Google rolls out tools and tech for Veterans

Google Blog - Bringing the very best of what we do to the veteran community

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Today, on Veterans Day, I am proud to share a few Google tools and platforms for the military veteran community. They can be accessed on our website, Google for Veterans and Families, which was created by veterans and their family and friends, who work at Google. This single interface brings together Google products and platforms for servicemembers and their families. We believe it will be useful to all veterans, whether still in the service, transitioning out, or on a new path in their civilian lives. Here are some examples of what you’ll find on the site:

• VetConnect - This tool helps servicemembers connect, communicate and share their experiences with others who have served using the Google+ platform.
• Google Veterans Channel - A YouTube channel for discussion about military service for veterans, their families and the public. Veterans can share their experiences with each other as well as with civilians to help shed light on the importance and complexity of service. If you have not served, this is a great place to offer your thanks by uploading a tribute video.
• Resume Builder powered by Google Docs - We found that Docs can be a particularly helpful tool to transitioning servicemembers seeking employment. Resume Builder generates an auto-formatted resume that can be easily edited, saved and downloaded to share with potential employers.
• Tour Builder powered by Google Earth (coming soon). A new way to tell your military story. Today, you can view some sample “tours”— 3D maps of veterans’ service histories, complete with photos and videos. Stay tuned for more details and updates on the Google Lat Long Blog.

It’s been a proud month for those of us here at Google who are veterans or family of veterans.

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Finally, this week, we introduced the Veterans Job Bank in partnership with the Department of Veterans Affairs. The Veterans Job Bank is a customized job search engine in the National Resource Directory (NRD), which is powered by Google Custom Search technology and crawls the web for JobPosting markup from Schema.org to identify veteran-committed job openings.

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Google Lat Long Blog - Map your military service for Veterans Day

"Today is Veterans Day in the U.S., and we’re honoring this community by sharing relevant Google tools for veterans and families all over the world--you can learn more on the Google for Veterans and Families site. I specifically wanted to highlight a couple of these tools that enable people to map and tell their stories using Google Earth and Google Maps.

Explore veteran tours in Google Earth
For Veterans Day we’re featuring several stories created by veterans that show how Google Earth can be used to create a 3D virtual tour of their service history, complete with photos and videos. Fly back to the 1940's to hear about six siblings who served in WWII and an Army nurse who worked in post-war Japan. Then see where a Marine Lieutenant spent four years during the Vietnam War. Watching these tours requires the Google Earth plug-in, which you can download here. We hope to make this story-telling tool available to everyone soon.

Make a Custom Map of your service
Google Maps makes it easy (and fun!) to create a simple Custom Map and also share with others. With our mapping tools, veterans can map their service and then share the personalized map with their families and friends. Stories, photos and videos can be geo-located so the complete story is recorded and marked on a map.

We hope our mapping tools can be useful to the veteran community for sharing and recording life stories. For more other relevant Google products, we invite you to explore the Google for Veterans and Families site, www.googleforveterans.com.

The Tour Builder looks pretty cool...