Google Blogs Mashup

The fight against scam ads—by the numbers

A Googler — Fri, 25 May 2012 09:00:00 +0000

This is the second in a series of posts that will provide greater transparency about how we make our ads safer by detecting and removing scam ads. -Ed.

Last month, I shared an overview of the technology Google has built to prevent bad ads from showing on Google and our partner sites, including our efforts to review accounts, sites and ads. To illustrate the scale of this challenge, today I’d like to provide some metrics that give greater insight into the scale of the problem we’re combating.

Bad ads have a disproportionately negative effect on our users; even a single bad ad slipping through our defenses is one too many. That’s why we’re constantly working to improve our systems and utilize new techniques to prevent bad ads from appearing on Google and our partner sites. In fact, billions of ads are submitted every year for a wide variety of products. We have a set of ads policies that cover a huge array of areas in more than 40 different languages. For example, because we aim to show safe, truthful and accurate ads to our users, we don’t allow ads for misleading claims, ad spam or malware.

Ads that are in violation of our ads policies aren’t allowed to be shown on Google and our AdSense partner sites. For many repeat offenders, we ban not just ads but also advertisers who seek to abuse our advertising system to take advantage of people. In the case of ads that are promoting counterfeit goods, we typically ban the advertiser after only one violation. Here are some metrics that give some insight into the scale of the impact we have had over time, showing the numbers of actions we’ve taken against advertiser accounts, sites and ads. You can see that the numbers are growing—and growing faster over time.

Year	Advertiser Accounts Suspended for Terms of Service and Advertising Policies	Sites Rejected for Site Policy	Ads Disapproved
2011	824K	610K	134M
2010	248K	398K	56.7M
2009	68.5K	305K	42.5M
2008	18.1K	167K	25.3M

We find that there are relatively few malicious players, who make multiple attempts to bypass our defenses to defraud users. As we get better and faster at catching these advertisers, they redouble their efforts and create more accounts at an even faster rate.

Even in this ever-escalating arms race, our efforts are working. One method we use to test the success of our efforts is to ask human raters to tell us how we’re doing. These human raters review a set of sites that are advertised on Google. We use a large set of sites in order to get an accurate statistical reading of our efforts. We also weight the sites in our statistical sample based on the number of times a particular site was displayed so that if a particular site is shown more often, it’s more likely to be in our sample set. By using human raters, we can calibrate our automated systems and ensure that we’re improving our efforts over time. In 2011, we reduced the percentage of bad ads by more than 50 percent compared with 2010. That means the proportion of bad ads that are showing on Google was halved in just a year.

Google’s long-term success is based on people trusting our products. We want to make sure that the ads on Google are safe and trustworthy, and we’re not satisfied until we do.

Posted by David W. Baker, Director of Engineering, Advertising

Transparency for copyright removals in search

A Googler — Thu, 24 May 2012 12:07:00 +0000

We believe that openness is crucial for the future of the Internet. When something gets in the way of the free flow of information, we believe there should be transparency around what that block might be.

So two years ago we launched the Transparency Report, showing when and what information is accessible on Google services around the world. We started off by sharing data about the government requests we receive to remove content from our services or for information about our users. Then we began showing traffic patterns to our services, highlighting when they’ve been disrupted.

Today we’re expanding the Transparency Report with a new section on copyright. Specifically, we’re disclosing the number of requests we get from copyright owners (and the organizations that represent them) to remove Google Search results because they allegedly link to infringing content. We’re starting with search because we remove more results in response to copyright removal notices than for any other reason. So we’re providing information about who sends us copyright removal notices, how often, on behalf of which copyright owners and for which websites. As policymakers and Internet users around the world consider the pros and cons of different proposals to address the problem of online copyright infringement, we hope this data will contribute to the discussion.

For this launch we’re disclosing data dating from July 2011, and moving forward we plan on updating the numbers each day. As you can see from the report, the number of requests has been increasing rapidly. These days it’s not unusual for us to receive more than 250,000 requests each week, which is more than what copyright owners asked us to remove in all of 2009. In the past month alone, we received about 1.2 million requests made on behalf of more than 1,000 copyright owners to remove search results. These requests targeted some 24,000 different websites.

Fighting online piracy is very important, and we don’t want our search results to direct people to materials that violate copyright laws. So we’ve always responded to copyright removal requests that meet the standards set out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). At the same time, we want to be transparent about the process so that users and researchers alike understand what kinds of materials have been removed from our search results and why. To promote that transparency, we have long shared copies of copyright removal requests with Chilling Effects, a nonprofit organization that collects these notices from Internet users and companies. We also include a notice in our search results when items have been removed in response to copyright removal requests.

We believe that the time-tested “notice-and-takedown” process for copyright strikes the right balance between the needs of copyright owners, the interests of users, and our efforts to provide a useful Google Search experience. Google continues to put substantial resources into improving and streamlining this process. We already mentioned that we’re processing more copyright removal requests for Search than ever before. And we’re also processing these requests faster than ever before; last week our average turnaround time was less than 11 hours.

At the same time, we try to catch erroneous or abusive removal requests. For example, we recently rejected two requests from an organization representing a major entertainment company, asking us to remove a search result that linked to a major newspaper’s review of a TV show. The requests mistakenly claimed copyright violations of the show, even though there was no infringing content. We’ve also seen baseless copyright removal requests being used for anticompetitive purposes, or to remove content unfavorable to a particular person or company from our search results. We try to catch these ourselves, but we also notify webmasters in our Webmaster Tools when pages on their website have been targeted by a copyright removal request, so that they can submit a counter-notice if they believe the removal request was inaccurate.

Transparency is a crucial element to making this system work well. We look forward to making more improvements to our Transparency Report—offering copyright owners, Internet users, policymakers and website owners the data they need to see and understand how removal requests from both governments and private parties affect our results in Search.

Posted by Fred von Lohmann, Senior Copyright Counsel

Google+ for Android: polish and performance

A Googler — Thu, 24 May 2012 06:24:00 +0000

We continue to work toward a simpler, more beautiful Google, and today we're accelerating these efforts with a new Google+ app for Android phones. The update includes lots of highly-requested features—like the ability to start a hangout on the go, and to edit posts inline—as well as a stream that celebrates the rich content shared across Google+. In all cases we're building for a mobile future, and we're excited about what's ahead.

Start a hangout from anywhere, and ring the folks that matter most
With Hangouts we want to help people connect face-to-face-to-face—at any time, from anywhere. Of course, there's really only one device that's always by your side—your phone—so we've invested in mobile hangouts since early on. Today we're adding another important feature to the mix: the ability to start a hangout directly from your mobile device.

To get started, tap “Hangout” in the (new) navigation ribbon, add some friends and tap “Start.” We'll ring their phones (if you want), and if someone misses the hangout, they can ring you back with a single tap.

Share your favorites, and feel awesome afterward
When you share with your circles, we owe you an experience that's both intimate and immersive. Your time and your relationships are precious, after all, so your posts should make you feel proud. Today's new Android app takes this to heart, with full-screen media in the stream, conversations that fade into view and instantly-touchable actions like +1.

Do more, in less time
We think you’ll find today’s app nicer to look at, but we’re also making it easier to use. Improvements include:

A navigation ribbon that slides in and out, providing quick access to just about everything
The ability to download photos directly from Google+, and turn them into wallpaper
The chance to edit posts inline, in case you make any mistakes while on the go

The update is available now from Google Play (version 2.6), so we invite you to download Google+, and let us know what you think!

Selected screenshots from today’s new Android app

Posted by Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice President

How Google+ has helped Cadbury connect with over 1.2 million people

Katie Wasilenko — Wed, 23 May 2012 13:46:00 +0000

Cadbury has become the European brand with the largest number of followers on Google+, currently at 1.2 million. Their Google+ success is having a strong impact on their overall marketing strategy, especially by improving the performance of their Search campaigns. The question is how exactly did they do this?

Their first step was to create a Google+ page. As featured in a previous blog post, Cadbury used hangouts to interact in real time with Olympic athletes and chocolate experts, and to participate in creating the chocolate replica Google+ page. By promoting their hangouts, Cadbury grew their Google+ follower base by 150,000 people.

They also used circles to segment their followers according to their chocolate preferences and unveiled a brand-new product launch, the Dairy Milk Bubbly Bar, which has achieved a strong impact, already sales are over £8M.

However, where they are seeing tremendous results is in their search campaigns. Since they started using social extensions, which links Cadbury’s Google+ page to its AdWords campaigns, they have achieved a 17% uplift in CTR across all their AdWords campaigns. Now when you search for “Cadbury” and see the relevant ad, recommendations from your friends are displayed directly with it, making the ad much more relevant to you. By clicking on the social extension, you directly land on Cadbury’s Google+ page and can start following all the great content they are posting.

And since Cadbury installed the Google+ badge on its homepage, it’s now easier than ever for fans to follow the brand; Cadbury gains 10,000 new followers on average per day and have had an increase of 7.5% of traffic from Google URLs. To continue benefiting from their Google+ success, Cadbury are looking to include a Google+ social stream that will pull in their most recent updates into a re-launch of their homepage, which will be happening soon. Stay tuned to learn how Cadbury continue to innovate to make their Google+ experience a success!

Learn more about Cadbury’s success with Google+ by reading the full case study here.

Posted by Natalia Cano, Product Marketing Manager Google+ For Businesses

A faster, simpler Google Search app for iPhone

A Googler — Wed, 23 May 2012 08:49:00 +0000

Starting today, when you use the Google Search app on your iPhone, you’ll see a completely redesigned interface that gives you faster results, beautiful full-screen image search, and a simple way to access all your Google apps in one place.

Search by voice, by typing, or with your camera

Get results, fast
When you’re on the go, you usually want to get things done quickly. Autocompletion of search suggestions is significantly faster in this latest version of the app, bringing you search predictions instantly with each letter you type. You’ll also notice that results load faster, and checking out webpages is easy with the slide-in panel. Quickly swipe back and forth between webpages and your search results, and swap between search modes like Images and Places with a swipeable menu. Finding text within a webpage is a snap as well; just try tapping the magnifying glass on the bottom menu option on any page.


Easily switch between search modes using the swipeable menu at the bottom	Swipe the slide-in panel to instantly return to your search results

Beautiful Image Search
Searching for images will never again be a chore. Tap the images button at the bottom of the search results page, and watch high-resolution images load into a beautiful grid. Browse the images by scrolling down the full-screen grid, or tap on a single image to get details about it and then quickly swipe from image to image. You can also tap and hold an image to save it to your camera roll to use as your wallpaper or share with a friend.

Full-screen image results take advantage of every inch of the screen

Swipe or tap on the edges to move between images

Sutro Tower image by Marc Liyanage

Simple access
We’ve put all of your favorite Google services in one place for easy access. You can choose to browse Google web apps, or see just the apps that you have on your phone. Sign in once, and you’ll never need to sign in again to check a quick email, view your next calendar appointment or see what’s hot on Google+.

All your Google mobile apps in one place

Download the Google Search app now for a fast, beautiful, simple search experience on your iPhone.

Posted by Noah Levin, Interaction Designer, Google Search app

Software downloads in Syria

A Googler — Wed, 23 May 2012 06:00:00 +0000

Free expression is a fundamental human right and a core value of our company—but sometimes there are limits to where we can make our products and services available. U.S. export controls and sanctions programs, for example, prohibit us from offering certain software downloads in some countries.

The fine details of these restrictions evolve over time, and we’re always exploring how we can better offer tools for people to access and share information. For example, last year we were able to make some of our products available for download in Iran. And today we’re pleased to make Google Earth, Picasa and Chrome available for download in Syria.

As a U.S. company, we remain committed to full compliance with U.S. export controls and sanctions. We remain equally committed to continue exploring how we can help more people around the globe use technology to communicate, find and create information.

Posted by Neil Martin, Export Compliance Programs Manager

A tribute to Bob Moog, sonic doodler

A Googler — Tue, 22 May 2012 21:00:00 +0000

In the mid-1960s, Dr. Robert Moog unleashed a new universe of sounds into musicdom with his invention of the electronic analog Moog Synthesizer. The timbre and tones of these keyboard instruments (true works of art in and of themselves) would come to define a generation of music, featuring heavily in songs by The Beatles, The Doors, Stevie Wonder, Kraftwerk and many others.

When people hear the word “synthesizer” they often think “synthetic”—fake, manufactured, unnatural. In contrast, Bob Moog’s synthesizers produce beautiful, organic and rich sounds that are, nearly 50 years later, regarded by many professional musicians as the epitome of an electronic instrument. “Synthesizer,” it turns out, refers to the synthesis embedded in Moog’s instruments: a network of electronic components working together to create a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

With his passion for high-tech toolmaking in the service of creativity, Bob Moog is something of a patron saint of the nerdy arts and a hero to many of us here. So for the next 24 hours on our homepage, you’ll find an interactive, playable logo inspired by the instruments with which Moog brought musical performance into the electronic age. You can use your mouse or computer keyboard to control the mini-synthesizer’s keys and knobs to make nearly limitless sounds. Keeping with the theme of 1960s music technology, we’ve patched the keyboard into a 4-track tape recorder so you can record, play back and share songs via short links or Google+.

Much like the musical machines Bob Moog created, this doodle was synthesized from a number of smaller components to form a unique instrument. When experienced with Google Chrome, sound is generated natively using the Web Audio API—a doodle first (for other browsers the Flash plugin is used). This doodle also takes advantage of JavaScript, Closure libraries, CSS3 and tools like Google Web Fonts, the Google+ API, the Google URL Shortener and App Engine.

Special thanks to engineers Reinaldo Aguiar and Rui Lopes and doodle team lead Ryan Germick for their work, as well as the Bob Moog Foundation and Moog Music for their blessing. Now give those knobs a spin and compose a tune that would make Dr. Moog smile!

Posted by Joey Hurst, Software Engineer

A world of opportunity at the G(irls)20 Summit

A Googler — Tue, 22 May 2012 12:00:00 +0000

We’re pleased to have Farah Mohamed join us today to talk about her organization, the G(irls)20 Summit, of which Google is a proud sponsor. The mission of the G(irls)20 Summit is to showcase how girls and women can impact a country’s economic prosperity, political stability and social innovation. - Ed.

Research shows that investing in girls and women can help the global economy. Consider the following examples:

According to Plan UK, an extra year of education increases a girl’s income by 10 to 20% and is a significant step on the road to breaking the cycle of poverty.
In Kenya, adolescent pregnancies cost the economy $500 million per year, while investing in girls could potentially add $32 billion to the economy (NIKE Foundation, 2009, Girl Effect).
If men and women had equal influence in decision-making , an additional 1.7 million children would be adequately nourished in sub-Saharan Africa (International Labour Organization, 2009).

These are significant estimates, and they highlight a real opportunity for global economic growth. That’s why the G(irls)20 Summit is working with Google and many other corporate and foundation partners to empower girls and women.

Launched in 2010 at the Clinton Global Initiative, the G(irls)20 Summit precedes the G20 Leaders Summit, and brings together one girl aged 18 to 20 from each G20 country plus the African Union. The delegates attend workshops and participate in panel discussions to come up with tangible, scalable solutions for how to engage and empower girls and women around the world. Then, at the end of the summit, they lead a press conference and present a set of recommendations for the G20 leaders to consider.

This year, the Summit will take place in Mexico City from May 28-31. But the impact of the Summit will be ongoing, thanks in part to the power of the Internet and social media. Take past Summit participants July Lee of the U.S. and Noma Sibayoni of South Africa, who launched Write With A Smile to encourage teens to continue with their education. Or Riana Shah of India who co-founded Independent Thought & Social Action (ITSA India), an education reform organization that aims to empower socially responsible youth leaders. And the African Union’s Lilian Kithiri continues to persevere creating awareness around reproductive health to communities living in the rural areas of Kenya.

There are a few ways you can experience the Summit:

Join us in Mexico City on May 28
Sign up for your number in support of girls and women
Join the conversation via our live stream on www.girls20summit.com on May 28, 29 and 31

Whether you’re a girl, boy, woman or man, we all have a role to play in empowering girls and women. As UN Under Secretary-General Michelle Bachelet once said, “gender equality and women’s empowerment are goals in their own right and central to all other goals—must be more than a mantra. It must become a lived reality for women and men and boys and girls in all countries.”

Posted by Farah Mohamed, President & CEO, G(irls)20 Summit

Notifying users affected by the DNSChanger malware

Jay — Tue, 22 May 2012 12:00:00 +0000

Posted by Damian Menscher, Security Engineer

Starting today we’re undertaking an effort to notify roughly half a million people whose computers or home routers are infected with a well-publicized form of malware known as DNSChanger. After successfully alerting a million users last summer to a different type of malware, we’ve replicated this method and have started showing warnings via a special message that will appear at the top of the Google search results page for users with affected devices.

The Domain Name System (DNS) translates familiar web address names like google.com into a numerical address that computers use to send traffic to the right place. The DNSChanger malware modifies DNS settings to use malicious servers that point users to fake sites and other harmful locations. DNSChanger attempts to modify the settings on home routers as well, meaning other computers and mobile devices may also be affected.

Since the FBI and Estonian law enforcement arrested a group of people and transferred control of the rogue DNS servers to the Internet Systems Consortium in November 2011, various ISPs and other groups have attempted to alert victims. However, many of these campaigns have had limited success because they could not target the affected users, or did not appear in the user’s preferred language (only half the affected users speak English as their primary language). At the current disinfection rate hundreds of thousands of devices will still be infected when the court order expires on July 9th and the replacement DNS servers are shut down. At that time, any remaining infected machines may experience slowdowns or completely lose Internet access.

Our goal with this notification is to raise awareness of DNSChanger among affected users. We believe directly messaging affected users on a trusted site and in their preferred language will produce the best possible results. While we expect to notify over 500,000 users within a week, we realize we won’t reach every affected user. Some ISPs have been taking their own actions, a few of which will prevent our warning from being displayed on affected devices. We also can’t guarantee that our recommendations will always clean infected devices completely, so some users may need to seek additional help. These conditions aside, if more devices are cleaned and steps are taken to better secure the machines against further abuse, the notification effort will be well worth it.

Make smarter decisions with the new Auction insights report

Andy — Tue, 22 May 2012 07:21:00 +0000

A key component of developing a search ads strategy is understanding what other advertisers are doing, and using this intelligence to optimize campaigns for top performance. To empower advertisers to make better informed optimization decisions, we’re launching the Auction insights report.

We currently provide Impression share columns within campaign and ad group reports that show the percentage of impressions received, compared to the estimated number of impressions for which they were eligible. While this report gives valuable insight into missed opportunities in aggregate, it also raises additional questions -- who competes in the same auctions, and can performance data be made available at a more detailed level?

With the Auction insights report, you can compare your performance with other advertisers who compete in the same set of auctions as you do. You can see how often your ads rank higher than other advertisers’ ads on the search results page, and how often your ads appear compared to theirs based on your estimated possible impressions. This information can help you make strategic decisions about bids, budgets, and keyword choices by showing you where you are succeeding and where you may be missing opportunities for improved performance.

The Auction insights report provides data at the keyword-level, and provides five different statistics: impression share, average position, overlap rate, position above rate, and top of page percent:

Note: Mock data only.

Reports can be generated for one keyword at a time, and data is only available for keywords that meet a minimum threshold of activity for the time period specified. If you see this icon () to the left of a keyword in your statistics table on the Keyword tab, you’ll know that the Auction insights report is available for that keyword.

Note: This report provides information on other advertisers that participated in the same auctions as you. This does not indicate that the other advertisers have the same keywords, match types, or other targeting settings as you. The other advertisers’ metrics shown are based only on instances when your ads were also estimated to be eligible to appear. These reports will not reveal the actual keywords, quality, or settings from your campaign, and it will not give you insight into the same information for others.

While this information is already available by performing queries on Google search -- and many already attempt to estimate this data by scanning the ads that appear -- this report will make it easier to access and understand this information. It is available at no additional cost to advertisers whose keywords have a minimum threshold of activity.

This report will be rolling out over the next few days. For more information on the Auction insights report, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Bhanu Narasimhan, Group Product Manager, AdWords

We’ve acquired Motorola Mobility

A Googler — Tue, 22 May 2012 05:53:00 +0000

The phones in our pockets have become supercomputers that are changing the way we live. It’s now possible to do things we used to think were magic, or only possible on Star Trek—like get directions right from where we are standing; watch a video on YouTube; or take a picture and share the moment instantly with friends.

It’s why I’m excited to announce today that our Motorola Mobility deal has closed. Motorola is a great American tech company that has driven the mobile revolution, with a track record of over 80 years of innovation, including the creation of the first cell phone. We all remember Motorola’s StarTAC, which at the time seemed tiny and showed the real potential of these devices. And as a company who made a big, early bet on Android, Motorola has become an incredibly valuable partner to Google.

Sanjay Jha, who was responsible for building the company and placing that big bet on Android, has stepped down as CEO. I would like to thank him for his efforts and am tremendously pleased that he will be working to ensure a smooth transition as long-time Googler Dennis Woodside takes over as CEO of Motorola Mobility.

I’ve known Dennis for nearly a decade, and he’s been phenomenal at building teams and delivering on some of Google’s biggest bets. One of his first jobs at Google was to put on his backpack and build our businesses across the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe and Russia. More recently he helped increase our revenue in the U.S. from $10.8 billion to $17.5 billion in under three years as President of the Americas region. Dennis has always been a committed partner to our customers and I know he will be an outstanding leader of Motorola. As an Ironman triathlete, he’s got plenty of energy for the journey ahead—and he’s already off to great start with some very strong new hires for the Motorola team.

It’s a well known fact that people tend to overestimate the impact technology will have in the short term, but underestimate its significance in the longer term. Many users coming online today may never use a desktop machine, and the impact of that transition will be profound—as will the ability to just tap and pay with your phone. That’s why it’s a great time to be in the mobile business, and why I’m confident Dennis and the team at Motorola will be creating the next generation of mobile devices that will improve lives for years to come.

Posted by Larry Page, CEO

Mark your calendars for DoubleClick Insights on June 5th

Inside AdWords crew — Mon, 21 May 2012 16:42:00 +0000

(Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Publisher Blog)

From our vantage point, we see unprecedented opportunity as the digital media world continues to grow and diversify. What does this mean for the future of buying and selling ads online?

Tune in and watch Google's Neal Mohan, VP of Display Advertising, sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital ecosystem's swift evolution, and how advertisers and publishers can work better together to chart a path to capitalize on every opportunity, while simultaneously addressing the challenges we face.

The live stream will start on June 5th, 2012, at 9:00am PST, and you’ll be able to watch from your computer, tablet, or mobile device.

Please register for this virtual event by visiting the DoubleClick Insights Live Stream page.

DoubleClick Insights
Tuesday, June 5th 2012
9:00am - 1:00pm PST
Set event reminder today

Following us on Twitter? Use the #dclkinsights as you're watching the event.

Posted by Stephen Kliff and Scott Brown, DoubleClick Marketing

Announcing the 90 regional finalists of the Google Science Fair 2012

A Googler — Mon, 21 May 2012 06:27:00 +0000

Congratulations to the regional finalists of the second Google Science Fair! These top 90 entries from around the world represent some incredibly innovative and groundbreaking science.

This year’s competition was even more international and diverse than last year. We had thousands of entries from more than 100 countries, and topics ranging from improving recycling using LEGO robots to treating cancer with a substance created by bees to tackling meth abuse. Our judges were impressed by the quality of the projects, and it was no easy task to evaluate the creativity, scientific merit and global relevance of each submission to narrow down the entries to just 90 finalists.

Thirteen of our 90 finalists have also been nominated for the Scientific American Science in Action award, the winner of which will be announced on June 6 along with our 15 finalists. These top 15 and the Science in Action winner will be flown out to Google’s headquarters in California in July for our celebratory finalist event and for the last round of judging, which will be conducted by our panel of renowned scientists and innovators.

Thanks to all of the students around the world who submitted projects to the Google Science Fair and congratulations to all the young scientists who were selected as regional finalists.

Posted by Sam Peter, Google Science Fair Team

Happy Birthday DoubleClick Search V3

Allison Sommer — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:42:00 +0000

DoubleClick Search V3 is one year old! Over the last year we've focused on:

Campaign Management
Deeper Insights
Bid Optimization
Better Results

To learn more about a year of DoubleClick innovation, visit the DoubleClick Search blog.

Posted by Allison Sommer, Inside AdWords crew

A look inside our 2011 diversity report

A Googler — Fri, 18 May 2012 11:13:00 +0000

We work hard to ensure that our commitment to diversity is built into everything we do—from hiring our employees and building our company culture to running our business and developing our products, tools and services. To recap our diversity efforts in 2011, a year in which we partnered with and donated $19 million to more than 150 organizations working on advancing diversity, we created the 2011 Global Diversity & Talent Inclusion Report. Below are some highlights.

In the U.S., fewer and fewer students are graduating with computer science degrees each year, and enrollment rates are even lower for women and underrepresented groups. It’s important to grow a diverse talent pool and help develop the technologists of tomorrow who will be integral to the success of the technology industry. Here are a few of the things we did last year aimed at this goal in the U.S. and around the world:

We held our third annual HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) Faculty Summit at Google New York, hosting 50 professors and administrators from 16 HBCUs, who came together to collaborate, share insights and engage with Googlers.
We helped 100,000 students and faculty at 22 HBCUs in the U.S. “go Google;” they now use Google Apps for Education.
To date, 3,000 students in 77 countries have received Google scholarships and we also expanded our scholarship programs for women in technology.
We piloted the Top Black Talent U.K. program to help the U.K.’s top black engineering and business students transition into the tech industry. We also partnered with the African Caribbean Society to offer 100 students workshops and mentoring with Googlers from engineering, sales and marketing.

We not only promoted diversity and inclusion outside of Google, but within Google as well.

We had more than 10,000 members participate in one of our 18 Global Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). Membership and reach expanded as Women@Google held the first ever Women’s Summit in both Mountain View, Calif. and Japan; the Black Googler Network (BGN) made their fourth visit to New Orleans, La., contributing 360 volunteer hours in just two days; and the Google Veterans Network partnered with GoogleServe, resulting in 250 Googlers working on nine Veteran-related projects from San Francisco to London.
Googlers in more than 50 offices participated in the Sum of Google, a celebration about diversity and inclusion, in their respective offices around the globe.
We sponsored 464 events in 70 countries to celebrate the anniversary of International Women's Day. Google.org collaborated with Women for Women International to launch the “Join me on the Bridge” campaign. Represented in 20 languages, the campaign invited people to celebrate by joining each other on bridges around the world—either physically or virtually—to show their support.

Since our early days, it’s been important to make our tools and services accessible and useful to a global array of businesses and user communities. Last year:

We introduced ChromeVox, a screen reader for Google Chrome, which helps people with vision impairment navigate websites. It's easy to learn and free to install as a Chrome Extension.
We grew Accelerate with Google to make Google’s tools, information and services more accessible and useful to underrepresented communities and diverse business partners.
On Veterans Day in the U.S., we launched a new platform for military veterans and their families. The Google for Veterans and Families website helps veterans and their families stay connected through products like Google+, YouTube and Google Earth.

We invite you to take a look back with us at our 2011 diversity and inclusion highlights. We’re proud of the work we’ve done so far, but also recognize that there’s much more to do to. These advances may not happen at Internet speed, but through our collective commitment and involvement, we can be a catalyst for change.

Posted by Yolanda Mangolini, Director, Global Diversity & Inclusion/Talent & Outreach Programs

Announcement: Custom alerts will sunset on June 30, 2012

Katie Wasilenko — Thu, 17 May 2012 11:06:00 +0000

When we first created custom alerts, we wanted to provide advertisers with a way to be notified when certain behaviors or changes occurred in their AdWords account. Over time, we observed that most advertisers wanted to take action when such triggers occurred within their accounts. Many of these actions can now be done by creating automated rules - a tool within AdWords that enables you to schedule automatic changes to specific parts of your account based on the criteria that you specify.

Based on automated rules adoption, we have decided to sunset custom alerts. Starting June 15, we will disable creation of new alerts and by the end of June, we will stop triggering existing alerts. This means that on June 30, you will not see custom alerts in your AdWords account. If you selected email as your notification method, this means you will no longer receive alert emails.

We are actively working to bring you an email-only option in automated rules so you can be notified when a rule requirements are met without taking any action. In the meantime, check out some of the common ways you can use automated rules to save you time in managing your account.

Posted by Prashant Baheti, AdWords Product Manager

Announcing the next series of Learn with Google webinars!

Inside AdWords crew — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year, we introduced the Learn with Google webinar program, and we were delighted to see thousands of you show up to learn about a variety of Google advertising products and solutions. Today, we’re happy to announce the continuation of our series with 10 new webinars over the next few months. During each webinar we’ll share tips and how-to’s to help make the web work for your business.

Check out our upcoming live webinars below:

May 23 at 10am PDT: Getting Started with Google Analytics
May 24 at 9am PDT: Building Blocks of Digital Attribution
May 31 at 10am PDT: Introduction to TrueView for YouTube
June 5 at 10am PDT: GoMo: Mobilize your Site with Quick and Easy New Tools
June 6 at 10am PDT: Our Mobile Planet: Understanding U.S. Smartphone Consumers
June 7 at 10am PDT: Introducing Mobile Apps Inventory in AdWords
June 12 at 10am PDT: Get Local with ZIP Code Targeting to Increase Sales/Leads
June 14 at 10am PDT: Search Optimization: Tips, Tricks, and Tools
June 19 at 10am PDT: Bringing the Power and Control of Search to Display
July 10 at 10am PDT: Account Management Tools for Large Advertisers and Agencies

Visit our webinar page to register for any of the sessions and to access past webinars on-demand. We’ll be adding new webinars as they’re scheduled, so check back regularly for updates. You can also stay up-to-date on the schedule by downloading our Learn with Google Webinar calendar to automatically see upcoming webinars in your Google Calendar.

Whether your goal is to engage the right customers in the moments that matter, make better decisions, or go bigger, faster, we hope that you’ll use these best practices and how-to’s to maximize the impact of digital and grow your business. We’re looking forward to having you at an upcoming Learn with Google webinar!

Posted by Erin Green, Marketing Coordinator

Younger viewers say hello to online video in 2012

Andy — Wed, 16 May 2012 09:11:00 +0000

As more consumers reach for their smartphones, tablets and laptops for news and entertainment, there’s a new segment of viewers that watch less than two hours of TV per day - the “light TV viewer.” Around 31% of adults 18 to 49 are light TV viewers. And this segment is growing - households that opted for broadband internet instead of cable TV grew 22.8 percent over the past year, according to the latest Cross Platform Report from Nielsen.

To understand how this trend will impact advertisers in 2012, we partnered with Nielsen to conduct six cross-media studies looking at viewership patterns and campaign effectiveness across TV, YouTube and the Google Display Network (GDN). The conclusion? The light TV viewer is more efficiently reached with cross media campaigns on YouTube and the GDN than with TV alone.

The Light TV viewer
Consumers in this group tend to be younger (49 years old and below), diverse, college-educated, high-income, social-networking, and influential consumers. Our research found that light TV viewers overall averaged only 39 minutes of TV a day. Since this audience watches significantly less TV than the general population, they can be difficult to reach with TV advertising alone.

Additional reach, lower cost
On average, YouTube and GDN campaigns added 4 percentage points of incremental reach to light TV viewers - and it cost 92 percent less to achieve these results online than it would have on TV. The research also showed that TV failed to reach 63 percent of light TV viewers.

By shifting budget from TV networks that primarily reach the “heavy TV viewer” audience to YouTube and the GDN, you could more efficiently reach light TV viewers. In our study, a projection done for Reebok found that advertiser could decrease impressions to heavy TV viewers by 40 percent and increase impressions delivered to light TV viewers by 76 percent, showing more ads to a valuable, hard-to-reach audience.

Increased frequency and recall
Finally, our research showed that online campaigns added much-needed frequency to help increase brand recall for the light TV viewer. Combining YouTube and GDN drove a 27 percent increase in impressions, since even light TV viewers exposed to both TV and online ads saw more online ads than TV.

Overall, the results suggest that adding YouTube and the GDN to your TV network campaigns improves effectiveness in several powerful ways, helping to:

Reach a valuable, complementary, younger audience
Add much-needed frequency to light TV viewers
Deliver media more evenly across light and heavy TV viewers, reducing waste
Do all of this both efficiently and affordably

To learn more about how to reach the lightest TV viewer, visit Think Insights to view more findings from the full study.

Posted by Sheethal Shobowale, Advertising Research Manager

*MediaMark
**Nielsen

Celebrate the best in digital creativity with Google+ at Internet Week New York and the Webby Awards

Inside AdWords crew — Tue, 15 May 2012 10:03:00 +0000

Once again, Internet Week New York is in full force, and we hope that you'll come and join Google+ for some of the festivities as the city’s digital thinkers, from developers to ad agency execs, collaborate on a week of panels and parties:

IAB Innovation Days: On Wednesday, May 16 at 1:45pm, Kate Stanford, Group Product Marketing Manager for Social Ads, will be giving a presentation at IAB Innovation Days at Skylight Soho about connecting with customers through a joint strategy across mobile and social platforms.

The Webby Awards: On Monday, May 21 at 5:30 PM, celebrate with the whole digital industry and Google+ at the 16th Annual Webby Awards, where we’ll be hosting an exclusive backstage Hangout On Air from the Webbys Google+ page during the show. Whether you're there in person, watching the live stream, or watching our Hangout, expect plenty of surprises and laughs. Connect with the Webby Awards on Google+ for more updates, and if you're there, say hello to the Google+ and Google Creative Lab teams at the afterparty!

We’re excited to share our thoughts about the future of digital advertising and marketing and proud to be part of New York’s technology scene. We hope to see you out and about!

Posted by Caroline McCarthy, Product Marketing Manager, Google+

AdWords Editor users: Migrate to v9.7.1 before June 12, 2012

Allison Sommer — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:30:00 +0000

As of June 12, 2012, AdWords Editor versions 9.0 and prior will be sunset. After this date, changes made via these versions will not be implemented in your AdWords account. Please download the latest version (9.7.1.) at your earliest convenience, but no later than June 12, 2012.

You can upgrade to version 9.7.1 through the auto-update prompt or download the latest version from the AdWords Editor website. After you install the new version, you’ll need to download your account again. To preserve your comments and unposted changes, select the ‘Backup then Upgrade’ option in the automatic upgrade prompt, then import the backup file after downloading the account.

For a complete list of version-specific changes, please see our release notes. To see which version you're using, go to the Help menu > About AdWords Editor.

Posted by Allison Sommer, Inside AdWords Crew

Model bid changes at scale with campaign bid simulator

Allison Sommer — Fri, 11 May 2012 09:57:00 +0000

When we launched bid simulator in 2009, we wanted to make it easy for you to understand the impact of bids on your advertising results. Until now, you’ve been able to access bid simulator at the keyword and ad group level.

To allow you to more easily simulate and apply bid changes at scale, we’re pleased to announce the launch of campaign bid simulator.

To access campaign bid simulator, go to the Opportunities tab and select “campaign bid simulator” from the left navigation tree.

With campaign bid simulator, you can:

View bid changes in aggregate and model changes even when keywords or ad groups might not have enough data for this on their own.
See what might happen if you increased or decreased all your bids by a specific percentage (10%, for example).
See whether you may need to increase your campaign budget to ensure it doesn’t become limited by budget at the new bid value.
Model what happens if you changed all your bids in the campaign to a single value.
Download the bid-simulation data at the account or campaign level.
Download an AdWords Editor-compatible file with bid amounts at the simulated level and the ad groups and keywords to which they should be applied.

Note: this is mock data only and should not be seen as a real or accurate simulation

For more information, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Sheridan Kates, Product Manager, AdWords

Sorting and Filtering Results in Custom Search

Custom Search Team — Wed, 09 May 2012 08:24:00 +0000

Using Custom Search Engine (CSE), you can create rich search experiences that make it easier for visitors to find the information they’re looking for on your site. Today we’re announcing two improvements to sorting and filtering of search results in CSE.

First, CSE now supports UI-based results sorting, which you can enable in the Basics tab of the CSE control panel. Once you’ve updated the CSE element code on your site, a “sort by” picker will become visible at the top of the results section.

By default CSE supports sorting by date and relevance. In the control panel, you can specify additional “sort by” keys that are based on the structure of your site’s content, giving users more options to find the results that are most relevant to them. For example, if you’ve marked up pages for product rich snippets, you could enable sorting based on price as shown below:

Second, we’re introducing compact queries for filtering by attribute. Currently you can issue a query like

[more:pagemap:product-description:search more:pagemap:product-description:engine]

which will only show pages with a ‘product-description’ attribute that contains both ‘search’ and ‘engine’. With a compact query, you can issue the same request as:
[more:p:product-description:search*engine]

We hope these new features help you create richer and more useful search experiences for your visitors. As always, if you have any questions or feedback please let us know via our Help Forum.

Posted by Roger Wang, Software Engineer

Spurring more vulnerability research through increased rewards

Jay — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:30:00 +0000

Posted by Adam Mein and Michal Zalewski, Security Team

We recently marked the anniversary of our Vulnerability Reward Program, possibly the first permanent program of its kind for web properties. This collaboration with the security research community has far surpassed our expectations: we have received over 780 qualifying vulnerability reports that span across the hundreds of Google-developed services, as well as the software written by fifty or so companies that we have acquired. In just over a year, the program paid out around $460,000 to roughly 200 individuals. We’re confident beyond any doubt the program has made Google users safer.

Today, to celebrate the success of this effort and to underscore our commitment to security, we are rolling out updated rules for our program — including new reward amounts for critical bugs:

$20,000 for qualifying vulnerabilities that the reward panel determines will allow code execution on our production systems.

$10,000 for SQL injection and equivalent vulnerabilities; and for certain types of information disclosure, authentication, and authorization bypass bugs.

Up to $3,133.7 for many types of XSS, XSRF, and other high-impact flaws in highly sensitive applications.

To help focus the research on bringing the greatest benefit to our users, the new rules offer reduced rewards for vulnerabilities discovered in non-integrated acquisitions and for lower risk issues. For example, while every flaw deserves appropriate attention, we are likely to issue a higher reward for a cross-site scripting vulnerability in Google Wallet than one in Google Art Project, where the potential risk to user data is significantly smaller.

Happy hunting - and if you find a security problem, please let us know!

An improved Google Authenticator app to celebrate millions of 2-step verification users

Jay — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 08:56:00 +0000

Posted by Sara "Scout" Sinclair, Associate Product Manager, Google Security Team

Since we first made 2-step verification available to all Google users in February of 2011, millions of people around the world have chosen to use this extra layer of security to protect their Google Accounts. Thousands more are signing up every day. And recently, we updated the feature’s companion smartphone app, Google Authenticator, for Android users.

2-step verification works by requiring users to enter a verification code when signing in using a computer they haven’t previously marked as “trusted.” Many users choose to receive their codes via SMS or voice call, but smartphone users also have the option to generate codes on their phone by installing the Google Authenticator app — an option that is particularly useful while traveling, or where cellular coverage is unreliable. You can use Google Authenticator to generate a valid code even when your phone isn’t connected to a cellular or data network.

We want 2-step verification to be simple to use, and therefore we are working continually to make it easier for users to sign up, manage their settings, and maintain easy access to their verification codes at any time and from anywhere. Our updated Google Authenticator app has an improved look-and-feel, as well as fundamental upgrades to the back-end security and infrastructure that necessitated the migration to a new app. Future improvements, however, will use the familiar Android update procedure.

Current Google Authenticator users will be prompted to upgrade to the new version when they launch the app. We’ve worked hard to make the upgrade process as smooth as possible, but if you have questions please refer to the Help Center article for more information. And, if you aren’t already a 2-step verification user, we encourage you to give it a try.

A new look for Custom Search results plus a new search box

Custom Search Team — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 15:52:00 +0000

We’re excited to announce that starting today, we are providing a new results style that’s more modern and streamlined, based on the evolving Google design and experience across Google properties.

This look will be the new default for new custom search engines, and admins of existing custom search engines can also choose this new style by visiting the Look and feel page of their CSE’s control panel and selecting “Default” in the Choose or customize a style section. The old default remains an option, but has been renamed to “Classic”.

In addition to the new style for results, we’ve also updated the search box and made autocomplete more robust and consistent with the standard Google autocomplete. Note that this update affects all CSEs that use the Element so, in some rare cases, site owners who have made customizations to their CSE search box (or who have enabled autocomplete for their own search boxes) may need to make minor updates to accommodate the new search box’s slightly different look.

We hope you and your visitors enjoy these updates. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Dana Bright, UI Designer

Image results now available from the Custom Search API

Custom Search Team — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:58:00 +0000

Last year we added image results to Google Custom Search Engines to enable sites to offer image-only results that showcase photos and other digital images. For site owners who want more flexibility in presentation, they are also now available from the Custom Search API.

Read more about accessing Image Results from the Custom Search API or try it out in the Custom Search API Explorer. For billing purposes, image queries will be treated the same as web queries. Note that you need to enable image search in your custom search engine control panel for the custom image search to work.

Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Nam Nguyen, Software Engineer

Celebrating one year of web vulnerability research

Jay — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:00:00 +0000

Posted by Adam Mein, Technical Program Manager, Google Security Team

In November 2010, we introduced a different kind of vulnerability reward program that encourages people to find and report security bugs in Google’s web applications. By all available measures, the program has been a big success. Before we embark further, we wanted to pause and share a few things that we’ve learned from the experience.

“Bug bounty” programs open up vulnerability research to wider participation.

On the morning of our announcement of the program last November, several of us guessed how many valid reports we might see during the first week. Thanks to an already successful Chromium reward program and a healthy stream of regular contributions to our general security submissions queue, most estimates settled around 10 or so. At the end of the first week, we ended up with 43 bug reports. Over the course of the program, we’ve seen more than 1100 legitimate issues (ranging from low severity to higher) reported by over 200 individuals, with 730 of those bugs qualifying for a reward. Roughly half of the bugs that received a reward were discovered in software written by approximately 50 companies that Google acquired; the rest were distributed across applications developed by Google (several hundred new ones each year). Significantly, the vast majority of our initial bug reporters had never filed bugs with us before we started offering monetary rewards.

Developing quality bug reports pays off... for everyone.

A well-run vulnerability reward program attracts high quality reports, and we’ve seen a whole lot of them. To date we’ve paid out over $410,000 for web app vulnerabilities to directly support researchers and their efforts. Thanks to the generosity of these bug reporters, we have also donated $19,000 to charities of their choice. It’s not all about money, though. Google has gotten better and stronger as a result of this work. We get more bug reports, which means we get more bug fixes, which means a safer experience for our users.

Bug bounties — the more, the merrier!

We benefited from looking at examples of other types of vulnerability reward programs when designing our own. Similarly, in the months following our reward program kick-off, we saw other companies developing reward programs and starting to focus more on web properties. Over time, these programs can help companies build better relationships with the security research community. As the model replicates, the opportunity to improve the overall security of the web broadens.

And with that, we turn toward the year ahead. We’re looking forward to new reports and ongoing relationships with the researchers who are helping make Google products more secure.

Android and Security

Jay — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:29:00 +0000

Posted by Adrian Ludwig, Android Security Engineer

We frequently get asked about how we defend Android users from malware and other threats. As the Android platform continues its tremendous growth, people wonder how we can maintain a trustworthy experience with Android Market while preserving the openness that remains a hallmark of our overall approach. We’ve been working on lots of defenses, and they have already made a real and measurable difference for our users’ security. Read more about how we defend against malware in Android Market on the Google Mobile Blog here.

Businesses: share Google Site Search query quota between multiple engines

Custom Search Team — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:21:00 +0000

Good news for Google Site Search owners who manage multiple Google Site Search engines! You can now share query quota between paid GSS and free Custom Search engines.

This may be useful for you if you pay for a quota with Google Site Search and you’d like to share that quota with your Custom Search engines. To do this, add those extra engines to a “business group” to share the quota.

To add CSEs to a business group, visit the Business Group page of your GSS’s Control Panel. Click Add and you’ll see a list of the free CSEs that you own or that have been shared with you. Select the free CSEs you wish to add and click OK. All group members will immediately share the quota of your GSS.

We hope you’ll find this much easier than trying to estimate your quota needs for each of your individual search engines. To learn more about Business Groups, please visit our help center. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Yong Zhu, Software Engineer

Landing another blow against email phishing

Jay — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

(Cross-posted from the Gmail Blog)

Posted by Adam Dawes, Product Manager

Email phishing, in which someone tries to trick you into revealing personal information by sending fake emails that look legitimate, remains one of the biggest online threats. One of the most popular methods that scammers employ is something called domain spoofing. With this technique, someone sends a message that seems legitimate when you look at the “From” line even though it’s actually a fake. Email phishing is costing regular people and companies millions of dollars each year, if not more, and in response, Google and other companies have been talking about how we can move beyond the solutions we’ve developed individually over the years to make a real difference for the whole email industry.

Industry groups come and go, and it’s not always easy to tell at the beginning which ones are actually going to generate good solutions. When the right contributors come together to solve real problems, though, real things happen. That’s why we’re particularly optimistic about today’s announcement of DMARC.org, a passionate collection of companies focused on significantly cutting down on email phishing and other malicious mail.

Building upon the work of previous mail authentication standards like SPF and DKIM, DMARC is responding to domain spoofing and other phishing methods by creating a standard protocol by which we’ll be able to measure and enforce the authenticity of emails. With DMARC, large email senders can ensure that the email they send is being recognized by mail providers like Gmail as legitimate, as well as set policies so that mail providers can reject messages that try to spoof the senders’ addresses.

We’ve been active in the leadership of the DMARC group for almost two years, and now that Gmail and several other large mail senders and providers — namely Facebook, LinkedIn, and PayPal — are actively using the DMARC specification, the road is paved for more members of the email ecosystem to start getting a handle on phishing. Our recent data indicates that roughly 15% of non-spam messages in Gmail are already coming from domains protected by DMARC, which means Gmail users like you don’t need to worry about spoofed messages from these senders. The phishing potential plummets when the system just works, and that’s what DMARC provides.

If you’re a large email sender and you want to try out the DMARC specification, you can learn more at the DMARC website. Even if you’re not ready to take on the challenge of authenticating all your outbound mail just yet, there’s no reason to not sign up to start receiving reports of mail that fraudulently claims to originate from your address. With further adoption of DMARC, we can all look forward to a more trustworthy overall experience with email.

A new and easy way to add new pages to your Custom Search Engine’s index

Custom Search Team — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 09:27:00 +0000

Our users have been telling us that while they love the concept of on-demand indexing, manually entering URLs or keeping a Sitemap up to date is too cumbersome. A new year brings a new and improved solution. If you are a Webmaster Tools verified site owner and have a page that links to your site’s latest content, simply provide us with that page’s URL and we will periodically visit it to discover your site’s new content.

For example, as the owners of this blog, we can provide the URL of the blog’s landing page, googlecustomsearch.blogspot.com, to our CSE. It will then periodically visit that URL and add any new links to content on this blog to our CSE’s index. Since this URL automatically links to all new content on this blog, our CSE’s index will always automatically get updated.

You can provide a URL(s) to your CSE via the URLs linked from a page feature in the Indexing page of your CSE’s Control Panel. Note that this feature is only for the discovery of new content and does not refresh content that has already been indexed.

To learn more about URLs linked from a page, please visit our help center. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Liqian Luo, Software Engineer

Tech tips that are Good to Know

Jay — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:37:00 +0000

Posted by Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Does this person sound familiar? He can’t be bothered to type a password into his phone every time he wants to play a game of Angry Birds. When he does need a password, maybe for his email or bank website, he chooses one that’s easy to remember like his sister’s name—and he uses the same one for each website he visits. For him, cookies come from the bakery, IP addresses are the locations of Intellectual Property and a correct Google search result is basically magic.

Most of us know someone like this. Technology can be confusing, and the industry often fails to explain clearly enough why digital literacy matters. So today in the U.S. we’re kicking off Good to Know, our biggest-ever consumer education campaign focused on making the web a safer, more comfortable place. Our ad campaign, which we introduced in the U.K. and Germany last fall, offers privacy and security tips: Use 2-step verification! Remember to lock your computer when you step away! Make sure your connection to a website is secure! It also explains some of the building blocks of the web like cookies and IP addresses. Keep an eye out for the ads in newspapers and magazines, online and in New York and Washington, D.C. subway stations.

The campaign and Good to Know website build on our commitment to keeping people safe online. We’ve created resources like privacy videos, the Google Security Center, the Family Safety Center and Teach Parents Tech to help you develop strong privacy and security habits. We design for privacy, building tools like Google Dashboard, Me on the Web, the Ads Preferences Manager and Google+ Circles—with more on the way.

We encourage you to take a few minutes to check out the Good to Know site, watch some of the videos, and be on the lookout for ads in your favorite newspaper or website. We hope you’ll learn something new about how to protect yourself online—tips that are always good to know!

Update 1/17: Updated to include more background on Good to Know.

Custom Search JavaScript API is now fully documented!

Custom Search Team — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:56:00 +0000

The Custom Search engineers spent 2011 launching great features. But we still hear from our users that our documentation could do with improvement. We hear you. Today we’re launching some updates to our docs:

Comprehensive JavaScript reference for the Custom Search Element. We’ve completely overhauled our Custom Search Element API documentation to provide a comprehensive overview of all the JavaScript methods available. We can’t wait to see what you build with it.

More languages. The Help Center is now available in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.

Easier navigation and cleaner design. We’ve reorganized the Help Center to make it easier to find the information you’re looking for. Navigation is simpler and more streamlined. Individual articles have been revised and updated, and designed to be more readable.

Documentation is an ongoing effort, and we’ll be continuing to improve both our Help Center and our developer documentation. If you have comments or suggestions, we’d love to see them in our user forum.

Posted by: Riona MacNamara, technical writer

Improvements to Autocomplete

Custom Search Team — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:26:00 +0000

Custom Search Autocompletions allow you to add to the list of useful queries users see as they type in the search box. Today we are announcing two major improvements.

Promotions in Autocomplete:

Promotions are a great way to call special attention to a result by putting it at the top of search results and making it visually distinct. Now you can choose to display them in autocomplete too. To enable this feature, simply click Show promotions in autocomplete in the Promotions section of your CSE’s Control Panel. Note that promotions based on regular expressions or the $q variable will not appear in autocomplete.

If you’d like to have promotions that appear in autocomplete but not in search results, you can add them via the new Autocomplete Promotion tab of the Custom Autocompletions in the Autocompletion section of your CSE’s Control Panel.

Match mode:

Match mode give you options for how Google displays autocompletions. The following are now available in the Promotions section of your CSE’s Control Panel. Changes to match mode will require you to update the CSE code snippet on your site.

Prefix (default) mode matches the opening words of the user’s query: “how to bake” will trigger “how to bake a pie”.
Ordered mode doesn’t require the words to be in the opening, but their order must match the user’s query: “bake a pie” will trigger “how to bake a pie”.
Any mode matches regardless of the order of the words in the user’s query. “pie bake” will trigger “how to bake a pie”.

We hope these new options make autocompletions even more useful for your site. Read more about Promotions in Autocomplete and Match mode. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Min Zeng, Software Engineer

Expanding Safe Browsing Alerts to include malware distribution domains

Jay — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:05:00 +0000

Posted by Nav Jagpal, Security Team

For the past year, we’ve been sending notifications to network administrators registered through the Safe Browsing Alerts for Network Administrators service when our automated tools find phishing URLs or compromised sites that lead to malware on their networks. These notifications provide administrators with important information to help them improve the security of their networks.

Today we’re adding distribution domains to the set of information we share. These are domains that are responsible for launching exploits and serving malware. Unlike compromised sites, which are often run by innocent webmasters, distribution domains are set up with the primary purpose of serving malicious content.

If you’re a network administrator and haven’t yet registered your AS, you can do so here.

Image Results for your Custom Search Engine

Custom Search Team — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 10:46:00 +0000

Since the launch of Custom Search in 2006, CSE has powered searches on a broad range of sites on the web. Until now, those CSEs have only returned text-based results, but in some cases images can be a much faster, easier and more visually appealing way to search. For photos-focused sites, image results are a great way to showcase your beautiful photos and help visitors to your site quickly and easily find the photos they want. We also think sites focused on news, celebrities, art and digital production assets will similarly benefit.

Now you can add an image results tab to your CSE to offer your visitors image-only results in a variety of image-optimized presentation formats. Once you enable this feature, your CSE will have two tabs. The first has your current web search results and the second, Image tab, contains the image search results. Here’s an example from India-Forums.com:

Enabling image results is easy! Just visit the Basics page of your CSE’s Control Panel and check the Enable image search checkbox. You can change the layout of your image results on the Look and feel page.

Once enabled, you’ll also be able to get separate image search reports from your CSE’s Statistics page.

This new feature is available to all users of our Custom Search Element (you will need to Get Code and update your site). Since we are transitioning all iframe users to the Element, this should be most sites. Our Google Site Search users can also access Image Results via XML. To learn more about Image Search for Custom Search, please visit our help center. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Update: check out the New York Times Image Search app powered by Google Custom Search.

Posted by: Peng Zhao, Software Engineer

Reminder: Safe Browsing version 1 API turning down December 1

Jay — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 12:46:00 +0000

Posted by Brian Ryner, Security Team

In May we announced that we are ending support for the Safe Browsing protocol version 1 on December 1 in order to focus our resources on the new version 2 API and the lookup service. These new APIs provide simpler and more efficient access to the same data, and they use significantly less bandwidth. If you haven't yet migrated off of the version 1 API, we encourage you to do so as soon as possible. Our earlier post contains links to documentation for the new protocol version and other resources to help you make the transition smoothly.

After December 1, we will remove all data from the version 1 API list to ensure that any remaining clients do not have false positives in their database. After January 1, 2012, we will turn off the version 1 service completely, and all requests will return a 404 error.

Thanks for your cooperation, and enjoy using the next generation of Safe Browsing.

More flexibility for promotions

Custom Search Team — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 10:38:00 +0000

Custom Search promotions enable you to put relevant information at the top of your search results for specific queries.

Today, we’re announcing several new features to give you more flexibility on how and when to trigger them.

Regular expressions: Use regular expressions instead of verbatim query matches to make it easier to display your promotions for all relevant user queries.

Promotion URL and titles based on the user’s query: Instead of manually adding and maintaining a long list of similarly structured URLs and promotion titles, now you can use the $q variable in your promotion URL or title to replace it with the user’s query.

Enable/disable individual promotions: Manually enable or disable each promotion without affecting the others.

Promotions for Custom Search engines created in AdSense: Promotions now work for these CSEs (though they are still managed via the CSE’s control panel on the Google Custom Search site).

We hope these new features make it easier for you to use promotions on your site. For more details and instructions, please visit our help center. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Weiyu Zhu, Software Engineer

Protecting data for the long term with forward secrecy

Jay — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 10:35:00 +0000

Posted by Adam Langley, Security Team

Last year we introduced HTTPS by default for Gmail and encrypted search. We’re pleased to see that other major communications sites are following suit and deploying HTTPS in one form or another. We are now pushing forward by enabling forward secrecy by default.

Most major sites supporting HTTPS operate in a non-forward secret fashion, which runs the risk of retrospective decryption. In other words, an encrypted, unreadable email could be recorded while being delivered to your computer today. In ten years time, when computers are much faster, an adversary could break the server private key and retrospectively decrypt today’s email traffic.

Forward secrecy requires that the private keys for a connection are not kept in persistent storage. An adversary that breaks a single key will no longer be able to decrypt months’ worth of connections; in fact, not even the server operator will be able to retroactively decrypt HTTPS sessions.

Forward secret HTTPS is now live for Gmail and many other Google HTTPS services(*), like SSL Search, Docs and Google+. We have also released the work that we did on the open source OpenSSL library that made this possible. You can check whether you have forward secret connections in Chrome by clicking on the green padlock in the address bar of HTTPS sites. Google’s forward secret connections will have a key exchange mechanism of ECDHE_RSA.

We would very much like to see forward secrecy become the norm and hope that our deployment serves as a demonstration of the practicality of that vision.

(* Chrome, Firefox (all platforms) and Internet Explorer (Vista or later) support forward secrecy using elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman. Initially, only Chrome and Firefox will use it by default with Google services because IE doesn’t support the combination of ECDHE and RC4. We hope to support IE in the future.)

Iframe Custom Search Engines are transitioning to the Element

Custom Search Team — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 11:27:00 +0000

In August we transitioned all Google-hosted Custom Search Engines to the Custom Search Element. Now we are transitioning iframe CSEs as well. No work is required from CSE owners. Moving from the iframe option to the Element enables those CSEs to take advantage of our latest features, like automatic thumbnails.

If you had an iframe CSE, we encourage you to visit your Control Panel to find new tools for customized presentation and results. As always, we appreciate your feedback in the user forum.

Posted by: Liang Ch'ng, Software Engineer

Farewell to Mashup Editor

Eric Tholomé — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:38:00 +0000

Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director, Developer Products

We had announced back in January that we would be shutting down the Mashup Editor in six months, and that time has come. Since a few of you still have applications running on the Mashup Editor, we decided to give you some extra time - 4 weeks. You can use this time to migrate your application to App Engine or any other infrastructure, or simply retrieve your data. We encourage you to replace your application as soon as possible with a static page giving useful information to your users about where to go. On August 12th, all traffic to the Mashup Editor will be redirected to a generic page. Note that your code is available on Project Hosting at http://code.google.com/p/mashup-{username}-{app name} (where non-supported characters are replaced by '-') and will remain available there for the foreseable future, but your data will not be accessible beyond August 12th. We've factored most of our learning from the Mashup Editor into App Engine, so we hope you'll give it a try if you haven't yet.

From Mashup Editor to App Engine

Paul McDonald — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:21:00 +0000

Posted by Paul McDonald, Google Mashup Editor Team

As we announced today on the Google Code Blog, we will be shutting down the Mashup Editor in six months. While it is always hard to say goodbye to a product, when we launched the Mashup Editor as a private beta last year, we did so to better understand the needs of you, our developers. And you spoke, and much of what we learned together is now a big part of App Engine, the new infrastructure for hosted developer applications. We look forward to working with you in the migration to App Engine, and can't wait to see what you build.

Google I/O

Paul McDonald — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:00:00 +0000

Posted by Paul McDonald, Google Mashup Editor Team

Almost 9 months ago we released the first version of GME at Google Developer Day. Since then Google Developer Day has morphed into Google I/O, a two day developer gathering on May 28th & 29th in San Francisco. The purpose of the event is to bring developers together to learn about products, tools, and techniques which are moving the web forward as a platform.

There is going to be lots of discussion about client side development and mashups Google I/O. We hope to see you there.

For more information on the event and to register checkout the Google I/O announcement on Google Code.

SurfDocs

Paul McDonald — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:01:00 +0000

Posted by Paul McDonald, Google Mashup Editor Team

Check out this nice documentation mashup: http://surf.googlemashups.com

View slideshows and YouTube videos about any subject by searching for it through the interface. Nice work!

If you've built a mashup you'd like us to share add it to our mashup gallery and post about it in our developer forum.

Google Earth Outreach on GME

Paul McDonald — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 08:57:00 +0000

Posted by Paul Mcdonald, Google Mashup Editor Team

Google Earth Outreach gives non-profits and public benefit organizations the knowledge and resources needed to reach the hearts and minds of charitable donors. To do this they are using a mashup, form and data feed created in GME to show how these non-profits are using Google mapping technology to improve their organizations.

Check out the Google Earth Outreach home page. The mashup on the bottom left was created with GME. If you are part of a non-profit you can add your organization to the map using the link below the map.

This is great way to showcase the utility of GME with a professional implementation using the same tools as our GME developers.

Do you have great examples of GME in action? Add your mashups to our mashup gallery or post about them in our developer forum.

Using built-in templates

Paul McDonald — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:26:00 +0000

Posted by Paul McDonald, Google Mashup Editor Team

Templates are a really powerful piece of the GME framework. They allow you to display data from feeds using Ajax UI controls without having to write feed parsing code and the hundreds of lines of javascript required to create these controls.

We've created a few built in templates to get you started and its extremely simple to create your own templates. Want to turn a simple read/write list into a task list with date pickers, ratings and checkboxes? All you have to do is change the value of the template parameter in your list and republish.

Simple Read/Write:


<gm:list id="simplelist" data="${app}/items" template="simple" pagesize="10">

Task List:


<gm:list id="simplelist" data="${app}/items" template="task" pagesize="10">

You can even use our JavaScript library to change your template on the fly.

If you want to find out about the other built in templates check out the Reading and displaying data section of our documentation. Let us know what types of information you like to see on this blog by going to our developer forum and posting.

New stuff - 1/18

Paul McDonald — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 11:53:00 +0000

Posted by Paul McDonald, Google Mashup Editor Team

Today we released a minor update to the Google Mashup Editor.

More fixes paging so that 250 items can be displayed per page
Fixes to the compiler so that it no longer optimizes tags. This fixes many bugs that caused problems in the display of compiled mashups.
More fixes to feed fetching. All Atom and RSS compliant feeds should now work correctly.
Documentation fixes

As always the full release notes are available in the GME release notes app (http://gmereleases.googlemashups.com/). We'll continue to do minor bug fix releases while we prepare for a major update to the Google Mashup Editor. If you have small features or bug fixes you'd like us to address please let us know by posting in our developer forum.

Nice Work! Some great nature mashups.

Paul McDonald — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 11:55:00 +0000

Posted by Paul McDonald, Google Mashup Editor Team

We continue to be impressed by the mashups GME developers are creating. We wanted to take some time to congratulate a few of you for some outstanding ones.

Floridoogle - Jack S.
This mashup combines photos and information about various plant species with Google Product Search to enable users to research and buy trees, flowers, seeds and bulbs from various vendors on the internet. Bonus points for being in Gadget form and enabling users to user the gadget on iGoogle, Google's personalized homepage.

Trails of Florianopolis - Ivan Linhares Martins
We've mentioned this one before but Ivan continues to work on this great looking mashup. His mashup explores the trails and the beautiful Nature of Florianópolis - an Island in the South of Brazil. Tips, trail rating, geographical information and other useful data describe each trail. The mashup combines data from Flickr, Google Base, Google Maps and Blogger.

Great work developers! If you'd like us to share your mashup on our blog please submit it to our mashup gallery and post about it in our developer forum. If you are new to GME check out our screencast gallery for videos on how to create mashups with the Google Mashup Editor.

Recipe of the Moment

Paul McDonald — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:06:00 +0000

Posted by Paul McDonald, Google Mashup Editor Team

Michael Thompson, one of the top Google Gadget Developers, recently switched out his old Recipe of the Moment Google Gadget with a new one built with the Google Mashup Editor. His new gadget adds search functionality, and tabs so that users can find new recipes and do some easy measurement conversions.

Add this gadget to your personalized homepage and checkout the rest of Michael's Gadgets at his website: http://chronita.com/google_gadgets/

To learn how you can create gadgets using GME check out our latest screencast - Deploying a Mashup Gadget

Mashup Tutorials for the New Year

Paul McDonald — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 14:32:00 +0000

Posted by Jason Cooper, Google Mashup Editor Team

Happy New Year! With 2008 now in full swing, the Google Mashup Editor team has returned to work and is actively preparing a host of exciting updates for the coming year. In the meantime, the new screencast gallery is bustling with four tutorials, the latest of which demonstrates how to leverage GME's integration with Google Gadgets by adding a simple mashup to iGoogle. Several new screencasts are already in the works and should be added to the gallery in the coming weeks, so be sure to check back often. And, as always, the mashup gallery and discussion board are available if you're in need of a quick GME fix.