From Micro Persuasion

Google just released a new set of widgets that make it easy to integrate their in-line AJAX search tools into your Web site. Among the notable applications are instructions and a demo for TypePad blogs and another for Blogger weblogs. You can also roll these onto an intranet or your Google Personalized Home Page as well. More info here.

Meanwhile, Google also made it a snap to add hundreds of home page gadgets to your social network page, blog or Web site.

UPDATED : From TechCrunch

Here’s an overview of some of the most recent offerings in the spirit of the mashup that the company has made available.

Google Gadgets Set Free

Formerly trapped largely in Google Desktop, more than 1200 Google Gadgets (widgets) were set free today for embedding in any web page. Site publishers can now make it even easier for their visitors to get driving directions, view Picasa photo albums or play hang-man. (Ok, how about a multi-video player widget, live sports scores or a police and fire map from Incidentlog.com.) Widgets are going to be everywhere next year, as they help non-technical site publishers pull in rich, dynamic data from all around the web and place it on one page. There should be even more interesting Gadgets on the way; the Google Gadgets Awards for Students contest ends November 1st and is being judged by people like Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame and Commander Taco from Slashdot.

Multi-site Search

The forthcoming issue of Time Magazine includes an interview with Google’s Marrissa Meyer, who says the company is building a multi-site search tool. It may look like Rollyo, the Yahoo! Search Builder or Windows Live Search Macros. That would be very useful and I hope it comes out soon.

SearchMash

Google launched a new site this week with hardly a word of Google branding, called SearchMash.com. It looks like one place to put lots of user interface experiments in one site. It’s basically the Google web and image search results displayed in a different way, including drag and drop reordering (hardly as useful yet as the Live.com search scratchpad), an Ajax “infinite scroll” that lets users stay on one page to view a long list of results and a right click drop down menu for options to display a URL. The best part of this is the option to request a new search for your search term inside the domain of the page you click on. That way once you find a site that discusses something once, you can easily view all the instances of that term being used everywhere in the site. Image search results are also displayed on the right side of SearchMash pages.

Ajax Search API 1.0

Google’s Ajax Search API version 1.0 was released today. The API makes it easy for site publishers to put a nice looking Ajax search box for video, news and maps embedded in their own pages or build applications on top of the API. See this page for an example of the video search, click on any of the still frames to see the feature in action.

Today’s release supports news search, restricting those searches to a list of news sources, local map search now including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, and the ability to access the API from behind intranet firewalls. Google is also now experimenting with putting sponsored links in the Ajax API search results. They aren’t charging advertisers for those clicks, but it is a sign that the strategy is under serious consideration.