed Google Maps and countless other tools into their website for quite a long time, Web Elements is aimed at making the process of embedding Google products into third party websites significantly easier. In this way, the search giant hopes it will be able to gain even more traction and user base on the Web by “exploiting” sites managed by novice webmasters.

At the event, DeWitt Clinton illustrated how to use Web Elements within a blog, proceeding to embed a Google News feed, a map, and a live conversation widget in about the same amount of time it takes to embed a YouTube video, as opposed as before, when the process could take significantly longer and was far less intuitive.

Thanks to Web Elements, if a web publisher wants to add a feed of Google News stories in a particular subject to offer fresh content for visitors, he or she will simply have to specify the keywords or categories of interest, and the tool will take care of generating the proper code that implements that function.

Google has already implemented eight different gadgets that can be added through Web Elements — Calendar, Conversation, Custom Search, Maps, News, Presentations, Spreadsheets, and YouTube News. Among these, Conversation is notable in that it allows visitors to add comments as well as their own media content (videos, links, images and so on), similarly to what they would do through FriendFeed.

For the time being, there doesn’t appear to be any advertisement embedded in Web Elements, which means that the search engine’s primary objective at launch is to, once more, improve the awareness and user base for some of its main products such as Calendar and Maps. This doesn’t however mean that Google won’t decide to integrate advertisement into the platform later on.