Official Search Engine Blogs in-ONE-feed

Google Reader is your new watercooler

Jenna Bilotta — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:21:00 EDT

One of the things that we love best about Reader is the ability to easily share interesting items with your friends. In fact, we like it so much that we've been adding bunches of new sharing features over the last year including choosing friends to share with, sharing with note and the sharing bookmarklet. But we quickly realized that one of the most important pieces of the sharing cycle was missing: the ability to have conversations with friends about all those shared items.

With our new conversation feature, you can have private discussions on shared items with your friends. Now, instead of obsessively asking everyone in your office if they have seen that awesome lego cake article you shared last night, they can tell you how awesome you are, right within Google Reader!

What's new with this feature:

You can comment on any items that you share or that have been shared by your friends.
In order to keep track of conversations, you can check out the new "Comment view" which is optimized for tracking conversations and commenting. Comment view is a little different from your normal reading mode because it sorts the list of items by most recent comment. When there are new comments, the "Comment view" link will appear as bold. You can even read the full text of the items in this view by clicking the "Expand this item" (which will mark it as read).
If you see a comment icon on top of a friend's profile picture in list or expanded view, it means there are comments on that item (this helps you decide what to read first.)
When more than one of your friends share the same item, you'll see a separate conversation under each person who shared it, together in the same view.
And don't forget, you can always read and add comments on your iPhone.

Some things to keep in mind:

Comments can only be seen by friends of the person who originally shared the item.
Comments are not yet available in the "All items" view.
We have much more planned for this feature, but we would love to hear what you think, too.
Currently, you cannot comment on items in a shared items subscription or on a shared tag; comments can only be made on items shared by friends.
This release is English-only for now.

We are super excited to bring you this feature, and have plans to keep improving it in the near future. So, find some friends that use Reader, find some cool stuff to share, and join the conversation. Happy commenting!

Making ads more interesting

A Googler — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 05:01:00 EDT

At Google, we believe that ads are a valuable source of information â€” one that can connect people to the advertisers offering products, services and ideas that interest them. By making ads more relevant, and improving the connection between advertisers and our users, we can create more value for everyone. Users get more useful ads, and these more relevant ads generate higher returns for advertisers and publishers. Advertising is the lifeblood of the digital economy: it helps support the content and services we all enjoy for free online today, including much of our news, search, email, video and social networks.

That's why Google has worked hard to create technology that makes the advertising on our own sites, and those of our partners, as relevant as possible. To date, we have shown ads based mainly on what your interests are at a specific moment. So if you search for [digital camera] on Google, you'll get ads related to digital cameras. If you are visiting the website of one of our AdSense partners, you would see ads based on the content of the page. For example, if you're reading a sports page on a newspaper website, we might show ads for running shoes. Or we can show ads for home maintenance services alongside a YouTube video instructing you on how to perform a simple repair. There are some situations, however, where a keyword or the content of a web page simply doesn't give us enough information to serve highly relevant ads.

We think we can make online advertising even more relevant and useful by using additional information about the websites people visit. Today we are launching "interest-based" advertising as a beta test on our partner sites and on YouTube. These ads will associate categories of interest â€” say sports, gardening, cars, pets â€” with your browser, based on the types of sites you visit and the pages you view. We may then use those interest categories to show you more relevant text and display ads.

We believe there is real value to seeing ads about the things that interest you. If, for example, you love adventure travel and therefore visit adventure travel sites, Google could show you more ads for activities like hiking trips to Patagonia or African safaris. While interest-based advertising can infer your interest in adventure travel from the websites you visit, you can also choose your favorite categories, or tell us which categories you don't want to see ads for. Interest-based advertising also helps advertisers tailor ads for you based on your previous interactions with them, such as visits to their websites. So if you visit an online sports store, you may later be shown ads on other websites offering you a discount on running shoes during that store's upcoming sale.

Our advertisers and publisher partners have been asking us for a long time to offer interest-based advertising. Advertisers need an efficient way to reach those who are most interested in their products and services. And publishers can generate more revenue when they connect advertisers to interested audiences.

This kind of tailored advertising does raise questions about user choice and privacy â€” questions the whole online ad industry has a responsibility to answer. Many companies already provide interest-based advertising and they address these issues in different ways. For our part, we're launching interest-based advertising with three important features that demonstrate our commitment to transparency and user choice.

Transparency - We already clearly label most of the ads provided by Google on the AdSense partner network and on YouTube. You can click on the labels to get more information about how we serve ads, and the information we use to show you ads. This year we will expand the range of ad formats and publishers that display labels that provide a way to learn more and make choices about Google's ad serving.
Choice - We have built a tool called Ads Preferences Manager, which lets you view, delete, or add interest categories associated with your browser so that you can receive ads that are more interesting to you.
Control - You can always opt out of the advertising cookie for the AdSense partner network here. To make sure that your opt-out decision is respected (and isn't deleted if you clear the cookies from your browser), we have designed a plug-in for your browser that maintains your opt-out choice.

To find out more about what Google is doing in this important area, please visit our Public Policy blog and Privacy Center.

Keyword advertising has been so successful because it's useful to users, advertisers and publishers â€” everyone's interests are aligned. We believe that interest-based ads will create the same virtuous cycle, by giving users more relevant ads, while generating higher returns for advertisers and publishers.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, VP, Product Management

SXSW 2009 Party: Reader, Blogger, and You

Brian Shih — Sat, 7 Mar 2009 16:31:00 EST

It's about that time of year again! If you're heading down to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest, we hope you can join us and our friends from Blogger for a little party. Come, drink, and meet the fine folks behind Google Reader. We may even have a few things for early arrivals...

Where: Six LoungeÂ - 117 W 4th St @ Colorado (map)
When: Sunday, March 15th from 10pm - 1am

Bring an SXSW Interactive Badge, or find one of us or the Blogger team at the conference for an invitation. We'll be donning some schwag, so keep an eye out.

Hope to see you there, and don't forget to follow googlereader on Twitter for any updates!

SearchMonkey and BOSS Take on ETech

administrator — Fri, 6 Mar 2009 17:12:27 EST

Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! BOSS, and Yahoo! Developer Network will be at ETech, O’Reilly’s flagship Emerging Technology conference, in San Jose, CA, next week. Stop by and visit us at Booth Four on March 10 to 11 to talk about the latest trends and technologies in search.

Weâ€™re also hosting a session on March 10, where our â€œChief Technical Monkeyâ€� Paul Tarjan will present and lead a discussion about SearchMonkey and the Semantic Web. The session is being held in the Crystal Room at 7:30 p.m.

Hope to see you there!

Yahoo! Search

Power down for the planet

A Googler — Fri, 6 Mar 2009 15:00:00 EST

Do you leave your fridge door open after grabbing what you need? Do you leave your vacuum cleaner running when you aren't cleaning? Of course not. The idea of doing either of these things sounds silly, yet many people don't think to turn off their computers after using them. By using power management tools on your computer and buying more efficient computers, you can save nearly half a ton of CO2 and more than $60 a year in personal energy costs.

To do our part, Google co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative (CSCI) to promote a smarter, greener computing future. The simple changes above can have a HUGE collective impact; our goal is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 54 million tons per year by 2010 â€” the equivalent of taking 11 million cars off the road.

The biggest obstacle we face is not technological, it's awareness. That's why we're excited that CSCI has launched the Power Down for the Planet video contest, a challenge to you and your friends to develop original and creative videos that educate, entertain, and inform others about the importance of energy efficient computing.

So pick up a camera and make a video telling your own Climate Savers Computing story. How will the environment benefit from advances in computer power management? How do poor computing practices waste energy? What does a sustainable computing future look like to you? Let your imagination go wild.

Join us, gather some friends, and broadcast your vision of efficient computing. The team with the most compelling video can win up to $5,000 and energy efficient laptops; students at participating universities are also eligible to win $5,000 and Specialized Globe bicycles.

We can't wait to see what you create.

Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar

New Craigslist Search Features

Thu, 5 Mar 2009 18:47:18 EST

I haven't said a lot here about what I've been working on at Craigslist recently. But Craig mentioned me today in his blog and that made me remember that I should say something. :-)

Much of my work has been behind the scenes infrastructure stuff, but some of that is translating into new features that craigslist users can see. And, as of this morning, a lot more users are seeing the fruits of that labor.

As I noted a few weeks back in Sphinx Search at Craigslist, I've been hacking a lot on search. Here's a screen shot to show you what I've been calling "nearby search" (though "nearby results" is probably more appropriate).

If you run a search in a city and there aren't many results, we'll also run the search in nearby areas to see if we can find matches there too. The above example was a search for "2008 mazda" in my hometown of Toledo, Ohio. The "nearby" results are clearly separated from local matches and local matches are still given priority.

The feedback has been generally positive so far. Though, with any change, some folks aren't happy. I can't say it's going to stay in this exact form. We may need to tweak the interface, the radius of the nearby search areas, and so on. But on the whole I think it's a helpful improvement when you're looking for something that's a bit harder to find and you're willing to drive an hour or two.

As of earlier today, it's available in most smaller and medium sized US cities. It'll probably come to the remainder of cities before long too. I've been testing it for about a week and a half, starting with about a dozen cities and then adding about twenty more late last week. This morning I mostly flipped the big switch.

Of course, this opened the flood gates for similar feature requests: custom radius searches, state wide searching, search ALL of craigslist, etc.

In related news, a couple months back I expanded the search help page to include advanced search syntax, including grouping, negation, OR queries, and more.

(comments)

Shaking up earthquake searches

A Googler — Thu, 5 Mar 2009 18:40:00 EST

Silicon Valley is well known as the home of technology companies like Google, but it's also one of many regions around the world with frequent earthquake activity. When we in the Bay Area feel an earthquake, we want to know how strong it was and where it occurred, as soon as possible. After all, even a small vibration could be the result of a severe earthquake far away. Traditionally, we've had to wait for answers as reporters scrambled to investigate and spread the news. But thanks to the US Geological Survey (USGS), we can get earthquake data straight from the source.

Now, when you search for "earthquakes" on Google, you'll get information on some of the most recent, significant earthquakes from around the world, right on the search results page. From there, you can click through to the USGS Earthquake Center for more information, or visit the epicenter of any quake on Google Maps. To find earthquakes closer to home, you can add a location to your query, for example: "earthquakes California."

Earthquake search is the latest of Google's special search features, and many others can help you in different ways. If you'd like to know the local time where an earthquake occurred, search for "time" followed by the location (for example, "time Japan"). Let's say the epicenter was 50km from the coast and you want to know how far that is in miles. Type "50km in miles" into the search box. You can find out about these special features and many more on the Search Features page.

Posted by Mike Danylchuk, Software Engineer, Search User Interface team

Inquisitor: Now on iPhone

administrator — Thu, 5 Mar 2009 11:59:36 EST

Today Inquisitor goes mobile for the iPhone, making the application ubiquitous across platforms. Searching on-the-go should be quick and easy â€“ thatâ€™s why we focused on making the design of the Inquisitor application simple and seamless so you can get your answers quickly.

Inquisitor Mobile Search auto-completes your search and gives suggestions as you type to refine your search. When you type in your query, websites and suggestions appear immediately below the search box. Inquisitor also speeds up your search by quickly loading site summaries and allowing you to navigate between results and the browser with just one click.

Give the Inquisitor iPhone app a try (download it here at the Apple App store) and let us know what you think.

Ariel Seidman and David Watanabe
Yahoo! Search

Tipping points

A Googler — Thu, 5 Mar 2009 06:00:00 EST

Ideas are everywhere, but how do we know which ones actually work? At Google, we put a lot of stock in both the wisdom of crowds â€” the idea that lots of people responding to a given question can collectively find the best answer â€” and the value of community. We believe that people working together can help one another through even the most difficult times.

As we all navigate today's choppy economic waters, we'd like to put these beliefs into practice. That's why we created Tip Jar (www.google.com/tipjar), an experiment powered by Google Moderator that we hope will help you discover the most effective ways to save money. There are lots of money-saving tips scattered across the web, but even if you found them, it would be hard to know which ones were worth trying. Tip Jar gathers tips in one place and invites people â€” i.e., you, me and everyone else â€” to rank them in order of usefulness and even add their own tips to the list. Over time, the best and most useful tips will rise to the top.

So go ahead: Take a Tip. Share a Tip. We'll all be a little bit richer for it.

Posted by Colby Ranger, Software Engineer

Google Health: helping you better coordinate your care

A Googler — Wed, 4 Mar 2009 18:43:00 EST

We continue to learn a tremendous amount since launching Google Health in the spring of 2008. We're listening to feedback from users every day about their needs, and one issue we hear regularly is that people want help coordinating their care and the care of loved ones. They want the ability to share their medical records and personal health information with trusted family members, friends, and doctors in their care network. I can relate to this.

Just a few years ago, my father suffered a minor heart attack and was sent to the ER. I arrived on the scene in a panic, and was asked what medications he was taking. To my surprise, I had no clue. If my father had a Google Health account, and had shared his profile with me, I would have been up-to-date on his current medications.

I'm happy to announce today Google Health has addressed this issue with the release of a new "Share this profile" feature enabling Google Health users to invite others they trust (whether it's a family member, a trusted care network provider, friends, and/or a doctor) to view their medical records and personal health information.

Log into Google Health, click on "Share this Profile," and type in the email address of the person with whom you'd like to share your profile. Google Health will send an email to them with a link to view your profile. The link will only work in connection with the email address of that person â€” your profile can't be accessed if the link is forwarded on. You can stop sharing at any time, and you can always see who has access to your information. Those who are viewing your profile can only see the profile you share â€” not any other one in your account. We've also built in some extra protections to make sure your health information stays safe, private, and under your control:

The link to view your profile expires after 30 days
Viewers can only see â€” not edit â€” your Google Health profile
You can review a user activity report to see who has viewed your profile

For doctors and family members who are not yet online, we've also made it easier to share a hard copy of your information via our new printing feature. The wallet format prints a wallet-sized card that includes a user's medications, and allergies; the PDF format prints a letter-sized copy of a user's profile, including medications, allergies, conditions, and treatments.

Finally, we've launched a new graphing feature that helps patients visualize their medical test information. This is great for, say, someone who has high cholesterol. They can use Google Health to enter their lab results on a monthly basis and see the trend over time.

There is still a lot more work to do on Google Health, and we're excited to keep hearing from you so we can continue to make improvements. For now, we hope this new sharing feature makes coordinating your care, or the care of loved ones, a little easier.

Posted by Sameer Samat, Director, Product Management

Chatting away on iGoogle...

A Googler — Mon, 2 Mar 2009 17:14:00 EST

I'm a creature of habit. My morning routine consists of going to my desk with coffee mug in hand and checking my email, reading the news and updating my to-do list. One place I can do all of that without having to go to multiple websites is iGoogle. Having the ability to work on email right on my iGoogle page has been awesome, but I simply couldn't get the same Gmail experience without the chat feature. So we got together with the iGoogle team several months back to talk about how to integrate a chat feature on iGoogle, and since then, we've been running experiments with a small number of iGoogle users and have also been using it internally. We're pleased to announce that starting today we are extending the feature to a larger set of iGoogle users.

Similar to the chat feature on Gmail, people will be able to send instant messages to their colleagues, friends and family straight from their iGoogle page. We've made this easy. If you're already a Gmail chat user, all your current chat settings will apply to iGoogle, so things will work the way you like in both places. But even more exciting is that you'll even be able to chat with friends who don't yet have a Gmail address â€” any email address will do. All you have to do is invite them as a chat buddy, and if they accept your invitation and sign up for iGoogle with their personal email account, their name becomes just a click away right on your page. Don't want to be bothered while you're checking out the latest news or reading your emails? You have a couple of options to hid the chat feature. You can either click the chat â€œoptionsâ€� link and selecting â€œhide chat,â€� or sign off completely by selecting "sign out of chat."

It's worth noting that this feature may have some kinks, so we ask for your patience as we work through them. Here at Google, it's common practice for us to involve our users as early possible so we can make sure we get it right. We'll also be rolling this feature out slowly, so if you don't see it on your iGoogle page and you simply can't wait to check it out, feel free to opt in by going to www.google.com/ig/v2invite.

Currently, iGoogle chat is rolling out in English for our U.S. users. But don't worry, the feature is coming soon for other iGoogle supported languages and countries. You can check out our Help Center for more information on how it works, and as always, we are interested in hearing any feedback you have.

Posted by Rhett Robinson, Google Talk Engineer

YouTube Symphony Orchestra winners are announced

A Googler — Mon, 2 Mar 2009 16:25:00 EST

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

Today we are proud to announce the winners of the world's first online collaborative orchestra. The global YouTube community and a judging panel containing members of the world's most renowned orchestras have selected over 90 talented musicians to be part of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. Together, these professional and amateur musicians play 26 different instruments and come from 30+ countries and territories on six continents.

To grasp the level of talent weâ€™re talking about, just take a look at the stellar string section:

The selected musicians will travel from around the world to New York City to participate in a collaborative summit for classical music on April 12-15, 2009, concluding with a concert at Carnegie Hall under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas, San Francisco Symphony Music Director, New World Symphony Founder and Artistic Director, and London Symphony Orchestra Principal Guest Conductor.

All the winning audition videos are on the YouTube Symphony Orchestra Channel; please share your congratulations with these musicians in the comments section, and donâ€™t forget to stay tuned as we follow them on the road to Carnegie Hall. (If youâ€™d like to cheer them on in person, tickets are on sale now at www.carnegiehall.org.)

Cue the congratulatory strings!

Posted by Michele Flannery, YouTube Music

Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update

administrator — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:31:00 EST

Weâ€™ve rolled out some changes to our index with fresh web data and updates to our crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We have had two updates since last November: one in December, 2008, and another in late January this year. We expect the update will be completed very soon. Throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index.

While we didnâ€™t do Weather Reports for the December and January updates, we heard loud and clear that the community still finds them helpful, so weâ€™ll continue to provide these reports.

To share your thoughts or check in with other Yahoo! Search users, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.

Sharad Verma
Yahoo! Search

Blogger connects to Google Friend Connect

A Googler — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:10:00 EST

When we introduced the Following feature for Blogger last fall, we wanted to help you connect with fans of your own blog and discover communities of people who share your interests. It has been exciting to see Following grow over the past few months, to say the least. With nearly three million communities of followers on Blogger blogs, and with one person following a blog every second, we've been looking for ways to help these communities continue to thrive.

As a first step toward that goal, today we are integrating the Blogger Following feature with Google Friend Connect. Not only does this make it easier for anyone to follow a Blogger blog, but also it gives your blog expanded visibility across the web as your followers join other sites and share their activities with their friends.

Blogger joins an open network of websites already using Friend Connect and visitors can now follow any Blogger blog by signing in with their Google, Yahoo, AOL, or OpenID credentials. The blogs that readers start to follow will appear alongside the other Friend Connect sites they've already joined. Additionally, you can find some new blogs and websites to join by checking out the profiles of other followers.

This video shows you how to follow a blog:

If you have a Blogger blog and you're already using the Followers gadget, you don't need to do anything to get these new features up and running â€” we've already migrated all of the existing Followers gadgets to the new version with Friend Connect. To learn more, visit our blog post on Blogger Buzz.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager, Google Friend Connect

Translate between 41 languages with Google Translate

A Googler — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 12:00:00 EST

Google Translate recently added Turkish, Thai, Hungarian, Estonian, Albanian, Maltese, and Galician to the mix. The rollout of these seven additional languages marks a new milestone: automatic translations between 41 languages (1,640 language pairs!). This means we can now translate between languages read by 98% of Internet users.

In just a few years, the machine translation group within Google Research has taken its initial research system from two languages to 41 languages and is now handling millions of translation requests a day. For several languages, Google Translate is the first freely available machine translation system for these languages. Of course, there's always room for improvement, and we're working hard to improve translation quality. Our statistical models are built from vast quantities of monolingual and translated texts using automated machine learning techniques.

It's exciting and satisfying to work on a product that can help people access content they may otherwise be unable to understand. We've heard stories of people using Google Translate to help them do business internationally, and we've seen many websites (e.g., New York's Metro Transit Authority) and blogs add the Google Translate My Page Gadget to their pages to make their content more accessible to people from all over the world.

Whenever I personally travel, I do lots of research on the web to figure out what to see and do, and where to stay and eat. With Translate, I'm able to use the cross-language search feature to find and access the latest info (e.g., restaurant recommendations, most recent trains/bus schedules, special events, etc.), which is often only available in the local language.

More importantly, Translate provides people who may not otherwise have a lot of web content available in their own language with access to the wealth of content on the truly worldwide web.

Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager

Let SearchMonkey Feed Your Facebook Addiction

administrator — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 11:00:23 EST

Starting today, Facebook enhanced results will automatically appear in search results. This means users can add a friend, poke, send a message, and view a personâ€™s friends from the deep links on the search results page. Facebook shared the structured data for this SearchMonkey app by adding semantic markup to their public profile pages.

Hereâ€™s an example of the Facebook enhanced result with Alex Moskalyuk, a key Facebook engineer on this project.

See the SearchMonkey app for Facebook in action yourself and try a search for your friends. Here at the Yahoo! Search Blog, we had fun checking out the Facebook profiles of marketing VP Raj Gossain and senior product marketing manager Graham Mudd.

We care about privacy as much as you do, so youâ€™ll only see results for Facebook users who have enabled their profiles to be publicly searched and viewed. If youâ€™re interested in â€œsocial-izingâ€� your search results page further, check out other SearchMonkey apps for social networking sites such as StumbleUpon, Delicious, and MyBlogLog.

We hope the SearchMonkey app for Facebook and our other social apps make finding and connecting with friends on the Web easier than ever. Let us know what you think.

SearchMonkey Team

Get Immersed (in Search) at TechFest 2009

livesearch — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:19:00 EST

Today hundreds of researchers from Microsoftâ€™s worldwide labs in China, England, India, and the United States will gather in Redmond to exchange ideas with colleagues, show off their latest projects, and provide a glimpse into the future of computing. There are some pretty cool search technologies being shown that we wanted to give some love to here on the Live Search team blog.

GeoLife 2.0: A Location-Based Social Network
GeoLife is a GPS-data-driven social network on Microsoft Virtual Earth. It is not only a Website where individuals can manage, visualize, and understand their life experience using their own GPS trajectories; itâ€™s also a social networking service that enables people to build connections with each other based on location histories.

Opinion Search
The Opinion Index in Live Search today is built off of research started in this project. The current project takes that work to the next level, collecting, storing, and organizing opinion data such as user reviews of computers, electronics, software, video games, restaurants, and hotels. That information will ultimately be used to help searchers more easily make informed purchase decisions.

Renlifang: Web-Scale Entity Summarization
Currently, information about a single entity (such as a person or a product) might appear on thousands of Web pages. Renlifang is a web-mining summarization system that extracts information about particular entities from billions of Web pages, reducing the number of pages a user has to comb through to find the information they are looking for.

Color-Structured Image Search
Color-Structure Image Search is a new image search interface that uses rough color layouts to indicate usersâ€™ intent (instead of using keywords only). This approach helps users find images that can be roughly described by color spatial distribution. For example, you may want images of a tiger on a sunny day, under a blue sky. If you search with the term â€œtiger,â€� it is difficult to find this type of image in the first few pages. If you expand your search term to â€œtiger sky,â€� it is even more difficult to find tiger-related images. With Color-Structured Image Search, weâ€™re able to re-rank search results for the query â€œtigerâ€� to include tiger-related images with â€œblueâ€� color at the top of the search results.

Check out the Microsoft Research TechFest 2009 homepage for more information including video clips and demos of some of the most innovative work from our research labs around the world.

Harry Shum, Corporate Vice President of Search Development, Live Search

Google Toolbar 6 beta for Internet Explorer: back to basics

A Googler — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:40:00 EST

The Toolbar Team has always been focused on improving your web experience. We started with the goal of making search more accessible, and a couple of iterations led to improvements like search suggestions, Google Bookmarks, Autofill, and Custom Buttons and gadgets. Now we're bringing the focus back to our core areas of search and navigation.

First of all, in today's Toolbar 6 launch for Internet Explorer we're introducing the Quick Search Box (QSB) feature that provides search functionality outside of the browser. Just click on the Google logo in the taskbar to trigger it (or use the Ctrl+Space shortcut for quicker access). As you type, it will provide search and website suggestions, relevant bookmarks, and even allow you to launch applications directly from the search box. Try typing "solitaire" to see the application launcher in action. And here's the best part: as you use the QSB, it'll customize itself to your usage pattern, so over time you have to type fewer characters to navigate to your favorite sites and applications.

In addition, we're building on our existing suggest functionality in the Toolbar search box by bringing elements from our search results page directly into the toolbar. We're experimenting with displaying high-quality website suggestions and sponsored links as you type your query. Clicking on these will take you directly to the website (try typing "cnn" in the toolbar to see an example). Going forward, we'll continue to explore new ideas and optimize the search box to give you the best experience possible.

Lastly, we wanted to bring the new tab page to our Internet Explorer users (our Firefox Toolbar users have been enjoying it already for the last few weeks). You can quickly access your most viewed sites, recently closed tabs and bookmarked pages â€” all from this new tab page. Editing your most visited sites is easy, and all this data remains locally in your browser, meaning none of your most viewed sites or recently closed pages are sent back to Google. Those who prefer new tabs to open a blank page or a website can do so in the Internet Explorer or Toolbar settings menus.

So, give the latest toolbar a shot â€” it's available in 40 languages â€” and don't forget to let us know what you think.

Posted by Zelidrag Hornung, Engineering Lead, Toolbar Team

The search is on for the Google Search Appliance

A Googler — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:05:00 EST

The Google Search Appliance (aka the GSA) provides universal search for businesses of all sizes. This handy yellow box pulls together documents, images, and other files from web servers, intranets, business applications, and more, making all of this accessible from one search box. Now we're holding a contest to see how "findable" the GSA is in offices from coast to coast in the U.S.

If the GSA has helped your business, we want to hear your story and see your pics with the shiny yellow box. (Don't worry, your photo doesn't have to be star-studded to win.) Two grand-prize winners will receive an all-expense paid trip to the Google IO conference.

The contest deadline is March 31, 2009 and the winners will be announced on April 17. For more information and to find out how to enter, check out the Enterprise Blog.

Posted by David Kim, Associate Product Marketing Manager, and avid appliance photographer

Update on Gmail

Karen — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 10:29:00 EST

The Gmail outage that affected many consumers and Google Apps users worldwide is now over. Users should find that theyâ€™re able to access their email now without any further problems.

Before you can access your Gmail, you may be asked to fill in whatâ€™s called a â€˜CAPTCHAâ€™ which asks you to type in a word or some letters before you can proceed. This is perfectly normal when you repeatedly request access to your email account, so please do go through the extra step â€“ itâ€™s just to verify you are who you say you are.

The outage itself lasted approximately two and a half hours from 9.30am GMT. We know that for many of you this disrupted your working day. Weâ€™re really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could. Our priority was to get you back up and running. Our engineers are still investigating the root cause of the problem.

Obviously weâ€™re never happy when outages occur, but we would like to stress that this is an unusual occurrence. We know how important Gmail is to you, and how much people rely on the service.

Thanks again for bearing with us.

Posted by Acacio Cruz, Gmail Site Reliability Manager

Current Gmail outage

Karen — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:28:00 EST

If youâ€™ve tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that weâ€™re having some problems. Shortly after 10 9:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email.

Weâ€™re working very hard to solve the problem and weâ€™re really sorry for the inconvenience. Those users in the US and UK who have enabled Gmail offline through Gmail Labs should be able to access their inbox, although they wonâ€™t be able to send or receive emails.

Weâ€™re posting updates to the Gmail Help Centre at http://mail.google.com/support/ and Google Apps users can visit the Google Apps help centre at www.google.com/support/a.

Thanks for bearing with us while we sort this out. We'll report back as we make progress.

Posted by Acacio Cruz, Gmail Site Reliability Manager

The next chapter for Google.org

A Googler — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 19:27:00 EST

(Cross-posted from the Google.org Blog)

When Larry and Sergey laid out their vision for Google.org, they hoped that this "experiment in active philanthropy" would one day have an even greater impact on the world than Google itself. They committed resources from Google's profits, equity and substantial employee time to this philanthropic effort, and they created the mission: "to use the power of information and technology to address the global challenges of our age." They structured Google.org so that in addition to traditional grant making, it can also invest in for-profit companies, advocate for policies and, most important, tap into Google's strengths: its employees, products and technologies. At first I was skeptical about "going corporate," but I came on board convinced that Google could make real progress on these issues. I think we have made an excellent beginning, but it is just a very few steps on a long path.

Now, three years after Google.org was founded, we've been reviewing our progress, and how best to take things forward. It's clear that I am most effective in helping to identify "big ideas" and potential partners, as well as raising awareness about society's biggest challenges. I am therefore very excited to become Google's Chief Philanthropy Evangelist. I think this is the highest contribution that I can make both to Google.org and to fighting the urgent threats of our day: from climate change to emerging infectious diseases, to issues of poverty and health care. By focusing my energy outwards I hope to be able to spend more time motivating policy makers, encouraging public and private partnerships, and generally advocating for the changes that we must make as a global society to solve these problems. Long-time Googler Megan Smith will take over day-to-day management of Google.org, joining as General Manager to lead us through this transition, in addition to her existing role as Vice President of New Business Development.

One of the first things that Megan will focus on is how Google.org can best achieve its mission. During our review it became clear that while we have been able to support some remarkable non-profit organizations over the past three years, our greatest impact has come when we've attacked problems in ways that make the most of Google's strengths in technology and information; examples of this approach include Flu Trends, RechargeIT, Clean Energy 2030, and PowerMeter. By aligning Google.org more closely with Google as a whole, Megan will ensure that we're better able to build innovative, scalable technology and information solutions. As a first step, Google has decided to put even more engineers and technical talent to work on these issues and problems, resources which I have found to be extraordinary. In this global economic crisis, the work Google.org is doing, together with our many colleagues around the world, to help develop cheap clean energy, find and fight disease outbreaks before they sweep the globe, and build information platforms for underserved people globally, is more important than ever. We stand behind the commitment made in 2004 to devote 1% of Google's equity and profits to philanthropy, and we will continue to iterate on our philanthropic model to make sure our resources have the greatest possible impact for good.

Posted by Dr. Larry Brilliant, Chief Philanthropy Evangelist, Google.org

Atlantis? No, it Atlant-isn't.

A Googler — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:18:00 EST

(Cross-posted from the Lat Long Blog)

[Note: Last week we saw some interesting speculation that Atlantis had been found in Google Earth. As much as we'd love for that to be the case, there is a scientific explanation for the odd markings found on the seafloor. We've invited two of the scientists who gathered the data that appears in Google Earth to answer some questions that came up. - Ed.]

Since the launch of Ocean in Google Earth, millions of people have started to explore the ocean, and many have been surprised by their discoveries.

Near Hawaii you can see a new volcanic island in the making called the Loihi Seamount.

You can also clearly see the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, an underwater mountain range in the Atlantic Ocean where two tectonic plates are moving away from one another. If you look closely, you can see this ridge connects with others around the globe, forming a nearly continuous mountain range that is over 60,000 kilometers long.

But so far nothing has sparked quite as much interest as this funny looking pattern off the west coast of Africa:

Patterns like this can actually be seen over much of the ocean floor in Google Earth. What is it? Is it real? Why does it look like this?

Some have speculated that these are the plow marks of seafloor farming by aliens. If there really are little green men hiding somewhere, the ocean's not a bad place to do it. Mars, Venus, the moon, and even some asteroids are mapped at far higher resolution than our own oceans (the global map of Mars is about 250 times as accurate as the global map of our own ocean).

One theory that's gained more traction is that these marks might be the ruins of the lost city of Atlantis. If that were the case, some of the city blocks would have to be over eight miles long - that's about fifty times the size of a city block in New York City (if you zoom in and use the measurement tool in Google Earth, you can do this comparison yourself).

So what is it? The scientific explanation is a bit less exotic, but we think it's still pretty interesting: these marks are what we call "ship tracks." You see, it's actually quite hard to measure the depth of the ocean. Sunlight, lasers, and other electromagnetic radiation can travel less than 100 feet below the surface, yet the typical depth in the ocean is more than two and a half miles. Sound waves are more effective. By measuring the time it takes for sound to travel from a ship to the sea floor and back, you can get an idea of how far away the sea floor is. Since this process â€” known as echosounding â€” only maps a strip of the sea floor under the ship, the maps it produces often show the path the ship took, hence the "ship tracks." In this case, the soundings produced by a ship are also about 1% deeper than the data we have in surrounding areas â€” likely an error â€” making the tracks stand out more. You can see all of the soundings that produced this particular pattern with this KMZ file.

Echosounding with sonar is currently the best method for collecting this kind of data, but it's not perfect. One challenge is that it's quite slow. It has to be done from ships or underwater vehicles, and they can't go very fast or they'll spoil the measurement. As a result, not much of the ocean has been mapped this way, and huge gaps remain all over the ocean. In fact, the typical hole between tracks is about 20,000 square kilometers, or about the size of the state of New Jersey.

Now you're probably wondering where the rest of the depth data comes from if there are such big gaps from echosounding. We do our best to predict what the sea floor looks like based on what we can measure much more easily: the water surface. Above large underwater mountains (seamounts), the surface of the ocean is actually higher than in surrounding areas. These seamounts actually increase gravity in the area, which attracts more water and causes sea level to be slightly higher. The changes in water height are measurable using radar on satellites. This allows us to make a best guess as to what the rest of the sea floor looks like, but still at relatively low resolutions (the model predicts the ocean depth about once every 4000 meters). What you see in Google Earth is a combination of both this satellite-based model and real ship tracks from many research cruises (we first published this technique back in 1997). If you zoom in and take a look around the ocean for yourself, you can see higher resolution patches where ships have studied the sea floor and all the places we've still yet to explore. Here's a good example just north of Hawaii:

So, what if we really wanted to find Atlantis? We probably couldn't do it with satellites â€” man-made structures simply aren't big enough to be measured that way. But we could map the whole ocean using ships. A published U.S. Navy study found that it would take about 200 ship-years, meaning we'd need one ship for 200 years, or 10 ships for 20 years, or 100 ships for two years. It costs about $25,000 per day to operate a ship with the right mapping capability, so 200 ship-years would cost nearly two billion dollars. That may seem like a lot of money, but it's not that far off from the price tag of, say, a new sports stadium.

For now, keep exploring the ocean in Google Earth, and continue to share what you discover. It's great to have so many sets of eyes looking at the data currently in Google Earth and asking questions about what it represents. We and our fellow oceanographers are constantly improving the resolution of our seafloor maps, so we promise to work with Google to keep the virtual explorers out there busy.

Posted by Walter Smith, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and David Sandwell, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego

Get Ready for the Oscars with Yahoo! Image Search

administrator — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:17:16 EST

The Oscars are one of our favorite times of year at Yahoo! Image Search. Our fascination with movies, celebrities, and red carpet fashion actually can be passed off as work! For the 81st Academy Awards, we are rolling out a new image carousel in Yahoo! Image Search so you can find some of the newest, most popular pictures from Yahoo!â€™s news and entertainment portals when you search for your favorite stars and Oscar moments.

To see the Oscars image carousel, search for the name of any nominated film or actor in Yahoo! Image Search. Youâ€™ll see a rolling gallery of the newest photos above the regular search results, with arrows to toggle through the images. And if you happen to miss any of the key moments on Sunday night, try searching for Oscars or Academy Awards after the show.

If youâ€™ve got your own favorite nominees, check out Yahoo! Moviesâ€™ complete coverage of the Oscars, where you can follow the buzz and see what Yahoo! users have predicted for this yearâ€™s winners. So far, Yahoo! users have picked â€œSlumdog Millionaireâ€� for best picture, Brad Pitt for best actor (in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), and Kate Winslet for best actress (in â€œThe Readerâ€�). You can download a printable ballot and make your own bets too.

Join us as we prepare for the fun on Sunday night and enjoy the Oscars!

Yahoo! Image Search Team

It's Girls Day at Google

A Googler — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:42:00 EST

Today we're celebrating Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, or Girls Day, as part of National Engineers Week (E-Week) in the U.S. For the second year in a row, we've partnered with the National Girl Scouts to bring girls to six Google offices around the country, where they'll participate in fun activities designed to educate them about engineering, specifically computer science. Googlers, many of them Google Women Engineers, are hosting the guests of honor and leading workshops covering all kinds of topics, including solar powered energy, image processing and a demo of Google Earth. At the end of the day, all of the participants will receive a limited edition "Introduce a Girl to E-Week" patch that they can add to their Scout sashes.

Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day participants in 2008.

Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day is just one important part of E-Week, which was founded by the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) and is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. By the end of the week, Google offices will have hosted more than 600 students at events designed to expose them to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The students who participate in our E-Week events are from partner organizations that also focus on STEM education for girls, underrepresented minorities, and the economically disadvantaged. Here's hoping each of these students will walk away feeling inspired to pursue studies in these fields.

Posted by Demian Caponi, Global Diversity and Talent Inclusion team

Stop bouncing: tips for website success

A Googler — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:02:00 EST

This is the first post in a series on The Power of Measurement. In this economic climate, these posts are designed to cover ways to make your website as successful as possible. Over the course of the next few weeks, our in-house Analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik, and others will demystify the world of website analytics and offer tips for getting the most out of your metrics. -Ed.

Would you believe me if I said you don't need a Ph.D. to understand your website data? No? Believe it. Free tools like Google Analytics can help simplify website data so that you can better understand what visitors are doing when they arrive on your site.

One of the coolest innovations in understanding your website has been to provide delightful metrics on your web data so that you can make direct changes to your site. In lesson one of our series on The Power of Measurement, we will learn about bounce rate and how understanding it can improve your website.

You may be used to reading about how many â€œhitsâ€� a site or a page has received. But reporting a "hit" meant something back in 1985 when it was essentially a pageview (the number of times your webpage was viewed). Today, you will find that each web page gets many "hits," rendering the metric meaningless. While the number of "hits" a page received used to be the best measure of success, we now have more in-depth and detailed metrics to analyze the performance of our web pages.

Bounce rate is insightful because from the perspective of a website visitor, it measures this phenomenon: "I came; I puked; I left." (OK, technically it also means the number of sessions with just one pageview.) While metrics like visitors show the number of people who came to your site, bounce rate will tell you how many of those people were unimpressed and left your site without taking any action (not even dignifying the site with a single click!).

Bounce rate has these attributes:
1) It is really hard to misunderstand. It measures the number of people who landed on your site and refused to give you even one single click!
2) It is available in most web analytics tools, including our own Google Analytics.
3) It is quick and easy to use. Bounce rate will help you understand where and how to make changes on your website in under an hour.

Now, let's make this real. If you have a Google Analytics account, you'll see this when you log in:

This means that about 77 percent of website visitors came to the site, "puked," and left. Ouch. Based on that, you may need to light a fire somewhere, as things need fixing. Here are two simple and specific ideas:

Tip #1: Find out where your visitors are coming from and which of these sites sends visitors with the highest bounce rate. To do so, all you have to do is go to "Traffic Sources" (in Google Analytics, or whatever tool you are using), click on "Referring Sites," and boom!

In about fifteen seconds you know which sites are your â€œbest friends foreverâ€� (BFFs), and where you need to look a tad deeper. By identifying the sites that are sending you visitors with high bounce rates, you can investigate the reasons why (the campaigns, the context in which your link is placed, the ads) and make changes to ensure that visitors find what they are looking for when they come to your site.

However, it may not just be the campaigns that turned your readers away; it could be the specific page that your visitors landed on. That leads to my Tip #2: Go to â€œContentâ€� (labeled as such in Google Analytics) and click on "Top Landing Pages" report:

You can see different pages of your website on the left and the corresponding bounce rates on the right. Remember, you don't decide the homepage of your website. When people search, the engine finds the most relevant page on your site and that's the homepage. If you have 50,000 pages on your website, you have 50,000 homepages. The report above is showing the top ten pages of your website and which ones might be letting you down by not engaging your visitors enough to get even one click!

In under an hour you can discover which sources are your BFFs and which pages on your site need some sprucing up. This will ensure lower bounce rates, higher engagement with your site, and perhaps even higher revenue. To learn about other ways in which you can use bounce rate effectively, check out this article on my web analytics blog, Occam's Razor.

Good luck!

Posted by Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist

From the height of this place

A Googler — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 22:52:00 EST

I originally wrote this email for internal consumption; Presidents' Day here in the US and President Obama's recent inaugural address got me thinking about the future of the Internet, Google, and the challenges that lie ahead. The note borrows from a host of US presidential inaugural addresses to illustrate some of its points (thanks to former President Clinton for the title). Quite a few Googlers suggested I share it externally, so here it is, with just a few minor edits. - Jonathan Rosenberg

Dear Googlers -

Today is Presidents' Day here in the United States, when we honor the birthdays of two of our country's greatest leaders, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. A few weeks ago many of us were lucky to witness, either in person or via TV or the web, a masterful inauguration speech by the newest President, Barack Obama. The speech was rife with poignant points and subtle historical allusions: "We the people" came directly from the US Constitution, while "all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness" echoes both the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. (Many of these nuances were only revealed to me upon reading the transcript.)

As expected, President Obama aptly captured the wary mood of the nation. After all, we are in the midst of what is likely the worst economic situation of our lifetimes. In the US alone, 2.6M people lost their jobs in 2008, followed by nearly 600,000 more last month, and on the Monday following the inauguration companies around the world, including Caterpillar, Pfizer, ING, and Phillips announced job cuts totaling over 75,000. Add to that our dependence on fossil fuels, the resulting (and accelerating) climate change, and national security concerns, and you can feel the gravity of this pivotal moment. Eric Schmidt has called these times 'uncharted waters': none of us has been here before.

President Obama asserted that we will face the moment with what he called new instruments and old values, values that have been "the quiet force of progress throughout history" and which must, once again, define our character. While this reference to the national character of the US was no doubt inspiring for Americans, the mention of "new instruments" was far more relevant to Google. In a way, I felt like he was talking about the Internet, which is the most powerful and comprehensive information system ever invented.

Consider its predecessors. The famed Library at Alexandria (that's Egypt, not Virginia - some of you have GOT to get out more ;) ) was built circa 323 BC for an educated public, which actually meant very few people since the skills of literacy were deliberately withheld from the majority of the population. For several centuries monks were the keepers of the written word, painstakingly transcribing and indexing books as a means of interpreting the word of God. They were prized as much for their ability to write small, which saved on expensive paper, as for their piety.

The first universities came about in the 4th century AD, the first formal encyclopedias didn't appear until the 16th century, the first truly public libraries appeared in the 19th century and proliferated in the 20th. Then suddenly comes the Internet, where, from the most remote villages on the planet, you can reach as much information as is held in thousands of libraries. Access to information has completed its journey from privileged to ubiquitous. At Google we are all so immersed in daily introspective exercises like product reviews, our GPS [Google Product Strategy] meetings, and budget exercises that it's easy to forget this.

We shouldn't. In fact, since the challenges the world faces are, to a large degree, information problems, I believe the Internet is one of the "new instruments" that the President and the world can count on. And how do a great many people use the Internet? What is the first place many of them go when they conduct research, seek answers, do their work and communicate with their friends and family? Google. Ours is much more than a passing role in this next phase of history, rather we have the responsibility and duty to make the Internet as great as it can possibly be. Fortunately, that is pretty much what we all set out to do every day anyway, but now there's just a little extra pressure. Not your average 9-to-5 job.

At Google we are all technology optimists. We intrinsically believe that the wave upon which we surf, the secular shift of information, communications, and commerce to the Internet, is still in its early stages, and that its result will be a preponderance of good.

As we look toward the pivotal year ahead, here are a few observations on the future of the Internet for all of us to assess, consider, and carry as we do our work. (I have occasionally borrowed the inaugural words of previous presidents, sometimes cited, as with Bill Clinton's phrase which I appropriated for my title, and sometimes not.) To paraphrase President Obama, these things will not happen easily or in a short span of time, but know this my colleagues: they will happen.

All the world's information will be accessible from the palm of every person
Today, over 1.4 billion people, nearly a quarter of the world's population, use the Internet, with more than 200 million new people coming online every year. This is the fastest growing communications medium in history. How fast? When the Internet was first made available to the public, in 1983, there were 400 servers. Twenty five years later: well over 600 million.

In many parts of the world people access the Internet via their mobile phones, and the numbers there are even more impressive. More than three billion people have mobile phones, with 1.2 billion new phones expected to be sold this year. More Internet-enabled phones will be sold and activated in 2009 than personal computers. China is a prime example of where these trends are coming together. It has more Internet users than any other country, at nearly 300 million, and more than 600 million mobile users â€” 600 million! Twenty-five years ago, Apple launched the Mac as "the computer for the rest of us." Today, the computer for the rest of us is a phone.

This means that every fellow citizen of the world will have in his or her pocket the ability to access the world's information. As this happens, search will remain the killer application. For most people, it is the reason they access the Internet: to find answers and solve real problems.

Our ongoing challenge is to create the perfect search engine, and it's a really hard problem. To do a perfect job, you need to understand all the world's information, and the meaning of every query. With all that understanding, you then have to produce the perfect answer instantly. Today, many queries remain very difficult to answer properly. Too often, we force users to correct our mistakes, making them refine their searches, trying new queries until they get what they need. Meanwhile, our understanding of the interplay between high-quality content, search algorithms, and personal information is just beginning.

Why should a user have to ask us a question to get the information she needs? With her permission, why don't we surf the web on her behalf, and present interesting and relevant information to her as we come across it? This is a very hard thing to do well, as anyone who has been presented with a where-the-heck-did-that-come-from recommendation on Amazon or Netflix can attest to, but its potential is huge.

While we're working on improving the quality of search, the web is exploding. Our infrastructure has to keep up with this growth just to maintain our current level of quality, but to actually make search smarter, our index and infrastructure need to grow at a pace FASTER than the web. Only then will we be able to reject the idea that we have to choose between latency, comprehensiveness, and relevancy; we will have the ability to preserve all our ideals.

Solving search is a long-term quest for perfection, but the transition of information from scarce and expensive to ubiquitous and free will conclude far sooner. We will then bear witness to a true democratization of information, a time when almost everyone who wants to be online will be online, able to access virtually every bit of the world's information. This is great for our business, even greater for all the users. In fact, it's difficult to overestimate how important that moment will be. As Harry Truman said, "Democracy of information alone can supply the vitalizing force to stir the peoples of the world into triumphant action." (OK, I added the "of information" part!)

Everyone can publish, and everyone will
One thing that we have learned in our industry is that people have a lot to say. They are using the Internet to publish things at an astonishing pace. 120K blogs are created daily â€” most of them with an audience of one. Over half of them are created by people under the age of nineteen. In the US, nearly 40 percent of Internet users upload videos, and globally over fifteen hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. The web is very social too: about one of every six minutes that people spend online is spent in a social network of some type.

Publishing used to be constrained by physical limitations. You had to have a printing press and a distribution network, or a transmitter, to publish to any sort of critical mass, so broadcasting was the norm. No more. Today, most publishing is done by users for users, one-to-one or one-to-many (think of Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and YouTube). Free speech is no longer just a right granted by law, but one imbued by technology.

The era of information being more powerful when hoarded has also passed. As our economist Hal Varian has noted, in the early days of the Web every document had at the bottom, "Copyright 1997. Do not redistribute." Now those same documents have at the bottom, "Copyright 2009. Click here to send to your friends." Sharing, not guarding information, has become the golden standard on the web, so not only can anyone publish, but virtually everyone does. This is both good and bad news. No one argues the value of free speech, but the vast majority of stuff we find on the web is useless. The clamor of junk threatens to drown out voices of quality.

Meanwhile, those voices are struggling. The most obvious example is newspapers, which have historically been the backbone of quality original reporting, a post they have mostly maintained throughout the Internet explosion. But news isn't what it used to be: by the time a paper arrives in the morning it's already stale. As written communication has evolved from long letter to short text message, news has largely shifted from thoughtful to spontaneous. The old-fashioned static news article is now just a starting point, inciting back-and-forth debate that often results in a more balanced and detailed assessment. And the old-fashioned business model of bundled news, where the classifieds basically subsidized a lot of the high-quality reporting on the front page, has been thoroughly disrupted.

This is a problem, but since online journalism is still in its relative infancy it's one that can be solved (we're technology optimists, remember?). The experience of consuming news on the web today fails to take full advantage of the power of technology. It doesn't understand what users want in order to give them what they need. When I go to a site like the New York Times or the San Jose Mercury, it should know what I am interested in and what has changed since my last visit. If I read the story on the US stimulus package only six hours ago, then just show me the updates the reporter has filed since then (and the most interesting responses from readers, bloggers, or other sources). If Thomas Friedman has filed a column since I last checked, tell me that on the front page. Beyond that, present to me a front page rich with interesting content selected by smart editors, customized based on my reading habits (tracked with my permission). Browsing a newspaper is rewarding and serendipitous, and doing it online should be even better. This will not by itself solve the newspapers' business problems, but our heritage suggests that creating a superior user experience is the best place to start.

Of course, the greatest user experience is pretty useless if there's nothing good to read, a truism that applies not just to newspapers but to the web in general. Just like a newspaper needs great reporters, the web needs experts. When it comes to information, not all of it is created equal and the web's future depends on attracting the best of it. There are millions of people in the world who are truly experts in their fields â€” scientists, scholars, artists, engineers, architects â€” but a great majority of them are too busy being experts in their fields to become experts in ours. They have a lot to say but no time to say it.

Systems that facilitate high-quality content creation and editing are crucial for the Internet's continued growth, because without them we will all sink in a cesspool of drivel. We need to make it easier for the experts, journalists, and editors that we actually trust to publish their work under an authorship model that is authenticated and extensible, and then to monetize in a meaningful way. We need to make it easier for a user who sees one piece by an expert he likes to search through that expert's entire body of work. Then our users will be able to benefit from the best of both worlds: thoughtful and spontaneous, long form and short, of the ages and in the moment.

We won't (and shouldn't) try to stop the faceless scribes of drivel, but we can move them to the back row of the arena. As Harry Truman said in 1949, "We are aided by all who want relief from the lies of propaganda â€” who desire truth and sincerity."

When data is abundant, intelligence will win
Putting the power to publish and consume content into the hands of more people in more places enables everyone to start conversations with facts. With facts, negotiations can become less about who yells louder, but about who has the stronger data. They can also be an equalizer that enables better decisions and more civil discourse. Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it at the start of his first term, "Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."

The Internet allows for deeper and more informed participation and representation than has ever been possible. We see this happening frequently, particularly with our Geo products. The Surui tribe in the Amazon rain forest uses Google Earth to mark the boundaries of their land and work with authorities to stop illegal logging. Sokwanele, a civic action group in Zimbabwe, used the Google Maps API on their website to document reported cases of political violence and intimidation after the controversial Presidential election in March 2008. Armed with this map, the group can better convey and defend their argument that elections in Zimbabwe are neither free nor fair. The stakes couldn't be higher for these people. We can give them a fighting chance.

Everyone should be able to defend arguments with data. To let them do so, we need tools like the Sitemaps protocol, which opens up large volumes of data previously trapped behind government firewalls. Most government websites can't be crawled, but with Sitemaps, thousands of pages have been unlocked. In the US, several states have opened up their public records through Sitemaps, and the Department of Energy's Office of Science & Technology Information made 2.3 million research findings available in just twelve hours.

Information transparency helps people decide who is right and who is wrong and to determine who is telling the truth. When then-Senator Clinton incorrectly stated during the 2008 Presidential campaign that she had come under sniper fire during her 1996 trip to Bosnia, the Internet set her straight. This is why President Obama's promise to "do our business in the light of day" is important, because transparency empowers the populace and demands accountability as its immediate offspring.

But as powerful as it can be in politics, data has the potential to be even more transformational in business. Oil fueled the Industrial Revolution, but data will fuel the next generation of growth. One of the largely unheralded by-products of the Internet era is how it has made the power of the most sophisticated analytical tools available to the smallest of businesses. Traditionally, business software packages have treated data reporting as a second class citizen. Here is my cool new feature, they say. Oh, you want to know how many people use it? You want the flexibility to organize and assess this data in ways that work best for you? Well, let us tell you about the analytics module! It's only tens of thousands of dollars more (not counting the 18% annual maintenance fee in perpetuity ... sucker!!)

Fortunately that's not Google, nor can it ever be. All of our products should reflect our bias toward giving our customers, users, and partners as much data as possible - and letting them do with it what they wish. Then they can run their business like we do, by making decisions based on facts, not opinions. Here at Google the words of every colleague, from associates to vice presidents, carry the same weight so long as they are backed by data. (If you don't think we live up to this standard then please feel free to correct me ... but you better have the facts to prove it!!!)

Hal Varian likes to say that the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. After all, who would have guessed that computer engineers would be the cool job of the 90s? When every business has free and ubiquitous data, the ability to understand it and extract value from it becomes the complimentary scarce factor. It leads to intelligence, and the intelligent business is the successful business, regardless of its size. Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Samurai.

In 1913, Woodrow Wilson stated, "... and yet, it will be no cool process of mere science ... with which we face this new age of right and opportunity." Perhaps, but from our perspective the cool process of mere science, fueled by ubiquitous data and intelligence, will be quite sufficient to power new generations to success.

The vast majority of computing will occur in the cloud
Within the next decade, people will use their computers completely differently than how they do today. All of their files, correspondence, contacts, pictures, and videos will be stored or backed-up in the network cloud and they will access them from wherever they happen to be on whatever device they happen to hold. Access to data, applications, and content will be seamless and device-agnostic. Convergence isn't something that occurs at the device level, which was the vision we all had in the 90s as we struggled to invent that perfect gadget that did it all (witness my own unfortunate progeny, the Apple Newton, which ended tragically). Rather, devices will proliferate in many directions, but all of them will converge on the cloud. That's where our stuff, not to mention civilization's knowledge, will live.

This doesn't mean that the access device simply becomes a juiced up version of an old 3270 terminal. To the contrary, smart programmers will figure out ways to use all that power in your hands to create great applications, and to let you run them whether or not you are connected. But it shouldn't take three minutes for the device to boot, and losing it shouldn't be a catastrophe. You'll just get a new one and it will sync instantly; all your contacts, pictures, music, files, and other stuff will automagically just be there, ready for you to log in and say "be mine".

Still, these examples simplify and understate the true impact of what is going on with the transition to cloud computing. As Hal has noted, we are in a period of "combinatorial innovation", when there is a great availability of different component parts that innovators can combine or recombine to create new inventions. In the 1800s, it was interchangeable parts. In the 1920s, it was electronics. In the 1970s, it was integrated circuits. Today, the components of innovation are found in cloud computing, with abundant APIs, open source software, and low-cost, pay-as-you-go application services like our own App Engine and Amazon's EC2. The components are abundant and available to anyone who can get online.

The power of innovation and the cloud are driving two trends. First, because the tools of innovation are so easy and inexpensive to access, and consumers are so numerous and easy to reach, the consumer market now gets the greatest innovations first. It's easy to forget that just twenty years ago the best technology was found in the workplace: computers, software, phone systems, etc. Thirty years ago all you software geniuses working on Search, Ads, and Apps would have been programmers at IBM; forty years ago, at NASA. Now, the best technology starts with consumers, where a Darwinian market drives innovation that far surpasses traditional enterprise tools, and migrates to the workplace only after thriving with consumers. Think of Google Video for Business, which started out as YouTube and then evolved to the enterprise. How many businesses out there have even conceived of how useful this can be to them? Not many, perhaps because only a year ago the costs of having such an internal service were prohibitive. No longer.

Second, it used to be that every growing business would at some point have to make a big investment in computers and software for accounting systems, customer management systems, email servers, maybe even phone or video conferencing systems. Today, all of those services are available via the network cloud, and you pay for it only as you use it. So small businesses can scale up without making those huge capital investments, which is especially important in a recession. Access to sophisticated computer systems, and all the value they can deliver, was previously the realm of larger companies. Cloud computing levels that playing field so that the small business has access to the same systems that large businesses do. Given that small businesses generate most of the jobs in the economy, this is no small trend.

We still have a long way to go in making web-based applications robust enough for businesses. Things like latency, data reliability, and security all have to be equal to or better than the currently available alternatives. The user experience needs to be fast, easy, and rich â€” "like reading a magazine," Larry has said. This is why we are building Chrome, Gears, V8 and more. Users now expect these apps to work perfectly for them all the time, and we need to meet that expectation.

The real potential of cloud computing lies not in taking stuff that used to live on PCs and putting it online, but in doing things online that were previously simply impossible. Combining open standards with cloud computing will enable businesses to conduct commerce in brand new ways. For example, there is a great opportunity to take advantage of (to quote Hal again) "computer-mediated transactions". Computers now mediate virtually every commercial transaction, recording it, collecting data, and monitoring it, which means that we can now write and enforce contracts that were previously impossible. When you rent a car, you could be offered a thirty percent discount for agreeing not to exceed the speed limit, a deal that they could actually enforce with GPS reporting! Would you take it?

Another example is machine language translation. As more people do more things online computer systems will have the opportunity to learn from the collective behavior of billions of humans. Translation will get a tiny bit smarter with each iteration. There are over 400,000 books in the modern version of the aforementioned Library of Alexandria, nearly half of them in Arabic. The culture and history that's in those books is not available to you unless you read Arabic, which of course most people don't. But soon, with the power of the cloud, they'll be able to read them anyway. This is why translation is important, because it gives us the ability, to quote John Adams from 1797, to "encourage schools, colleges, universities, academies, and every institution [to propagate] knowledge, virtue, and religion among all classes of the people."

Lit by lightning
Virtually every American president since George Washington has used his Inaugural Address to speak not just of the coming four years, but also of his vision for future generations. Similarly, we manage Google with a long-term focus. We live and run our business in these uncertain times, but our eyes are always on the future, on the better tomorrow that the Internet and all of its promise shall help bring to fruition. I hope that the four predictions that I have presented here will elicit your curiosity and illuminate the significance of the changes that lay ahead. They may inevitably come to pass, but their impact on us, our neighbors, our countries, and our world is not inevitably good. Hence, our challenge.

We are standing at a unique moment in history which will help define not just the Internet for the next few years, but the Internet that individuals and societies around the world will traverse for decades. As Googlers our responsibility is nothing less than to help support the future of information, the global transition in how it is created, shared, consumed, and used to solve big problems. Our challenge is to steer incessantly toward greatness, to never think small when we can think big, to strive on with the work Larry and Sergey began over ten years ago, and from this task we will not be moved. In a world that feels like it is lit by lightning, speed wins, and we have a responsibility to our users to not retreat, to not be content to stand still, to not be complacent or near-sighted. The Internet has had a profound and remarkable impact in the past decade. Now, from the height of this place, let's appreciate its implications and pursue its promise.

It seems only fitting to conclude this Presidents' Day treatise, which began by quoting our 44th president, with a statement from our first. And so, having thus imparted to you my sentiments as they have been awakened by the occasion which brings us together, I shall take my present leave.

Posted by Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP, Product Management

My Maps, your love stories

A Googler — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:24:00 EST

Flowers, chocolates and cards are all typically associated with Valentine's Day. But as someone with a bit of a crush on cartography, I wanted to find a way for people to express their love using maps. I rallied a few other hopeless romantics around here and, together, we created a My Map where you can mark the romantic places in your life. Whether it's the waterfall where you proposed, the Chinese restaurant where you had your first date with your sweetheart, the secluded beach where you got married, or simply the most romantic spot that comes to mind, we'd love to hear from you. You can even add photos and videos to illustrate your love story. (But make sure your story doesn't make Cupid blush, as this map is intended for all audiences.)

View Larger Map

And if you're still scrambling for a last-minute gift for your valentine this year, we hope this map will provide some inspiration. You can use My Maps or the new Touring feature in Google Earth to make a special map just for your loved one, showing all the important places throughout your relationship. Of course, some flowers probably wouldn't hurt either. :-)

Posted by Elaine Filadelfo, Google Blog team and self-professed map lover

Time to Say Goodbye to Yahoo! MyWeb

administrator — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:00:51 EST

Back in 2005, we launched Yahoo! MyWeb with the goal to help our users save valuable information they discover on the Web. As we have continued to innovate with the 2.0 release of Delicious and the upgraded Yahoo! Bookmarks, we saw that MyWeb usersâ€™ needs are being served by our newer products. To streamline our bookmarking services, we will discontinue the MyWeb service starting March 18, 2009 and focus our efforts on improving Delicious for social bookmarking. We are working on many Delicious product enhancements for 2009 â€“ in the meantime, weâ€™ll make the transition for our MyWeb users in the least disruptive manner possible. MyWeb users have three choices to migrate their bookmarks:

1. Yahoo! Bookmarks. For users primarily interested in private bookmarking, the switch is simple â€“ all MyWeb bookmarks are already available in Yahoo! Bookmarks.

2. Delicious . For users who enjoy sharing their bookmarks and exploring the bookmarks of other users, we recommend migrating to Delicious. The migration is a three-step process â€“ see details here.

3. Export. For users who choose to use other bookmarking services, we recommend using our export tools, which will provide an archive of your bookmarks that is easily readable by 3rd party services and browsers such as Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

For publishers using the MyWeb Bookmark button or the MyWeb badge, we recommend migrating these to the Delicious button or badge.

If you have any questions about the migration, please contact us at the MyWeb Feedback page.

Ariel Seidman and Craig Taylor

Optimizing your very large site for search

livesearch — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 01:02:27 EST

We get asked it a lot. â€œHow do I get more coverage for my site?â€� Over the past couple of weeks on the Webmaster Center blog, we have been sharing strategies for large sites to help them optimize their sites for search. The series, called â€œOptimizing your very large site for search,â€� covered four important areas we believe a large site should look at to improve its relevance and coverage:

Part 1

We started by focusing on reducing the surface area of your site by removing and canonicalizing your URLs. Reducing URLs that are redundant or unnecessary will make room for the ones that are. This post offers some practical suggestions on how to make fewer URLs a reality.

Part 2

After removing redundant URLs, we focused on the need to optimize for crawl by ensuring you are compressing your site and telling us which content is new or recently updated. This helps us focus on crawling the latest and greatest content.

Part 3

The third post is all about producing content in a way that ensures it is crawled. Despite improvements in Silverlight and Flash, it is still difficult for us to ensure all of your content makes it into the index. This post offers some suggested workarounds and advice when using these advanced technologies.

Part 4

To wrap things up, we look at content from a big site perspective and offer some suggested content management strategies for ensuring your siteâ€™s rapid growth doesnâ€™t hinder the ability of your content to be accessible to users and, as a result, suffer in ranking.

In the end, everyone on the Live Search team has a vested interest in seeing all sites reach their optimum rank for the content they provide to users. Some might mistakenly believe that large sites have an automatic advantage with search engines based merely on their size and quantity of content. But that large size can actually be a disadvantage when webmasters donâ€™t thoughtfully consider how their sites are used by end users. If you take the time to optimize your large sites for your users, those optimizations will have a very positive effect on your ranking with search engines.

--Jeremiah Andrick, Program Manager, Live Search Webmaster Center