Google Blogs Mashup

HTTPS support coming to Blogspot

Jo-el van Bergen — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 10:16:00 +0000

Posted by Jo-el van Bergen, Software Engineer, Security.

Since 2008, we've worked to encrypt the connections between our users and Google servers. Over the years we've announced that Search, Gmail, Drive, and many other products have encrypted connections by default, and most recently, we've made a similar announcement for our ads products.

In this same vein, today we're expanding on the HTTPS Everywhere mission and beginning an initial rollout of HTTPS support for Blogspot. HTTPS is a cornerstone of internet security as it provides several important benefits: it makes it harder for bad actors to steal information or track the activities of blog authors and visitors, it helps check that visitors open the correct website and aren’t being redirected to a malicious location, and it helps detect if a bad actor tries to change any data sent from Blogger to a blog visitor.

While this initial rollout won’t support all of our Blogger users, we wanted to take the first step to make HTTPS available for Blogspot; for those users who want to try it early.

We’re rolling this out gradually and Blogspot authors interested in enabling HTTPS support can begin opting-in today. Simply log into https://www.blogger.com, click on the blog you’d like to make HTTPS enabled, navigate to the Settings page, and select "yes" for "HTTPS Availability". Unfortunately, blogs with custom domains are not supported in this first version.

Once enabled, your blog will become accessible over both HTTP and HTTPS connections. Blogspot authors should be aware that if they choose to encrypt at this time, some of the current functionality of their blog may not work over HTTPS. This can be a result of template, gadgets, and blog post content, and is often caused by mixed content errors, some of which may be fixable by the author themselves.

We’ll also be moving some of our own blogs over to HTTPS gradually, beginning with the Official Google Blog and the Google Online Security Blog.

For the Blogspot authors who try this out - we’re interested to hear your feedback while we continue to improve this feature and its capabilities! For more information, visit our Help Center.

Enhancing the Google Display Network with new innovations

Rob Newton — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 06:30:00 +0000

Consumers have higher expectations than ever because of mobile — they want everything right, and they want everything right away. To connect with consumers in the intent-rich moments when they want to buy, find or do something, marketers are increasingly turning to programmatic advertising — which uses data and technology to reach the right person at the right time. The Google Display Network (GDN) brings this sophisticated technology to all advertisers so you can be there in the moments that matter the most for your brand.

Today we’re introducing several tools that further enhance what the GDN offers for display advertisers.

More transparency: take action with AdWords audience insights
When you understand your customers well — like their age, location, and interests — you can make more informed decisions about your marketing programs. AdWords audience insights give advertisers aggregate information about people on your remarketing lists, including demographics, interests, locations, and device usage.¹ Since these reports are available right in AdWords, you can quickly and easily take action on the insights. For example, if most people who converted on your site are jazz enthusiasts, you may wish to add this affinity audience to your campaign. Or, if many of your customers are females between the ages of 25 and 34, you might want to customize your ad creative to appeal to this demographic. Learn more.

Example: AdWords audience insights shows 30% of customers on this remarketing list are 25-34 years old
compared to an average of 19.9% in the US.

BASE, a Belgian telecommunications company, used AdWords audience insights and discovered cycling enthusiasts were twice as likely as the average customer to buy a mobile phone subscription. Based on this insight, BASE engaged with cycling enthusiasts on the GDN and doubled its conversions. BASE now uses AdWords audience insights to inform its campaigns, online and offline.

Sony PlayStation discovered classical music enthusiasts were likely to engage with its brand using AdWords audience insights. Sony then connected with this audience on the GDN and drove a 31% higher view-through rate than with its average affinity audience. This allowed Sony to capture more views for its budget. Now, Sony uses AdWords audience insights to uncover the best audiences for its new campaigns.

More accountability: the GDN is going 100% viewable
Most display ads — 56% in fact — never had a chance to be viewed because they were below the fold, scrolled out of view, or in a background tab. Soon, we’ll make the GDN one of the only media platforms where advertisers don’t pay for an ad impression unless it was viewable. This means your media dollars will only be spent where they can have impact. In the next few months, all campaigns that buy on a CPM basis will be upgraded to be viewable CPM (vCPM).

More impact: a fresh approach to dynamic remarketing ads
People use devices of varying shapes and sizes, engaging with content that can be horizontal, vertical, tapped, swiped or pinched. This means ads must be flexible so they can show across varying placements. Today, we introduced enhancements to dynamic remarketing so ads can be automatically re-shaped and re-sized to fit all device types. Ads are also touched up to look great on any mobile or desktop site, or app. For example, if your logo is predominantly blue and yellow, AdWords may use these colors to shade the border and background of your ad. We’ll even try out varying color combinations and use the ones that drive the best performance. As always, you have control to make changes to these selections based on your personal style and preferences.

Meeting consumer expectations requires technology to answer their needs the moment they have them, wherever they are, whatever kind of device or screen they are using. Programmatic advertising ensures that brands are there in those important moments when decisions are made and preferences are shaped. Our hope is that the GDN brings this enterprise-level technology to all advertisers so you can be there at the moments when it matters most for your brand.

Posted by Brad Bender, VP of Product Management, Google Display Network

¹All insights are based on anonymized, aggregated data.

Today at IAB Mixx: a preview of new capabilities coming to YouTube advertising

Rob Newton — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 12:14:00 +0000

Over the past 10 years of YouTube, video viewership has come a long way. In fact, according to new commissioned custom research conducted by Nielsen, the time 18-49 year olds spend on YouTube grew by 44 percent, while the time they spend watching traditional TV fell by nearly 10 percent over that same time period.

YouTube has become the place the world comes to watch, share and engage with video. And we want to keep creating even better experiences for the viewers, advertisers and creators who turn to YouTube every day. So today at IAB Mixx, we announced new products that point toward the future of our video ad platform, specifically around interactivity, mobile, and measurement.

Turn YouTube into your virtual showroom
Over the course of the year, we’ve been working hard to make videos more interactive, shortening the distance between the time a viewer sees an ad and their actual purchase. First we launched Cards, which let you share product information directly within your videos across all screens. We took this feature further with TrueView for shopping, which is a bit like “automatic” Cards – simply connect your Google Merchant Center feed to your TrueView campaign to dynamically insert product cards within your in-stream ads, based on the products that are most likely to lead to a conversion.

To help advertisers reach all the other product-focused content on YouTube – from unboxings, hauls, product reviews and how-to videos – today we’re announcing Shopping ads for YouTube. These will let you show a click-to-buy ad within partner videos on YouTube, going beyond your own videos to transform any relevant video into your digital storefront. Similar to Shopping ads on Google, you only pay when a user clicks on your ad.

We’ve kept the format similar to Cards and TrueView for shopping, so users can easily recognize and click on the “i” icon at the top right of a video to view the Shopping ads. Shopping ads on YouTube are built off of your existing product feed in Merchant Center. They will enter an auction similar to Shopping ads on Google search and are selected based on a variety of contextual signals.

Shopping ads on YouTube

Shopping ads on YouTube provide an entirely new revenue stream for creators, providing another way to monetize product-focused videos. They also provide a more interactive experience for viewers, letting them shop directly from videos. Stay tuned as we roll this new capability in the coming months.

Driving long term success for mobile apps with TrueView for app promotion
Mobile viewership on YouTube continues to grow. In fact, the average viewing session on mobile is now more than 40 minutes, up more than 50% year over year. We’re focused on creating ad formats that help you reach viewers across all screens, and today we’re making YouTube an even better place to promote your mobile apps.

Building off the success advertisers are seeing with app promotion in in-stream ads on YouTube, we’re introducing TrueView for app promotion for our in-display format as well. This format reaches potential users when they’re exploring content on YouTube. Early results from brands promoting their apps with in-display point to strong performance both in cost per install and lifetime value.

TrueView in-display for app promotion

We’re also enabling app promotion ads in our dedicated Gaming app, because what better place to promote gaming apps than in YouTube gaming content? And in the coming months, we’ll bring the ability to bid by cost per install. You tell us what you want to pay for a download, and we’ll optimize for that price. In an early beta, Smule used target CPA bidding to increase installs by 85%.

Expanding Brand Interest to YouTube Search
We’re also focused on providing better measurement, helping you understand whether your investments are driving results. Our Brand Lift solution, for example, helps you measure interest by monitoring lift in organic keyword searches related to your brand on Google.com.

Starting today, Brand Lift will look not only at searches on Google.com, but will take YouTube searches into account as well. With this update, you’ll be able to see if your ad is driving searches for organic video content related to your brand on YouTube. Measuring interest is an important part of determining impact, and is a unique benefit of advertising on Google and YouTube.

Reach the right audience on YouTube with Customer Match
Finally, I’d like to call out our new targeting product, called Customer Match. Announced yesterday, Customer Match helps you reach your existing customer base with the right message across three of Google’s largest properties: Google Search, YouTube, and Gmail.

Advertisers looking to grow their brand can also use Similar Audiences with Customer Match to reach prospective customers across YouTube and Gmail based on the interests and characteristics of their existing customer base. With Similar Audiences, you can leverage your customer email lists to discover new audiences that are most like the customers you already have. These new targeting features enable advertisers to connect with – or exclude – customers to drive the best results for their brand.

Here’s to the next 10 years
As we head into our second decade as the place the world comes to engage with video, I’m excited to see us continuing to move fast, to build new things and to help marketers build brands. We can’t wait to see what you’ll do with these new tools.

Posted by Diya Jolly, Director, Video Ads Product Management

S’more to love across all your screens

Google Blogs — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 10:16:00 +0000

From your watch to your phone to your TV, we want to help you stay connected, entertained and informed across all your screens. Today we’re introducing a few new things that do just that: two Nexus phones, a tablet for work and play, updates to Chromecast and features for some of your favorite apps—all working together to make your day a little bit easier and more fun.

New Nexus phones
We made Android to be an open platform that anyone can build on, and today there are 4,000+ Android devices in all shapes and sizes. Android’s diversity is why it’s become the most popular mobile platform in the world, and the latest version, Marshmallow, takes Android to a new level of performance.

While we love all the Android devices out there, every year we build Nexus devices to show off the latest and greatest, directly from the people who built Android. Today we’re introducing the latest Nexus treats, both running Marshmallow, sweetened by amazing apps and sandwiched by some cutting-edge hardware (see what we did there?):

Nexus 6P is the first all-metal-body Nexus phone. Built in collaboration with Huawei, this 5.7” phone is crafted from aeronautical-grade aluminum, with a USB Type-C port for fast charging, a powerful 64-bit processor, and a 12.3 MP camera sensor with massive 1.55µm pixels (hello, better photos!). The Nexus 6P starts at $499.
You’re not the only one who misses your Nexus 5. We’ve joined forces with LG to bring it back with the new Nexus 5X, which gives you great performance in a compact and light package, with a beautiful 5.2” screen and the same 12.3 MP camera and Type-C port as the Nexus 6P. Nexus 5X starts at $379.

Both phones include a new fingerprint sensor, Nexus Imprint, which gives you quick and secure access to your phone, as well as use of Android Pay (in the U.S.). They are available for pre-order on the Google Store from a number of countries, including the U.S., U.K., Ireland and Japan, and come with a free 90-day subscription to Google Play Music. In the U.S., pre-orders include a $50 Play credit to help you stock up your favorite music, apps, games and shows. And, finally, for you Project Fi fans out there, you'll be happy to know Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X will work on your favorite network. Request an invite to our Early Access Program at fi.google.com.

Pixel C
We’re expanding the Pixel family by introducing the first Android tablet built end-to-end by Google. The Pixel C brings together the benefits of a full-size keyboard with the portability of a tablet. The tablet and keyboard attach magnetically (no docking mechanism FTW), so it’s easy to switch between typing and using the touch screen.

And if you’re familiar with the Chromebook Pixel, you’ll immediately see the family resemblance: the Pixel C has the same beautiful aluminum design, great display and USB Type-C port. The Pixel C will be available in time for the holidays on the Google Store.

Cast ALL the things
Today we’re introducing two new Chromecast devices. The new Chromecast has a fresh design, and is easier to plug into TVs with crowded ports. It supports the latest Wi-Fi standards and adapts more easily to changing Wi-Fi conditions in your home, so you get higher quality video with less buffering. Most importantly, we added two new colors. ;)

Chromecast Audio is a small device that plugs into your existing speakers, so you can stream your favorite music, radio and podcasts over Wi-Fi, similar to Chromecast. It works with tons of apps, including Spotify, Pandora and Google Play Music. Just like Chromecast, it works from anywhere in your home with your favorite devices, including Android, iOS, and laptops. And it’s available on the Google Store and other online retailers for just $35—way less than most Wi-Fi speakers today.

We’ve also updated the Chromecast app to make it easier for you to find great things to watch or to play, across the thousands of apps that work with Chromecast—whether you feel like browsing or want to search for a specific TV show or movie. For Cast-enabled apps that aren’t already on your phone, we’ll suggest one for you. The updated Chromecast app is rolling out on Android and iOS over the next few weeks.

Your favorite apps... for the whole family
All your shiny devices get even better when you have great apps to go with them. So we’re making a few updates to Google Play Music and Google Photos.

First, Google Play Music will offer a new family plan later this year. Up to six people will be able to use one account for a shared fee of $14.99 a month (instead of $9.99 per person). Get the dance party ready.

Sharing is a theme of today’s Google Photos updates, too. We’re adding Chromecast support to give you that old-school slideshow experience—dimmed lights optional. In the U.S., you can now add private labels to your photos to make it easier to search for specific pics of people with things, places or other people—say, that photo of Mom at the Grand Canyon, or of your daughter with her pet bunny. And soon you’ll be able to pool all your photos and videos with friends and family in one place, and get updates as soon as new photos are added. Best of all, there’s no setup involved, and you can use any device. So that dance party we mentioned earlier? Now it’s easier to gather all the memories from everyone who was there.

More to love, for more people
From Nexus to Chromecast to Pixel C to Photos, these updates are more than the sum of their parts—they unite great apps with devices that are designed to support them. They’re built to work together, so they do—seamlessly, across all your screens.

Posted by Hiroshi Lockheimer, VP Android, Chromecast and Chrome OS at Google

Big ideas for an even better Bay Area

Google Blogs — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 06:01:00 +0000

Converting a liquor store into a community-based learning and tutoring center. Providing millions of dollars of 0% interest loans to small businesses. Breaking the poverty- to-prison cycle by building a residential alternative to prison for young adults. This is just a sampling of the big ideas that local nonprofits submitted for our second annual Google Impact Challenge: Bay Area.

Today, after reviewing hundreds of submissions, we’re unveiling 10 finalists chosen together with our panel of advisors—a group that includes the San Francisco Chronicle’s Editor-in-Chief Audrey Cooper, The Golden State Warriors’ Harrison Barnes, The San Francisco Giants’ Hunter Pence, and CEO of the San Francisco Foundation, Fred Blackwell.

Representing San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Santa Clara, San Mateo and more, these organizations span the Bay Area. Learn more about these groups and their ideas for change:

This year, finding and funding new ideas will be just one part of the Google Impact Challenge: Bay Area. We are also reinvesting in a few of our 2014 finalists. The Ella Baker Center, Beyond12, Lava Mae, and Bay Area Community Resources in collaboration with Instituto Familiar de la Raza all were funded last year, and will receive between $250,000 and $1,000,000 in additional funding this year. We’re very pleased to continue supporting organizations focused on homelessness, youth employment, and racial justice—big problems that Google.org works to tackle with local organizations, year-round.

What happens next is in your hands! Anyone can vote for the new projects they think will have the most impact on the Bay Area. Again, the top four will receive $500,000 in grant funding, the remaining six will get $250,000 each. 15 additional organizations will each receive $100,000 and all nonprofits will be connected with Googler volunteers and coworking space in San Francisco. We’ll announce winners on October 21.

To vote, visit g.co/bayareachallenge or check out one of our voting stations across the Bay Area.

When creative, socially-conscious minds and the Bay Area’s innovative spirit join forces, big things can happen. Congratulations to all finalists, and best of luck the rest of the way!

Posted by David Drummond, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development, Alphabet

Bring virtual reality field trips to your school with Google Expeditions

Google Blogs — Mon, 28 Sep 2015 10:05:00 +0000

At the Bronx Latin School in New York City, teacher Katrina Roman says the topic of ancient history doesn’t usually set students abuzz. But this week, they took a field trip to ancient Aztec ruins using Google Expeditions, a virtual reality teaching tool built with Google Cardboard. Normally, their assignment would involve poring over photocopied photographs, but instead, they stood at the top of Chichen Itza, then examined detailed carvings at Tenochtitlan. Amid “oohs” and “aahhs,” the students shouted out details they noticed and shot hands up to answer Ms. Roman’s questions.

Katrina Roman’s class at the Bronx Latin School fills out their assignment after visiting Aztec ruins with Expeditions. The class is part of a history and geography pilot with New Visions for Public Schools.

Starting today, we’re bringing this experience to thousands of schools around the world with the new Expeditions Pioneer Program. During the 2015/2016 school year, we’ll be bringing “kits” containing everything a teacher needs to run a virtual trip for their class: ASUS smartphones, a tablet for the teacher to direct the tour, a router that allows Expeditions to run without an Internet connection, and Google Cardboard viewers or Mattel View-Masters that turn phones into virtual reality headsets. Although nothing replaces hopping on the bus for a field trip, there are some places that are just out of reach (hello, Chichen Itza!). Virtual reality gives teachers a tool to take students places a school bus can't.

To help teachers learn how to use Expeditions, we’ll be visiting thousands of schools around the world and bringing the kit for teachers to use in their classes for the day. Up first: Australia, Brazil, New Zealand, the U.K. and the U.S., followed by more locations as the school year progresses. At each school, our team will show teachers how Expeditions works and help set it up before class.

Right now, teachers can choose from a library of 100+ virtual trips to places like Mars, the Great Barrier Reef and the Great Wall of China. But we’re constantly adding more trips with the help of partners like PBS, educational publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, British documentarian David Attenborough in collaboration with Alchemy VR, and the Wildlife Conservation Society. We’re also working with the Starfish Foundation to help students explore future careers by showing them a virtual day in the life of professionals including a veterinarian and computer scientist. And to help students achieve those career goals, we’re working with First Lady Michelle Obama to support her Reach Higher initiative by taking students on virtual college tours.

And if you see one of these cars on the road, that's us! The folks at Subaru, who invest in education as part of their Love Promise initiative, have created a fleet of Expedition Pioneer Program rides that we'll be using to bring kits to schools.

If visiting Mars, trekking on the Great Wall of China or exploring what it’s like to work at a veterinarian’s office sounds like something your class would be interested in, head to the Expeditions Pioneer Program site and sign up.

Posted by David Quaid, Software Engineer, Google Expeditions

Google brings you closer to your customers in the moments that matter

Rob Newton — Sun, 27 Sep 2015 21:00:00 +0000

Mobile has changed the game for both consumers and brands. Consumer expectations for immediacy and relevance are higher than ever, and successful brands are those that connect with people in the moments that matter most to them -- the I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-do, and I-want-to-buy moments. Google is a company built on meeting people’s needs in the moment. Through our ads innovations, we’ve brought that ability to businesses large and small.

On Monday afternoon at Advertising Week’s Times Center Stage, I’ll be announcing two new products, Customer Match and Universal App Campaigns, to help you be there and be relevant in those intent-rich moments that truly matter.

Reach your most valuable customers with Customer Match

70% of online consumers agree that the quality, timing, and relevance of a brand’s message influences their perception of a brand.¹ Google is in a unique position to connect consumers with your business in the most relevant ways. Whether they’re searching on Google, checking promotions on Gmail, or watching videos on YouTube, we can deliver the most relevant information based on what they’re doing, wherever they are, when they’re looking, and on any device they’re using. Today, we’re building on these capabilities with new ads innovations to deliver even more relevance.

When it comes to your most valuable customers, they expect even more from you. And now, Google can help you reach customers that you already have a relationship with -- like those in your loyalty program or who have made a previous purchase -- in ways that are most relevant to their intent and context.

Customer Match is a new product designed to help you reach your highest-value customers on Google Search, YouTube, and Gmail -- when it matters most. Customer Match allows you to upload a list of email addresses, which can be matched to signed-in users on Google in a secure and privacy-safe way. From there, you can build campaigns and ads specifically designed to reach your audience. Users can control the ads they see, including Customer Match ads, by opting out of personalized ads or by muting or blocking ads from individual advertisers through Google Ads Settings.

Let's say you’re a travel brand. You can now reach people who have joined your rewards program as they plan their next trip. For example, when these rewards members search for “non-stop flights to new york” on Google.com, you can show relevant ads at the top of their search results on any device right when they’re looking to fly to New York. And when those members are watching their favorite videos on YouTube or catching up on Gmail, you can show ads that inspire them to plan their next trip.

Using Customer Match, you can also generate Similar Audiences to reach new customers on YouTube and Gmail who are likely to be interested in your products and services. For example, you can drive awareness on YouTube for new non-stop flights by showing TrueView ads to prospective customers who have similar interests and characteristics to your rewards members.

With Customer Match, your brand is right there, with the right message, at the moment your customer is most receptive. Only Google can help you do this to delight your most loyal customers in the moments that truly matter.

Customer Match and Similar Audiences will be rolling out to all advertisers over the next few weeks. Learn More.

Promote your apps with unparalleled reach

People discover new apps in many ways: online searches, recommendations while watching their favorite videos, and in-app suggestions. If your business has an app, you need a scalable way to reach the customers that are most likely to install your app -- across a variety of channels.

Starting today, Universal App Campaigns will be available to all developers and advertisers as a new AdWords campaign type that helps you connect with app users across Google Search, Google Play, YouTube, and the Google Display Network (GDN). In just a few simple steps, you can promote your app with unparalleled reach across the world’s largest network and platforms.

Let’s say you’ve built an adventure game. With Universal App Campaigns, you have unparalleled reach: you can drive installs on YouTube, the platform with 1B+ users who watch hundreds of millions of hours of content everyday. Your ads can also reach specific audiences across 650K apps and 2M+ websites in the GDN. And importantly, Universal App Campaigns tap into intent-rich searches like “adventure games” and “puzzle games” that are happening throughout the day on Google Search and Google Play so your app can be seen when people are looking to download something new.

All you need to do is give us your desired cost-per-install and we do the rest. Universal App Campaigns are the one-stop-shop campaign type that scales your reach and maximizes Android app installs across Google’s entire suite of ad platforms. We’ve automated campaign set-up by pulling in your app images, videos, and app description directly from your Google Play store listing to generate ad formats that look amazing wherever they’re placed.

From there, our systems will optimize your campaigns using dynamic learning to maximize app install volume at your target cost-per-install. By testing different versions of your ad text and app images in each of the eligible Google networks, we determine the highest-performing variations so only your best ads show. Learn more.

The energy and buzz at Advertising Week 2015 (Join the conversation) reinforces what an exciting time it is to be a marketer. I’m privileged to get to build products that help brands tell their stories and connect with consumers in the moments that really matter to them.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce

¹Google/Ipsos, "Consumers in the Micro-Moment," March 2015.

Bringing the Internet to more Indians—starting with 10 million rail passengers a day

Taj — Sun, 27 Sep 2015 12:22:00 +0000

When I was a student, I relished the day-long railway journey I would make from Chennai Central station (then known as Madras Central) to IIT Kharagpur. I vividly remember the frenetic energy at the various stations along the way and marveled at the incredible scale and scope of Indian Railways.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Googleplex today

I’m very proud to announce that it’s the train stations of India that are going to help get millions of people online. In the past year, 100 million people in India started using the Internet for the first time. This means there are now more Internet users in India than in every country in the world aside from China. But what's really astounding is the fact that there are still nearly one billion people in India who aren’t online.

We’d like to help get these next billion Indians online—so they can access the entire web, and all of its information and opportunity. And not just with any old connection—with fast broadband so they can experience the best of the web. That’s why, today, on the occasion of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to our U.S. headquarters, and in line with his Digital India initiative, we announced a new project to provide high-speed public Wi-Fi in 400 train stations across India.

Working with Indian Railways, which operates one of the world's largest railway networks, and RailTel, which provides Internet services as RailWire via its extensive fiber network along many of these railway lines, our Access & Energy team plans to bring the first stations online in the coming months. The network will expand quickly to cover 100 of the busiest stations in India before the end of 2016, with the remaining stations following in quick succession.

Even with just the first 100 stations online, this project will make Wi-Fi available for the more than 10 million people who pass through every day. This will rank it as the largest public Wi-Fi project in India, and among the largest in the world, by number of potential users. It will also be fast—many times faster than what most people in India have access to today, allowing travelers to stream a high definition video while they’re waiting, research their destination, or download some videos, a book or a new game for the journey ahead. Best of all, the service will be free to start, with the long-term goal of making it self-sustainable to allow for expansion to more stations and other places, with RailTel and more partners, in the future.

This map shows the first 100 stations that will have high-speed Wi-Fi by the end of 2016

We think this is an important part of making the Internet both accessible and useful for the more than 300 million Indians already online, and the nearly one billion more who are not.

But it’s not the only piece. To help more Indians get access to affordable, high-quality smartphones, which is the primary way most people there access the Internet, we launched Android One last year. To help address the challenges of limited bandwidth, we recently launched a feature that makes mobile webpages load faster and with less data, and we’ve made YouTube available offline with offline Maps coming soon.

To help make web content more useful for Indians, many of whom don’t speak English, we launched the Indian Language Internet Alliance last year to foster more local language content, and have built greater local language support into our products—including Hindi Voice Search, an improved Hindi keyboard and support for seven Indian languages with the latest versions of Android. And finally, to help all Indians reap the benefits of connectivity, we’ve been ramping up efforts to help women, who make up just a third of Internet users in India today, get the most from the web.

Just like I did years ago, thousands of young Indians walk through Chennai Central every day, eager to learn, to explore and to seek opportunity. It’s my hope that this Wi-Fi project will make all these things a little easier.

Posted by Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google

Through the Google lens: Search Trends Sept 18–24

Google Blogs — Fri, 25 Sep 2015 16:05:00 +0000

Even if you weren’t trying to keep up with all your fall shows returning, this week was a busy one. Here’s a look at what captured our attention the past seven days—from the Pope to a little rat with a big dream.

Also, we’re changing up this series, so this will be our last regular Friday post for a while. We’ll be back soon in a different format. Until then, keep on searchin’ on.

Pizza rat is all of us
Let’s start with the important stuff. This week the Internet was captivated by a YouTube video showing a rat carrying a slice of pizza down the stairs of a New York subway station. There were more than 50K+ searches for “Pizza Rat” on Monday, and the 14 second-video has more than 6 million views at last count. But while #PizzaRat memes multiplied across the web, New Yorkers had some more unsettling questions in mind, like: “How many rats are in New York?” and “What is the rat to people ratio in New York?” (Are you sure you want to know?) Whether Pizza Rat is a hero or a quitter, something about him spoke to us. Because in a way, aren’t we all just rats trying to find a slice of pizza in the subway station of life?

Hello, Pope Francis
This week Pope Francis became the fourth pope to visit the United States, in a highly anticipated tour that took him from D.C. to New York, with a Philadelphia stop still to come. Every day of his visit has brought headlines and curious searches (more than 500K on Tuesday)—and he’s been busy. He met with President Obama (and the President’s dogs) at the White House, stopped by the Capitol to give a joint address to Congress (the first time a pontiff has ever done so), canonized Junipero Serra, visited the 9/11 Memorial, spoke at the United Nations and made statements on everything ranging from climate change to the refugee crisis.

Meanwhile, people have been asking all sorts of questions about the Pope and his visit. Perhaps the most interesting—and inspiring—searches about the Pope’s visit are those looking for information on what he has said. Notably, people wanted to learn more about Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day, whom the Pope described in his joint address to Congress as Americans who had “built a better future” through “hard work and self-sacrifice” (the other two Americans he mentioned? Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.). In fact, searches for Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and an advocate for social justice, spiked 1700x after the Pope discussed her in his speech.

It ain’t over ‘til it’s over
This week baseball fans and others said farewell to Yankees catcher Yogi Berra, who died at age 90. A Hall of Famer who appeared in 21 World Series as a player, coach and manager, Yogi was perhaps best known for his nonsensical, sometimes koan-like statements (some of which it’s disputed he actually made, but all of which you’ve probably said without even knowing their origin), and as the namesake for the cartoon bear. As news spread of his death, people searched for him more than 1M times, asking “What number was Yogi Berra?” and “How did Yogi Berra get the name Yogi?” (It’s a good story.)

Posted by Emily Wood, Managing Editor, who searched this week for [pontifex] and [postpositive adjective]

New research: The underground market fueling for-profit abuse

Google Security PR — Thu, 24 Sep 2015 10:00:00 +0000

Posted by Kurt Thomas and Elie Bursztein, Google Anti-Fraud and Abuse Research

Recently, we teamed up with top researchers exploring innovative anti-abuse strategies to build a holistic understanding of for-profit abuse. The full report, which you can read here, was presented in June at the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security 2015.

Over the last decade, Internet crime has matured into an underground economy where a large number of globally distributed criminals trade in data, knowledge, and services specifically geared towards defrauding users and businesses. Within this black market, criminals buy and sell compromised machines, scam hosting, exploit kits, and wholesale access to pilfered user records including usernames and passwords, credit card numbers, and other sensitive personal data. The availability of such specialized resources has transformed for-profit abuse into a cooperative effort among criminals each satisfying a cog in a supply chain.

Profiting from abuse: a bird’s eye view

Here’s an example of the underground value chain required to make money from spamming knock-off luxury products:

In aggregate, the problem may appear intractable to stop. However, if we view this scenario in an economic light, then increasing the cost of fake accounts, phone numbers, or compromised websites cuts into the profitability of abuse. In the end, abuse propped up by cost-ineffective resources will crumble.

Collaborating to better understand the underground

Given the complex underbelly of abuse, we pulled together experts from industry and academia to build a systematic understanding of how criminals operate. Our previous example represents just one configuration of a value chain. In our example, revenue originates solely from victims buying counterfeit products. Criminals could adapt this strategy to scam users into paying for fake anti-virus, defraud advertisers via clickbots, or liquidate a victim’s banking assets. Regardless of the composition, we argue there is always a profit center through which victims transfer new capital into the underground. These schemes form a spectrum between selling products to unwitting victims to outright theft. A medley of alternatives such as dating scams, call-center scams, premium SMS fraud, DDoS extortion, or even stealing and re-selling gaming assets all fall within this spectrum and ultimately derive a payout from victims outside the underground.

These profit centers are in turn propped up by an ecosystem of support infrastructure that can be configured arbitrarily by criminals per their requirements. This infrastructure includes compromised hosts, human labor, networking and hosting, and accounts and engagement—all available for a fee. For example, 1,000 Google accounts cost on the order of $170, compared to CAPTCHAs which cost $1 per thousand. These costs reflect socio-economic factors as well as the impact of technical, legal, and law enforcement interventions on the availability of resources.

Redefining the abuse arms race

Client and server-side security has dominated industry’s response to digital abuse over the last decade. The spectrum of solutions—automated software updates, personal anti-virus, network packet scanners, firewalls, spam filters, password managers, and two-factor authentication to name a few—all attempt to reduce the attack surface that criminals can penetrate.

While these safeguards have significantly improved user security, they create an arms race: criminals adapt or find the subset of systems that remain vulnerable and resume operation.

To overcome this reactive defense cycle, we are improving our approach to abuse fighting to also strike at the support infrastructure, financial centers, and actors that incentivize abuse. By exploring the value chain required to bulk register accounts, we were able to make Google accounts 30–40% more expensive on the black market. Success stories from our academic partners include disrupting payment processing for illegal pharmacies and counterfeit software outlets advertised by spam, cutting off access to fake accounts that pollute online services, and disabling the command and control infrastructure of botnets.

Google Hotel Ads makes it easier for more hotels to participate

Rob Newton — Tue, 22 Sep 2015 09:01:00 +0000

Over the past several months we’ve made improvements to hotel search across Google, to help travelers find information more quickly and to enable hotels to generate more qualified leads. As a continuation of these efforts, we’re announcing a few more changes to Hotel Ads on Google: broader availability for the Google Hotel Ads Commission program, an expansion of the Book on Google feature to more partners, and the inclusion of more amenity information within Google search. With these changes, we’ll be retiring the dedicated site for Hotel Finder this week, as users are now able to access the hotel information they need right from Google search.

Making it easier for more hotels to generate qualified leads from Google
Earlier this year we started testing the Google Hotel Ads Commission Program with a small set of independent hotels. With this program, these hotels are charged on the industry-standard commission basis rather than cost-per-click, making it easier for smaller, independent hotels to use Google Hotel Ads. Today, we’re announcing that more hotels can participate in this program now that we’ve partnered with leading hotel technology solutions providers.

Seekda, one of the participating hotel technology solutions providers, helps us offer hotels a risk-free way to reach a massive audience efficiently. “Google Hotel Ads allows hotels to be there when a traveler is ready to book, and pay only when a booking is made or consumed,” says Klaus Niederacher, General Manager and COO at Seekda. “This new commission model gives smaller chains and independent hotels the option to participate in the highly effective Google Hotel Ads, without having to manage CPC bids and budgets.”

So far, the program has proven to be successful at driving bookings for hoteliers. According to Scott Koehler, Senior Vice President, Product & Operations of TravelClick: “Since March, hotels enrolled in TravelClick’s Demand Services program have seen, on average, a 56 percent year-over-year increase in revenue driven by Google Hotel Ads. The evolution from a pay-per-click to commission model has increased hotel revenue.”

We currently work with DerbySoft, Fastbooking, Sabre Hospitality Solutions, Seekda, TravelClick, and Trust International and will be integrating additional hospitality technology providers in the future.

Making bookings easier for hoteliers and consumers
In 2013, we launched Book on Google on mobile devices to make it easier for users to book hotel rooms directly from their phone. Now, we’re expanding the availability of Book on Google, bringing it to desktop and tablet devices and making it easier for more hotels to participate.
With Book on Google, Google facilitates the booking payment transaction. The hotel partner owns the guest relationship, including sending the confirmation email, answering post-booking questions, and handling changes to the reservation or cancellations.

“Given the successes that our hotel clients have experienced with Google Hotel Ads, we look forward to offering additional Hotel Ads features to our hotel clients globally, including Book on Google,” said Scott Koehler, Senior Vice President, Product & Operations of TravelClick.

Book on Google is available to all Hotel Ads partners and works for users in the U.S.

Bringing more hotel information to search

Earlier this year we announced improvements to hotel search across Google so users can find information like availability, prices, and reviews right in the search results and in Google Maps.

This month, we’re adding information about hotel amenities for locations in the U.S. and we’re working to add this information for 24 more countries through next year. This means that users will now see whether a hotel has things like free WiFi, free breakfast, parking availability, a pool, or a business center, right in search.

We’re focused on helping travelers find information and choices about hotels, while making it easier for them to select and book the hotel that’s right for them. We’re also committed to helping partners connect with travelers when they are ready to book, across devices and Google platforms. We hope the changes announced today will make planning that next trip an even easier click away.

Tom Mulders, Senior Program Manager, Travel

Supporting our young scientists through the Google Science Fair

Google Blogs — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 22:06:00 +0000

Mariette DiChristina is the Editor in Chief and senior vice president of Scientific American—the first woman to hold the role in the magazine's 170-year history. She has been a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 2011 and served as president of the National Association of Science Writers in 2009 and 2010. She joins us here today to share her perspective on the Google Science Fair, which is in its fifth edition this year. -Ed.

This marks my fifth year with the Google Science Fair. In October 2010, when I had my first conversations with my friends at Google about their idea to create a global online science fair that any kid 13–18 could participate in, I thought it sounded pretty cool. But I couldn’t then imagine just how inspiring and powerful such a competition would turn out to be in reality.

At the time, I hadn’t even been editor in chief of Scientific American for a year, but I had real ambitions to try to do something to make a difference in educating our young people about science. You see, I believe that science is the engine of human prosperity—it’s the way we grapple with some of the world’s most challenging problems, from cures for diseases to living sustainably in a finite world. So I’ve always seen the idea of fostering evidence-based thinking in our next generation of global citizens as vital.

Now, five years later and working with partners LEGO Education, National Geographic and Virgin Galactic, the Google Science Fair has an impressive track record of enabling our world’s young scientists to shine. Over the years, they’ve tackled serious issues, like world hunger and the energy crisis. Their projects have worked on how to diagnose and treat diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. They’ve engineered flashlights powered by their hands and plastics made of banana peels. And to date, the fair has provided almost $1 million in scholarships, and sent four grand prize winners on trips around the world to further their scientific passions.

Tonight we added some new winners to that list as we recognized and celebrated the 2015 top 20 finalist projects and the bright young scientists behind them:

The Grand Prize went to Olivia Hallisey for creating a novel way to detect Ebola.
Girish Kumar won the Google Technologist Award for helping improve learning through auto-generated study questions.
The National Geographic Explorer Award went to Deepika Kurup for her idea to use solar-powered silver to create clean drinking water.
Krtin Nithiyanadam’s project focused on improved diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease and won him the Scientific American Innovator Award.
Pranav Sivakumar's automated search for gravitationally lensed quasars earned him the Virgin Galactic Pioneer Award.
And Anurudh Ganesan took home The LEGO Education Builder Award for his unique twist on effectively transporting vaccines.

If you didn’t get to tune in, you can still watch the Awards Show live stream and check out the complete list of impressive finalists and winners, including our first ever Inspiring Educator, Aydan Meydan from Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In all of these finalists and the thousands of submissions from students in 100+ countries, we see something common. These students are inventive, thoughtful, and determined to help make the world a better place. All they need is a chance and a platform to do so. And, unlike some of us adults, they are ready to try things that other people think are “impossible.” I find them inspiring.

It’s imperative for us to support and encourage our young people to explore and challenge the world around them through scientific discovery. So we’re especially glad that Ahmed Mohamed—the 14-year-old clock maker from Texas—took us up on our invite to attend this year’s event. Curious young scientists, inventors and builders like him should be encouraged and empowered.

The past decades have brought tremendous innovations and challenges, and none of us knows what the future of scientific discovery holds. But I can tell you one thing: it’s going to be better thanks to these kids. They will be part of building a brighter future for us all—and as they do, those of us at Scientific American, Google, LEGO Education, National Geographic and Virgin Galactic will be cheering them on.

So start thinking of your ideas for next year! We can’t wait to see what you’ll try next.

Posted by Mariette DiChristina, Editor in Chief of Scientific American and Chief Judge of the Google Science Fair

Improved Digital Certificate Security

Google Security PR — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 18:23:00 +0000

Posted by Stephan Somogyi, Security & Privacy PM, and Adam Eijdenberg, Certificate Transparency PM

On September 14, around 19:20 GMT, Symantec’s Thawte-branded CA issued an Extended Validation (EV) pre-certificate for the domains google.com and www.google.com. This pre-certificate was neither requested nor authorized by Google.

We discovered this issuance via Certificate Transparency logs, which Chrome has required for EV certificates starting January 1st of this year. The issuance of this pre-certificate was recorded in both Google-operated and DigiCert-operated logs.

During our ongoing discussions with Symantec we determined that the issuance occurred during a Symantec-internal testing process.

We have updated Chrome’s revocation metadata to include the public key of the misissued certificate. Additionally, the issued pre-certificate was valid only for one day.

Our primary consideration in these situations is always the security and privacy of our users; we currently do not have reason to believe they were at risk.

Through the Google lens: Search Trends Sept 11–17

Google Blogs — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 15:17:00 +0000

Another week flown by—sometimes the pace is enough to make you need a dislike button. Here’s a look at the past seven days as seen through Google Search:

Tick tock
A 14-year-old teenager named Ahmed Mohamed found himself in the spotlight this week, with searches for his name soaring above 500K. Mohamed, who lives in Texas and is Muslim, was arrested on Monday after he brought a clock that he’d made himself to school and it was mistaken for a bomb. In the days that followed, thousands of people expressed their support for Mohamed online with the hashtag #IStandwithAhmed, and he received invitations to visit the White House, MIT, Facebook—and yes, even Google. As more and more people heard about the story, they turned to search with questions like “What did Ahmed’s clock look like?” and “What was Obama’s response to Ahmed’s clock?”

Nature’s ways
California has been battling brutal wildfires this year, as the drought has dried up fields and forests across the state. Last week’s Butte Fire threatened thousands of acres and burned hundreds of homes, and it seemed like as soon as it was contained the Valley Fire in Lake County was blazing. Searchers turned to the web with questions like “How does a wildfire create its own weather?” and “Why are the wildfires getting worse?” But while firefighters worked around the clock up north to stop the inferno, southern California was breaking records for rainfall. Really. Tuesday was the second-wettest day in L.A. in September since 1877, with 50,000+ searches for [weather Los Angeles] as astonished Angelenos looked to learn more about this unfamiliar wet stuff falling from the sky.

Mother Nature wasn’t through with her surprises, though. Wednesday, an 8.3 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Chile, forcing 1 million people to evacuate—and causing 2 million searches for [Chile earthquake]. Tsunami warnings were in effect as far away as California, Japan and New Zealand. Despite some casualties and billions of dollars’ worth of damages, experts say that Chile’s investments in structural reinforcements and other earthquake preparedness prevented the disaster from being much worse.

Debate club
The Republican presidential debate was the subject of more than 5 million searches this week as people looked for more about the candidates and issues. While Donald Trump was the most searched candidate both overall and in nearly every state, he had some competition from former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. Fiorina drew attention for her performance in the debate, in particular her opposition to Planned Parenthood (the subject of more than 200K searches this week) and her reaction to comments Trump had made about her in the press. Taking Trump to task for past comments was a theme on Wednesday; in fact, the top searched moment of the night was when Jeb Bush asked Trump for an apology to his wife.

Posted by Emily Wood, Managing Editor, who searched this week for [drywall anchors] and [pine state biscuits]

Disabling SSLv3 and RC4

Google Security PR — Thu, 17 Sep 2015 17:00:00 +0000

Posted by Adam Langley, Security Engineer

As the previously announced transition to SHA-256 certificates is nearing completion, we are planning the next changes to Google’s TLS configuration. As part of those changes, we expect to disable support for SSLv3 and RC4 in the medium term.

SSLv3 has been obsolete for over 16 years and is so full of known problems that the IETF has decided that it must no longer be used. RC4 is a 28 year old cipher that has done remarkably well, but is now the subject of multiple attacks at security conferences. The IETF has decided that RC4 also warrants a statement that it too must no longer be used.

Because of these issues we expect to disable both SSLv3 and RC4 support at Google’s frontend servers and, over time, across our products in general, including Chrome, Android, our webcrawlers and our SMTP servers. (Indeed, SSLv3 support has already been removed from Chrome.) The SSL Pulse survey of the top 200,000 HTTPS sites finds that, already, 42% of sites have disabled RC4 and 65% of sites have disabled SSLv3.

If your TLS client, webserver or email server requires the use of SSLv3 or RC4 then the time to update was some years ago, but better late than never. However, note that just because you might be using RC4 today doesn’t mean that your client or website will stop working: TLS can negotiate cipher suites and problems will only occur if you don’t support anything but RC4. (Although if you’re using SSLv3 today then things will stop working when we disable it because SSLv3 is already a last resort.)

Minimum standards for TLS clients

Google's frontend servers do a lot more than terminate connections for browsers these days; there are also lots of embedded systems talking to Google using TLS. In order to reduce the amount of work that the deprecation of outdated cryptography causes, we are also announcing suggested minimum standards for TLS clients today. This applies to TLS clients in general: certainly those that are using TLS as part of HTTPS, but also, for example, SMTP servers using STARTTLS.

We can't predict the future, but devices that meet these requirements are likely to be able to continue functioning without changes to their TLS configuration up to 2020. You should expect these standards to be required in cases where Google runs certification programs, but it’s a very good idea to meet them anyway.

Devices that don’t meet these standards aren’t going to stop working anytime soon (unless they depend on RC4 or SSLv3—see above), but they might be affected by further TLS changes in the coming years.

Specifically, we are requiring:

TLS 1.2 must be supported.
A Server Name Indication (SNI) extension must be included in the handshake and must contain the domain that's being connected to.
The cipher suite TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 must be supported with P-256 and uncompressed points.
At least the certificates in https://pki.google.com/roots.pem must be trusted.
Certificate handling must be able to support DNS Subject Alternative Names and those SANs may include a single wildcard as the left-most label in the name.

In order to make testing as easy as possible we have set up https://cert-test.sandbox.google.com, which requires points 1–3 to be met in order to make a successful connection. Thus, if your TLS client can’t connect to that host then you need to update your libraries or configuration.

No longer serving a cross-sign to Equifax

At the moment the certificate chains that Google properties serve most often include a cross-sign from our CA, GeoTrust, to our previous CA, Equifax. This allows clients that only trust our previous CA to continue to function. However, this cross-sign is only a transitional workaround for such clients and we will be removing it in the future. Clients that include our required set of root CAs (at https://pki.google.com/roots.pem) will not be affected, but any that don’t include the needed GeoTrust root may stop working.

Matching your donation to humanitarian relief for refugees and migrants

Google Blogs — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 14:03:00 +0000

My name is Rita Masoud and I am a refugee. I was born in war-torn Kabul, Afghanistan. When I was seven, my family and I fled to Europe with our belongings in a single suitcase, hoping for a safer and better future. Our journey involved many dark train and bus rides, as well as hunger, thirst, cold and fear. Fortunately, we received asylum in The Netherlands, where I grew up in a safe environment and was able to find my way in life. Today, I work for Google in California.

I was lucky. But as the refugee and migrant crisis has grown, many people like my family are desperate for help. Last week, Google announced a €1 million (~$1.1 million) donation to organizations who are providing front-line humanitarian relief to refugees and migrants around the world. Today, we're inviting you to join us. To double the impact of your contribution, we’ll match the first €5 million (~$5.5 million) in donations globally, until together we raise €10 million (~$11 million) for relief efforts.

Your donation will be distributed to four nonprofits providing aid to refugees and migrants: Doctors Without Borders, International Rescue Committee, Save the Children and UN High Commissioner for Refugees. These nonprofits are helping deliver essential assistance—including shelter, food and water, and medical care—and looking after the security and rights of people in need.

Visit google.com/refugeerelief to make your donation. Thank you for giving.

En route from Afghanistan, with my family and some belongings. You can read more about my journey on my blog.

Update September 18: In just two and a half days, you've helped us reach our goal to raise €10 million (~$11 million). Thank you for your contributions to help refugees and migrants in need.

Posted by Rita Masoud, Product Marketing Manager, Google.org

Google forwarding numbers arrive in Canada

Rob Newton — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 09:00:00 +0000

The ability to call a business is often critical in helping potential customers complete a purchase. In fact, 61% of mobile searchers say it's extremely important to be able to call a business during the purchase phase of the shopping process.¹ Measuring these phone calls to your business is essential for understanding the full value of Google search ads and making informed decisions for acquiring new customers. That’s why we’re excited to announce the launch of Google forwarding numbers in Canada.

A "Call" button in a search ad on a mobile device

Canada, say hello to Google forwarding numbers

Google forwarding numbers are an important step toward measuring the phone calls you receive through Google search ads. When you use Google forwarding numbers with your call extensions and call-only campaigns, we’ll dynamically assign a unique phone number to your ad. When a customer calls that number, AdWords will route the call to your business phone number while providing you with useful information about the caller’s area code, call duration, and whether the call was answered.

Many people who search for local businesses prefer to call a phone number with a recognizable area code, which is why Google forwarding numbers will show a local Google forwarding number, where available. For example, if your business is based in Vancouver, your ads are eligible to use a “604” area code with your Google forwarding number.

Canadian advertisers like belairdirect and 1-800-Got-Junk are already using Google forwarding numbers to improve performance on their call ads:

"As marketers, we are always looking for new ways to leverage technology in order to be more efficient and measure the full value of our ad campaigns. Now, with Google forwarding numbers, we're able to gain valuable insights into the consumer behavior behind calls to make our campaigns and call centers more useful for current and future customers. Furthermore, we've identified that calls that last over 10 minutes are more likely to result in someone signing up for an insurance policy. We can now count these as call conversions to optimize for higher-quality calls." Anne Fortin, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Strategic Relationships, belairdirect

“Call extensions and call-only campaigns help customers reach our service representatives more quickly to schedule a junk pick-up. So far, we’ve been able to generate thousands of leads and now with insights from Google forwarding numbers in Canada, we can monitor call details and filter calls by duration. This gives us vital information on which campaigns are driving the right calls and how we can better invest our advertising spend." Keegan Morrison, PPC Account Manager, 1-800-Got-Junk

Clicks that lead to calls from your website

While call extensions and call-only ads are very effective, many customers also call your business after clicking through a Google ad and learning more about the products and services you offer on your website. Website call conversions is a powerful tool that dynamically inserts a Google forwarding number on your website to identify and measure the calls that occur after a Google ad click. When someone clicks on your website’s phone number or dials it directly from their phone, you can attribute the call and call value back to the keyword and ad that drove the customer.

Advertisers like Blinds.com are already using website call conversions to gain a more holistic picture of their AdWords performance:

“It’s a great idea to implement Google’s website call conversions, particularly if you have a call center that handles over 15% of sales or if you’re faced with the challenge of attributing offline calls to online spend. With website call conversions, we’ve attributed 56% more revenue to mobile ads and measured 173% higher average order value. With these insights, we’ve been able to increase and optimize spend towards keywords that are generating the most call conversions. We’re looking forward to rolling this out to Blinds.ca in Canada.” Michael Nicholas, SEM Specialist

Maximize call value

In addition to measuring call conversions, Google forwarding numbers also allow you to assign a conversion value. For example, a business might assign a revenue value to calls that last over 5 minutes. By measuring these calls, you can automatically optimize your keyword bids to drive more valuable calls using Target ROAS. This flexible bid strategy factors in signals like device, location, and time of day to make auction-time bid adjustments that maximize call conversion value, while reaching your business goals.

Learn more

With the launch of Google forwarding numbers, you can now report on call metrics and conversions, measure website call conversions, and optimize your bids to drive more valuable phone calls. You can learn more about each of these products in the AdWords Help Center and read our best practices for maximizing performance with calls.

Posted by Amit Agarwal, Product Manager, AdWords

¹Think with Google, The Role of Click to Call in the Path to Purchase, September 2013
*In some cases, a local Google forwarding number may not be available. When this happens, your ad will show a toll-free Google forwarding number instead

Walk alongside the elephants of the Samburu National Reserve in Street View

Google Blogs — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 03:00:00 +0000

Today for the first time, we’re releasing Street View imagery of Kenya—including the Samburu National Reserve, Lewa Wildlife Conservancy and the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust—in partnership with Save the Elephants and with the support of the Samburu County Government. We'll let Save the Elephants' David Daballen take it from here. -Ed.

It’s a wild life at the Save the Elephants research camp in Samburu, in the heart of northern Kenya’s wilderness. For the last 15 years at Save the Elephants, I’ve spent my days among the elephants, working alongside my fellow Samburu people to study and protect them. Research shows that 100,000 elephants across Africa were killed for their ivory between 2010-2012, but thanks to our work in the Samburu National Reserve their numbers are now slowly increasing. Today, a visit to Samburu is a chance not only to see these magnificent creatures in their natural habitat, but also discover a uniquely beautiful landscape where people’s lives are interwoven with the landscape’s wildlife. It’s my honour to invite you on a journey to my homeland with Street View in Google Maps.

Every time I drive into the Reserve, I can see the trust on the elephants’ faces and feel a warm welcome. When I’m out and about, I never know which of my fellow citizens I’ll bump into next. It could be some of the 600+ elephants I can recognize—like the Hardwood family—frolicking together, a group of Samburu warriors walking along the Ewaso Nyiro River, a pride of lions enjoying a bit of shade, or a leopard crossing the path. While you make your journey through Street View, you may be surprised what awaits.

Hardwood family of elephants, Samburu National Reserve, Kenya

South of Samburu, up into the hills of Kenya, the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy awaits exploration. In this greener landscape, you can cross the open savannah, where animals like zebras and rhinoceroses live protected from poachers and hunters. Every day, the Lewa radio command center plots the movements of elephants (and other GPS-collared wildlife) onto Google Earth to help rangers determine where elephants are and when they might be in danger. If an elephant’s GPS collar sends an alert to indicate the elephant has stopped moving, a team of rangers and tracking dogs will investigate. Save the Elephants was one of the first organizations to use this technology, having collared 266 elephants across Africa since 1998.

Elephants and zebras graze in the open plains of the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy

Visiting the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, you can see the devastating effect of poaching and other causes of elephant deaths in Kenya. Founded in 1977, the Trust provides lifesaving assistance to wild animals in need, including orphaned elephants and rhinos. At their Elephant Orphanage in Nairobi, elephant caretakers stand in for an elephant’s lost family, providing 24/7 care and specially formulated milk. As the orphans grow, they are gradually reintegrated back into the wild, where they are protected by the charity’s Anti-Poaching and Aerial Surveillance Teams. To date, the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust has hand-raised more than 180 orphaned infant elephants, including little Sokotei, who I helped to rescue in Samburu after his mother died of natural causes when he was six months old. He’s just one elephant amid thousands that have been lost across the continent, but when you're up against a challenge of this scale, every elephant counts.

Orphaned elephants play in the mud at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Nairobi, Kenya

I hope this glimpse into life in Samburu has inspired you to learn more about elephants’ plight and how you can help. Samburu is my home and is full of life. To ensure it remains that way, please consider supporting the research of Save the Elephants, making a donation to the anti-poaching efforts of Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, or fostering an orphaned elephant at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. After exploring in Street View, come and see us here in Kenya in person—we’d love to have you!

Posted by David Daballen, Head of Field Operations at Save the Elephants

Through the Google lens: Search Trends Sept 4–11

Google Blogs — Fri, 11 Sep 2015 16:37:00 +0000

Alongside star athletes, royals and vice presidents, an unpronounceable village in Wales had its moment in the search spotlight this week. Read on for seven days of search trends.

That interview
Stephen Colbert took to the air as the new host of CBS’ The Late Show Tuesday, with an impressive 6.6 million viewers and half a million Google searches for the premiere, and a search spike every night since. The week’s star-studded line-up included actors George Clooney and Scarlett Johanssen, but by Friday morning it was guest Vice President Joe Biden who was driving the search buzz for the frank and emotional conversation he had with Colbert about the family tragedies both have suffered. The interview wasn’t all serious—the VP joked about the host’s 2008 run for the presidency, and proposed joining forces for 2016. A Colbert-Biden ticket would be tough to beat (in searches, at least).

Venus vs. Serena (vs. Roberta)
Game on. As Venus and Serena Williams faced each other this week in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open, the sisters generated a combined one+ million searches from people following the action online. Serena ultimately beat out older sister Venus both on the court and on Google—topping Venus Tuesday in search volume. Heading into the weekend, all eyes continued to be on Serena and her bid for the first tennis Grand Slam win since Steffi Graf’s in 1988. But it wasn’t to be. As Serena suffered a shocking semifinal upset by Roberta Vinci of Italy this afternoon, people from Jamaica to Romania to Zimbabwe followed the action on Google.

Congrats, Ma’am
This week, Queen Elizabeth II became Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, surpassing the record set by great-great-grandmum Queen Victoria. (According to the BBC, this happened at 23,226 days, 16 hours and approximately 30 minutes … but who’s counting?) This milestone was popular across the pond—the U.S. was the top country outside the Commonwealth searching for information about Her Royal Highness. But her loyal subjects in the U.K. also had questions. Besides some basics like the Queen’s age and her cash flow, one question Brits repeatedly searched on Google this week was: Why does the Queen celebrate two birthdays? The lengthy official answer on the royal website references the weather, King Edward VII, and horses. An alternative answer? Because she can.

It’s Welsh, and it starts with an L (two, actually)
At 58 letters, the Welsh village of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch has the longest and most notoriously difficult-to-say place name in the United Kingdom. And after Welsh weatherman Liam Dutton nailed its pronunciation live on air Wednesday (and subsequently on YouTube), people around the world turned to Google with a collective “Whoa!” Along with wanting to know if this is a real place (yes, indeed), and how it got its name (unconfirmed, but one YouTube commenter suggests it was named by a cat taking a walk on a keyboard), the top search on Google was, of course, how to pronounce it. With 7 million views and counting, here’s weatherman Dutton with the answer. Show-off.

Posted by Abbi Tatton, who searched this week for [the war of 1812]

Cutting unwanted ad injectors out of advertising

Google Security PR — Thu, 10 Sep 2015 09:00:00 +0000

Posted by Vegard Johnsen, Product Manager, Google Ads Traffic Quality

For the last few months, we’ve been raising awareness of the ad injection economy, showing how unwanted ad injectors can hurt user experience, jeopardize user security, and generate significant volumes of unwanted ads. We’ve used learnings from our research to prevent and remove unwanted ad injectors from Google services and improve our policies and technologies to make it more difficult to spread this unwanted software.

Today, we’re announcing a new measure to remove injected ads from the advertising ecosystem, including an automated filter in DoubleClick Bid Manager that removes impressions generated by ad injectors before any bid is made.

Unwanted ad injectors: disliked by users, advertisers, and publishers
Unwanted ad injectors are programs that insert new ads, or replace existing ones, in the pages users visit while browsing the web. Unwanted ad injectors aren’t part of a healthy ads ecosystem. They’re part of an environment where bad practices hurt users, advertisers, and publishers alike.

We’ve received almost 300,000 user complaints about them in Chrome since the beginning of 2015—more than any other issue, and it’s no wonder. Ad injectors affect all sites equally. You wouldn’t be happy if you tried to get the morning news and saw this:

Not only are they intrusive, but people are often tricked into installing them in the first place, via deceptive advertising, or software “bundles.” Ad injection can also be a security risk, as the recent “Superfish” incident showed.

Ad injectors are problematic for advertisers and publishers as well. Advertisers often don’t know their ads are being injected, which means they don’t have any idea where their ads are running. Publishers, meanwhile, aren’t being compensated for these ads, and more importantly, they unknowingly may be putting their visitors in harm’s way, via spam or malware in the injected ads.

Removing injected inventory from advertising
Earlier this quarter, we launched an automated filter on DoubleClick Bid Manager to prevent advertisers from buying injected ads across the web. This new system detects ad injection and proactively creates a blacklist that prevents our systems from bidding on injected inventory. Advertisers and agencies using our platforms are already protected. No adjustments are needed. No settings to change.

We currently blacklist 1.4% of the inventory accessed by DoubleClick Bid Manager across exchanges. However, we’ve found this percentage varies widely by provider. Below is a breakdown showing the filtered percentages across some of the largest exchanges:

We’ve always enforced policies against the sale of injected inventory on our ads platforms, including the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Now advertisers using DoubleClick Bid Manager can avoid injected inventory across the web.

No more injected ads?
We don’t expect the steps we’ve outlined above to solve the problem overnight, but we hope others across the industry take action to cut ad injectors out of advertising. With the tangle of different businesses involved—knowingly, or unknowingly—in the ad injector ecosystem, progress will only be made if we all work together. We strongly encourage all members of the ads ecosystem to review their policies and practices and take actions to tackle this issue.

New reporting columns for multi-channel advertisers

Rob Newton — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:00:00 +0000

In April, we introduced improvements that help multi-channel advertisers more easily manage reporting for specific campaign types. For example, if you want to see performance columns for Display, you can quickly filter your view to see only your Display campaigns. Today, we introduced another important enhancement to AdWords - TrueView is joining Search, Shopping and Display campaigns within the core AdWords interface. Now we are adding three new reporting columns to make it easier to report across all of these campaign types.

Introducing new ad interaction columns

As we add more campaign types into AdWords, we want to help you surface key insights across all of the campaigns you manage. That’s why we’re rolling out three new reporting columns to help you quickly report on some of the most important ad interactions that occur across all of your campaign types.

Starting this week, you’ll notice the following new columns:

Interactions - An interaction is the main action people take with your ad format— such as clicks for text and shopping ads, views for video ads, and engagements for Lightbox ads.
Interaction Rate - Interaction rate is used to measure how often people interact with your ad after it’s shown to them—for example, clicks divided by impressions for text ads, or views divided by impressions for video ads.
Avg Cost - Average cost is the average amount you've paid for your ads divided by total interactions—clicks divided by cost, or views divided by total cost.

New interaction columns help you measure metrics across your campaign types

When viewing multiple campaign types, these columns give you a more uniform and quick way to view key metrics for your campaign types in a single column. For example, for search, the primary metric you might want to view is clicks. And for video, your primary metric is views. Now, you can use the Interactions column to quickly see a combined metric for clicks and views for each of these campaign types within a single column.

Additionally, to make reporting by specific campaign type easier, you’ll now see your Total rows broken out by campaign type, instead of by network. And you will also see total rows for only the campaign types you manage.

Total rows are now broken out by campaign type

Getting started

Over time, you may start seeing these columns in other areas of AdWords. To learn how to start using the new ad interactions columns in your AdWords reporting, check out our Help Center.

Posted by Pallavi Naresh, Product Manager, AdWords

The power of video meets the capabilities of AdWords – all TrueView campaigns now in AdWords

Rob Newton — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 11:08:00 +0000

You know how you have to go to a special section within AdWords to create and manage your TrueView video campaigns? And jump back and forth when you want to report and optimize across all your campaigns? And you still can’t take advantage of AdWords bulk tools for your video campaigns? Well, good news, friends: those days are now over. TrueView is joining Search, Display, and Shopping campaigns within the core AdWords interface.

With the simplicity of a single interface and a more consistent experience, AdWords makes it easier for you to optimize across campaign types. Plus, you can take advantage of powerful bulk management tools to save time and effort when working on multiple TrueView campaigns. And now that all campaign types share the same structure, we can bring you new features for video, faster than ever before.

Now if you’ll follow us, we’d love to show you around…

In the top left corner, you can find the campaign type selector. This is useful to see only campaigns of a certain type. For instance, selecting “Video” gives you a view of your campaigns that looks similar to AdWords for video – meaning you’ll see only the tabs and columns that are most relevant for managing video campaigns. And best of all, we remember your column preferences whenever you switch among views, so you don’t need to change them around each time you toggle campaign types.

Campaign type selector

We’re also replacing targeting groups with ad groups, the basic building blocks for Search, Display, and Shopping campaigns. Now every ad group will have a single TrueView format, either in-stream or in-display. Though each ad group has only one format, campaigns can have multiple ad groups so you can still run both in-stream and in-display ads in the same campaign. To create a new campaign, just click the +CAMPAIGN button, click the new Video campaign type, and then create new ad groups within each campaign by clicking +AD GROUP.

Ad group creation

Now that TrueView has joined the party in AdWords, you’ll have access to a trove of goodies designed to help you manage, optimize, and report on accounts with lots of campaigns. For instance, bulk UI editing lets you modify information for multiple campaigns at once – directly from the UI, and bulk uploads let you download a snapshot of your campaigns, make changes en masse, and upload the changes live to your account. And report scheduling gives you the ability to set up a schedule for reports to run automatically, and have them emailed regularly to account users.

Bulk edits

Reporting for video campaigns is getting more powerful as well, as you’ll now have the ability to filter your results to isolate things like campaign name, label, cost, and conversions.

Filters

You’ll also see popular video features in familiar places in AdWords. For example, video remarketing is now in the AdWords shared library and YouTube account linking is in the Linked accounts section. Plus you’ll be able to see analytics for your video ads within the new "Videos" tab, and manage your targeting within the "Video targeting" tab.

Creating remarketing lists

Linking YouTube channels

Customers who’ve previewed the new interface found it saves them time and offers more powerful reporting. "As avid users of TrueView, we were eager to beta test the new TrueView in AdWords, and see how the change impacted our most complex campaign setups," said Pixability CTO Andreas Goeldi. "The increased functionality allows for improved workflow, better reporting, and significant time saved."

Whether your goals are to drive direct response or to build your brand, you now have a single, unified tool to address your full range of marketing goals. Starting today, you’ll be able to upgrade your campaigns to the new ad group structure, and say goodbye to those days of going to “All Video Campaigns” to get to your TrueView campaigns. To upgrade, just head to AdWords for video by clicking All video campaigns (once more, for old time’s sake) and click into the Upgrade Center to easily switch over all your campaigns in one fell swoop. And don’t worry – all your historical stats and targeting will carry over (just drill down to the campaign level to see them). If you’d rather not upgrade your campaigns yourself, no problem – we’ll automatically upgrade your campaigns, starting in six weeks.

And if you’re a video type of person (we certainly are!), check out all the content of this blog post in video form here.

For more information, check out the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by the fka AdWords for video team
Lane Shackleton, Group Product Manager
Ammar Ibrahim, Product Manager
Avi Fein, Product Manager

Native Gmail ads arrive in AdWords for all advertisers

Rob Newton — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 13:00:00 +0000

Email is a big part of our everyday routines as a go-to place for staying in touch with family, friends and colleagues. It’s also a great way to get the latest updates from our favorite brands, whether we’re hearing about a huge weekend sale, getting deals on vacation packages, or learning about a new cutting-edge product. For several years, we’ve been working with advertisers to extend their email marketing strategies and test ways to bring more relevant offers to users with native Gmail ads¹. Starting today, these native Gmail ads are now available for all advertisers directly in AdWords.

Rich and interactive ad formats

As we’ve developed Gmail ads, we’ve tested various formats to see what users find most engaging. One improvement we’ve made is to remove standard text ads from Gmail and show fewer, higher-quality native ads that integrate more seamlessly with the inbox experience.

With today’s announcement, advertisers can manage native Gmail ads right in AdWords by setting up a Display Network campaign and creating a Gmail ads format in the Ad gallery. The ad has two main parts:

The collapsed ad that users initially see that matches the look and feel of the Gmail inbox. Users can click on this to expand it and get more details.

The expanded ad unit is triggered by a click on the collapsed ad. This is a full-page native ad that recreates the informational and visual richness of a landing page. After users click to expand, any subsequent clicks on your content are free, including clicks to save the ad to your inbox or forward it to others.

Advertisers can choose from several customizable Gmail ads templates for the expanded ad unit. They can feature a single image, highlight a promotion that combines an image with a description and call-to-action button, or showcase multiple products at once. The custom HTML format offers the greatest amount of flexibility in how you configure your assets and allows you to create an even richer ad experience by including videos, forms, phone numbers, and multiple links and calls-to-action.

Expanded ad unit examples

Reach your audience with advanced display targeting

You can use most of the display targeting options you’re already familiar with like keywords, affinity audiences, demographics, and topics. For example, a sports apparel advertiser could select relevant topics like “Fitness” and “Sporting Goods” or reach people in the “Health & Fitness Buffs” or “Running Enthusiasts” affinity audiences.

Brands like Marriott International are already using Gmail Ads to connect with users looking for compelling offers:

“We've had a lot of success working with our media agency, Beeby Clark+Meyler, to run Gmail ads and drive awareness for Renaissance Hotels. The larger ad unit allows us to feature videos and imagery that highlight the experience at Renaissance Hotels and our commitment to helping guests discover something new at their destination. We partnered with our creative agency, Anomaly, to embed rich visuals into our ads, and were able to drive great user engagement with 25% longer time spent on site and an 18% increase in pageviews per visit on RenHotels.com. This unit has also delivered ongoing high reach for the Renaissance Hotels brand. Since then, we've rolled out Gmail ads to additional Marriott International brand hotels globally and we're excited to launch them soon for our Autograph Collection Hotels as well."

Amy Sherman, Senior Director of Digital Marketing -

Giving users control over the ads they see

As Gmail ads have evolved, we've continued to give users the ability to actively control the types of ads they see. As with other Google ads, users can manage their ad settings to remove unwanted ads from specific advertisers. They can also opt out of interest-based ads entirely.

To learn how to set up your first Gmail ad, visit our Help Center for more information.

Posted by Omry Pruzan, Senior Product Manager, Gmail ads

¹Gmail ads do not run on Gmail for work as part of Google Apps for Work

Highlight a specific aspect of your products or services with structured snippet extensions

Rob Newton — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 12:59:00 +0000

Earlier this year, we introduced dynamic structured snippets. This automated ad extension gives your customers a better sense of the content on your website before they click on your ad. Whether it’s highlighting a list of hotel amenities or top clothing brands, dynamic structured snippets make your search ads more relevant and helpful while saving you time and simplifying campaign management.

Over the past few months, many of you have been seeing tremendous success with dynamic structured snippets. And we’ve heard that you sometimes want to customize the information that shows in this format. That’s why today we’re starting to roll out structured snippet extensions: advertiser-provided structured information that show with your text ads.

From amenities to brands to product types, you’ll now be able to select a predefined “Header” and input a list of customized values that make the most sense for your business. For example, if you’re a hotel brand promoting hotel property, you can now create a structured snippet for “Amenities” and order them accordingly.

Using structured snippets with callouts

Structure snippets and callouts have distinct attributes and benefits.

Learn more

Structured snippets will be rolling out to all AdWords accounts over the coming weeks. Please note that structured snippets can only be created in English at this time.

Ad extensions typically boost the performance of an ad and are also a factor in Ad Rank. Though ad extensions aren’t always eligible to show, the more you provide, the better the auction is at selecting the best combination of extensions to improve performance.

For more information about setting up structured snippets, see the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Senthil Hariramasamy, Product Manager, AdWords

Beautiful New Designs for Full-Screen In-App Ads

Rob Newton — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 10:48:00 +0000

Nearly 60% of smartphone users expect their favorite apps to look visually appealing. We’ve always believed that in-app ads can enhance an app’s overall experience by being well designed. So today we’re announcing a completely new look for our interstitial in-app ad formats - also known as full-screen ads - that run on apps in the AdMob network and DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Inspired by Material Design, the new app install interstitial comes with a beautiful cover photo, a round install button, and matching color schemes. Technology called “color extraction” makes the ads more consistent with the brand's look and feel -- we extract a dominant color either from the cover photo or app icon and apply it to the footer and install button. We found that having a greater variety of designs and colors can improve conversion rate.

Other features include the app’s rating, and a screenshot gallery which appears when a user taps ‘More images’, so users can learn more about the app without leaving the ad.

The previous design of our app install ads on the left, and our new version on the right.

Different examples of color matching.

Our app install formats have driven more than a billion downloads across Android and iOS. You can use these new designs automatically when you run a mobile app install campaign on the AdMob network in AdWords. That’s right, no extra work required!

Next, our new text-based ads are easier to read, and contain a larger headline and a round call-to-action button that clicks through to a website.

On the left, the previous text ad interstitial design, and the new version on the right.

As with other ad format innovations, our ads UI team test multiple designs - ten in this case over the course of a year - to find final versions that increase clicks and conversions for advertisers, and a positive experience for users. Both app install and text ad formats appear within the app and can be closed easily, so users can return to what they were doing with a single tap.

As we announced at Google I/O this year, the volume of interstitial impressions has more than doubled across AdMob since last July, so now’s a great time to get your business in front of more app users.

If you’re a developer looking to learn more about earning with in-app interstitial ads in your app, visit AdMob now. These new designs will also be available to developers monetizing their apps with DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Posted by Pasha Nahass, Product Manager

Say hello to the Enigma conference

Elie Bursztein — Tue, 18 Aug 2015 10:09:00 +0000

Posted by Elie Bursztein - Anti-abuse team, Parisa Tabriz - Chrome Security and Niels Provos - Security team

USENIX Enigma is a new conference focused on security, privacy and electronic crime through the lens of emerging threats and novel attacks. The goal of this conference is to help industry, academic, and public-sector practitioners better understand the threat landscape. Enigma will have a single track of 30-minute talks that are curated by a panel of experts, featuring strong technical content with practical applications to current and emerging threats.

Google is excited to both sponsor and help USENIX build Enigma, since we share many of its core principles: transparency, openness, and cutting-edge security research. Furthermore, we are proud to provide Enigma with with engineering and design support, as well as volunteer participation in program and steering committees.

The first instantiation of Enigma will be held January 25-27 in San Francisco. You can sign up for more information about the conference or propose a talk through the official conference site at http://enigma.usenix.org

New research: Comparing how security experts and non-experts stay safe online

Google Security PR — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 02:00:00 +0000

Posted by
Iulia Ion, Software Engineer
Rob Reeder, Research Scientist
Sunny Consolvo, User Experience Researcher

Today, you can find more online security tips in a few seconds than you could use in a lifetime. While this collection of best practices is rich, it’s not always useful; it can be difficult to know which ones to prioritize, and why.

Questions like ‘Why do people make some security choices (and not others)?’ and ‘How effectively does the security community communicate its best practices?’ are at the heart of a new paper called, “...no one can hack my mind”: Comparing Expert and Non-Expert Security Practices” that we’ll present this week at the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security.

This paper outlines the results of two surveys—one with 231 security experts, and another with 294 web-users who aren’t security experts—in which we asked both groups what they do to stay safe online. We wanted to compare and contrast responses from the two groups, and better understand differences and why they may exist.

Experts’ and non-experts’ top 5 security practices

Here are experts’ and non-experts’ top security practices, according to our study. We asked each participant to list 3 practices:

Common ground: careful password management

Clearly, careful password management is a priority for both groups. But, they differ on their approaches.

Security experts rely heavily on password managers, services that store and protect all of a user’s passwords in one place. Experts reported using password managers, for at least some of their accounts, three-times more frequently than non-experts. As one expert said, “Password managers change the whole calculus because they make it possible to have both strong and unique passwords.”

On the other hand, only 24% of non-experts reported using password managers for at least some of their accounts, compared to 73% of experts. Our findings suggested this was due to lack of education about the benefits of password managers and/or a perceived lack of trust in these programs. “I try to remember my passwords because no one can hack my mind,” one non-expert told us.

Key differences: software updates and antivirus software

Despite some overlap, experts’ and non-experts’ top answers were remarkably different.

35% of experts and only 2% of non-experts said that installing software updates was one of their top security practices. Experts recognize the benefits of updates—“Patch, patch, patch,” said one expert—while non-experts not only aren’t clear on them, but are concerned about the potential risks of software updates. A non-expert told us: “I don’t know if updating software is always safe. What [if] you download malicious software?” and “Automatic software updates are not safe in my opinion, since it can be abused to update malicious content.”

Meanwhile, 42% of non-experts vs. only 7% of experts said that running antivirus software was one of the top three three things they do to stay safe online. Experts acknowledged the benefits of antivirus software, but expressed concern that it might give users a false sense of security since it’s not a bulletproof solution.

Next Steps

In the immediate term, we encourage everyone to read the full research paper, borrow experts’ top practices, and also check out our tips for keeping your information safe on Google.

More broadly, our findings highlight fundamental misunderstandings about basic online security practices. Software updates, for example, are the seatbelts of online security; they make you safer, period. And yet, many non-experts not only overlook these as a best practice, but also mistakenly worry that software updates are a security risk.

No practice on either list—expert or non-expert—makes users less secure. But, there is clearly room to improve how security best practices are prioritized and communicated to the vast majority of (non expert) users. We’re looking forward to tackling that challenge.

Working Together to Filter Automated Data-Center Traffic

Google Security PR — Tue, 21 Jul 2015 06:00:00 +0000

Posted by Vegard Johnsen, Product Manager Google Ad Traffic Quality

Today the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) announced a new pilot blacklist to protect advertisers across the industry. This blacklist comprises data-center IP addresses associated with non-human ad requests. We're happy to support this effort along with other industry leaders—Dstillery, Facebook, MediaMath, Quantcast, Rubicon Project, TubeMogul and Yahoo—and contribute our own data-center blacklist. As mentioned to Ad Age and in our recent call to action, we believe that if we work together we can raise the fraud-fighting bar for the whole industry.

Data-center traffic is one of many types of non-human or illegitimate ad traffic. The newly shared blacklist identifies web robots or “bots” that are being run in data centers but that avoid detection by the IAB/ABC International Spiders & Bots List. Well-behaved bots announce that they're bots as they surf the web by including a bot identifier in their declared User-Agent strings. The bots filtered by this new blacklist are different. They masquerade as human visitors by using User-Agent strings that are indistinguishable from those of typical web browsers.

In this post, we take a closer look at a few examples of data-center traffic to show why it’s so important to filter this traffic across the industry.

Impact of the data-center blacklist

When observing the traffic generated by the IP addresses in the newly shared blacklist, we found significantly distorted click metrics. In May of 2015 on DoubleClick Campaign Manager alone, we found the blacklist filtered 8.9% of all clicks. Without filtering these clicks from campaign metrics, advertiser click-through rates would have been incorrect and for some advertisers this error would have been very large.

Below is a plot that shows how much click-through rates in May would have been inflated across the most impacted of DoubleClick Campaign Manager’s larger advertisers.

Two examples of bad data-center traffic

There are two distinct types of invalid data-center traffic: where the intent is malicious and where the impact on advertisers is accidental. In this section we consider two interesting examples where we’ve observed traffic that was likely generated with malicious intent.

Publishers use many different strategies to increase the traffic to their sites. Unfortunately, some are willing to use any means necessary to do so. In our investigations we’ve seen instances where publishers have been running software tools in data centers to intentionally mislead advertisers with fake impressions and fake clicks.

First example

UrlSpirit is just one example of software that some unscrupulous publishers have been using to collaboratively drive automated traffic to their websites. Participating publishers install the UrlSpirit application on Windows machines and they each submit up to three URLs through the application’s interface. Submitted URLs are then distributed to other installed instances of the application, where Internet Explorer is used to automatically visit the list of target URLs. Publishers who have not installed the application can also leverage the network of installations by paying a fee.

At the end of May more than 82% of the UrlSpirit installations were being run on machines in data centers. There were more than 6,500 data-center installations of UrlSpirit, with each data-center installation running in a separate virtual machine. In aggregate, the data-center installations of UrlSpirit were generating a monthly rate of at least half a billion ad requests— an average of 2,500 fraudulent ad requests per installation per day.

Second example

HitLeap is another example of software that some publishers are using to collaboratively drive automated traffic to their websites. The software also runs on Windows machines, and each instance uses the Chromium Embedded Framework to automatically browse the websites of participating publishers—rather than using Internet Explorer.

Before publishers can use the network of installations to drive traffic to their websites, they need browsing minutes. Participating publishers earn browsing minutes by running the application on their computers. Alternatively, they can simply buy browsing minutes—with bundles starting at $9 for 10,000 minutes or up to 1,000,000 minutes for $625.

Publishers can specify as many target URLs as they like. The number of visits they receive from the network of installations is a function of how long they want the network of bots to spend on their sites. For example, ten browsing minutes will get a publisher five visits if the publisher requests two-minute visit durations.

In mid-June, at least 4,800 HitLeap installations were being run in virtual machines in data centers, with a unique IP associated with each HitLeap installation. The data-center installations of HitLeap made up 16% of the total HitLeap network, which was substantially larger than the UrlSpirit network.

In aggregate, the data-center installations of HitLeap were generating a monthly rate of at least a billion fraudulent ad requests—or an average of 1,600 ad requests per installation per day.

Not only were these publishers collectively responsible for billions of automated ad requests, but their websites were also often extremely deceptive. For example, of the top ten webpages visited by HitLeap bots in June, nine of these included hidden ad slots -- meaning that not only was the traffic fake, but the ads couldn’t have been seen even if they had been legitimate human visitors.

http://vedgre.com/7/gg.html is illustrative of these nine webpages with hidden ad slots. The webpage has no visible content other than a single 300×250px ad. This visible ad is actually in a 300×250px iframe that includes two ads, the second of which is hidden. Additionally, there are also twenty-seven 0×0px hidden iframes on this page with each hidden iframe including two ad slots. In total there are fifty-five hidden ads on this page and one visible ad. Finally, the ads served on http://vedgre.com/7/gg.html appear to advertisers as though they have been served on legitimate websites like indiatimes.com, scotsman.com, autotrader.co.uk, allrecipes.com, dictionary.com and nypost.com, because the tags used on http://vedgre.com/7/gg.html to request the ad creatives have been deliberately spoofed.

An example of collateral damage

Unlike the traffic described above, there is also automated data-center traffic that impacts advertising campaigns but that hasn’t been generated for malicious purposes. An interesting example of this is an advertising competitive intelligence company that is generating a large volume of undeclared non-human traffic.

This company uses bots to scrape the web to find out which ad creatives are being served on which websites and at what scale. The company’s scrapers also click ad creatives to analyse the landing page destinations. To provide its clients with the most accurate possible intelligence, this company’s scrapers operate at extraordinary scale and they also do so without including bot identifiers in their User-Agent strings.

While the aim of this company is not to cause advertisers to pay for fake traffic, the company’s scrapers do waste advertiser spend. They not only generate non-human impressions; they also distort the metrics that advertisers use to evaluate campaign performance—in particular, click metrics. Looking at the data across DoubleClick Campaign Manager this company’s scrapers were responsible for 65% of the automated data-center clicks recorded in the month of May.

Going forward

Google has always invested to prevent this and other types of invalid traffic from entering our ad platforms. By contributing our data-center blacklist to TAG, we hope to help others in the industry protect themselves.

We’re excited by the collaborative spirit we’ve seen working with other industry leaders on this initiative. This is an important, early step toward tackling fraudulent and illegitimate inventory across the industry and we look forward to sharing more in the future. By pooling our collective efforts and working with industry bodies, we can create strong defenses against those looking to take advantage of our ecosystem. We look forward to working with the TAG Anti-fraud working group to turn this pilot program into an industry-wide tool.

Google, the Wassenaar Arrangement, and vulnerability research

Google Security PR — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 10:00:00 +0000

Posted by
Neil Martin, Export Compliance Counsel, Google Legal
Tim Willis, Hacker Philanthropist, Chrome Security Team

Cross-posted on the Google Public Policy Blog

As the usage and complexity of software grows, the importance of security research has grown with it. It’s through diligent research that we uncover and fix bugs — like Heartbleed and POODLE — that can cause serious security issues for web users around the world.

The time and effort it takes to uncover bugs is significant, and the marketplace for these vulnerabilities is competitive. That’s why we provide cash rewards for quality security research that identifies problems in our own products or proactive improvements to open-source products. We’ve paid more than $4 million to researchers from all around the world - our current Hall of Fame includes researchers from Germany, the U.S., Japan, Brazil, and more than 30 other countries.

Problematic new export controls

With the benefits of security research in mind, there has been some public head scratching and analysis around proposed export control rules put forth by the U.S. Department of Commerce that would negatively affect vulnerability research.

The Commerce Department's proposed rules stem from U.S. membership in the Wassenaar Arrangement, a multilateral export control association. Members of the Wassenaar Arrangement have agreed to control a wide range of goods, software, and information, including technologies relating to "intrusion software" (as they've defined that term).

We believe that these proposed rules, as currently written, would have a significant negative impact on the open security research community. They would also hamper our ability to defend ourselves, our users, and make the web safer. It would be a disastrous outcome if an export regulation intended to make people more secure resulted in billions of users across the globe becoming persistently less secure.

Google comments on proposed rules

Earlier today, we formally submitted comments on the proposed rules to the United States Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS). Our comments are lengthy, but we wanted to share some of the main concerns and questions that we have officially expressed to the U.S. government today:

Rules are dangerously broad and vague. The proposed rules are not feasible and would require Google to request thousands - maybe even tens of thousands - of export licenses. Since Google operates in many different countries, the controls could cover our communications about software vulnerabilities, including: emails, code review systems, bug tracking systems, instant messages - even some in-person conversations! BIS’ own FAQ states that information about a vulnerability, including its causes, wouldn’t be controlled, but we believe that it sometimes actually could be controlled information.
You should never need a license when you report a bug to get it fixed. There should be standing license exceptions for everyone when controlled information is reported back to manufacturers for the purposes of fixing a vulnerability. This would provide protection for security researchers that report vulnerabilities, exploits, or other controlled information to any manufacturer or their agent.
Global companies should be able to share information globally. If we have information about intrusion software, we should be able to share that with our engineers, no matter where they physically sit.
Clarity is crucial. We acknowledge that we have a team of lawyers here to help us out, but navigating these controls shouldn’t be that complex and confusing. If BIS is going to implement the proposed controls, we recommend providing a simple, visual flowchart for everyone to easily understand when they need a license.
These controls should be changed ASAP. The only way to fix the scope of the intrusion software controls is to do it at the annual meeting of Wassenaar Arrangement members in December 2015.

We’re committed to working with BIS to make sure that both white hat security researchers’ interests and Google users’ interests are front of mind. The proposed BIS rule for public comment is available here, and comments can also be sent directly to publiccomments@bis.doc.gov. If BIS publishes another proposed rule on intrusion software, we’ll make sure to come back and update this blog post with details.

More Visible Protection Against Unwanted Software

Google Security PR — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 08:19:00 +0000

Posted by Moheeb Abu Rajab and Stephan Somogyi, Google Safe Browsing Team

Last year, we announced our increased focus on unwanted software (UwS), and published our unwanted software policy. This work is the direct result of our users falling prey to UwS, and how badly it was affecting their browsing experience. Since then, Google Safe Browsing’s ability to detect deceptive software has steadily improved.

In the coming weeks, these detection improvements will become more noticeable in Chrome: users will see more warnings (like the one below) about unwanted software than ever before.

We want to be really clear that Google Safe Browsing’s mandate remains unchanged: we’re exclusively focused on protecting users from malware, phishing, unwanted software, and similar harm. You won’t see Safe Browsing warnings for any other reasons.

Unwanted software is being distributed on web sites via a variety of sources, including ad injectors as well as ad networks lacking strict quality guidelines. In many cases, Safe Browsing within your browser is your last line of defense.

Google Safe Browsing has protected users from phishing and malware since 2006, and from unwanted software since 2014. We provide this protection across browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and Safari) and across platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Android). If you want to help us improve the defenses for everyone using a browser that integrates Safe Browsing, please consider checking the box that appears on all of our warning pages:

Safe Browsing’s focus is solely on protecting people and their data from badness. And nothing else.

Create a search engine with schema.org types

Custom Search Team — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 01:28:00 +0000

We are happy to announce the integration of Google Custom Search with the schema.org standard. Schema.org is a structured data markup schema including a shared markup schema vocabulary that is supported by major search providers. This integration enables you to create powerful and expressive topical search engines by simply specifying schema.org types in your Google Custom Search Engine definition.

How would you go about using this new feature? Say you are the webmaster of a site about movies. You might want to create a movie search engine that can search for pages about movies either from your website, your affiliated websites or from the millions of sites that use schema.org. Achieving this functionality is now only a click away thanks to the integration of Google Custom Search with schema.org. All you have to do is add the schema type “Movie” to your Custom Search Engine definition, as shown below, and you’re done! Users of your movie search engine will then only see result pages that have the “Movie” schema annotation.

You can even refine schema.org-based search engines with other advanced search features. For example, you might make an engine for pages that describe http://schema.org/JobPosting, with a country restriction of "France", or a language restriction of "French".

To know more about creating Custom Search Engines with schema.org types, visit our developer documentation.

Posted by: Neelesh Bodas, Custom Search Engine team.

Use your expertise - build a topical search engine

Ewa Gasperowicz — Tue, 10 Dec 2013 06:27:00 +0000

Did you know that a topical search engine can help your users find content from more than a single domain? You can use your expertise to provide a delightful user experience targeting a particular topic on the Web.

There are two main types of engines built with Google Custom Search: site search and topical search. While site search is relatively straightforward - it lets you implement a search for a blog or a company website - topical search is an entirely different story.

Topical search engines focus on a particular topic and therefore usually cover a part of the Web that is larger than a single domain. Because of this topical engines need to be carefully fine-tuned to bring the best results to the users.

Kritikos

A nice example of a topical search engine is Kritikos - a search engine for visual media relevant to higher education developed by the Engineering Department at Liverpool University. Developed in its pilot phase exclusively for Engineering students, Kritikos is now able to add new academic subjects simply by changing one line of code in the API call.

Kritikos is using a mix of Custom Search tuning techniques to find the most relevant results and then matches the results with the data stored in the local node of the Learning Registry. The additional data is displayed as an overlay in the search results page, providing valuable reference for the engine’s users. This method allows Kritikos to also include a social mechanism into their results - e.g. it is able to show users votes or comments about the usefulness of particular resources. Here is what Andrew Green, the Technical Director of Kritikos from the University of Liverpool says about the project.

In developing Kritikos, we wanted to build upon existing search engines, rather than try and build our own. We discovered that, once we found the documentation, the Google Custom Search Engine API was incredibly easy to use. The call to the API, based on the user’s subject of interest, search terms and preferred media type, is constructed in only a dozen lines of code. The resulting JSON data was easily parsed in order to generate the thumbnail images that give Kritikos its visual impact.

This shows the first 3 results for the term query term “fracture”, as seen by an Engineering student. The icons in the top right corners indicate that other students have interacted with these resources in some way.

Here are the results for the same search term (“fracture”), this time as viewed by a Medical student.

Andrew Green
Technical Director, Kritikos
The University of Liverpool

You can read more about their adventures with Custom Search on the project’s blog.

From talking to developers working with Custom Search and looking at different engines out there on the Web, I learned a few trends present in many of the solutions. Here they are - a few things to keep in mind when building a topical search engine.

Choose your index wisely

There is a lot of mess on the Internet. You don’t want to distract your users and make them spend time on random sites. The point of making a topical search engine is to make it focused and targeted.

An index is a list of sites - or url patterns - that your engine is operating on. Choosing what should go into the engine’s index and what should be left out is a matter of expected quality. Sometimes even sites that are on topic can be left out of the index or de-prioritized in order to promote other content, that you - the author of the engine - consider more valuable to your users.

Guess your user intention

The usability rule - Don’t make me think - plays nicely with topical search engines. You build the engine to make your users life easier, finding the information faster and more efficient. Usually your engine is functioning in some particular context - it is included in a topical website, it is addressed to some specific audience etc. You can apply this context to the search process, to make your users more productive and happier with the experience. There are a number of techniques that allow you to add context to your users’ queries - for details check out the Topical CSE article on Google Developers site.

Provide delightful experience with custom rendering

Search does not need to be boring. You can add all sorts of fireworks to your search results - custom design, non-linear browsing experience, user interactions or displaying additional data.

Google Custom Search allows you to change almost any aspect of the presentation layer of the results - as long as it is not misleading to the users.

What is coming

Structured data is gaining more and more momentum on the Web. It is a way of expressing real-world concepts in a machine-readable format - for example information about places, events, businesses etc. It already powers some of Google’s products and features, like Rich snippets, Knowledge Graph panels or Google Now cards.

You can harness the power of structured data in a topical search engine by filtering results by a schema.org types and properties or creating your own custom rich snippets.

Stay tuned, we will post more about the integration of Google Custom Search and schema.org standard soon.

Learn how

In the Advanced Topics section of developer’s documentation, you can find an article about creating a Topical CSE. It describes in more detail the techniques needed to obtain the results discussed in this blog post.

If you have an interesting topical search engine and would like to share it, give us a shout at twitter at @googlecse, we’d love to see what you came up with. Happy coding!

Ewa Gasperowicz, Developer Programs Engineer

Bootstrapping your CSEs from keywords

Custom Search Team — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 02:10:00 +0000

Custom Search provides upto 5000 URL patterns to define a “slice” of the web to search over. However, if you’re creating a Custom Search Engine on a topic, such as “global warming”, finding more than a few good sites for a topic can be hard. We recently launched suggested sites to help suggest more sites for your search engine similar to your included sites.

Today, we’re introducing another tool that is hopefully intuitive as well as interesting : You can discover hundreds of sites to include in your CSE starting just with keywords! For example, for a CSE on “global warming”, adding keywords like [pollution], [global warming] and [greenhouse effect] can lead you to discover global warming related sites within minutes.

This tool attempts to combine Google’s knowledge with the topic expertise you have - Google suggests sites, but you can control the topic expansion, and guide the tool towards your topic in a fine grained way.

The tool is accessible off of the New Search Engine page on the Custom Search control panel. Give the tool a whirl, see more details on how the tool works in our documentation, and let us know what you think on the product forum.

Posted by: Vivek Sahasranaman, Custom Search Team

Suggested sites for CSEs

Custom Search Team — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 01:31:00 +0000

Have a CSE to search over your favorite topic (e.g. cars)? Here is a new feature to help you expand your CSE’s definition. This feature recommends more url patterns relevant to the ones you already have in your search engine. We also provide a set of sample pages for each of the recommended patterns.

You can find more documentation here.

Make your CSEs better and richer. Try this out now on your CSE’s homepage !

Posted by: Chirag Sethi, Custom Search Team

A new look for Custom Search control panel

Custom Search Team — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 06:00:00 +0000

We’re excited to announce a new, modern design for the control panel in keeping with prior user experience changes to Custom Search. You’ll also find a more intuitive layout to the various controls and configuration options. While configuring a Custom Search Engine, you can immediately view and test your work within the control panel.

We hope you enjoy the new look!

Posted by: Neelesh Bodas and Brent VerWeyst, Custom Search team

A simple, yet powerful custom search engine

Custom Search Team — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 05:40:00 +0000

Simplicity and speed are two principles we love when it comes to design at Google. Today, we’re excited to announce the new CSE layout that displays results in an overlay, on top of any content on your page.

What this means for developers:

Takes seconds to create. We simplified the creation interface to get you going faster.
One snippet for search box and results. Place it where you want your search box to appear.
Powerful features now come by default: autocomplete, image thumbnails and results sorting.

What this means for your users:

Uninterrupted browsing experience.
Faster, more simple search means more chances for your users to discover great content from your site.

You may visit W3Schools to see the new layout in action or use the CSE below which searches our blog.

Try out the new layout by creating a new search engine. It takes less than a minute. Once you have your search engine snippet ready, simply paste it on your website.

Posted by Manolis Kounelakis and Neelesh Bodas, Custom Search team

Introducing Custom Search Element v2

Custom Search Team — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 09:13:00 +0000

Custom Search Engine (CSE) allows you to incorporate rich search functionality into your website. You do this by adding specific HTML markup - known as the Custom Search element - to web pages on your site. The Custom Search element renders a search experience (search boxes and results pages) on your site’s pages. By controlling the placement of the Custom Search element on your pages and configuring your CSE settings, you can create customized layouts that are tuned for the look-and-feel of your website.

We’re happy to announce today a new, improved version of the Custom Search element. Here are some of the key highlights and improvements of what we call Custom Search element v2.

Search UI is rendered based on the settings stored on the Google CSE servers. This means that any configuration changes you make in the CSE control panel will automatically be reflected on your web pages the next time they reload. You no longer need to copy-and-paste new element code into your website when you modify your CSE using the control panel.

All element code is loaded asynchronously for reduced page load times.

Client-side customization allows you to overwrite global CSE settings on a per-page basis. For example, you can enable search history, disable auto search on page load, configure different Google Analytics parameters, and more. Customization is done through an easy-to-use HTML syntax which does not require any Javascript knowledge.

To start using Custom Search element v2 on your website, go to the “Get code” section of the CSE control panel and follow the instructions shown there.

We’ll continue to support older versions of the Custom Search element for the time being but encourage you to update your CSE implementation to take advantage of the improvements.

Posted by Ying Huang, Software Engineer

Ads background colors in Custom Search

Custom Search Team — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 13:19:00 +0000

As we continue to improve the look and feel of Google Custom Search Engine (CSE), today we’re announcing a change in how ads are displayed on CSE search results pages.

Currently ads in CSE results are shown in a separate section from organic search results labeled “Ads by Google”. With this latest change, the ads section will also have a distinct background color, in keeping with the visual style of ads on the google.com search results page.

Because CSE allows you to choose from one of several built-in styles, the ads background color is different for each style to contrast in a visually appealing way with the default background color. (Note that if you customize the main background color, the ads background color will automatically match it to avoid clashing.)

The following screenshots illustrate what a user performing a custom search on a website might see, for two of the built-in CSE styles.

This change in design provides users another way to distinguish ads in CSE search result pages.

CSE publishers will see these changes effective immediately. As always, please let us know any questions or feedback in our discussion forum.

Posted by MyLinh Yang, Product Manager

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

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

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.