A new tool has been launched by Google with the aim of helping website owners and bloggers to integrate the search engine's products with their sites.

Google Web Elements lets users pull content from the likes of Google Maps, News and YouTube for use on their own blogs and websites.

It also offers a social commenting function from Google's Friend Connect service.

Website owners copy and paste several lines of code to integrate Google products into their pages and can opt to customise the content they embed if they so wish.

The news was announced at Google's 2009 I/O developer conference this week, at which the search engine also revealed that developers can now take advantage of the general availability of Java language support in its App Engine.

Vic Gundotra of Google said of the web's potential: "Its rate of innovation has dramatically accelerated over the past 12 months, giving rise to an open web platform that's fundamentally more capable and more sophisticated than even a year ago."

Google has updated its core web search offering with several new features in the last few weeks, including improvements for Google Suggest and the launch of new filters allowing users to search for web pages based on time of publication and other factors.