Kamis, 19 Februari 2009

Stick 'em up!

If you're well versed in webspeak, you're probably familiar with the concept of stickiness -- the quality that entices web users to stick around a given site. Here at AdSense, we're down with the web version of stickiness, but we've got a different kind of adhesive in mind: the kind that lets you take the AdSense logo a-go-go.

That's right, we're talking stickers.

We've printed up a batch of AdSense stickers, and we'd be delighted to send one or two your way, wherever you are in the world. The stickers are designed for laptops, but they'll work just as well for placement on mugs, skateboards, or temporarily on a shirt. (Note: turning a pal into a walking Google ad without their knowledge is not recommended.)


So how do you get one of these glue-backed masterpieces? Easy: send us a self-addressed, stamped envelope with enough postage to return 1 oz of sticker goodness to you from our office in California via standard U.S. mail. (Sorry, we can't help you calculate the postage to your location). Send your envelope, along with a note if you'd like, to:

Google AdSense
c/o Arlene Lee
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
USA

Supplies are limited, so send your envelope soon! Then you can stick with AdSense wherever you go. (And one last thing to keep in mind: while we're flattered that you might want a whole box, note that we're only able to provide one or two per publisher.)

Rabu, 18 Februari 2009

NYC transit directions have arrived
9/23/2008 07:32:00 AM
Today I'm happy to report we've taken a giant step in bringing public transit information to Google Maps. We've just added comprehensive transit info for the entire New York metro region, encompassing subway, commuter rail, bus and ferry services from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, New Jersey Transit and the City of New York. That means this information is now at the fingertips of the more than 20 million people who live in and around New York (not to mention the millions of people who visit the region every year). The MTA is the largest transportation agency in the U.S., serving one in every three users of mass transit in the country.

Transit is a vital part of the infrastructure that makes cities run efficiently, and can help mitigate congestion, environmental concerns, and increasing energy costs. But until recently, access to that information has been more difficult than it needs to be. Even very prominent train and subway stations were often omitted entirely from maps in many cases. And as for bus lines, well, forget about it! This lead us to the fundamental goal of the Google Transit project: make public transit information as easy to find as any other geographic information.

We can only achieve this goal if we work closely with transit agencies around the globe to bring accurate and comprehensive transit information to everyone. Our role in this partnership is to bring all of this information together and make it easy to search and browse in interfaces that are simple, consistent and readily available.

Thinking about the magnitude of today's launch, I can't help but think about how far we've come towards reaching our goal. It's been nearly two years to the day since I posted about the expansion of the Google Transit trip planner (we added five more cities to our initial single-city launch in Portland, Oregon). And in that post I included some statistics about how many people lived in a city covered by our product. At the time, our coverage was 6 U.S. cities. Now we cover more than 170 cities and countries across the globe, including about 70 cities in North America and 81 in China, plus cities in Europe and Australia and national coverage of Japan, Switzerland and Austria. And the number of people served annually by agencies was at about 6 million. Now it's hard to count precisely, but the number is at least at several hundred million (wow!).

I would like to personally thank everyone at the agencies for their incredible level of enthusiasm for and commitment to the best interests of their riders.

And to the riders: have fun! I hope you like the product as much as I do, and that it helps you get out and explore the world. To learn more about transit info in New York, head to maps.google.com/nyc.

Posted by Chris Harrelson, Tech Lead & Creator of Google Transit

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Labels: Geo

Book Search spreads its wings with new partnerships and tools
9/22/2008 12:09:00 PM
You probably know that you can use Google Book Search to search the full text of books -- and that, thanks to universal search, you can find many of these books doing a regular Google search as well.

Today, we're announcing a new set of partnerships and tools to bring even more books to the people who are looking for them. We've partnered with booksellers like Books-a-Million, Buy.com, and Borders.com to allow their customers to browse previews of books right on the retailer's website. We've also extended this functionality to libraries, publishers, and social book sites like GoodReads. And, to make sure we didn't miss anyone, we're releasing a powerful set of APIs, which make it easier for web developers and site owners to enable this functionality on their own sites, as well.

To read more, head on over to the Google Book Search blog.

Posted by Tom Turvey, Google Book Search Partnerships Director

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Labels: books + book search

Building a future that's clean and green
9/22/2008 10:04:00 AM
The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of. Which got us to thinking, what's going to happen in the next ten years? How will this phenomenal technology evolve, how will we adapt, and (more importantly) how will it adapt to us? We asked ten of our top experts this very question, and during September (our 10th anniversary month) we are presenting their responses. As computer scientist Alan Kay has famously observed, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, so we will be doing our best to make good on our experts' words every day. - Karen Wickre and Alan Eagle, series editors

At Grist.org they have a saying about climate change: "A frog in water doesn't feel it boil in time. Dude, we are that frog."

It isn't very Googley to stand on the sidelines – whether the challenge involves search, apps, or clean energy. So we're working to be part of the solution. Specifically, we have embraced the challenge of developing a gigawatt of renewable electricity that is cheaper than electricity from coal – in years, not decades.(We call it RE
In ten years, we envision a cleaner, greener world -- running on wind, solar, and steam - with clean cars plugged into a clean grid. But for that vision to become real, the technologies to power it will have to be economically competitive -- otherwise they won't scale. So we are focusing much of our effort on technology innovation to drive down the costs of key renewable technologies. We are fundamentally optimists -- we believe that when innovative people focus on the right problems, they can find solutions. And when renewable energy is cheaper than fossil-based alternatives, and when plug-in hybrids are as cheap as traditional cars, they will take off in the marketplace.

Our company founders, Larry and Sergey, are engineers and when they encouraged our team to tackle this issue we knew they would prefer a technological approach. This summer, we welcomed at our Mountain View headquarters the first Google engineers dedicated exclusively to exploring the development of utility-scale clean energy at a price cheaper than coal.

But we need a thousand groups of engineers focused on developing renewable energy - not just the team we're building at Google. That means we need government to set the right incentives and regulatory environment to foster clean energy innovation and R&D. Our team is also working to advance a policy agenda that stimulates clean energy projects.

We're getting the word out about tax credits, government research funding, renewable portfolio standards, and the limitations of our current transmission grid. Our philanthropic arm is doing its part too. The climate team at Google.org is working to complement the work of our engineering team with grants and investments in clean energy projects. To date, we've invested over $45 million in breakthrough technologies like solar thermal, advanced wind, and enhanced geothermal systems.

It will take the concerted efforts of many -- but dude, we don't need to be that frog.

Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar

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Labels: Google at 10, green

Now, read us in gadget form
9/21/2008 09:12:00 PM
Our corporate blog network is more than four years old now. We offer blogs about Google products and initiatives, local blogs (for 11 countries), blogs for advertisers and publishers, and a stable of blogs for developers. We hope you find the contents to be informative, timely, and, on occasion, fun.

To help you keep track of our news and updates more easily, we've created a new Blog Directory (which links from the main page on this blog) and an iGoogle gadget so you can stay current right from your dashboard. If you'd prefer to read recent posts by category, install our iGoogle blog tab (the customizable tab will load upon clicking), which will always show you the most recent blog updates by categories such as 'Open Source,' 'Mobile' or 'Publishers.' There are 16 categories, so you can pick and choose which ones to keep on your page after adding.

Software engineer Derek Collison built the gadget using the AJAX APIs. The current version is in beta; we plan to use the Language API to roll out translations for the blogs in 13 languages other than English and add new interface and navigation options. Developer Ben Lisbakken built the tab, and webmaster extraordinaire Champika Fernando built the directory with help from graphic designer Ryan Germick. A heartfelt thanks for all of their contributions in making our blog family more 'universally accessible and useful.'

Posted by Joscelin Cooper, Google Blog team

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Labels: gadgets

The democratization of data
9/21/2008 03:57:00 PM
The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of. Which got us to thinking, what's going to happen in the next ten years? How will this phenomenal technology evolve, how will we adapt, and (more importantly) how will it adapt to us? We asked ten of our top experts this very question, and during September (our 10th anniversary month) we are presenting their responses. As computer scientist Alan Kay has famously observed, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, so we will be doing our best to make good on our experts' words every day. - Karen Wickre and Alan Eagle, series editors

Information technology has enabled the "democratization of data:" information that once was available to only a select few is now available to everyone. This is particularly true for small businesses.

Fifteen years ago, only the big retailers could afford intelligent cash registers that tracked inventory and produced detailed daily reports. Nowadays cash registers are just PCs with a different user interface, and the smallest mom and pop retailer can track sales and inventory on a daily basis.

A decade ago, only the big multinational corporations could afford systems to allow for international calling, videoconferencing, and document sharing. Now startups with a handful of people can use voice over IP, video, wikis and Google Docs to share information. These technological advances have led to the rise of "micro multinationals" which can leverage creativity and talent across the globe. Even tiny companies can now have a worldwide reach.

These changes will have a profound effect on the global economy. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, "small businesses represent 99.7 percent of all firms, they create more than half of the private nonfarm gross domestic product, and they create 60 to 80 percent of the net new jobs." Information technology has already had a huge effect on the productivity of large businesses, but the benefits from "trickle down productivity" may be even more significant.

We think that Google can play a significant role in helping small businesses utilize the power of information technology. Our search technology provides answers to questions that only companies with large research libraries could answer decades ago. Our advertising programs allow small business to sell their wares to consumers around the world, as well as providing revenue opportunities for small publishers. Google Docs provides productivity tools for remote collaboration.

Google also provides data for business intelligence that only large companies were able to afford a few years ago. For example, Google Trends can help businesses track the popularity of specific queries, enabling them to identify new business opportunities. Website Optimizer allows businesses to test different versions of a website to see which one works best. Rather than waiting a month for a sales report, businesses can instantly learn of spikes in traffic to their website using Trends for Websites. All these services are available for free, allowing even the smallest businesses to make use of these tools.

Technology available to large firms has traditionally trickled down to smaller enterprises, making it relatively easy to forecast the sorts of capabilities will become available to small businesses in the future. We just have to ask: what can big companies do now that small companies can't currently afford?

* Today, only the largest companies can afford to hire consultants and experts. In the future, even small companies will be able to purchase on-demand expertise and other services via the Internet.
* Today, marketing intelligence are costly reports describing data many months or years old. In the future, small businesses will have access to real-time data on market conditions.
* Today, only the largest companies can run expensive experiments with their advertising campaigns. In the future, even small business will be able to run carefully controlled marketing experiments that will enable them to better reach their potential customers.
* Today, only large companies can sell products in many countries. Tomorrow, businesses of any size can use online services and outsourced logistics to buy and sell in every corner of the globe.

Google will be a part of this global economy, helping both large and small companies to grow their markets and manage their information. Exciting times are ahead!

Posted by Hal Varian, Chief Economist

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Labels: Google at 10

The future of mobile
9/19/2008 03:18:00 PM
The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of. Which got us to thinking, what's going to happen in the next ten years? How will this phenomenal technology evolve, how will we adapt, and (more importantly) how will it adapt to us? We asked ten of our top experts this very question, and during September (our 10th anniversary month) we are presenting their responses. As computer scientist Alan Kay has famously observed, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, so we will be doing our best to make good on our experts' words every day. - Karen Wickre and Alan Eagle, series editors

There are currently about 3.2 billion mobile subscribers in the world, and that number is expected to grow by at least a billion in the next few years. Today, mobile phones are more prevalent than cars (about 800 million registered vehicles in the world) and credit cards (only 1.4 billion of those). While it took 100 years for landline phones to spread to more than 80% of the countries in the world, their wireless descendants did it in 16. And fewer teens are wearing watches now because they use their phones to tell time instead (somewhere Chester Gould is wondering how he got it backwards). So it's safe to say that the mobile phone may be the most prolific consumer product ever invented.

However, have you ever considered just exactly how powerful these ubiquitous devices are? The phone that you have in your pocket, pack, or handbag is probably ten times more powerful than the PC you had on your desk only 8 or 9 years ago (assuming you even had a PC; most mobile users never have). It has a range of sensors that would do a martian lander proud: a clock, power sensor (how low is that battery?), thermometer (because batteries charge poorly at low temperatures), and light meter (to determine screen backlighting) on the more basic phones; a location sensor, accelerometer (detects vector and velocity of motion), and maybe even a compass on more advanced ones. And most importantly, it is by its very nature always connected.

Project out these trends another ten years. You will be carrying with you, 24x7 (a recent study of Chinese mobile customers showed that the majority of them sleep within a meter of their phones), a very powerful, always connected, sensor-rich device. And the cool thing is, so will everyone else. So what are you going to do with it that you aren't doing now? Here are some possibilities:

Smart alerts: Your phone will be smart about your situation and alert you when something needs your attention. This is already happening today -- eBay can text you when you've been outbid, and alert services (such as Google News) can deliver news, sports, or stock updates to you. In the future these applications will get smarter, patiently monitoring your personalized preferences (which will be stored in the network cloud) and delivering only the information you desire. One very useful scenario: your phone knows that you are heading downtown for dinner, and alerts you of transit conditions or the best places to park.

Augmented reality: Your phone uses its arsenal of sensors to understand your situation and provide you information that might be useful. For example, do you really want to know how much is that doggy in the window? Your phone, with its GPS and compass, knows what you are looking at, so it can tell you before you even ask. Plus, what breed it is and the best way to train him.

Crowd sourcing goes mainstream: Your phone is your omnipresent microphone to the world, a way to publish pictures, emails, texts, Twitters, and blog entries. When everyone else is doing the same, you have a world where people from every corner of the planet are covering their experiences in real-time. That massive amount of content gets archived, sorted, and re-deployed to other people in new and interesting ways. Ask the web for the most interesting sites in your vicinity, and your phone shows you reviews and pictures that people have uploaded of nearby attractions. Like what you see? It will send you directions on how to get there.

Sensors everywhere: Your phone knows a lot about the world around you. If you take that intelligence and combine it in the cloud with that of every other phone, we have an incredible snapshot of what is going on in the world right now. Weather updates can be based on not hundreds of sensors, but hundreds of millions. Traffic reports can be based not on helicopters and road sensors, but on the density, speed, and direction of the phones (and people) stuck in the traffic jams.

Tool for development: Your phone may be more than just a convenience, it may be your livelihood. Already, this is true for people in many parts of the world: in southern India, fishermen use text messaging to find the best markets for their daily catch, in South Africa, sugar farmers can receive text messages advising them on how much to irrigate their crops, and throughout sub-Saharan Africa entrepreneurs with mobile phones become phone operators, bringing communications to their villages. These innovations will only increase in the future, as mobile phones become the linchpin for greater economic development.

The future-proof device: Your phone will open up, as the Internet already has, so it will be easy for developers to create or improve applications and content. The ones that you care about get automatically installed on your phone. Let's say you have a piece of software on your phone to improve power management (and therefore battery life). Let's say a developer makes an improvement to the software. The update gets automatically installed on your phone, without you lifting a finger. Your phone actually gets better over time.

Safer software through trust and verification: Your phone will provide tools and information to empower you to decide what to download, what to see, and what to share. Trust is the most important currency in the always connected world, and your phone will help you stay in control of your information. You may choose to share nothing at all (the default mode), or just share certain things with certain people -- your circle of trusted friends and family. You'll make these decisions based on information you get from the service and software providers, and the collective ratings of the community as well. Your phone is like your trusted valet: it knows a lot about you, and won't disclose an iota of it without your OK.

Now, if we can just train it to do your laundry ...

Posted by Andy Rubin, Engineering Director

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Labels: Google at 10, mobile

Changes in Phoenix
9/19/2008 10:14:00 AM
At Google, engineering is everything - no great engineers, no life enhancing products, no happy users. So we've spent a lot of time structuring our engineering operations to make the most of the exceptional talent that's available across America - developing local centers that give engineers the autonomy and opportunity to be truly innovative. These principles have served us well as we've grown, so when the model fails, it's doubly disappointing.

We opened our Phoenix office in 2006 and hoped that it would develop to support many of our internal engineering projects, the systems that make Google, well, Google. But we've found that despite everyone's best efforts, the projects our engineers have been working on in Arizona have been, and remain, highly fragmented. So after a lot of soul searching we have decided to incorporate work on these projects into teams elsewhere at Google. We will therefore be closing our Arizona office on November 21, 2008.

We'd like to thank everyone involved in this project for their energy and enthusiasm: our engineers; the engineering community in Arizona; Arizona State University; the city of Tempe; and the greater Phoenix area. We are now working with the Phoenix Googlers to transition them to other locations, or to identify other opportunities for them at Google.

Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, Engineering & Research

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Google in one more language
9/18/2008 08:05:00 PM
As we've written before, one of our goals is to enable everyone using Google to find the information they want easily, no matter what language they speak.

It recently came to our attention that Google was not accessible to a large, influential, and notoriously quick-tempered community: Pirates. As of today we are proud and rather relieved to announce that Google Search is available in Pirate.

As you can see from this graph of the popularity of related searches from past years, we have reason to believe that this might be a timely addition:


If ye're a gentleman or lady o' fortune yerself — or just want t' talk like one — ye c'n set Pirate as yer preferred lingo usin' th' Likes an' Dislikes page, or cast yer deadlights on an example.

Posted by Cap'n Pam Greenebearde

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Labels: innovation

The intelligent cloud
9/18/2008 07:04:00 AM
The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of. Which got us to thinking, what's going to happen in the next ten years? How will this phenomenal technology evolve, how will we adapt, and (more importantly) how will it adapt to us? We asked ten of our top experts this very question, and during September (our 10th anniversary month) we are presenting their responses. As computer scientist Alan Kay has famously observed, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, so we will be doing our best to make good on our experts' words every day. - Karen Wickre and Alan Eagle, series editors

In coming years, computer processing, storage, and networking capabilities will continue up the steeply exponential curve they have followed for the past few decades. By 2019, parallel-processing computer clusters will be 50 to 100 times more powerful in most respects. Computer programs, more of them web-based, will evolve to take advantage of this newfound power, and Internet usage will also grow: more people online, doing more things, using more advanced and responsive applications. By any metric, the "cloud" of computational resources and online data and content will grow very rapidly for a long time.

As we're already seeing, people will interact with the cloud using a plethora of devices: PCs, mobile phones and PDAs, and games. But we'll also see a rush of new devices customized to particular applications, and more environmental sensors and actuators, all sending and receiving data via the cloud. The increasing number and diversity of interactions will not only direct more information to the cloud, they will also provide valuable information on how people and systems think and react.

Thus, computer systems will have greater opportunity to learn from the collective behavior of billions of humans. They will get smarter, gleaning relationships between objects, nuances, intentions, meanings, and other deep conceptual information. Today's Google search uses an early form of this approach, but in the future many more systems will be able to benefit from it.

What does this mean to Google? For starters, even better search. We could train our systems to discern not only the characters or place names in a YouTube video or a book, for example, but also to recognize the plot or the symbolism. The potential result would be a kind of conceptual search: "Find me a story with an exciting chase scene and a happy ending." As systems are allowed to learn from interactions at an individual level, they can provide results customized to an individual's situational needs: where they are located, what time of day it is, what they are doing. And translation and multi-modal systems will also be feasible, so people speaking one language can seamlessly interact with people and information in other languages.

The impact of such systems will go well beyond Google. Researchers across medical and scientific fields can access massive data sets and run analysis and pattern detection algorithms that aren't possible today. The proposed Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), for example, may generate over 15 terabytes of new data per day! Virtually any research field will benefit from systems with the ability to gather, manipulate, and learn from datasets at that scale.

Traditionally, systems that solve complicated problems and queries have been called "intelligent", but compared to earlier approaches in the field of 'artificial intelligence', the path that we foresee has important new elements. First of all, this system will operate on an enormous scale with an unprecedented computational power of millions of computers. It will be used by billions of people and learn from an aggregate of potentially trillions of meaningful interactions per day. It will be engineered iteratively, based on a feedback loop of quick changes, evaluation, and adjustments. And it will be built based on the needs of solving and improving concrete and useful tasks such as finding information, answering questions, performing spoken dialogue, translating text and speech, understanding images and videos, and other tasks as yet undefined. When combined with the creativity, knowledge, and drive inherent in people, this "intelligent cloud" will generate many surprising and significant benefits to mankind.

Posted by Alfred Spector, VP Engineering, and Franz Och, Research Scientist

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Labels: Google at 10, innovation

Shelter from the storm
9/17/2008 10:32:00 PM
Following last week's landfall of Hurricane Ike, thousands of Gulf Coast residents remain without shelter, and millions more are without electricity. As the Gulf slowly recovers from the powerful Category 2 storm, organizations such as the American Red Cross have stepped up efforts to provide relief for those most affected by the storm. For these individuals, the Red Cross has set up a number of shelters, providing food, safety, shelter, and above all, hope. Working with the Red Cross, we've mapped the open American Red Cross Shelters in the states of Texas and Louisiana. These locations, updated every ten minutes, are available to view in Google Earth, or via Google Maps:



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Google Toolbar 5 now available in Firefox
9/26/2008 12:33:00 PM
A few months ago we launched several new features for Google Toolbar in Internet Explorer. Since then, we've received many emails asking us when we plan to support all our new features in Firefox.

Guess what: Starting today, you can download the latest version of Google Toolbar for Firefox, available in 29 languages. This new version is the first Toolbar launched out of our St. Petersburg, Russia office. It includes all the Toolbar features you know and love, such as Search, Bookmarks and Translate. When you install it, you can try out some of our newest features.

We don't like to play favorites among Toolbar's features, but it's hard not be wowed by Autofill. You can create several profiles with personal or business information including different addresses, email addresses and credit card details. So anytime you want to fill an online form, just click on Autofill and the right information will appear in the form automatically. All your information is safely stored only in your own computer, with your credit card numbers encrypted and protected by a password.


We also love Google Gadgets in Toolbar. Gadgets bring information from your favorite websites closer to you. For example, you can add the YouTube gadget to your Toolbar. When you want to have a quick break from work, click on the YouTube icon and search or view videos in a box that pops down from the Toolbar, without leaving the web page you are on. Close that box when you're done with it (or when your manager starts walking towards your cube). You can find the YouTube gadget and thousands of others in our gallery.


We look forward to get your feedback, or to hear your stories about the exciting ways you are using Toolbar's features. We hope that you enjoy the new Google Toolbar as much as our team enjoyed building it!

If you're interested in learning more about Google Toolbar, visit us at http://tools.google.com/firefox/toolbar/FT5 or check out our video:



Posted by Vladislav Kaznacheev, Head, St. Petersburg Engineering Office, and Igor Bazarny, Software Engineer, Toolbar team

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Labels: search

Submitting your content to Google
9/26/2008 10:27:00 AM
We've talked a lot about our mission to organize the world's information and make it readily available to all, but we haven't spent as much time as we could helping others understand how they can participate in this endeavor. Last week we took two steps to address this: we updated the Submit Your Content site and we launched our Content Central blog. The goal of both of these resources is to inform and help the many organizations that distribute various types of content via Google Web Search, Maps, Product Search, Book Search, YouTube, iGoogle and more.

So whether you're a plumber, a map data provider, a local government, a major media company or a museum, we have a wealth of information available to help you reach your audience through Google. Comments are open on the blog -- we look forward to hearing from you.

Posted by Patrick Jabal, Director, Content Partnerships

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The next Internet
9/25/2008 04:34:00 PM
The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of. Which got us to thinking, what's going to happen in the next ten years? How will this phenomenal technology evolve, how will we adapt, and (more importantly) how will it adapt to us? We asked ten of our top experts this very question, and during September (our 10th anniversary month) we are presenting their responses. As computer scientist Alan Kay has famously observed, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, so we will be doing our best to make good on our experts' words every day. - Karen Wickre and Alan Eagle, series editors

Historically, the Internet has been all about connectivity between computers and among people. The World Wide Web opened enormous opportunities and motivations for the injection of content into the Internet, and search engines, such as Google's, provided a way for people to find the right content for their interests. Of course, the Internet continues to develop: new devices will find their way onto the net and new ways to access it will evolve.

In the next decade, around 70% of the human population will have fixed or mobile access to the Internet at increasingly high speeds, up to gigabits per second. We can reliably expect that mobile devices will become a major component of the Internet, as will appliances and sensors of all kinds. Many of the things on the Internet, whether mobile or fixed, will know where they are, both geographically and logically. As you enter a hotel room, your mobile will be told its precise location including room number. When you turn your laptop on, it will learn this information as well--either from the mobile or from the room itself. It will be normal for devices, when activated, to discover what other devices are in the neighborhood, so your mobile will discover that it has a high resolution display available in what was once called a television set. If you wish, your mobile will remember where you have been and will keep track of RFID-labeled objects such as your briefcase, car keys and glasses. "Where are my glasses?" you will ask. "You were last within RFID reach of them while in the living room," your mobile or laptop will say.

The Internet will transform the video medium as well. From its largely programmed, scheduled and streamed delivery today, video will become an interactive medium in which the choice of content and advertising will be under consumer control. Product placement will become an opportunity for viewers to click on items of interest in the field of view to learn more about them including but not limited to commercial information. Hyperlinks will associate the racing scene in Star Wars I with the chariot race in Ben Hur. Conventional videoconferencing will be augmented by remotely controlled robots with an ability to move around, focus cameras and microphones, and perhaps even directly interact with the local environment under user control.

The Internet will also become more closely integrated with other parts of our daily lives, and it will change them accordingly. Power distribution grids, for example, will become a part of the Internet's information universe. We will be able to track and manage electrical power demand and our automobiles will participate in the generation as well as the consumption of electricity. By sharing information through the Internet about energy-consuming and energy-producing devices and systems, we will be able to make them more efficient.

A box of washing machine soap will become part of a service as Internet-enabled washing machines are managed by Web-based services that can configure and activate your washing machine. Scientific measurements and experimental results will be blogged and automatically entered into common data archives to facilitate the distribution, sharing and reproduction of experimental results. One might even imagine that scientific instruments could generate their own data blogs.

These are but a few examples of the way in which the Internet will continue to surround and serve us in the future. The flexibility we have seen in the Internet is a consequence of one simple observation: the Internet is essentially a software artifact. As we have learned in the past several decades, software is an endless frontier. There is no limit to what can be programmed. If we can imagine it, there's a good chance it can be programmed. The Internet of the future will be suffused with software, information, data archives, and populated with devices, appliances, and people who are interacting with and through this rich fabric.

And Google will be there, helping to make sense of it all, helping to organize and make everything accessible and useful.

Posted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist

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Labels: Google at 10, innovation

Facts about our deal with Yahoo!
9/25/2008 02:02:00 PM
Some people have questions about our advertising agreement with Yahoo! and there are some misconceptions about it. So today we are putting facts about the deal on a new website to provide more information on the agreement and why it is good for consumers, advertisers and publishers. We'll be updating the site regularly, so check back when you have additional questions.

Posted by Karen Wickre, Google Blog Team

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Labels: ads

Adobe users get help with Google Site Search
9/24/2008 12:31:00 PM
"No man is an island," the old saying goes. The same could be said of software: in an always-online world, even traditional desktop applications can become richer, faster, and easier to use by connecting people to information and to each other, right within the apps themselves.

That's one of the things we thought about this week when we launched the Adobe Creative Suite 4, and why it seemed natural to work with Google to help customers search and find the information online they need to fully take advantage of the rich features Creative Suite offers.

Now for the first time, Creative Suite applications tap directly into the new Adobe Community Help powered by Google Site Search. Site Search enables us to selectively index only the most relevant information from the highest-quality community sites online. Our Google Site Search index includes content such as product help, TechNotes, Developer Connection articles, and Design Center tutorials, as well as the best online content from the Adobe
community.

What's the upshot? We've plugged the whole community brain trust right into the Suite and used the power of Google Site Search to do it. Creative Suite 4 customers can find fast, relevant information from our online communities, without ever having to leave their desktop work environments, making design faster and more fun. And because we've built the Adobe Flash Platform into the whole Suite, other developers can take these concepts even farther. This is just the start of great online integration to come.

Find out more about how Adobe is connecting customers to Adobe Community Help online from within Creative Suite 4.

Posted by John Nack, Senior Product Manager, Adobe

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Online safety tips from Google and AARP
9/24/2008 11:15:00 AM
Now more than ever before, older Americans are logging on and surfing the web to stay in touch with family and friends, read websites and blogs, share photos, watch videos, and run online businesses. Like all Internet users, they're sometimes faced with unsafe activity online, such as viruses and malware, and they're looking for resources to learn how to keep their information on the web safe, private, and under their control.

So we teamed up with AARP to launch a new video series that provides AARP members with helpful, easy-to-understand tips on how to stay safe online. It includes pointers on how to set privacy controls in online photo-sharing sites, configure firewalls to protect your computer, select safe and secure passwords for your online accounts, shop safely online, and avoid phishing scams. You can find the videos on AARP's online safety page, as well as on our Privacy Channel on YouTube.

Here's a look at the first video, Safe Starts:



Our team gave a sneak peek of the videos from our booth at the annual AARP member event, Life@50+, earlier this month. We received lots of great feedback from AARP members. Even the most computer-savvy members found the videos helpful, and most folks who stopped by were eager to share them with friends and family members who are just getting started online.

Check out the rest of the online safety video series. We hope the tips in these videos raise awareness among Internet users of all ages about how to stay safe online.

Update (12:06 p.m.): Nancy LeaMonde, AARP's Executive VP of Social Impact, just posted tips from the video series on AARP's blog.

Posted by Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust and Safety

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Labels: online safety, privacy

Project 10^100
9/24/2008 08:47:00 AM
If you could suggest a unique idea that would help as many people as possible, what would it be?

It's a question worth considering. Never in history have so many people had so much information, so many tools at their disposal, so many ways of making good ideas come to life. Yet at the same time so many people (in all walks of life) could use some help, in small ways and big. In the midst of this, new studies are reinforcing the timeless wisdom that beyond a basic level of material wealth, the only thing that seems to increase individual happiness is... helping other people. In other words, help helps everybody.

But what would help, and what would be most helpful? We don't believe we have the answers, but we do believe the answers are out there. Maybe in a lab, or a company, or a university -- or maybe not. Maybe the answer that helps somebody is in your head, in something you've observed, some notion that you've been fiddling with, some small connection you've noticed, some old way of doing something that you've seen with new eyes.

To mark our 10th birthday and celebrate the spirit of our users and the web, we're launching Project 10^100 (that's "ten to the hundredth") a call for ideas that could help as many people as possible, and a program to bring the best of those ideas to life. CNN will be covering this project, including profiles of ideas and the people who submit them from around the world. For a deeper look, follow along at Impact Your World.

Ideas are due by October 20, 2008. Get started submitting your own ideas, and come back on January 27th to vote on ideas from others. We hope you feel inspired enough to try. Good luck, and may the ones who help the most win.

Posted by Andy Berndt, Managing Director, Google Creative Lab

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Labels: Google at 10

This year's Faculty Summit
9/23/2008 05:37:00 PM
Recently we hosted more than 90 distinguished faculty members from roughly 60 North American universities to the Googleplex for the 4th Annual North American Faculty Summit.

This annual event is both an opportunity for us to showcase our latest research and products, and a chance to deepen our relationship with the academic community. Faculty have the chance to network with colleagues and students-turned-Googlers, and to learn about opportunities for collaboration with Google.

Some of this year's highlights:

* Roundtables - small group discussions with senior engineers
* API demos - introducing applications of our most popular APIs: Google Data, Open Social, Geo, and Android
* A technical panel I hosted, "Computing at Scale: Challenges and Opportunities" - comprised of Googlers Rob Pike and Urs Hoelzle as well as Jeanette Wing, Assistant Director for Computer & Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at the National Science Foundation, and Ed Lazowska, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington
* Visits from our CEO, Eric Schmidt, who dropped by the opening cocktail reception, plus founders Larry & Sergey, who mingled at the reception and conducted the closing Q&A

You can watch videos of the talks on our University Relations website.

Posted by Alfred Spector, VP of Research & Special Initiatives

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Wiping out the next smallpox
9/23/2008 02:49:00 PM
The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of. Which got us to thinking, what's going to happen in the next ten years? How will this phenomenal technology evolve, how will we adapt, and (more importantly) how will it adapt to us? We asked ten of our top experts this very question, and during September (our 10th anniversary month) we are presenting their responses. As computer scientist Alan Kay has famously observed, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, so we will be doing our best to make good on our experts' words every day. - Karen Wickre and Alan Eagle, series editors

It took more than a village: it took the entire world -- people of all races, countries and religions -- to eradicate smallpox. The final naturally occurring cases of "Variola major" in Bangladesh in 1978 and "Variola minor" in Somalia in 1977 marked the end to a chain of suffering and early death dating back to the Biblical plagues, and to Pharoah Ramses, who died from the very same disease. Since then we have continued to face countless pandemics -- the Black Death, cholera, and now bird flu, SARS, HIV/AIDS and a new generation of zoonotic diseases -- diseases that, often because of changes in population or climate, jump from animals to humans. We can't be sure where the next smallpox will emerge, but we can be sure that it will take an effort larger than any single person or organization to defeat it.

Today there are some real heroes working to check off two more diseases from the list. The World Health Organization has led the charge against the highly infectious disease of polio. Along with UNICEF and dozens of NGOs, and millions of national and local health workers, members of Rotary International and volunteers from moms to Mullahs have stepped up to the plate and contained polio so that hundreds, not millions, of kids are paralyzed annually, but we cannot consider the case closed until we erase the last case, in the last country. The Carter Center has also accomplished a tremendous feat by leading the effort to shrink the cases of Guinea worm to the tens of thousands from the millions. Just as it took 150,000 health workers -- the world's unsung heroes -- to make one billion house calls in India searching for hidden cases of smallpox, it will take collaboration on a global scale to track and eliminate the next pandemic.

There is no Nobel Prize for "Preventing a Pandemic," and the hardest part about working in this field is imagining the unimaginable. What will be the next SARS, the next ebola, the next H5N1 bird flu? Epidemiologists try to "out think" the massive numbers of permutations and combinations that may give rise to the newest threat to our lives. Chances are a microbe capable of sweeping the globe will emerge in the next decade or two, and chances are it will cross to humans from an animal host (as did SARS, the Spanish flu, and HIV/AIDS). We need new ways to find these emerging threats earlier in the process, before thousands are infected and the epidemic spirals out of control.

Google.org's Predict and Prevent initiative is working with partners to use digital, genomic and IT technology to identify "hot spots" of emerging threats and provide early warning before they become global crises. When you're fighting a pandemic, early detection and early response can be the difference between dozens and hundreds of millions infected. What better birthday present could we offer the world after our 20th year, than to say we joined hands with a global movement and helped prevent the next smallpox?

Posted by Dr. Larry Brilliant, Google.org

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Labels: Google at 10, google.org, healthcare

The first Android-powered phone
9/23/2008 08:20:00 AM
Today, T-Mobile announced the world's first Android-powered phone. This marks an important milestone in the young history of Android. It was less than a year ago, on November 5, that the Open Handset Alliance, a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies, announced plans to create a complete mobile platform that would facilitate the development of advanced mobile applications and give users the best the web has to offer on a mobile device.

Software developers are key to driving innovation on the web, and also for mobile. That's why, over the past year, we've released several early versions of the Software Developer Kit (SDK) and worked with developers from around the world to make it better and more complete. This has culminated in today's release of the Android 1.0 SDK R1. Through the SDK, developers have unprecedented access to the hardware and software capabilities of the device, enabling them to innovate freely. More than 1,700 applications were developed as part of the Android Developer Challenge. Google engineers have also been busy developing Android applications. Many of our products (Search, Gmail, and Maps, among others) are available on a wide range of phones such as the iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile devices, and many more. Today, they're also available on Android, and you can check out the Google Mobile blog for more details.

But there's more to the Android story. Not only does it allow all applications open access to the phone's functionality; the platform itself will also be open. The Open Handset Alliance has announced its intention to open source the entire Android platform by the end of the year. Along with the other members of the Alliance, we hope that Android can provide a meaningful contribution to all players in the mobile ecosystem: the developers, the wireless carriers, the handset manufacturers, etc. Everyone will be free to adopt and adapt the technology as they see fit. By doing so, we hope that users will get better, more capable phones with powerful web browsers and access to a rich catalogue of innovative mobile applications.

Developers will soon be able to distribute their applications to real handsets through the beta version of Android Market. Handset manufacturers and wireless carriers will be able to incorporate Android innovations into their own new handsets and service offerings. And users will get better handsets and more choice. We think it's another step towards realizing the full potential of the mobile phone.
Browse what the world is saying on Blog Search
10/01/2008 03:41:00 PM
Did you know that millions of bloggers around the world write new posts each week? If you're like me, you probably read only a tiny fraction of these in Google Reader. What's everybody else writing about? Our Blog Search team thought this was an interesting enough question to look into. What we found was a massive mix: entertaining items about celebrities, personal perspectives on political figures, cutting-edge (and sometimes unverified) news stories, and a range of niche topics often ignored by the mainstream media.

Today, we're pleased to launch a new homepage for Google Blog Search so that you too can browse and discover the most interesting stories in the blogosphere. Adapting some of the technology pioneered by Google News, we're now showing categories on the left side of the website and organizing the blog posts within those categories into clusters, which are groupings of posts about the same story or event. Grouping them in clusters lets you see the best posts on a story or get a variety of perspectives. When you look within a cluster, you'll find a collection of the most interesting and recent posts on the topic, along with a timeline graph that shows you how the story is gaining momentum in the blogosphere.

In this example, the green "64 blogs" link takes you inside the cluster and shows you all the blog posts for a story.


We've had a great time building the new homepage and we hope you enjoy using it. Please give it a try and let us know if you have comments or suggestions. We're launching in English only today, but plan to add new features and support for more languages in the coming months, so stay tuned.

Posted by Michael Cohen, Product Manager

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Labels: search

Now's the time: Register to vote
10/01/2008 01:35:00 PM
Political participation is at an all-time high this election season, and a record number of voters have already started to cast ballots -- a few even camped out in Ohio to be the first in line for early voting yesterday.

But roughly 1 in 4 Americans still aren't registered to vote, according to the most recent Census report. Now is the time -- voter registration deadlines are less than a week away in most states.

We're trying to help increase participation by making sure you have easy access to voting information. Google's Voter Info Map currently puts registration, absentee and early voting information in one place. (If you're on a phone, you can check out our mobile version at m.google.com/elections.)

We're working closely with state and local election officials, the Voting Information Project and the League of Women Voters to centralize official voting information. Stay tuned for more posts on the project and details on how you can help confirm your local polling place address.



Leonardo DiCaprio, will.i.am, Tobey Maguire, Forrest Whitaker and a few of their friends put together the first in a series of public service announcements to encourage young Americans to register to vote -- and they include a link to our Voter Info Map.



As the Internet plays a greater role in helping people participate in elections, we're excited to help out. And you can, too. Help make sure everyone is ready for election day by reminding your friends and family to register and vote.

Posted by Katie Jacobs Stanton, Google Elections Team

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Labels: politics

Clean energy 2030
10/01/2008 10:44:00 AM
Right now the U.S. has a very real opportunity to transform our economy from one running on fossil fuels to one largely based on clean energy. We are developing the technologies and know-how to accomplish this. We can build whole new industries and create millions of new jobs. We can reduce energy costs, both at the gas pump and at home. We can improve our national security. And we can put a big dent in climate change. With strong leadership we could be moving forward on an aggressive but realistic timeline and an approach that balances costs with real economic gains.

The energy team at Google has been crunching the numbers to see how we could greatly reduce fossil fuel use by 2030. Our analysis, led by Jeffery Greenblatt, suggests a potential path to weaning the U.S. off of coal and oil for electricity generation by 2030 (with some remaining use of natural gas as well as nuclear), and cutting oil use for cars by 40%. Al Gore has issued a challenge that is even more ambitious, getting us to carbon-free electricity even sooner. We hope the American public pushes our leaders to embrace it. T. Boone Pickens has weighed in with an interesting plan of his own to massively deploy wind energy, among other things. Other plans have also been developed in recent years that merit attention.

Our goal in presenting this first iteration of the Clean Energy 2030 proposal is to stimulate debate and we invite you to take a look and comment -- or offer an alternative approach if you disagree. With a new Administration and Congress -- and multiple energy-related imperatives -- this is an opportune, perhaps unprecedented, moment to move from plan to action.

Over 22 years this plan could generate billions of dollars in savings and help create millions of green jobs. Many of these high quality, good-paying jobs will be in today's coal and oil producing states.

To get there we need to move immediately on three fronts:

(1) Reduce demand by doing more with less

We should start with the low-hanging fruit by reducing energy demand through energy efficiency -- adopting technologies and practices that allow us to do more with less. At Google, we've seen the benefits of this approach. We identified $5M in building efficiency investments with a 2.5 year payback. We've also designed our own data centers to run more efficiently, and we believe they are the most efficient in the world. On a smaller scale, personal computers can also become much more efficient. A typical desktop PC wastes nearly half the power it consumes. Last year, Bill Weihl, our Green Energy Czar, worked with industry partners to create the Climate Savers Computing Initiative to raise energy efficiency standards for personal computers and servers. If we meet our goals, these standards will cut energy consumption by the equivalent of 10-20 coal-fired power plants by 2010.

Government can have a big impact on achieving greater efficiency. California's aggressive building codes, efficiency standards and utility programs have helped the state keep per-capita energy use flat for years, while consumption in much of the rest of the country has grown significantly. Enacting similar policies at the national level would help even more.

We also need to give the American people opportunities to be more efficient. The way we buy electricity today is like going to a store without seeing prices: we pick what we want, and receive an unintelligible bill at the end of the month. When homes are equipped with smart meters and real-time pricing, research shows that energy use typically drops. Google is looking at ways that we can use our information technology and our reach to help increase awareness and bring better, real-time information to consumers.

(2) Develop renewable energy that is cheaper than coal (RE
Google’s data centers draw from a U.S. electricity grid that relies on coal for 50% of its power. We want to help catalyze the development of renewable energy that is price-competitive with coal. At least three technologies show tremendous promise: wind, solar thermal, and advanced geothermal. Each of these is abundant and, when combined, could supply energy in virtually every region of the U.S.

This year Google has invested more than $45 million in startup companies with breakthrough wind, solar and geothermal technologies through our Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative (RE
We also must work both sides of the RE
(3) Electrify transportation and re-invent our electric grid

Imagine driving a car that uses no gas and is less expensive to recharge than buying a latte. A "smart grid" allows you to charge when electricity is cheap, and maybe even make some money by selling unused power back to the grid when it's needed. Plug-in cars are on their way, with GM, Toyota and other manufacturers planning introductions in the next two years. At Google we have a small fleet of Toyota Prius and Ford Escape plug-in conversions, as a part of our RechargeIT program. The converted Prius plug-ins get over 90 MPG, and the Escapes close to 50 MPG. However, to successfully put millions of plug-in cars on the road and fuel them with green electricity, we need a smart grid that manages when we charge and how we're billed. A smart grid could also provide for the two-way flow of electricity, as well as large-scale integration of intermittent solar and wind energy. Much of the technology in our current electrical grid was developed in the 60s and is wasteful and not very smart. We are partnering with GE to help accelerate the development of the smart grid and support building new transmission lines to harness our nation's vast renewable energy resources.

We see a huge opportunity for the nation to confront our energy challenges. In the process we will stimulate investment, create jobs, empower consumers and, by the way, help address climate change.

Posted by Dan Reicher, Director, Climate Change and Energy Initiatives, and Jeffery Greenblatt, Climate and Energy Technology Manager, Google.org

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Labels: google.org, green

Saving electricity one data center at a time
10/01/2008 07:03:00 AM
Hundreds of millions of users access our services through the web, and this traffic requires lots of computers. We strive to offer great Internet services while taking our energy use very seriously. That's why, nearly a decade ago, we started work to optimize the energy efficiency of our servers and later set out to build the most environmentally sustainable data centers possible. We now believe that Google-designed data centers are the most efficient in the world.

The graph below shows what we've achieved: our data centers use considerably less energy for the servers themselves, and much less energy for cooling, than a typical data center. We achieved this milestone by significantly reducing the amount of energy needed for the data center facility overhead. Specifically, Google-designed data centers use nearly five times less energy than conventional facilities to feed and cool the computers inside. Our engineers worked hard to optimize every element in the data center, from the chip to the cooling tower.

As a result, the energy used per Google search is minimal. In the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than we will use to answer your query. To learn more about our 5-step approach to efficiency, please check out our new website about efficient data centers.

Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations

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Labels: green

2001: A search odyssey
9/30/2008 03:59:00 PM
Now that we're a decade old, we figured we're long overdue for some spring cleaning. We started digging around our basement and found all kinds of junk: old Swedish fish, pigeon poop, Klingon translation books. Amazingly enough, hidden in a corner beneath Larry's and Sergey's original lab coats, we found a vintage search index in mint condition. We dusted it off and took it for a spin, gobsmacked to see how different the web was in early 2001. "iPod" did not refer to a music player, "youtube" was nonsense, and if you were looking for "Michael Phelps," chances are you meant the scientist, not the swimmer. "Wikipedia" was brand new. Remember "hanging chads"? (And speaking of that election-specific reference -- if you're a U.S. citizen, it's not too late: please register to vote.)

We had so much fun searching that we wanted to put this old index online for everyone to play with. We thought it'd be even cooler if we could actually see the full versions of the old web pages, so we worked with the Internet Archive to link to their cache of these pages from 2001. Step into the time machine and try a 2001 Google search.

For more information on this search, please read our FAQ.

Posted by Shirin Oskooi, Product Manager

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Labels: Google at 10, search

Your YouTube video: Hot or Not?
9/30/2008 12:07:00 PM
YouTube Insight has helped millions of you learn more about your YouTube videos and figure out when, where, and why your videos are popular. But what if you could learn not just which of your videos are hot on the site, but which specific parts of those videos are hotter than others? What if you could know exactly when viewers tend to leave your videos, or which scenes within a video they watch again and again?

This information is now available to all YouTube video uploaders with an innovative new feature for Insight called "Hot Spots." The Hot Spots tab in Insight plays your video alongside a graph that shows the ups-and-downs of viewership at different moments within the video. We determine "hot" and "cold" spots by comparing your video's abandonment rate at that moment to other videos on YouTube of the same length, and incorporating data about rewinds and fast-forwards. So what does that mean? Well, when the graph goes up, your video is hot: few viewers are leaving, and many are even rewinding on the control bar to see that sequence again. When the graph goes down, your content's gone cold: many viewers are moving to another part of the video or leaving the video entirely.

Here's an example of Hot Spots in action:


You can see that many viewers are not impressed with the dance moves of Michael Rucker, Associate Product Marketing Manager at YouTube; they're leaving the video at a faster than average rate almost immediately after the video begins. But the longer the video goes on, the more people tend to stay, generating a hot spot at the end of the video. Better late than never -- kudos, Rucker!

We think you'll find Hot Spots useful in several ways. For example, users can figure out which scenes in their videos are the "hottest" and edit those videos, or include well-timed annotations, to keep their audience more engaged. Partners might similarly create better content -- like more exciting promotional trailers -- for use on and off YouTube, and advertisers and agencies can study the effectiveness of their creative, to make sure they keep viewers' attention throughout an ad. Now that Insight shows what parts of videos viewers are watching and skipping, creators no longer have to play guessing games. YouTube, the world's largest focus group, provides them with answers. You can find this new feature under the "Hot Spots" tab within the Insight Dashboard.

As with all of Insight's features, we learn about the most creative examples from you. We can't wait to see what you come up with next.

Posted by Tracy Chan and Nick Jakobi, Product Managers, YouTube Team

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Labels: video

The ONE News YouTube Election Debate in New Zealand
9/30/2008 09:59:00 AM
Over the course of the long U.S. Presidential election campaign, millions of people have checked out the candidates' YouTube Channels on our You Choose '08 platform, and communicated directly with all those running for President. Thousands more submitted questions for candidates in the CNN/YouTube debates, participated in our You Choose '08 Spotlight, or made videos for the Democratic and Republican conventions. Outside the U.S., YouTube has also become an important part of leveling the political playing field. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, the 2008 New Zealand general elections were called, with Kiwis going to the polls in early November.

Now, we're thrilled to announce the ONE News YouTube Election Debate between Helen Clark and John Key, a history-making initiative with New Zealand's public broadcaster, TVNZ. This marks the first time the head of a national government and a challenger will face YouTube video questions in an official live TV debate. The debate will be broadcast live on TV ONE on October 14.



If you're a Kiwi, head on over to the YouTube New Zealand blog for details on how to submit your own questions.

Posted by Steve Grove, YouTube News & Politics

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Labels: politics, video

Ten years and counting
9/26/2008 09:00:00 PM
The Google doodle tradition started a long time ago (in summer 1999, in fact) when Larry and Sergey put a stick figure on the homepage to signify that they were out of the office at Burning Man. Nothing against stick figures, but our logo designs have become rather more varied since then. Today you'll see a special design that commemorates our 10th birthday. We've incorporated a little bit of history by using the original Google logo from 1998. And since everyone keeps asking what we'd like for our birthday (besides cake and party hats) -- the first thing we thought of was a nice new server rack.



Update: Added image.

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience, and Dennis Hwang, Webmaster

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Labels: Google at 10, googlers and culture

What would you ask Senators McCain and Obama?
9/26/2008 04:16:00 PM
Millions of Americans will be tuning in tonight for the first Presidential debate between Senator Obama and Senator McCain. Historically, the debates are led by a moderator from a prestigious news organization, asking questions to each candidate and leaving time for a rebuttal from the other. Tonight is no different, with the well-respected Jim Lehrer from PBS serving as the debate moderator.

While tonight's event will be exciting, many have argued that we should consider new ways for the candidates to debate. Technology has enabled a historic number of voters to learn from and participate in the election process -- something that was well illustrated by the CNN/YouTube debates.

While we're not officially part of the Commission of Presidential Debates, a few days ago we launched Google Moderator. It's a free tool which enables communities to submit and vote on questions for debates, presentations and events. This way, the best and most representative questions rise to the top.

One of the featured series on Google Moderator is U.S. Presidential Debates 2008 which, at the time of this writing, has 730 people already contributing 230 questions that have over 11,000 votes. Top questions submitted so far include:

* Many Americans feel it's unfair to saddle taxpayers with the bailout of irresponsible Wall Street firms. What caused this mess and what is a fair solution which benefits the average American, not the executives who got us here in the first place? - Suggested by Doug H, Los Angeles, CA

* What will be your single, top priority for your first 100 days in office? - Suggested by Shira, Pensacola, FL

* What will you do to reduce the size or increase the efficiency of the US government? - Suggested by Dave M, Philadelphia, PA

Do these questions represent your concerns? What would you ask the Presidential candidates? Who knows, maybe NBC legend Tom Brokaw will have a look at what you're asking before he moderates the next Presidential debate on October 7th in Nashville!

Posted by Katie Jacobs Stanton, Elections and Moderator teams

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Labels: politics

Our position on California's No on 8 campaign
9/26/2008 03:23:00 PM
As an Internet company, Google is an active participant in policy debates surrounding information access, technology and energy. Because our company has a great diversity of people and opinions -- Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, all religions and no religion, straight and gay -- we do not generally take a position on issues outside of our field, especially not social issues. So when Proposition 8 appeared on the California ballot, it was an unlikely question for Google to take an official company position on.

However, while there are many objections to this proposition -- further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text -- it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 -- we should not eliminate anyone's fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.
Have you ever clicked on a link only to have it unveil an unfriendly "file not found" message? We know it's a bummer, so now Webmaster Tools offers site owners a way to help all of us click seamlessly through the web.

For years webmasters have been able to view the URLs on their site that are linked from various websites but actually don't exist. Today webmasters can fix these broken links through Webmaster Tools Crawl error sources. Crawl error sources displays the source URL containing the broken link to their site -- no matter where it exists on the web.


What about any "file not found" URLs that haven't yet been fixed? Let's improve that, too: Webmaster Tools provides site owners with the "file not found" widget, (aka the 404 widget). It's a small snippet of code that can change the message from this unfriendly one:


To this helpful message (note the handy URL suggestion, search box, and link to existing sitemap and parent directory):



So, if you're a site owner, help us help you fix broken links and make your "file not found" pages more useful by signing up for Webmaster Tools. Here's to an even better experience on the web!

Posted by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

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Labels: search

Google Health feels accessible
10/14/2008 03:47:00 PM

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful.

Keeping track of personal health records using printed paper is painful at best for most users; as someone with a visual impairment, this is a show-stopper for me. As I begin paying more attention to my own health, I've come to realize first-hand how hard it is at present to track one's health using the means that traditional health care programs provide.

As luck would have it, Google Health arrived at around the same time that I started dealing with these issues, and focusing on the usability of Google Health from the perspective of someone who cannot see was therefore a no-brainer. Today, we are launching a version of Google Health that has been augmented with several usability enhancements that aid users of screen readers and self-voicing browsers. These enhancements are implemented using W3C ARIA, an emerging set of Web standards that make AJAX applications work smoothly with screen readers — see our related post on the GWT blog for details. With these enhancements, I can now easily navigate Google Health to not only manage my own health records; Google Health enables me to quickly research various relevant health conditions, track medications and do a myriad health-related tasks.

Google Health gives me a single unified web interface to manage all of my health-related information. Kudos to the Google Health and GWT teams for creating an extremely useful and usable solution!


Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

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Labels: accessibility, healthcare

Stories by Googlers
10/10/2008 03:36:00 PM
I recently had the chance to interview several long-time Googlers about the early days. To commemorate our 10th birthday, we've been revisiting our memories by digging into company lore. As fun as it has been to look back, of course we've also got our sights firmly set on what lies ahead.

Vint Cerf has some predictions about the interplanetary Internet, while Kai-Fu Lee talks about the growing ubiquity of cloud computing. Also featured are stories from early Googlers, like Craig Silverstein's memories of a certain famous garage, and Marissa Mayer's reflections on the spirit that has carried over from our formative years.

So take a few minutes to watch this blended tale of startup quirkiness and big dreams. And if you like, feel free to comment on YouTube.




Posted by Joscelin Cooper, Google Blog Team

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Labels: googlers and culture

Getting around your neighborhood with Google Maps
10/08/2008 08:02:00 AM
When I moved to the Bay Area last year, everything was new to me. I didn't know Los Altos from Los Gatos, good eateries in my neighborhood, or how to get to where I wanted to go. Whether you're moving to a new area, traveling to a new place, or simply exploring a new part of town, this may sound familiar to a lot of people.

There's a simple solution: turn to Google Maps to find local information. We've gathered a lot of useful info about local businesses so you can find everything you need in one place. You can find neighborhoods and see if they're close to downtown, parks or other places of interest. If you're moving into a new home, you can look for nearby supermarkets, hardware stores, restaurants and other places that will help you settle in. Almost every business listing includes the phone number, website, store hours, price and more. Most also have user reviews and photos.

And it turns out I wasn't the only one who turned to Google Maps to learn more about my town. Watch this video to see how Google Maps helped Ryan, a fellow newcomer to the Bay Area:



Even if you know your hometown like the back of your hand, odds are you'll want to go somewhere new at some point. Not only can you find out the address of a specific location and get directions to it before even heading out the door, but you can virtually explore the neighborhood with Street View (available in many cities in the U.S., Japan, and Australia), or check out live traffic conditions. You can also use the "Send" feature of Google Maps to text the address to your phone or email directions to friends.

Watch this video to see all the things you can do:



And don't forget, with Google Maps for mobile, you can access all of this great information on the go.

Posted by Cathy Tang, Google Maps and Earth

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Labels: search

The Presidential debate: Expanding the town hall
10/08/2008 02:18:00 AM
As we promised, here's an update on the search patterns we observed during last night's presidential debate. While a few lucky citizens were able to ask the candidates questions directly, millions of others used Google to find their answers.

Similar to last Thursday, people sought to understand the meaning of several words mentioned in the debate: morass, commodity, junket, cynicism, and cronyism to name a few. In the chart below you can see four of the most popular queries during the debate. People were quite interested in both Meg Whitman and Warren Buffett, who were mentioned as potential candidates for the Secretary of Treasury, but the biggest rising query was Senator McCain's paraphrasing of Theodore Roosevelt's motto. Both candidates spoke against genocide while discussing the role of the United States as a peacekeeper, and as we saw in the vice presidential debate, nuclear energy and weapons were prominent topics.

Queries occurred as the candidates talked, but
the query volume dropped after 90-minute debate ended.

Here's an additional view on queries for each of the candidates, charting queries from swing states (which had no more than a 5% gap between votes for George Bush and John Kerry in the 2004 election) and non-swing states. Swing states generated proportionally more queries for the candidates than non-swing states. Both candidates peaked at the end of the debate, with McCain showing a larger spike while Obama has a larger overall volume.

Queries for the presidential candidates form a higher fraction of all queries in swing states.

We also were curious how queries for Senator Biden and Governor Palin during their debate compared to queries for Senators McCain and Obama last night. As you see here, searches on the candidates during the VP debate came out on top:

Queries containing "Biden" and "Palin" had higher peaks during last week's debate
than did "McCain" and "Obama" queries last night.

Using Google Hot Trends you can see some of the more interesting things people were researching during this debate. Visit Google Election Trends to learn about longer-term election-related Google search queries, and read our previous post for the earlier VP debate queries.

Posted by Jeffrey D. Oldham, Software Engineer, and Fred Leach, Customer Labs Analyst

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Labels: politics, search

I clicked to buy and I liked it
10/07/2008 02:35:00 PM
When you view a YouTube video with a great soundtrack, you often see comments from YouTube users asking about the name of the song and where they can download it. Or when users watch the trailer for an upcoming video game, they want to know when it will be released and where they can buy it.

Today, we're taking our first steps to providing YouTube users with this kind of instant gratification, by adding "click-to-buy" links to the watch pages of thousands of YouTube partner videos. Click-to-buy links are non-obtrusive retail links, placed on the watch page beneath the video with the other community features. Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos quickly and easily, now users can click-to-buy products -- like songs and video games -- related to the content they're watching on the site. We're getting started by embedding iTunes and Amazon.com links on videos from companies like EMI Music, and providing Amazon.com product links to the newly-released video game Spore(TM) on videos from Electronic Arts.

This is just the beginning of building a broad, viable e-commerce platform for users and partners on YouTube. Our vision is to help partners across all industries -- from music, to film, to print, to TV -- offer useful and relevant products to a large, yet targeted audience, and generate additional revenue from their content on YouTube beyond the advertising we serve against their videos. And those partners who use our content identification and management system can also enable these links on user-generated content, by using Content ID to claim videos and choose to leave them up on the site.

These retail links are being gradually added to our library of music videos and are currently only available to users in the United States, but our goal is to slowly but surely expand the program to additional content and product partners, as well as our international users. We'll be experimenting with the UI over time to make sure this works for our community, and we'll continue to innovate based on your feedback. We're just getting started, so stay tuned for other innovative new features and product options soon.

YouTube partners interested in this program should contact their partner manager.

Posted by Glenn Brown, YouTube Strategic Partner Development Manager, and Thai Tran, YouTube Product Manager

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Labels: video

Knol debates: See both sides, get involved
10/07/2008 10:04:00 AM
As the election season builds to a climax, the candidates have been engaging in a number of debates. With all the excitement, we wanted to get involved, so we've started our own set of debates on our new tool Knol. The debates on Knol are meant to offer a variety of in-depth opinions from experts so you can really understand all sides of an issue.

Our first debate focuses on the economy. Economists from the Cato Institute and the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) have offered opening arguments on what should come next now that the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act is law. Take a look to see what they think -- but don't stop there. As with most articles in Knol, these are open to collaboration, so you can rate what you read, submit comments, write full responses (i.e. reviews), or even suggest edits to the author by making changes right in the knol itself. These experts are using Knol because they want to collaborate with readers, and they are committed to updating the articles based on your input.

In addition, there's a forum where you can suggest additional topics that you'd like to see debated in our new tool Google Moderator. As we prepare for the election, experts from leading think-tanks including Cato, EPI, the Heritage Foundation, and the Center for American Progress Action Fund will conduct similar debates on the issues you find the most important.

We hope these knols help inform your decision on election day, and we encourage you to voice your opinion.

Posted by Matt Ghering, Product Marketing Manager

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New Technology Roundtable series
10/06/2008 02:44:00 PM
We've just posted the first three videos in the Google Technology Roundtable Series. Each one is a discussion with senior Google researchers and technologists about one of our most significant achievements. We use a talk show format, where I lead a discussion on the technology.

While the videos are intended for a reasonably technical audience, I think they may be interesting to many as an overview of the key challenges and ideas underlying Google's systems. And of course they offer a glimpse into the people behind Google.

The first one we made is "Large-Scale Search System Infrastructure and Search Quality." I interview Google Fellows Jeff Dean and Amit Singhal on their insights in how search works at Google.

The next title is "Map Reduce," a discussion of this key technology (first, at Google, and now having a great impact across the field) for harnessing parallelism provided by very large-scale clusters computers, while mitigating the component failures that inevitably occur in such big systems. My discussion is with four of our Map Reduce expert engineers: Sanjay Ghemawat and Jeff Dean again, plus Software Engineers Jerry Zhao and Matt Austern who discuss the origin, evolution and future of Map Reduce. By the way, this type of infrastructure underlies the infrastructure concepts in our recent post on "The Intelligent Cloud."

The third video, "Applications of Human Language Technology," is a discussion of our enormous progress in large-scale automated translation of languages and speech recognition. Both of these technology domains are coming of age with capabilities that will truly impact what we expect of computers on a day-to-day basis. I discuss these technologies with human language technology experts Franz Josef Och, an expert in the automated translation of languages, and Mike Cohen, an expert in speech processing.

We hope to produce more of these, so please leave feedback at YouTube (in the comments field for each video), and we will incorporate your ideas into our future efforts.

[Cross-posted on the Google Research Blog.]

Posted by Alfred Spector, VP of Research and Special Initiatives

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Labels: innovation, search, video

The VP debate: Candidates, questions, and queries
10/06/2008 06:34:00 AM
If information is the currency of democracy, as Thomas Jefferson allegedly said, then during last Thursday's vice-presidential debate between Senator Biden and Governor Palin a lot of people used Google Search to get a bit wealthier, metaphorically speaking. Using Google Hot Trends, we can see some of the more interesting things that people were researching, and you can do the same to follow along yourself during tomorrow night's second presidential debate (9 PM ET). But first, here's what people were curious about during the VP match.

Many people were simply interested in understanding the meaning of particular terms. Governor Palin called Senator McCain a "maverick" several times, sending many viewers to Google to query definition of maverick, what is a maverick, and define:maverick.

As the debaters spoke, voters queried for more information.

When Biden mentioned that the "theocracy controls the security apparatus" in Iran, users searched for the meaning of theocracy — as they did when he spoke of the windfall profits tax.

Getting these definitions got a bit tougher when the candidates couldn't even agree on pronunciation. Discussion about a certain type of energy caused a flurry of queries: nucular vs nuclear, nuclear pronunciation, palin nucular, and even nukular. And when Senator Biden talked about the "7,000 madrasses built along [the Pakistani-Afghan] border", the queries ranged from madrass, madrases, madrasa, and even madras, a major city in India that's most definitely not on the Pakistani-Afghan border.

Governor Palin's claim that "Israel is in jeopardy of course when we're dealing with Ahmadinejad as a leader of Iran" led viewers to try to learn more about this leader even if they could not spell his name. They searched for [Achmadinijad], [Akmadinijad], [Akmadinajad], and the correct Ahmadinejad. Some did not even try, instead looking for [president Iran] and [Iran leader]. The Governor also referred to General McKiernan, the U.S. military leader in Afghanistan, as "McClellan", sending viewers in search of McClellan, general in Afghanistan, General McClellan Afghanistan, and general Afghanistan surge. Some searchers eventually did find the correct general, but not that many.

Historical references abounded. When Senator Biden claimed "This is the most important election you will ever, ever have voted in, any of you, since 1932", some people wanted to know what it was about the 1932 presidential campaign between Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt that was so special. And twice as many them wanted to know about that "shining city on a hill", a phrase from Ronald Reagan's farewell address that was originally coined in 1630 by John Winthrop.

When Senator Biden offered a civics lesson ("Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the Executive Branch") many people checked, and learned that Article I of the Constitution describes the legislative branch of the U.S. government. The executive branch is described in Article II. Others just searched directly for the role of vice president and vice president duties.

People searched on clean coal and took a look at Senator Biden's position (as the candidate asked them to) with queries like Biden clean coal.

These are some of the more interesting queries, but which were the most popular ones? Among the candidates, Senator Biden was a big winner. Searches on him soared more than 70-fold, compared to a week earlier. Governor Palin, much more of a search favorite in the weeks leading up to the debate, only saw a 6x jump, but her volume outpaced Senator Biden's.

Searches for the VP candidates peaked near the debate's end.

Beyond names, two search terms which triggered the most searches were [nuclear] (a 130x spike compared to a week earlier) and [maverick] (70x). [Register to vote] was also quite popular; we even have a special site for that.

The Commission on Presidential Debates, which hosts the debates, has stated its objective as providing "the best possible information to viewers and listeners". From Google's perspective — the little search box on viewers' and listeners' computers and mobile phones — the vice presidential debate did a pretty darn good job.

We'll give you an update on tomorrow night's debate later this week. In the meantime, keep an eye on the most recent queries yourself on Google Hot Trends; they change frequently and will start to reflect the debate's talking points soon after it finishes.

Posted by Jeffrey D. Oldham, Software Engineer; Fred Leach, Customer Labs Analyst; and Betsy Masiello, Economics Analyst

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Labels: politics, search

Amazon conservation in San Francisco
10/04/2008 06:47:00 AM
For most of us, today is another Saturday. For a chief of the Surui tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, it's a unique day, because San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has issued a proclamation declaring October 4th as "Chief Almir Surui Day."


Chief Almir and the Amazon Conservation Team will be in the Bay Area to attend the world premiere of a documentary film by Denise Zmekhol called Children of the Amazon. They'll also participate in a unique panel tomorrow, October 5th.

In June, a team of Googlers went to the Amazon to train indigenous people including Chief Almir's Surui tribe on how to use Google Earth, You Tube and other Internet tools to show the world what's at stake with deforestation in the Amazon. The tribes are using this knowledge to preserve their history, culture, and develop a long-term sustainability plan to protect their rainforest and create economic opportunity.

Filmmaker Zmekhol joined us on the trip and filmed dozens of hours of footage. Out of this footage has come a story about cloud computing from under a lush canopy of Amazon rainforest, where a group of emerging technologists are eager to share their story about their culture and their plan to preserve their forest and their way of life. (Learn more about our trip here.)



Posted by Tanya Keen, Google Earth Outreach
The time has come to announce the conclusion of the 2008 Google Treasure Hunt competition. More than 100,000 people worldwide tackled the puzzles we designed, and we received correct answers from more than 30 countries and five different continents.

Congratulations to our grand prize winner, Sophia Dichomides, whose speed and skill won her a MacBook Air. And we'd also like to extend a hearty congratulations to all of the other master treasure hunters who braved the high seas and shifting time zones to solve all four puzzles the fastest, as well as to the hundreds of winners who received Google Treasure Hunt T-shirts. Thanks to everyone who participated. Be sure to keep your spyglass on the horizon for future contests.

Grand Prize (MacBook Air winner)

* Sophia Dichomides (Australia)

First Mates (iPod Touch winners)

* Alok Ladsariya (India)
* David Bidorff (France)
* Vincent Zanotti (France)

Second Mates (iPod Nano winners)

* Alex North (Australia)
* Alicja Krajnik (Poland)
* Artur Makutunowicz (Poland)
* Benoit Boissinot (France)
* David Poblador (Spain)
* Dmitry Kim (Russia)
* Graham Dennis (Australia)
* Gregorio Guidi (Italy)
* Jared Brothers (USA)
* Jérémy Selier (France)
* Kartikaya Gupta (Canada)
* Lucas Bergman (USA)
* Manuel Freire (Spain)
* Mariano Faraco (Argentina)
* Matthew Imhoff (Australia)
* Nathan Kitchen (USA)
* Nelson Castillo (Colombia)
* Paul Cowan (Australia)
* Perry Lorier (New Zealand)
* Qiang Fu (Australia)
* Tanaeem Moosa (Bangladesh)
* Xuân Baldauf (Germany)

Posted by Phillip Grasso, Manager, Engineering/Operations

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Is your house haunted by high energy prices?
10/21/2008 09:45:00 AM
Halloween is nearly upon us; the days are getting shorter and Google is gearing up for one of our favorite holidays. But as the temperature drops, the price you pay each month to power your home might start to make your blood run cold. Fear not! We've created a handy energy saving calculator to help you see how simple steps can help you save money for treats -- and ward off scary carbon emissions. We've also put together a webpage full of tricks to help you save energy -- and money. (For inspiration for this idea, we want to thank the U.S. Department of Energy.)
It's the perfect time of year to talk about efficiency since many of the energy-wasters in our homes are named after the ghouls of Halloween. Our living rooms may be infested with "vampire" electronics that suck power even when turned off. And open chimney flues let the "ghosts" of winter steal our heat (not to mention the "monster" furnace that lives in the basement). By taking small steps to ward off these ghouls of inefficiency, you can save cold, hard cash. By one estimate, if the 80% of Americans who leave their fireplace flue open all winter all simply closed the damper, we could save over $6 billion a year. That's a lot of candy corn!

Posted by David Bercovich, Project Manager, and Dan Reicher, Director Climate Change & Energy Initiatives, Google.org

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Labels: green

A Googlicious time
10/19/2008 12:48:00 PM
For a lot of us who work here, there's one thing that defines the culture more than anything else: the food. We have a passion for every edible item offered, from the ubiquitous organic fruit to the rotisserie leg of lamb with smoked shallot marmalade, mahi-mahi with coconut milk & lime in banana leaf, or the oysters with cilantro mignonette (and yes, the meals are free). But we're also accustomed to having our amazing culinary team do the work while we try to deploy our ingenuity in front of computers (and in devising new ways to work off the extra weight).

So last week some Googlers decided to see if the creativity that they bring to their jobs could be applied to other arenas. Charlie's Patio on our Mountain View campus was the site of the first-ever Google (Free) Bake Sale. More than 30 teams used the cafe kitchens and worked with our chefs to create delectables in five categories: cookies, cupcakes, confections, dessert bars, and pies. Everyone who stopped by was given 5 marbles to vote for their favorites.

What did we discover? Most Googlers prefer a hands-on approach to their endeavors. Some put their efforts into looking the part, whether that meant dressing as the bakers or as the food, while others chose to focus on the presentation of their creation. Pastry designs ran the gamut from the elemental to the slightly fishy, from the basic to the elaborate. It can never be said that Googlers don't eat our own dogfood. At the very least, the people who attended the event left with a smile on their faces and enough ingested sugar to turn their blood to cola.

More importantly we learned that, even in a skittish economy, it's possible to find ways to keep morale high -- and nothing does it as well as chocolate. With a little creativity, some motivation, and a culture that embraces fun (and food!) as a necessary component of our work, inspiration will flow, and spirits (and blood-sugar levels) will run high. One proof point: Recession-Proof Brownies.

Posted by Ben Bayer, Master of Space and Time, Google Research

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Labels: googlers and culture

Give your gadgets some space
10/18/2008 02:17:00 PM
This week we launched a set of new features to all iGoogle users in the U.S. These features were designed to make it more powerful and bring more information to the homepage.

At the heart of this release is a feature we call "canvas view," which gives you the option to maximize your gadgets into full-screen mode. To use the Gmail gadget as an example, previously, you could only get a quick snippet of your Gmail messages on iGoogle. Now you can maximize Gmail to fully read and reply to your messages.

Comics. Games. Feeds. Photos. All of these get better when you give them some space. And to give you fast, one-click access to maximize your gadgets, we've introduced a new left-navigation model. This is a good way to navigate to these new, richer applications, and it makes space for more features you'll see in the coming months.

We invite you to take a tour of all the new features, and hope you'll give us a chance to show you why we're excited about the evolution of iGoogle.

Posted by Jessica Ewing, Group Product Manager, iGoogle

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Labels: gadgets, search

High-powered search for Arabic-speaking engineers
10/17/2008 07:44:00 AM
When I first started working at Google in 2006 I was amazed to see that the fabled 20% time really existed, and that it was up to me to decide how to use it. Being of Egyptian descent and having lived in Canada and the U.S., I became increasingly interested in Google's international work. Based on my interests and background, I helped assemble a team of Arabic-speaking engineers and we began to spend 20% of our time on developing Arabic-language products. Over time this has become a more formal effort, so I'm really happy to tell you that today we're stepping up our commitment to users in the Middle East by hiring full-time engineers familiar with the Arabic language and its engineering challenges.

The reality is that in many countries across Middle East and North Africa (MENA) there is only single-digit Internet penetration rate. On the other hand, there are over 330 million Arabic speakers worldwide, many of them hungry for the information, interactivity, and opportunities that the Internet can provide. As more Arabic speaking people come online -- the vast majority via mobile phones -- our team wants to help provide effective and useful products in their native language. For example, despite the fact that there are millions of Arabic speakers worldwide, only approximately 1% of all of the content online is in Arabic. We want to build tools to make content creation even easier for our Arabic-speaking users, encouraging them to connect, share and interact with each other, and with other users around the world.

This isn't easy. Creating an Arabic-language product is actually significantly harder than for most other languages. As mentioned in a previous post about our 40 language initiative, Arabic is written from right to left. An Arabic speaker searching for [Ramadan TV series schedule 2008] (a very popular query during Ramadan) would type [مواعيد مسلسلات رمضان 2008]. Part of the query will be written from right to left in Arabic while the numbers will be written left to right. Sometimes the right-to-left difference can mean having to change the entire layout of a page, as with Gmail.

As you can see, just delivering products in Arabic is challenging, but we also believe the differences mean that the capabilities of the products can be different. There are a large number of new, innovative features and products that need to be created to properly serve the Arabic markets, many of which have fundamental computer science challenges.

Intrigued? Google is looking for the best Arabic engineer minds to join the first dedicated team focused on tackling these engineering challenges. Our goal is to put together a top-notch Arabic engineering team. I am passionate about building an exceptional global team of engineers whose job it will be to design and develop innovative products and features that meet the needs of our Arabic speaking users. I was initially attracted to this challenge because I knew that my work at Google could easily have an impact on tens of millions of people around the world. It especially excites me that for a language that has been underserved to date, we'll be making product innovations that can have a material effect on the future of the region.

Google has been formally recognized in the UK and in the U.S. and publicized worldwide for our unique work environment. The first question I always get from people after they find out I work here is, "Is what we've heard about Google really true?" The short answer: Yes. Two of our offices have slides, and one actually has a firepole between floors. We have numerous gourmet cafes that are free. We have massage therapists available in many locations. And the list goes on. It is truly a fun and rewarding place to work. But what I think what is most exceptional about Google is that we bring our own unique culture to every country we open an office in, and blend it with the uniqueness of the local culture.

Interested in joining our effort? Well if you've heard anything about our interview process, you probably know that simply put, it's tough, but for good reason. When I interviewed two years ago I went through many intense interviews. You're expected to be well versed in areas such as coding, data structures, algorithms, designing large scale systems and, depending on the role, you might be asked leadership questions. Having a Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science definitely helped, but it was still grueling. The interview process was less about what I had memorized from the past (fact-based questions) but instead included questions that showed my ability to apply what I had learned to problem sets that I had never encountered before. I came out of the interview with a deep respect for this style because Google hires the best of the best, and it shows in the rigor of the hiring process.

Are you a great engineer familiar with Arabic speaking skills? We're looking for engineers with the regional knowledge and Arabic language expertise to make Google products more relevant to this important population and to build new products for the global market. If you're interested, please visit our job center and apply for one of the open positions. You could be a part of a team that will positively affect the lives of millions of Arabic users around the world.


Some of our engineers working on Arabic products (L to R):
Mohamed Elfeky, Adel Youssef, Amgad Zeitoun, Ahmad Hamzawi.

Posted by Ahmad Hamzawi, Engineering Manager, MENA

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Labels: googlers and culture

Search findings from the third presidential debate
10/16/2008 05:54:00 PM
Last night, Republican candidate John McCain and Democratic candidate Barack Obama met at New York's Hofstra University for the last 2008 U.S. presidential debate. CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer moderated the format of two-minute candidate answers followed by five minutes of discussion. This format gave Senators Obama and McCain more time to debate each individual issue — and gave viewers more time to search Google for information than they did for either for their previous debate or the vice presidential debate.

Searches also clustered around [abortion], a question Schieffer posed earlier. In fact, of all the search queries emerging during the debate, Roe v. Wade was the most popular. Senator McCain's state-based approach to the issue sent many searching for more information on federalism, and subsequent discussions of partial-birth and late-term abortion prompted queries too. The conversations around nominations to the Supreme Court inspired many to search for litmus test and Justice Breyer.

While the volatile global economy and high energy prices may dominate news headlines, viewers sought more information about the topic of the evening's last question: education. People dug deeper into the issue of charter schools and school vouchers; some searched explicitly for school vouchers vs. charter schools. Senator McCain raised the example of Washington, D.C., schools, prompting many to explore the issue further, searching for Michelle Rhee, who is D.C.'s Chancellor of Public Schools. Other education-related searches included No Child Left Behind, Troops to Teachers, Head Start, and Teach for America.

A figure named "Joe" has been popular throughout the campaign: first there was Democratic VP candidate Joe Biden, and then we heard about Joe Sixpack from Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin. Now there's "Joe the plumber," who figured prominently throughout last night's debate. Viewers responded in kind, searching heavily for Joe the plumber. Some even found his real name: Joe Wurzelbacher. Other names that were dropped, discussed and then searched for large numbers: Bill Ayers and Congressman John Lewis.

And finally, here's a summary of sorts: these queries show the biggest overall spikes in search activity throughout the entire 90-minute debate.


Posted by Jeffrey Oldham, Software Engineer; Fred Leach, Customer Labs Analyst; and Jennie Johnson, Communications team

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Labels: politics, search

What's new with iGoogle?
10/16/2008 10:01:00 AM
I'm an iGoogle addict. I check my news, email, stocks, feeds and weather there and sometimes even manage to squeeze in a game or two during the day. Having everything in one place is super convenient, but I often wish I could deal with all my stuff without having to leave my iGoogle page. With today's release, I can. We've rolled out an updated design for iGoogle to all U.S. users, which includes full canvas views for gadget and support for full feed reading.

Not all of our gadgets have canvas views yet, but here are some of the best:

* News - New gadgets from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post give me full-page views of what's new in the world. Nice.
* Games - The Sudoku gadget lets me play thousands of full-page Sudoku puzzles without squinting at 6-point type. The GoComics gadget gives me my fix of Garfield and Doonesbury and lets me choose from all of their other comics. I've also spent many coffee breaks browsing through videos from YouTube and CurrentTV.
* Entertainment - I've configured the TV Guide gadget to my zip code and just used it today to figure out when the newest episode of The Office is playing. Flixster's movies gadget lets me access trailers, ratings, and theater information for any movie. I also use the iLike gadget to browse news, concerts, and free MP3s from my favorite musicians.
* Google stuff - The new Gmail gadget lets me read my full email and perform simple actions like send or reply to emails without leaving iGoogle. Last but not least, a gadget that I authored and use every day is for Google Finance, which provides full-screen finance charts and news of the stocks in my portfolio.

Here's a full list of our highlighted canvas view gadgets.

We've also replaced the tabs at the top with a left navigation that allows for access to any gadget with one click. We're very excited about these changes because it makes iGoogle a more useful homepage and a better platform for developers. And this is just the beginning: Expect to see more canvas gadgets created by developers and more new features on iGoogle soon. Not in the U.S.? Don't worry. We'll also be rolling out this updated version in other countries very soon.


Posted by Matt Gundersen, iGoogle Engineer

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Remembering Jon Postel: Looking beyond the decade
10/16/2008 06:00:00 AM
A decade has passed since Jon Postel left our midst. It seems timely to look back beyond that decade and to look forward beyond a decade hence. It seems ironic that a man who took special joy in natural surroundings, who hiked the Muir Trail and spent precious time in the high Sierras was also deeply involved in that most artificial of enterprises, the Internet. As the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and the RFC editor, Jon could hardly have chosen more polar interests. Perhaps the business of the artificial world was precisely what stimulated his interest in the natural one.

As a graduate student at UCLA in the late 1960s, Jon was deeply involved in the ARPANET project, becoming the first custodian of the Request for Comment note series inaugurated by Stephen D. Crocker. He also undertook to serve as the “Numbers Czar” tracking Domain Names, Internet Addresses, and all the parameters, numeric and otherwise, that were key to the successful functioning of the burgeoning ARPANET and, later, Internet protocols. His career took him to the east and west coasts of the United States but ultimately led him to the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI) where he joined his colleagues, Danny Cohen, Joyce K. Reynolds, Daniel Lynch, Paul Mockapetris and Robert Braden, among many others, who were themselves to play important roles in the evolution of the Internet.

It was at ISI that Jon served longest and as the end of the 20th century approached, began to fashion an institutional home for the work he had so passionately and effectively carried out in support of the Internet. In consultation with many colleagues but particularly with Joseph Sims of the Jones Day law firm and Ira Magaziner, then with the Clinton administration at the White House, Jon worked to design an institution to assume the IANA responsibilities. Although the path to its creation was rocky, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was officially created in early October, 1998, just two weeks before Jon’s untimely death on October 16.

In 1998 there were an estimated 30 million computers on the Internet and an estimated 70 million users. In the ensuing decade, the user population has grown to almost 1.5 billion and the number of servers on the Internet now exceeds 500 million (not counting episodically connected laptops, personal digital assistants and other such devices). As this decade comes to a close, the Domain Name System is undergoing a major change to accommodate the use of non-Latin character sets in recognition that the world’s languages are not exclusively expressible in one script. A tidal wave of newly Internet-enabled devices as well as the increasing penetration of Internet access in the world’s population is consuming what remains of the current IPv4 address space, driving the need to adopt the much larger IPv6 address space in parallel with the older one. Over three billion mobiles are in use and roughly 15% of these are already Internet-enabled.

Jon would take considerable satisfaction knowing that the institution he worked hard to create has survived and contributed materially to the stability of the Internet. Not only has ICANN managed to meet the serious demands of Internet growth and importance in all aspects of society, but it has become a worked example of a new kind of international body that embraces and perhaps even defines a multi-stakeholder model of policy making. Governments, civil society, the private sector and the technical community are accommodated in the ICANN policy development process. By no means a perfect and frictionless process, it nonetheless has managed to take decisions and to adapt to the changing demands and new business developments rooted in the spread of the Internet around the globe.

Always a strong believer in the open and bottom-up style of the Internet, Jon would also be pleased to see that the management of the Internet address space has become regionalized and that there are now five Regional Internet Registries cooperating on global policy and serving and adapting to regional needs as they evolve. He would be equally relieved to find that the loose collaboration of DNS root zone operators has withstood the test of time and the demands of a hugely larger Internet, showing that their commitment has served the Internet community well.

As the very first individual member of the Internet Society he helped to found in 1992, Jon would certainly be pleased that it has become a key contributor to the support of the Internet protocol standards process, as intended. The Internet Architecture Board and Internet Engineering and Research Task Forces as well as the RFC editing functions all receive substantial support from the Internet Society. He might be surprised and pleased to discover that much of this support is derived from the Internet Society’s creation of the Public Interest Registry (PIR) to operate the .ORG top level domain registry. The Internet Society’s scope has increased significantly as a consequence of this stable support and it contributes to global education and training about the Internet as well as to the broad policy developments needed for effective use of this new communication infrastructure.

As a computer scientist and naturalist, Jon would also be fascinated and excited by the development of an interplanetary extension of the Internet to support manned and robotic exploration of the solar system. This very month, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory will begin testing of an interplanetary protocol using the Deep Impact spacecraft now in eccentric orbit around the sun. This project began almost exactly ten years ago and is reaching a major milestone as the first decade of the 21st century comes to an end.

It is probable that Jon would not agree with all the various choices and decisions that have been made regarding the Internet in the last ten years and it is worth remembering his philosophical view:

“Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive.”

Of course, he meant this in the context of detailed protocols but it also serves as a reminder that in a multi-stakeholder world, accommodation and understanding can go a long way towards reaching consensus or, failing that, at least toleration of choices that might not be at the top of everyone’s list.

No one, not even someone of Jon’s vision, can predict where the Internet will end up decades hence. It is certain, however, that it will evolve and that this evolution will come, in large measure, from its users. Virtually all the most interesting new applications of the Internet have come, not from the providers of various Internet-based services but from ordinary users with extraordinary ideas and the skills to try things out. That they are able to do this is a consequence of the largely open and non-discriminatory access to the Internet that has prevailed over the past decade. Maintaining this spirit of open access is the key to further development and it seems a reasonable speculation that if Jon were still with us, he would be in the forefront of the Internet community in vocal and articulate support of that view.

A ten-year toast seems in order. Here’s to Jonathan B. Postel, a man who went about his work diligently and humbly, who served all who wished to partake of the Internet and to contribute to it, and who did so asking nothing in return but the satisfaction of a job well done and a world open to new ideas.

Updates: Corrected PIR mention; added Internet Society's roundup of tributes.

Posted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist

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Information poverty
10/15/2008 02:01:00 PM
Today is Blog Action Day, an annual event that rallies blogs around the world to post about a common cause. This year's issue up for discussion is poverty, so we wanted to take a look at the relationship between access to information and social and economic development. The right information at the right time in the hands of people has enormous power. As someone who works for Google, I see evidence of this everyday as people search and find information they need to create knowledge, grow their business, or access essential services. But that applies primarily to the rich world, where economies are built on knowledge and presume access to information. What about the poor and developing countries where people are offline more than online? How do they benefit from the power of information?

In much of Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, rates of economic growth over the last decade have exceeded 5% every year. Despite this trend, poverty in many countries has remained constant. In Kenya, for example, the official poverty rate was 48% in 1981 (World Bank, June 2008). According to the Kenya Poverty and Inequality Assessment released by the World Bank this year, 17 million Kenyans or 47% of the population were unable to meet the costs of food sufficient to fulfill basic daily caloric requirements. The vast majority of these people live in rural areas and have even less access to the information that impacts their daily life. Data on water quality, education and health budgets, and agricultural prices are nearly impossible to access.

Despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent each year on providing basic public services like primary education, health, water, and sanitation to poor communities, poverty in much of Sub-Saharan Africa persists. Where does this money go, who gets it, and what are the results of the resources invested? That’s where we find a big black hole of information and a lack of basic accountability. How do inputs (dollars spent) turn into outputs (schools, clinics, and wells), and, more importantly, how do outputs translate into results (literate and healthy children, clean water, etc.)?

We simply don’t know the answers to most of these basic questions. But what if we could? What if a mother could find out how much money was budgeted for her daughter's school each year and how much of it was received? What if she and other parents could report how often teachers are absent from school or whether health clinics have the medicines they are supposed to carry? What if citizens could access and report on basic information to determine value for money as tax payers?

The work of The Social Development Network (SODNET) in Kenya is illustrative. They are developing a simple budget-tracking tool that allows citizens to track the allocation, use, and ultimate result of government funds earmarked for infrastructure projects in their districts. The tool is intended to create transparency in the use of tax revenues and answer the simple question: Are resources reaching their intended beneficiaries? Using tools like maps, they are able to overlay information that begins to tell a compelling story.

Google.org’s role, through our partners in East Africa and India, is to support, catalyze, and widely disseminate this kind of information to public, private, and civil society stakeholders that can use it to see more clearly what’s working, what’s broken and what are potential solutions. Leveraging platforms like Google Earth and Google Maps can help organizations disseminate their content widely and let people see and understand what was once invisible. Once information is visible, widely known, and easy to understand, we are betting that governments and citizens will pay more attention to leakages in the service delivery pipeline and feel empowered to propose solutions.

You can’t change what you can’t see. The power to know plus the power to act on what you know is the surest way to achieve positive social change from the bottom up. And when we consider the magnitude of resources invested in delivering public services each year, a 10% improvement globally would exceed the value of all foreign aid. We believe that is a bet worth making.

(Cross-posted from the Google.org blog)

Posted by Aleem Walji, Head of Global Development Initiatives, Google.org

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Labels: education

Quality scores and ad auctions
10/15/2008 10:35:00 AM
There's some interest in how and why "quality scores" are used in search engine ad auctions. In this post, we will try to describe "why" we use quality scores; a later post will go into "how," including more information about bids.

When a user types a query into a search engine, it will typically return both natural search results and advertisements. Google and other major search engines use an ad auction to determine which ads are shown and how much advertisers pay for them.

In the auctions, advertisers enter bids that reflect how much they are willing to pay for a click on their ad -- this is called their maximum cost per click (CPC). Ads are then ordered by the product of the bid that is entered and the estimated ad quality score. People often ask why ad quality enters the formula -- isn't the bid per click enough? Why can't advertisers just buy their way to to the top ad position? To see why both components are important, let us look at a simple example.

Suppose that two advertisers are bidding on the keyword "jet airplane." Joe's Jets is selling actual jet airplanes, while Moe's Models is selling models of jet airplanes. Since jets are expensive, Joe is willing to pay a lot per click. But not many people can afford to buy jets, so Joe won't get many clicks. Moe, by contrast, is willing to pay a lot less per click, but he will also get many more clicks.

Which ad should be listed higher in the "sponsored links" section of the search results page?

What matters in this decision is not simply an advertiser's value for a single click -– the maximum CPC that the advertiser is willing to pay -- but rather the total estimated value of showing that ad: the value per click times the number of clicks that the ad is likely to receive.

The number of clicks that the ad is likely to receive depends on the historical clickthrough rate, which is an important component of the ad quality score. Thus the bid per click times the quality score gives us an estimate of the total value of displaying an ad over time. Joe's ad may have a higher value for a single click, but if Moe's ad gets a lot more clicks over time, it could easily have a greater total value. In that case, Moe's ad will be shown in the more prominent position. (Click on the image to view larger.)

The quality score gives search engines a way of aligning the incentives of the buyers, the sellers, and the viewers of ads. The search engine wants to sell ad impressions, but advertisers want to pay for clicks. The solution is for advertisers to bid on a cost-per-click basis, while the search engine estimates the total value of the ad over time: bid per click times the expected number of clicks.

This is a neat way to align incentives, but it has a problem: since the advertiser only pays on a per click basis, it may as well seek as many ad impressions as it can so that as many users as possible will be exposed to the ad. Joe might well want to buy the keywords "rocket ship" even if he only has jets to sell. Why not? Joe only has to pay if someone actually clicks on the ad.

This is where another distinct, but related quality issue arises: an ad that gets very few clicks shouldn't really be shown. It is just distracting from the viewpoint of users. The advertisers may not care much about annoying users but the search engine certainly does. Why? Because if it shows a lot of irrelevant ads, people will likely stop looking at or clicking on ads. They may develop a terrible affliction known in the trade as "ads blindness." Better ad relevance leads to a better user experience.

So search engines often apply a "disabling rule" that inhibits ads with very low clickthrough rates for a given query from being shown. Or they might set a relatively high minimum cost per click for ads that don't attract much interest from users as a way to discourage advertisers from showing ads that annoy users and deliver few clicks. A high cost per click can easily be consistent with a low cost per impression when clickthrough rates are low.

So why are quality scores important? Answer: they lead to a better auction by allowing advertisers to buy clicks, publishers to sell impressions, and users to see relevant ads.