More and more companies are storing data in the cloud, and as this data grows, so does the need for reporting tools to make sense of this information. To address these growing needs, earlier this year we introduced the Google Visualization API, a powerful API that enables anyone to build apps on top of Google Spreadsheets. Companies can create and use reporting applications from the Google Visualization Gadget Gallery that can be integrated anywhere on the web, displaying data from a Google Spreadsheet. Today, we are expanding the capabilities of the Google Visualization API by enabling developers to display data from any data source connected to the web (any database, Excel spreadsheet, etc.), not just from Google Spreadsheets. From pivot tables and heat graphs to motion charts and timelines, the Google Visualization Gallery holds a growing set of 40+ visualizations that appeal to a multitude of businesses.

We're also pleased to announce that Salesforce.com has made available some tools to make the Google Visualization API even easier to use. These tools enable their customers to build sophisticated reporting and analysis applications using the API that works with data inside Salesforce.com's CRM. The Visualization API also enables developers to create custom reporting applications to sell to Salesforce customers or to other companies with data in the cloud. Earlier today at the Dreamforce conference, Adam Gross, Vice President, Developer Marketing, Salesforce.com, commented that "The enhancement of the Google Visualization API represents a significant opportunity for developers. We expect to see the creation of new tools for our users to quickly generate reports and dashboards for their Salesforce CRM data and in their Force.com applications. These enhanced analysis capabilities will provide our customers with greater productivity and deeper insight into their businesses."

As companies open their platforms, we expect to see increased integration of data and services across clouds, benefiting the enterprise community.




Posted by Nir Bar-Lev, Senior Product Manager, and Yossi Matias, Director of Tel Aviv Engineering Center

Permalink Links to this post

Labels: developers

What are you going to be for Halloween?
10/31/2008 03:45:00 PM
In 2006 it was a pirate. Halloween party-goers donned eye patches, tricornes, and the Jolly Roger, inspired by favorite seafarer Captain Jack Sparrow. And last year the search was on for a lot of blond wigs and microphones à la teen pop idol Hannah Montana.

Halloween being one of our favorite holidays, we couldn't wait to see what the hot getups of 2008 would be. Using Insight for Search we tracked the fastest rising searches related to Halloween costumes for this year's ghoulish festivities.

Here are some of the "costume"-related queries (in the U.S.) that have seen the most growth for 2008 — don't be surprised when you run into some of these outfits roaming the streets on All Hallows' Eve.


If you're like me, you found your inspiration in the past 24 hours. However, it looks like others are more serious — according to this Google Trends graph, searches for costumes have been increasing since July.


Around Google, we've been planning our outfits for months as well. Not even rain could stop us from showing off our fiendish finery at this year's Googleween in Mountain View. And have a scary-happy Googleween yourself!



Posted by Jordan Newman, Google Blog Team

Permalink Links to this post

Labels: googlers and culture

Feed me! Google Alerts not just for email anymore
10/31/2008 01:15:00 PM
This week, our Trondheim-based Google Alerts team launched support for feeds, a highly requested feature you can use to receive alerts via the feed reader of your choice. (Of course, we think the best places to view your updates are iGoogle and Google Reader.) Until now, alerts have been delivered via email only, but those days are over. Now your News, Web, Blog, Video, and Groups alerts are more easily accessible than ever.

Once you sign in to Google Alerts and create an alert, you can opt for feed delivery by clicking 'Edit' next to your alert on the 'Manage Your Alerts' page and changing your 'Deliver to' selection from 'Email' to 'Feed' (click on the image to see larger).



Two other notable improvements to Google Alerts are that we've made them faster (especially News alerts) and are now including — where possible — images in News alerts. It's a busy time in Trondheim these days, so stay tuned for more changes to Google Alerts in the coming months.

Have feedback or a feature request? Send your thoughts our way.

Posted by Jaime Forman-Lau, Online Operations

Permalink Links to this post

A picture of a thousand words?
10/30/2008 02:33:00 PM
(Note: Click on the first result in each of the search results pages linked to throughout the post to see this feature in action.)

A scanner is a wonderful tool. Every day, people all over the world post scanned documents online -- everything from official government reports to obscure academic papers. These files usually contain images of text, rather than the text themselves.But all of these documents have one thing in common: someone somewhere thought they were they were valuable enough to share with the world.

In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn't be sure of their content. We had occasional clues from references to the document-- so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes. We are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that we find stored in Adobe's PDF format. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words -- words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found. This is a small but important step forward in our mission of making all the world's information accessible and useful.

While we've indexed documents saved as PDFs for some time now, scanned documents are a lot more difficult for a computer to read. Scanning is the reverse of printing. Printing turns digital words into text on paper, while scanning makes a digital picture of the physical paper (and text) so you can store and view it on a computer. The scanned picture of the text is not quite the same as the original digital words, however -- it is a picture of the printed words. Often you can see telltale signs: the ring of a coffee cup, ink smudges, or even fold creases in the pages.

To people reading these documents, the distinction between words and pictures of words makes little difference, but for a computer the picture is almost unintelligible. Consider a circle. Should it be read it as a zero, the letter 'O', just a circle, or the ring from my coffee cup? People learn to answer this kind of question very quickly, but for the computer it is a painstaking and error-prone process.

To see our new system at work, click on these search queries. Note the document excerpt in the search results, along with the full text presented after the 'View as HTML' link:

[repairing aluminum wiring]
[spin lock performance]
[Mumps and Severe Neutropenia]
[Steady success in a volatile world]

Posted by Evin Levey, Product Manager

Permalink Links to this post

Labels: search

What we learned from 1 million businesses in the cloud
10/30/2008 11:42:00 AM
The reliability of cloud computing has been a hot topic recently, partly because glitches in the cloud don't happen behind closed doors as with traditional on-premises solutions for businesses. Instead, when a small number of cloud computing users have problems, it makes headlines. As with most things at Google, we are fanatical about measuring the availability of Gmail, and we thought it best to simply share our reliability metrics, which we measure as average uptime per user based on server-side error rates. We think this reliability metric lets you do a true side-by-side comparison with other solutions.

We measure every server request for every user, every moment of every day. Any millisecond delay is logged. Over the last year, Gmail has been available more than 99.9 percent of the time — for everyone, both consumers and business users. The vast majority of people using Gmail have seen few issues, experienced no downtime, and have continued to have a great Gmail experience, with exception of an outage in August 2008. If you average all these data together, including the August outage, across the entire Gmail service, there has been an aggregate 10-15 minutes of downtime per month over the last year of providing the service. That 10-15 minutes per month average represents small delays of a couple of seconds here and there. A very small number of people have unfortunately been subject to some disruption of service that affected them for a few minutes or a few hours. For those users, we are very sorry. And for Google Apps Premier Edition customers, we have extended service level agreement credits to them.

So how does greater than 99.9 percent reliability compare to more conventional approaches for business email? We asked some experts. Naturally, the normal caveats apply for on-premises solutions, since each individual business environment will vary, depending on server reliability, staff response time, and actual maintenance schedules for each application.

According to the research firm Radicati Group, companies with on-premises email solutions averaged from 30 to 60 minutes of unscheduled downtime and an additional 36 to 90 minutes of planned downtime per month.1

Looking just at the unplanned outages that catch IT staffs by surprise, these results suggest Gmail is twice as reliable as a Novell GroupWise solution, and four times more reliable than a Microsoft Exchange-based solution that companies must maintain themselves. And higher reliability translates to higher employee productivity. Gmail's reliability jumps to more than four times as reliable as a GroupWise solution and 10 times more reliable than an Exchange-based solution if you factor in the planned outages inherent in on-premises messaging platforms. But this isn't the only way Google Apps helps businesses do more with their resources. Compared to the costs of Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus or Novell GroupWise — including software licensing, server expenses and the labor associated with deploying, maintaining and upgrading them on a regular basis — Google Apps leaves companies with much more time and money to focus on their real business.

We are now extending what we've learned from Gmail to the other applications in Google Apps.

Today, we're announcing that we will extend the 99.9 percent service level agreement we offer Premier Edition customers on Gmail to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. We have been delivering high levels of reliability across all these products, so it makes sense to extend our guarantees to them.

More than 1 million businesses have selected Google Apps to run their business, and tens of millions of people use Gmail every day. With this type of adoption, a disruption of any size — even a minor one affecting fewer than 0.003% of Google Apps Premier Edition users, like the one a few weeks ago — attracts a disproportional amount of attention. We've made a series of commitments to improve our communications with customers during any outages, and we have an unwavering commitment to make all issues visible and transparent through our open user groups.

Google is one of the 1 million businesses that run on Google Apps, and any service interruption affects our users and our business; our engineers are also some of our most demanding customers. We understand the importance of delivering on the cloud's promise of greater security, reliability and capability at lower cost. We are hugely thankful to our customers who drive us to become better every day.

1. The Radicati Group, 2008. "Corporate IT Survey – Messaging & Collaboration, 2008-2009"

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Product Management Director, Google Enterprise

Permalink Links to this post

Labels: apps, enterprise

The latest on Google Apps for Education
10/30/2008 08:46:00 AM
It was exactly two years ago at the EDUCAUSE conference that we first announced our free Google Apps offering for educational institutions. We've kept pretty busy in that time, working closely with thousands of schools to reach 2.5 million students, staff, and faculty actively using Google Apps on campuses across the globe. As part of this mission, we also recently drove our eco-friendly bus (think bio-fuel and solar panels) to universities across the country to hear directly from people using Google Apps. Here's what some of them had to say:



One thing hasn't changed in the last two years: Google Apps still offers academic institutions, from neighborhood schools to international universities, free integrated solutions for email, calendaring, and online document and site sharing. We're glad to be back at EDUCAUSE this week in Orlando to reminisce about how far technology in education has come since 2006, and to look forward toward even more possibilities for innovation.

If you're involved in education, check out Google Apps to see if it can help make your school a more effective learning community. And if you're a student, visit the newly launched Google for Students Blog to find Google-related information relevant to you.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Permalink Links to this post

Labels: apps, education

Voting tools for volunteers on the go
10/29/2008 09:03:00 PM
(Cross-posted from the Google Mobile Blog)

With the U.S. elections less than a week away, voting drives are ramping up. Political parties and non-partisan groups alike are sending out volunteers to encourage citizens to vote on November 4. To make sure these volunteers have the same voter info tools available to them on their phone as on their computer, we've now launched a mobile voting locator tool on m.google.com/elections. (Click here to send this to your phone.)


Now, volunteers can type in the home address of any registered voter and find his or her voting location, whether they're in an office making phone calls, working from a booth set up outdoors, or going door to door. While on the go, they can use Google Maps for mobile to find their next address or display directions to voting locations.


Of course, between talking to potential voters, volunteers can check out the Elections section in Google News for mobile for the latest updates (go here on your phone), or just search for a nearby coffee shop to stay warm.

Posted by Steve Kanefsky and Jerry Morrison, Google Mobile engineers

Permalink Links to this post

Labels: mobile, politics

Video your vote on Election Day
10/29/2008 02:24:00 PM
If you've been paying even passing attention to the 2008 election, you know that without a doubt this is the most documented election in history. On YouTube, average citizens have posted millions of videos chronicling their experiences and opinions about the 2008 election. Never before has the campaign trail been sliced, diced, clipped, mashed-up, and exposed in so many ways — and never before have voters been the ones in control of the content.

The YouTube team is shining a spotlight on election documentation with the Video Your Vote program. In partnership with PBS, we're asking you to submit videos of your voting experiences to the Video Your Vote channel. The idea is simple: we want this to be the most transparent election day in history, so that the world can see — through the eyes of voters — just how the election transpired.

This is important because not only will there be more people voting in this election than ever before, but there undoubtedly will be bumps along the way: long lines, broken machines, confusion over the registration process, and even voter intimidation and fraud are all unfortunate election realities. Video can help document where problems occur in a more compelling and concrete way than other media. By documenting your voting experience, you can help make this a more transparent election.

On the Video Your Vote channel, PBS's program The News Hour with Jim Lehrer is providing educational information about voting in America, with a particular nod to election reform issues. You can also learn what the laws of your state say (or don't say) about bringing a video camera to the polls (in most states, it's okay to document your own experience respectfully). Learn more in this call-out video that correspondent Judy Woodruff made (it's on the YouTube homepage):



With hundreds of thousands of voters casting their ballots before Election Day, we're already seeing videos coming in. From excitement from first-time voters to videos of long lines at the polling places or touch-screen problems in the field, voters are already documenting their experiences. Join them to video your vote!

Posted by Steve Grove, YouTube News & Politics Team

Permalink Links to this post

Labels: politics

Eight candles for Google Toolbar
10/29/2008 09:00:00 AM
Google recently celebrated its 10th birthday. As we participated in the festivities, we realized that we are coming upon another birthday: In just a few weeks, our very own Google Toolbar will be turning 8 years old. To celebrate, we wanted to take a few moments to reflect on its evolution over the past few years and how we've tried to make the web a better place for the hundreds of millions of people who use Toolbar.

Back in 1999, the Internet was a very different place. At that time, you had to fight annoying pop-up ads that would randomly appear as you navigated from one page to another. You had to fill in endless forms with your personal information in order to create accounts for websites you wanted to use. And when you wanted to find information on your airline's luggage policy, you spent more time finding the right search terms to get you there than actually packing for your trip. The Toolbar team was formed to develop tools to make your web experience better, so we created features like pop-up blocker and AutoFill. We also built a dynamic search box that automatically guesses what you're typing and offers search suggestions in real time (click on the image to see larger).


Over the years, we've been proud to see several of the features we've pioneered integrated into web browsers as well as other websites. We're encouraged by this progress, but this doesn't mean that our mission is complete. We're still working hard to make the time you spend on the web more enjoyable and productive. On that note, we'd like to announce our latest release of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, now launching out of beta and available in 40 languages.

Here are just a few things you can do with this latest version:
- Add gadgets to your Toolbar to bring content from your favorite websites closer to you
- Synchronize your settings online to access your Toolbar from wherever you are
- Create multiple profiles in AutoFill to keep your business and personal information separate

To learn more about the different features, visit us at toolbar.google.com/features. We'd also love to hear your feature ideas and other Toolbar feedback, so send us a quick note with your thoughts.

Posted by Albert Bodenhamer and Jenny Zhang, Software Engineers, Google Toolbar

Permalink Links to this post

New steps to protect free expression and privacy around the world
10/28/2008 09:30:00 AM
In a world where governments all too often censor what their citizens can see and do on the Internet, Google has from the start promoted global free expression and taken the lead in being transparent with our users. We've pressed governments around the world to stop limiting free speech and made it possible for dissidents, bloggers and others to have their voices heard.

As part of those ongoing efforts to promote free expression and protect our users' privacy, today we're announcing Google's participation as a founding company member of a new program called the Global Network Initiative.

This initiative is the result of two years of discussions with other leading technology companies, human rights organizations, socially responsible investors and academic institutions. Thanks to hard work and cooperation from all parties, the Initiative sets the kinds of standards and practices that all companies and groups should use when governments threaten internationally recognized rights to free expression and privacy.

The Global Network Initiative also offers an important commitment from all parties to take action together to promote free expression and protect privacy in the use of all information and communication technologies. We know that common action by these diverse groups is more likely to bring about change in government policies than the efforts of any one company or group acting alone.

Companies that join the Initiative commit to putting into effect procedures that will protect their users by:

* Evaluating against international standards government requests to censor content or access user information
* Providing greater transparency
* Assessing human rights risks when entering new markets or introducing new products
* Instituting employee training and oversight programs


These are things that Google does now, but joining the Initiative will help us refine our methods and maintain our leadership position. Down the road companies will be assessed on how they're doing in implementing the principles and the Initiative will report those results.

This Initiative is by no means a silver bullet or the last word, but it does represent a concrete step toward promoting freedom of expression and protecting users' privacy in the 60th anniversary year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Now we're actively recruiting more companies and groups to join the Initiative and advance these critical human rights