The Official Google Blog

This week in search 11/20/09

2009-11-20T15:58:00.000-08:00

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

This week brought a number of new features to the fore.

Google Translate
The biggest and most visible release this week was our update to Google Translate. New changes to the interface help you translate instantly and see translations as you type. We have also introduced both input and output transliteration: for selected languages, our tool will show you letter by letter how a word or phrase appears in a different language as you type. We have also added text-to-speech, so you can figure out how to pronounce new words as you learn them.

Rich snippets in Japanese
On the topic of international launches, at our Searchology event in May we announced the launch of rich snippets, which webmasters can use to help Google show more useful information from the page. For example, if you are thinking of trying out a new restaurant and are searching for reviews, rich snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the restaurant's price range. Starting this week, this feature is available in Japanese.

Flu shot finder now on results pages
Following in the footsteps of last week's launch, we have now added our flu shot finder to the search results page.

Example searches: flu shot, h1n1 shot, flu vaccine

Site hierarchies in search results
Google usually shows a green web address, or URL, at the bottom of each search result to let you know where you're headed. Tuesday we began rolling out an improvement that replaces the URL in some search results with a hierarchy showing the precise location of the page on the website. The new display offers valuable context and new navigation options. For example, on the eHow.com result below, you can see that this page is in the Martial Art Techniques section.

Example searches: venn diagram, how to punch harder, hodgkins lymphoma, keurig

Hope you enjoyed this week's new features. Stay tuned for more!

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search

Google Apps highlights – 11/20/2009

2009-11-20T08:57:00.000-08:00

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label "Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

Over the last two weeks, we've made improvements across Google Apps, some geared for individuals, others meant for business customers.

Green Robot icon in Gmail Labs
The green, orange and red chat bubbles in Gmail signal if your contacts are online, idle or unavailable, but as more people sign in from mobile devices, it's becoming harder to tell when someone is actually online at a computer or just connected with their phone. The Green Robot feature in Gmail Labs helps you spot when you might want to tailor your exchanges with more succinct messages for people who are signed in with Android-powered devices. Look for the green beaker icon at the top of Gmail to enable Green Robot and other Labs features.

Site templates
On Tuesday we launched templates for Google Sites. The templates gallery is filled with useful example sites ranging from wedding websites to corporate intranets, which you can copy and customize so they're just right. This lets you create a useful, visually appealing collaborative workspace in seconds. And if you have a great site other people would find useful, you can submit it to the gallery. If your business uses Google Sites, templates you submit stay private within your company.

More overflow storage for less
If you're using Google Apps to store photos and manage large volumes of personal email, you'll be happy to hear we're now offering more extra storage for less. Our new overflow storage plans start at $5 per year for 20 GB. For the most avid shutterbugs, the 16 TB plan is enough space for roughly 8 million high resolution pictures!

Improvements to Sync for Outlook
Last week, we released an update to Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, our tool that lets companies stop running Microsoft Exchange while still letting some employees use the familiar Outlook interface. Now, employees can sync multiple calendars between Outlook and Google Apps, and look up free/busy information from Exchange for co-workers who haven't migrated to Google Apps yet.

Google Apps Premier Edition innovation – Year in review
Businesses using Google Apps not only save money compared to running their own email systems, but also their employees get access to innovation at a much faster pace than with conventional business technologies. We've launched over 100 improvements to Google Apps in the last year, and on Thursday I hosted a webcast to recap noteworthy recent updates for businesses, including push email, contacts and calendar support for BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Mobile and Android, Sync for Microsoft Outlook, offline access and more. If you missed the webcast, you can watch it on YouTube.

Who's gone Google?
This week I'm pleased to welcome a new crop of companies, schools and public agencies that have recently switched to Google Apps, including Delta Hotels, Michigan State University, the City of Orlando and the Office of the New Mexico Attorney General. The Motorola Mobile Devices Division deployed Google Apps to its employees this week, and the Los Angeles City Council recently voted unanimously to move 30,000 city employees to Google Apps.

We hope these updates help you get even more from Google Apps. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Cool. Even Batman uses Google.

2009-11-19T12:00:00.000-08:00

When I first started at Google, Craig Nevill-Manning, engineering director here in New York, said to me: "The Google homepage doesn't belong to us. It belongs to the millions of people who use it." Besides the fact that Craig can make one of those insanely cool leaf patterns in his latte, I find the simple truth of his statement inspiring. I often refer to it as a guidepost for our work.

So when we got together with the search team to brainstorm ways to talk about our latest innovations (like music in search results), we decided to feature them through stories inspired by our users. Because while we're proud of the innovations we're making in search, we're proudest of the things people use search to accomplish. In other words, the best search results don't show up on a webpage — they show up in somebody's life.

So in that spirit, we made a bunch of videos. There's one about grandma dipping her toe into technology. One about friends taking a Kerouac inspired road trip. And yes, there's even one about Bruce Wayne.

Here's the first one:

You can see them all here.

As they say in the movies, all the characters in these videos are fictional, any resemblance to persons alive or dead are purely coincidental.

We hope you enjoy them.

Posted by Robert Wong, Google Creative Lab

Releasing the Chromium OS open source project

2009-11-19T10:31:00.000-08:00

In July we announced that we were working on Google Chrome OS, an open source operating system for people who spend most of their time on the web.

Today we are open-sourcing the project as Chromium OS. We are doing this early, a year before Google Chrome OS will be ready for users, because we are eager to engage with partners, the open source community and developers. As with the Google Chrome browser, development will be done in the open from this point on. This means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions. The Chromium OS project includes our current code base, user interface experiments and some initial designs for ongoing development. This is the initial sketch and we will color it in over the course of the next year.

We want to take this opportunity to explain why we're excited about the project and how it is a fundamentally different model of computing.

First, it's all about the web. All apps are web apps. The entire experience takes place within the browser and there are no conventional desktop applications. This means users do not have to deal with installing, managing and updating programs.

Second, because all apps live within the browser, there are significant benefits to security. Unlike traditional operating systems, Chrome OS doesn't trust the applications you run. Each app is contained within a security sandbox making it harder for malware and viruses to infect your computer. Furthermore, Chrome OS barely trusts itself. Every time you restart your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code. If your system has been compromised, it is designed to fix itself with a reboot. While no computer can be made completely secure, we're going to make life much harder (and less profitable) for the bad guys. If you dig security, read the Chrome OS Security Overview or watch the video.

Most of all, we are obsessed with speed. We are taking out every unnecessary process, optimizing many operations and running everything possible in parallel. This means you can go from turning on the computer to surfing the web in a few seconds. Our obsession with speed goes all the way down to the metal. We are specifying reference hardware components to create the fastest experience for Google Chrome OS.

There is still a lot of work to do, and we're excited to work with the open source community. We have benefited hugely from projects like GNU, the Linux Kernel, Moblin, Ubuntu, WebKit and many more. We will be contributing our code upstream and engaging closely with these and other open source efforts.

Google Chrome OS will be ready for consumers this time next year. Sign up here for updates or if you like building your operating system from source, get involved at chromium.org.

Lastly, here is a short video that explains why we're so excited about Google Chrome OS.

Update at 8:55PM: Watch the video of our Google Chrome OS event, which took place earlier today.

Posted by Caesar Sengupta, Group Product Manager and Matt Papakipos, Engineering Director

Automatic captions in YouTube

2009-11-19T08:30:00.000-08:00

Since we first announced captions in Google Video and YouTube, we've introduced multiple caption tracks, improved search functionality and even automatic translation. Each of these features has had great personal significance to me, not only because I helped to design them, but also because I'm deaf. Today, I'm in Washington, D.C. to announce what I consider the most important and exciting milestone yet: machine-generated automatic captions.

Since the original launch of captions in our products, we’ve been happy to see growth in the number of captioned videos on our services, which now number in the hundreds of thousands. This suggests that more and more people are becoming aware of how useful captions can be. As we’ve explained in the past, captions not only help the deaf and hearing impaired, but with machine translation, they also enable people around the world to access video content in any of 51 languages. Captions can also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they're looking for.

However, like everything YouTube does, captions face a tremendous challenge of scale. Every minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded. How can we expect every video owner to spend the time and effort necessary to add captions to their videos? Even with all of the captioning support already available on YouTube, the majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me.

To help address this challenge, we've combined Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they're off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time.

In addition to automatic captions, we’re also launching automatic caption timing, or auto-timing, to make it significantly easier to create captions manually. With auto-timing, you no longer need to have special expertise to create your own captions in YouTube. All you need to do is create a simple text file with all the words in the video and we’ll use Google’s ASR technology to figure out when the words are spoken and create captions for your video. This should significantly lower the barriers for video owners who want to add captions, but who don’t have the time or resources to create professional caption tracks.

To learn more about how to use auto-caps and auto-timing, check out this short video and our help center article:

You should see both features available in English by the end of the week. For our initial launch, auto-caps are only visible on a handful of partner channels (list below*). Because auto-caps are not perfect, we want to make sure we get feedback from both viewers and video owners before we roll them out more broadly. Auto-timing, on the other hand, is rolling out globally for all English-language videos on YouTube. We hope to expand these features for other channels and languages in the future. Please send us your feedback to help make that happen.

Today I'm more hopeful than ever that we'll achieve our long-term goal of making videos universally accessible. Even with its flaws, I see the addition of automatic captioning as a huge step forward.

* Partners for the initial launch of auto-caps: UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Demand Media, UNSW and most Google & YouTube channels.

Posted by Ken Harrenstien, Software Engineer

What's cooking with iGoogle...

2009-11-19T06:05:00.000-08:00

We're both huge foodies, and we always love spending time in the kitchen with friends and family, especially around the holidays. Particularly during this season, many of us turn to Google when searching for recipes. But, in addition to spicing up your recipe repertoire, Google can be a huge resource in the kitchen. From helping you with sugar measurements, to jump starting ideas for unique Thanksgiving table settings, the web has made becoming a culinary master much easier.

Since many of us love to celebrate great food, we're excited to announce that we've partnered with a variety of top chefs and food industry experts to bring you some elegant new, food-focused iGoogle themes and gadgets. iGoogle is all about personalization and freshness, and in that spirit, these unique themes are sure to delight the chef in all of us. Be sure to check out our iGoogle gallery, where you'll find some tasty new themes from chefs like Alton Brown and Paula Deen, food artists like Carl Warner and James Parker and even famous bakeries like New York City's Crumbs Bake Shop and Magnolia Bakery.

In addition to these taste bud tantalizing themes, we've also partnered with many top food industry names to build a suite of new gadgets for your iGoogle page. For example, Supercook lets you input various ingredients you have on hand, then gives you some great recipes you can whip up. And if you're feeling like a night out at a new restaurant, Urbanspoon will help you pick a restaurant on the fly — all from your iGoogle page.

We hope this new element of gourmet iGoogle personalization will get you even more interested in enhancing your cooking and dining experiences. Here's to some great new food with family and friends this holiday season!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience and Brittany Bohnet, Product Marketing Manager

Explore images with Google Image Swirl, now in Labs

2009-11-17T11:17:00.000-08:00

Back in 2001, to give people a new, quicker way to find images, we launched Image Search. When you do a search for [eiffel tower] you'll find an array of images of the tower in the daytime, in black and white, at sunset and more. With Similar Images, which recently graduated from Google Labs, you can click "Find similar images" to narrow your search to, say, pictures of the Eiffel Tower lit up at night. Today, we've launched an experimental feature in Labs called Google Image Swirl, which builds on new computer vision research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a fun, exploratory interface.

For example, if you search on Image Swirl for [washington], you'll see 12 image thumbnails including President Washington, the Washington Monument, a map of Washington D.C. and the Capitol Building:

Once you find the group of images you're interested in, you can click on the thumbnail and a cluster of images will "swirl" into view. For example, here's what you'll see if you click the image of the Washington Monument:

You can then further explore additional sub-groups within any cluster. The interface may look familiar to those of you who have tried Google's Wonder Wheel available in the Search Options panel, which enables you to explore related search queries.

Image Swirl expands on technologies developed for Similar Images and Picasa Face Recognition to discern how images should be grouped together and build hierarchies out of these groups. Each thumbnail on the initial results page represents an algorithmically-determined representative group of images with similar appearance and meaning. These aren't just the most relevant images — they are the most relevant groups of images.

Image Swirl currently works for more than 200,000 queries and we plan to include more queries in the future. Available queries will auto-complete as you start to type in the search box, similar to Google Suggest.

You can try out Google Image Swirl in Google Labs today. The feature is experimental and the underlying technology is a work in progress, so please share your feedback and let us know how we can make it more useful.

Posted by Aparna Chennapragada, Product Manager, and Yushi Jing, Google Research

Finding the laws that govern us

2009-11-17T09:05:00.000-08:00

As many of us recall from our civics lessons in school, the United States is a common law country. That means when judges issue opinions in legal cases, they often establish precedents that will guide the rulings of other judges in similar cases and jurisdictions. Over time, these legal opinions build, refine and clarify the laws that govern our land. For average citizens, however, it can be difficult to find or even read these landmark opinions. We think that's a problem: Laws that you don't know about, you can't follow — or make effective arguments to change.

Starting today, we're enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the "Legal opinions and journals" radio button, and try the query separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the acceptablity of "separate but equal" facilities for citizens at two different points in the history of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less familiar with, but which have played an important role.

We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all. To understand how an opinion has influenced other decisions, you can explore citing and related cases using the Cited by and Related articles links on search result pages. As you read an opinion, you can follow citations to the opinions to which it refers. You can also see how individual cases have been quoted or discussed in other opinions and in articles from law journals. Browse these by clicking on the "How Cited" link next to the case title. See, for example, the frequent citations for Roe v. Wade, for Miranda v. Arizona (the source of the famous Miranda warning) or for Terry v. Ohio (a case which helped to establish acceptable grounds for an investigative stop by a police officer).

As we worked to build this feature, we were struck by how readable and accessible these opinions are. Court opinions don't just describe a decision but also present the reasons that support the decision. In doing so, they explain the intricacies of law in the context of real-life situations. And they often do it in language that is surprisingly straightforward, even for those of us outside the legal profession. In many cases, judges have gone quite a bit out of their way to make complex legal issues easy to follow. For example, in Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court justices present a fascinating and easy-to-follow debate on the legality of internment of natural born citizens based on their ancestry. And in United States v. Ramirez-Lopez, Judge Kozinski, in his dissent, illustrates the key issue of the case using an imagined good-news/bad-news dialogue between the defendant and his attorney.

We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the work of several pioneers, who have worked on making it possible for an average citizen to educate herself about the laws of the land: Tom Bruce (Cornell LII), Jerry Dupont (LLMC), Graham Greenleaf and Andrew Mowbray (AustLII), Carl Malamud (Public.Resource.Org), Daniel Poulin (LexUM), Tim Stanley (Justia), Joe Ury (BAILII), Tim Wu (AltLaw) and many others. It is an honor to follow in their footsteps. We would also like to acknowledge the judges who have built this cathedral of justice brick by brick and have tried to make it accessible to the rest of us. We hope Google Scholar will help all of us stand on the shoulders of these giants.

Posted by Anurag Acharya, Distinguished Engineer

New site hierarchies display in search results

2009-11-17T08:02:00.000-08:00

Google usually shows a green web address, or URL, at the bottom of each search result to let you know where you're headed. Today we're rolling out an improvement that replaces the URL in some search results with a hierarchy showing the precise location of the page on the website. The new display provides valuable context and new navigation options. The changes are rolling out now and should be available globally in the next few days.

Some web addresses help you understand the structure of the site and how the specific page fits into the site hierarchy. For example, consider a search for the biography of Vint Cerf (Google's Internet Evangelist). The URL for one result, "www.google.com/corporate/execs.html," shows that the page is located in a page about "execs," under "corporate," which is on the "google.com" site. This can provide valuable context when deciding whether to click on the result.

Often, however, URLs are too long, too short, or too obscure to add useful information. For example, consider this result from ProductWiki for the query [spidersapien reviews]:

The URL of this result is "www.productwiki.com/spidersapien," which doesn't provide much additional information about the site or this result. Now take a look at the result with the new site hierarchy display:

The new text provides useful information about the page. You can tell that the ProductWiki site has information about many different products, organized in different categories, and you can even tell that Spidersapien is a robot toy. In addition, each phrase in the green line is actually a link. For example, clicking on "Toys & Games" takes you to ProductWiki's listing page for all toys, and clicking on "Robots" takes you to a list of their robot toys. This way if you realize that you're interested in a more general category than this specific product (there are a lot of cool robot toys out there) you can easily access information on broader topics.

The host and domain for the site (in this case www.productwiki.com) will always be shown, so you always know what website you're going to before you click. There's not always enough room to show the complete hierarchy, so sometimes we use ellipses to replace some of the intermediate levels, like in this result for [how to make granola]:

The information in these new hierarchies come from analyzing destination web pages. For example, if you visit the ProductWiki Spidersapien page, you'll see a series of similar links at the top, "Home> Toys & Games> Robots." These are standard navigational tools used throughout the web called "breadcrumbs," which webmasters frequently show on their sites to help users navigate. By analyzing site breadcrumbs, we've been able to improve the search snippet for a small percentage of search results, and we hope to expand in the future.

When we design the way results appear on google.com, our goal is to get you to the information you're looking for as quickly as possible. Sometimes that means improving how we represent websites, and other times that means giving you new ways to explore content. We're always happy when we can introduce a feature, like site hierarchies, that does both!

Posted by Harvey Jones and Daniel Rocha, Software Engineers, Result UI Team

Connecting citizens and journalists with YouTube Direct

2009-11-17T06:00:00.000-08:00

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

Every day, people with video cameras are changing the ways we get our news. We see it during elections. We see it during earthquakes, fires and other natural disasters. We see it on our freeways, in our schools and in our public spaces. Almost any event that takes place today has a chance of being captured on camera. As YouTube has become a global platform for sharing the news, media organizations have been looking for a good way to connect directly with citizen reporters on our site so they can broadcast this footage and bring it to a larger audience.

That's why we created YouTube Direct, a new tool that allows media organizations to request, review and rebroadcast YouTube clips directly from YouTube users. Built from our APIs, this open source application lets media organizations enable customized versions of YouTube's upload platform on their own websites. Users can upload videos directly into this application, which also enables the hosting organization to easily review video submissions and select the best ones to broadcast on-air and on their websites. As always, these videos also live on YouTube, so users can reach their own audience while also getting broader exposure and editorial validation for the videos they create.

Though we built YouTube Direct to help news organizations expand their coverage and connect directly with their audiences, the application is designed to meet any organization's goal of leveraging video content submitted by the community. Businesses can use YouTube Direct to solicit promotional videos, nonprofits can use the application to call out for support videos around social campaigns and politicians can use the platform to ask for user-generated political commercials. The opportunities to use the tool are as broad as the media spectrum itself.

Already, we've seen ABC News, the Huffington Post, NPR, Politico, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post and WHDH-TV/WLVI-TV in Boston using YouTube Direct. We look forward to seeing many more organizations to do the same.

To get started, visit youtube.com/direct.

Posted by Steve Grove, YouTube News and Politics

Templates now available in Google Sites

2009-11-16T22:30:00.000-08:00

I'm pleased to announce we just added a stocked gallery of site templates in Google Sites. Anyone can browse the public template gallery, and businesses using Google Apps each have a private area where employees can share site templates with coworkers.

The rate that businesses are adopting Google Sites has surpassed our expectations, and templates will make Sites even more useful by dramatically reducing the time it takes to set up collaborative workspaces like employee intranets, project tracking sites, team sites and employee profile pages. Templates let you quickly start a new site with pre-built content, embedded gadgets, page layouts, navigation links, theming and more.

You can find more about what's new and read stories from customers about why they switched to Google Sites from on-premises collaboration solutions on the Google Enterprise Blog.

And because many of you are managing personal projects with Google Sites, we also added templates for family sites, weddings, neighborhood associations, clubs, charitable causes and more to the public gallery. Check out the Google Docs Blog for other examples and details, and if you have a personal site that others could use as a template, please submit your work to the public gallery!

Posted by Scott Johnston, Product Manager

And the Google Code Jam 2009 champion is...

2009-11-16T15:18:00.000-08:00

Last week, we hosted the the final round of Google Code Jam 2009, the sixth iteration of our annual global programming competition. From almost 23,000 registrants in the beginning, we winnowed down the contestants to the fastest and most fervent coders. On Friday, we brought the top 23 competitors to our Mountain View headquarters for four concentrated hours of thinking, testing and trouble-shooting. The competition platform, built as a 20% project by a group of Google engineers, was powered by Google App Engine and allowed the contestants to use the programming language of their choice. These diverse finalists represented 15 different countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas.

The contestants were confronted by six puzzles. In one, they had to take on the role of a telecommunications company upgrading some of its equipment. The company wants to upgrade its most profitable cell towers; however, doing so might force them to upgrade less profitable towers as well — at a high cost. The contestants were charged with figuring out which towers to upgrade, to maximize gains and minimize costs. The competitors used their coding skills to figure out the most efficient solution as quickly as possible.

Last year's champion, Lou Tiancheng of China, code-named ACRush, once again took top honors and the $5,000 grand prize. Qi Zichao of China won second place, and Iwata Yoichi of Japan came in third.

For a glimpse into this year's Code Jam take look at the video below, courtesy of NBC. And to all the coders out there, we hope to see you next year — start practicing now!

Posted by Bartholomew Furrow, 20% Tech Lead for Google Code Jam

A new look for Google Translate

2009-11-16T02:07:00.000-08:00

Today, we've launched three new features as well as a new look and feel for Google Translate — a service that helps people access information throughout the world by enabling them to automatically translate text and and web pages into their own language. Google Translate offers 51 languages, representing over 98% of Internet users today.

Along with our shiny new layout, these new features should make it faster and easier for you to translate text between our 2550 language pairs:

Translate instantly: Say goodbye to the old "Translate" button. Google Translate now translates your text right as you type.

Read and write any language: Want to say "Today is a good day" in Chinese, but can't read Han characters? Click "Show romanization" to read the text written phonetically in English. Right now, this works for all non-Roman languages except for Hebrew, Arabic and Persian.

We also have a new input transliteration feature for Arabic, Persian or Hindi. If you want to translate from one of these languages, but can't type the script on your keyboard, our input transliteration feature will allow you to type words as they sound and convert them to native script.

--->

Text-to-speech: When translating into English, you can now also hear translations in spoken form by clicking the Speaker Icon.

Watch Josh, an engineer on our team, give a quick demo of the new Google Translate:

We hope these improvements will make reading, learning and communicating in foreign languages easier and more fun. As we continue to improve the precision of our automatic translation system, we're also always looking for ways to evolve and improve our interface. Let us know if you have any feedback on these changes in our discussion group.

Posted by Awaneesh Verma, Product Manager

This week in search 11/13/09

2009-11-13T16:33:00.000-08:00

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label "This week in search" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

This week brought a variety of changes, including a flu shot finder to keep you healthy during this year's flu season. And since you'll be healthy, you can enjoy updates to our movie showtimes feature and go out and have fun.

Flu shot finder
We launched a flu shot finder with the goal of helping people find where they can get their fall flu shots. At the moment we have data for shot locations in 20 states. We'll be increasing our coverage to all 50 states. We're just getting started with this project, so stay tuned for improvements.

You can find flu shots at www.google.com/flushot.

The ability to lock SafeSearch
We launched a feature that lets you lock your SafeSearch setting. When you lock SafeSearch, two things will change. First, you'll need to enter your password to change the setting. Second, the Google search results page will be visibly different to indicate that SafeSearch is on and locked:

That way, if you're taking care of kids, you'll be able to verify that SafeSearch is on from clear across the room! Just look for the colorful balls in the upper right corner.

You can lock your SafeSearch by visiting our Search Settings page in the Settings menu in the upper right corner of www.google.com and clicking "Lock SafeSearch".

Updated movies showtimes
We launched an update to the movies showtimes feature, which now includes movie posters to enrich our movie results. When you click on the result, you'll get a more comprehensive summary of the movie as well as the ability to view theater locations on a map and sort by genre.

Example searches: movies, where the wild things are, 2012

Adding World Bank data to search
We have added World Bank data to search. This makes finding global facts like life expectancy, electricity use and birth rates a lot faster and easier. The Public Data feature also lets you make comparisons across countries. Here's what the feature looks like when it appears in your search results:
Example searches: the worlds life expectancy, electricity use germany

Hope you enjoyed this week's new features. Stay tuned for next week!

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search

Introducing the Europe Scholarship for Students with Disabilities

2009-11-13T09:37:00.000-08:00

(Cross-posted with the Google Students Blog)

Today, we're excited to announce the most recent addition to our scholarship programs in Europe, the Google Europe Scholarship for Students with Disabilities. This scholarship is designed for students with disabilities who are pursuing university degrees in the field of computer science at a university anywhere in the European Union, plus Switzerland and Israel. Multiple scholarships will be awarded based on the strength of candidates’ academic performance and demonstrated passion for computer science.

Scholarships will be granted for the 2010/2011 academic year, and recipients will be invited to attend an all-expenses-paid retreat at Google’s Engineering Center in Zurich in 2010.

Here's what Nelson Mattos, our VP for Product & Engineering in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, has to say about this scholarship: "We're committed to diversifying the long-term engineering talent pool for the industry as a whole. We hope that this scholarship will increase opportunities for students with disabilities and encourage them to pursue careers in computer science. The retreat fosters relationships so that scholars can form a supportive network lasting the full length of their academic studies and beyond."

We know that a diverse group of people use our tools and services and only an equally diverse workforce can anticipate our users' needs. We've found that the diversity of perspectives, ideas and cultures leads to the creation of better products to the benefit of all users of the Internet. We hope that this scholarship works towards that end.

The deadline to apply is March 15th 2010. For more details, visit www.google.com/studentswithdisabilities-europe.

Posted by Beate List, EMEA University Programmes and Eleanor Mulligan, EMEA Diversity & Inclusion

Google Sidewiki: The first 50 days of valuable entries and new API features

2009-11-12T15:20:00.000-08:00

It's been just under 2 months since we launched Google Sidewiki and we've already seen a great number of valuable entries that have been written worldwide.

From product tips to online petitions and from expert health advice to programming help, Sidewiki users are finding many useful and creative ways to help others. We've been really excited by these uses of Sidewiki and wanted to share 10 of these great entries with you:

Jason Young speaks from personal experience and gives detailed insight into tuning a bass guitar on EMG's Bass Tips site.
Antony Carthy, a programmer in South Africa, wrote tips on how to find latitude and longitude coordinates on Google Maps.
Google's own Matt Cutts warns visitors about a deceptive website.
Shalin Gala of PETA calls on readers to sign a petition next to an article about animal mistreatment.
Ron Burk suggests a missing reference for a medical article.
The Mayo Clinic uses Sidewiki to welcome visitors with a special webmaster entry on its homepage (this one requires Sidewiki to view).
Jesse Poe from New York offers up great insights in a review of an iPhone app by Daniel Johnston, one of his favorite musicians.
Alfonso Grandis from Italy talks about his eye-witness account of a recent earthquake.
David Davis, a software engineer from California, improves a snippet of code in a programming tutorial.
Michael Roizen from the Cleveland clinic adds his advice about H1N1 vaccinations.

If you haven't used Sidewiki yet, you can download it at google.com/sidewiki as part of the Google Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer. If you're using Google Chrome, Safari or other browsers without the Google Toolbar, simply install the Sidewiki bookmarklet.

We're also releasing a top-requested feature for our API today that makes it easy to retrieve all Sidewiki entries for an entire domain. With this addition, you can look for new entries created on any page of a website and also subscribe to them via RSS (such as this RSS feed for all Sidewiki entries on the Google Blog). See our Sidewiki API documentation for all of its details.

We look forward to seeing many more great entries and keeping you posted with new features — follow us on Twitter for the latest news and highlights. Try using Sidewiki right now to add your feedback to this blog post and read what others are saying!

Posted by Ario Jafarzadeh, Sidewiki User Experience Designer

Gone Google at EDUCAUSE 2009

2009-11-12T10:13:00.000-08:00

Last week the Google Apps for Education team headed to Denver for EDUCAUSE 2009 where the higher education community meets annually. It was at this conference three years ago that we first unveiled Google Apps for Education. Since then, we've witnessed staggering growth in the world of cloud computing in education. Lots has happened over the past year especially: more than 100 new features have rolled out in Google Apps, we've engaged well over six million students and faculty (a 400% increase since this time last year), launched free Google Message Security for K-12 schools and have integrated with other learning services such as Blackboard and Moodle.

These developments are just the beginning. According to the newly-released 2009 Campus Computing survey statistics, 44% of colleges and universities have converted to a hosted student email solution, while another 37% are currently evaluating the move. Of those that have migrated, over half — 56% precisely* — are going Google.

To toast the students and faculty that are shaping this movement, we hosted our customers and EDUCAUSE conference attendees at the Denver Public Library. Check out the photos to see what these schools have to say:

We also did something different this year and invited some student ambassadors from schools using Google Apps to come to Denver and share how using Apps on campus helps make their lives easier. Daniel Miller who works at University of Washington's Ethnic Cultural Center uses Calendar to let students on campus know about his organization's events. Sociology major Robin Brown uses forms in Docs to collect data for her class surveys at Notre Dame. Taylor Bell at Boise State relies on Gmail's filters and gadgets to seamlessly access to his Calendar, Docs, Tasks and Chat. After losing his journal, Vaughn Parker at Temple University created a Calendar to keep track of his assignments and share them with his classmates and professors. (There are many more of these student stories, too).

Every year, more schools move to Google Apps so they can spend their time focusing on students, not servers; on higher learning, not higher costs. If you're a school, you can go Google, too. Check out www.google.com/appsatschool to learn more.

*Update on 11/20: Among 4-year universities and colleges, the number is slightly higher, with 59% choosing Google Apps.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Product Marketing Manager

Google's movie showtimes, digitally remastered

2009-11-11T16:45:00.000-08:00

Did you know you can immediately discover movie times and locations by typing a simple search on Google? For example, search for [where the wild things are] and you'll see times and places to watch the film, or try [glendale 18 los angeles] to see movies playing at your local theater. You can also click on the showtimes search result to get more complete movie listings and information.

Today, we're making a few improvements to movie results on Google, including more detailed movie pages, genre filters and a new map view.

Click "showtimes" in your search results for more detailed information.

When you visit google.com/movies, you'll discover a new, more comprehensive resource with all the information you need to decide what movie to see and where to see it:

Comprehensive movie pages: Deciding what movie to see can take a few searches: What's it about? How are the reviews? Where is it playing near me? Our new detailed layout brings together all the basic information you need with a plot synopsis, trailer, reviews and photos in the same page.
Genre filters: The new movie pages also give you new ways to explore films by genre and find one you're in the mood for. Sometimes, you might feel like seeing a sci-fi flick or a romance, but you're not sure what's out in theaters. With genre filters you can start browsing right away and quickly find the right movie for you.
Map view: After you've chosen a movie, the new map view shows you nearby theaters playing that exact film. You no longer need to do a separate search to find out where you're going.

We hope these improvements will help you spend more time at the movies and less time researching. Visit google.com/movies or click through a "showtimes" result to try them out, and treat yourself to a movie!

Posted by Dan Stokeley, Associate Product Manager

Googlers receive prestigious ITOJUN Service Award

2009-11-11T15:10:00.000-08:00

Googlers Lorenzo Colitti and Erik Kline have received the ITOJUN Service Award while attending the 76th Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Hiroshima, Japan.

The Itojun Service Award honors the memory of Dr. Jun-ichiro "itojun" Hagino, who passed away in 2007 at the age of 37. The friends of itojun and the Internet Society (ISOC) came together to establish this award last year. The award recognizes and commemorates the extraordinary dedication exercised by itojun over the course of IPv6 development.

Lorenzo and Erik have been the spark plugs and workhorses of Google's implementation of the IPv6 protocol that will help to carry the Internet beyond the anticipated exhaustion of the IPv4 address space in mid-2011. The two undertook, at their own initiative, to analyze the requirements and begin implementation of IPv6 throughout our networking infrastructure. Their leadership has placed us in the forward ranks of companies prepared for this important expansion. They are role models for others around the world, in the spirit of Itojun Hagino who was, himself, a model leader in this domain.

We're all proud to be associated with Lorenzo, Erik and the others at Google who recognized this challenge and took it head on.

Posted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist

Commemorating Veterans Day at Google

2009-11-11T13:00:00.000-08:00

Today is Veterans Day, the annual U.S. holiday honoring military veterans who have served our country in the armed forces. It is also celebrated as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day in other parts of the world, falling on November 11, the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I in 1918. We want to take a moment to highlight a few things we're doing at Google to reflect on the service of our veterans.

YouTube has become an important platform for current service members as well as veterans who want to share their stories. Starting today, you can visit www.youtube.com/veterans to hear from these brave men and women. In addition, on the homepage, YouTube is featuring content from some institutions and organizations that have provided much-needed support to veterans. You can read more about how YouTube is recognizing Veterans Day on the YouTube Blog.

We also launched a Google Voice partnership with Blue Star Families, a group of military spouses who work hard to educate civilian communities and leaders about the hardships faced by military families. We're giving priority Google Voice invites to U.S. members of Blue Star Families to help bring them closer to their loved ones during deployments.

Finally, we're commemorating Veterans Day in Google offices around the country with an event hosted by the Google Veterans Network, our employee group dedicated to veterans' issues. The highlight of the event is a fireside chat with Google veterans discussing the values associated with military service, issues they face at Google and in the world in general, their hopes to end conflicts, similar groups at other companies and the company's efforts to support our Googler service women and men.

We hope to make this Veterans Day a memorable one and we want to thank everyone in the armed forces for their service.

Posted by Carrie Laureno, Learning & Development Manager and Founder, Google VetNet

World Bank public data, now in search

2009-11-11T11:00:00.000-08:00

When we first launched public data on Google.com, we wanted to make statistics easier to find and to encourage debate based on facts rather than intuition. The day after we launched, a friend who worked at the World Bank called me, her voice filled with enthusiasm, "Did you know that the World Bank also just released an API for their data?" Excited, I checked it out, and found an amazing treasure trove of statistics for most economies in the world. After some hard work and analysis, today we're happy to announce that 17 World Development Indicators (list below*) are now conveniently available to you in Google search.

With today's update, you can quickly access more data with a broad range of queries. Search should be intuitive, so we've done the work to think through queries where public data will be most relevant to you. To see the new data, try queries like [gdp of indonesia], [life expectancy brazil ], [rwanda's population growth], [energy use of iceland], [co2 emissions of iceland] and [gdp growth rate argentina]. For example, if you search for [internet users in the united states], you will see the following chart at the top of the results page:

Clicking on the result will bring you to an interactive chart where you can compare the United States with other regions around the world. We've also added a new feature to enable you to embed these charts in your own website or blog by clicking on the "Link" button in the upper right-hand corner of the chart page. You have the option to either embed the chart with static data, or you can also set the chart to update dynamically when new data becomes available. To give you a sense of what these charts look like, we've embedded the chart below comparing Internet users in the United States and South Korea:

We hope this new data and our new embedding feature will help facilitate quick and easy access to public statistics. There are still many other data sets and sources out there, and we're excited about the possibilities for the future. If you're a data publisher interested in making your data more easily discoverable in Google, please contact us.

* Complete list of World Bank indicators currently available: CO2 emissions per capita, Electricity consumption per capita, Energy use per capita, Exports as percentage of GDP, Fertility rate, GDP deflator change, GDP growth rate, GNI per capita in PPP dollars, Gross Domestic Product, Gross National Income in PPP dollars, Imports as percentage of GDP, Internet users as percentage of population, Life expectancy, Military expenditure as percentage of GDP, Mortality rate, under 5, Population, and Population growth rate.

Update at 11:26am: We've updated this post to include a better example.

Posted by Chung Wu, Software Engineer

Locking SafeSearch

2009-11-11T08:00:00.000-08:00

When you're searching on Google, we think you should have the choice to keep adult content out of your search results. That's why we developed SafeSearch, a feature that lets you filter sexually explicit web sites and images from your search results. While no filter is 100% accurate, SafeSearch helps you avoid content you may prefer not to see or would rather your children did not stumble across. We think it works pretty well, but we're always looking for ways to improve the feature.

Today we're launching a feature that lets you lock your SafeSearch setting to the Strict level of filtering. When you lock SafeSearch, two things will change. First, you'll need to enter your password to change the setting. Second, the Google search results page will be visibly different to indicate that SafeSearch is locked:

Even from across the room, the colored balls give parents and teachers a clear visual cue that SafeSearch is still locked. And if you don't see them, it's quick and easy to verify and re-lock SafeSearch.

To use SafeSearch lock, go to the "Search Settings" page on Google. For detailed instructions, check out this video.

We hope you and your family find exactly what you’re looking for in Google search results — and nothing more.

Posted by Pete Lidwell, Product Manager and Aaron Arcos, Engineer

Twice the storage for a quarter of the price

2009-11-10T18:17:00.000-08:00

(Cross-posted from the Google Photos Blog)

People today have more personal data online than ever before. More and more people are starting to move the bulk of their data off the desktop and into servers "in the cloud," where it's accessible from any computer or mobile device and easily shareable with friends and family. At the same time, digital photo technology is making it easier and cheaper than ever to take a lot of pictures, and client software like Picasa 3.5 makes it easier than ever to move photos from your camera to the cloud. That's why we've always given you lots of free storage in products like Picasa Web Albums and Gmail, and why for the past two years we've offered additional storage you can purchase if you need even more space.

While the cost of hard drive storage has continued to drop in these two years, we've also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce your costs even further. Today we're dramatically lowering our prices to make extra storage even more affordable. You can now buy 20 GB for only $5 a year — that's twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price, and enough space for more than 10,000 full resolution pictures taken with a five megapixel camera. Since most people have less than 10 GB of photos, chances are you can now save all your memories online for a year for the cost of a triple mocha. If you need more than 20 GB, plans range all the way up to 16 TB, which is enough room for 8 million full resolution photos! And Google paid storage offers an extra level of security, protection and accessibility that you can't get with an external drive — at a similar cost per gigabyte.

As always, extra storage acts as an overflow that you only start using when you reach the limit of your free storage, and people who have extra storage will be automatically upgraded. So if you need more space for thousands of photos of your toddler, or if you're running out of room in your overflowing inbox, visit www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage to see all the plans and to buy more storage.

Posted by Elvin Lee, Software Engineer

Finding flu vaccine information in one easy place

2009-11-10T09:15:00.000-08:00

This year, it's especially important to have clear information on what you can do to prepare for the flu season. With this in mind, we are happy to share a new feature for the U.S. which allows you to more easily find locations near you for getting both the seasonal and H1N1 flu vaccine. After expanding Google Flu Trends to a total of 20 countries and 38 languages, allowing more people to see near real-time estimates of flu activity, we began brainstorming with the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services (HHS), their flu.gov collaborators and the American Lung Association on the flu shot finder and other ways Google can be helpful to people this flu season.

You can check out the flu shot finder at www.google.com/flushot. The same tool will also be available shortly on www.flu.gov and the American Lung Association websites. It's important to note that this project is just beginning and we have not yet received information about flu shot clinics for many locations. In addition, many locations that are shown are currently out of stock. We launched this service now in order to help disseminate information about locations where vaccines are available, and also to make more vaccine providers aware of the project so that they can contribute.

Especially given slower than expected vaccine production, we think it's important to bring together flu shot information in a coherent manner. We've been working with HHS, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and state and local health agencies to gather information on flu vaccine locations across the country, particularly for the H1N1 flu vaccine (both the nasal-spray vaccine and the shot). At the moment we have data for locations of flu vaccine directly from 20 states and counting. We are also continuing to add information from chain pharmacies and other providers in all 50 states; today, you'll find results from chains such as Walgreens, CVS and PDX participants, such as Kmart, Duane Reade, WinnDixie and Giant Eagle.

Of course you should still call flu vaccine providers ahead of time to find out more about availability and eligibility for the two vaccines.

We hope to continue providing you with relevant information to help keep you and your loved ones healthy.

Update on 11/19: We just added the flu shot finder as a search feature on Google.com. Now, if you search for terms like [flu], [flu shot], [h1n1 shot] or [flu vaccine], information will appear at the top of your search results, including flu tips from flu.gov as well as the flu shot finder box with an expanding map that displays locations where you can receive seasonal and/or H1N1 flu shots.

Posted by Roni Zeiger, M.D., Product Manager and Jennifer Haroon, Product Marketing Manager

A WiFi wonderland in the sky... and on the ground!

2009-11-10T08:00:00.000-08:00

The holiday season is always about connecting with friends, family... and the web. During the holidays in particular, the web brings us closer to others through the email we send, YouTube videos we share, gifts we buy, holiday music we listen to and charitable donations we make. That's why a few weeks ago, Google announced that we're working with Virgin America to give free WiFi to all passengers on Virgin flights this holiday season.

If you're one of the millions of people who will be flying during this busy travel period, chances are you may spend more time in the airport than on the plane itself. So, starting today and lasting through January 15th, we're happy to announce that we will be offering free WiFi in 47 airports across the country. You can see the full list of airports here. This is one of our holiday gifts to our users, and, when you connect, we also hope that you'll take the opportunity to try some of the latest Google products. Our hope is that being connected for a few extra minutes (or hours, if you're delayed!) will help make things a bit easier. Be sure to look for the Google signs in an airport near you.

Here's to the beginning of a happy, healthy holiday season!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience