The Official Google Blog

More great news sources to discover in Fast Flip

2009-12-16T13:05:00.000-08:00

Three months ago, we launched Google Fast Flip, a service that seeks to make reading articles online as fast and simple as flipping through a magazine or newspaper. It's still early in this experiment, which is why Fast Flip remains in Google Labs. But so far our initial thesis has held up: If you make it easier to read news online, people will read more of it. Users have told us they like being able to browse content so quickly, and we've been pleased with the amount of time they have spent reading articles in Fast Flip.

We've also received good feedback from the three dozen publishers who joined us for the launch, as well as a lot of interest from others. Today, we're excited to be adding articles from another two dozen publishers representing more than 50 newspapers, magazines, web outlets, news wires and TV and radio broadcasters. Some of the new sources include Tribune Co. newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, McClatchy Company newspapers such as the Miami Herald and the Kansas City Star, the Huffington Post, Popular Science, Reuters, Public Radio International, POLITICO and U.S. News & World Report. Now you can use Fast Flip to engage with content from even more of your favorite news outlets in an innovative way, and continue to explore topics covered by a diverse group of sources. And, through the mobile version, you can flip through all these new articles on your Android-powered device or iPhone.

While we're encouraged by the positive feedback about Fast Flip, it's just one of many experiments you'll see us try in partnership with news publishers. Our goal is to work with the industry to help it continue to innovate and build bigger audiences, better engage those audiences and generate more revenue. We're looking forward to innovating and iterating with all these new partners in Fast Flip. And if you have more suggestions for ways we can improve Fast Flip, please let us know.

Posted by Jack Hebert, Software Engineer

What you watched and searched for on YouTube in 2009

2009-12-16T00:00:00.000-08:00

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

This year has been the biggest yet for online video, and for the first time we're sharing our official Most Watched lists and some of the fastest-rising search terms on YouTube. Some moments were big (President Obama's inauguration), some small (a Minnesota wedding party erupts into dance), some expected ("New Moon"), some surprising (Susan Boyle) — but all of them inspired, entertained and connected millions of people around the world via YouTube.

For these lists, we looked at view counts of YouTube's most popular videos (in some instances we aggregated views across multiple versions of the same video):

Most Watched YouTube videos (Global):
1. Susan Boyle - Britain's Got Talent (120+ million views)
2. David After Dentist (37+ million views)
3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views)
4. New Moon Movie Trailer (31+ million views)
5. Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views)

Most Watched music videos on YouTube (Global)*:
1. Pitbull - I Know You Want Me (82+ million views)
2. Miley Cyrus - The Climb (64+ million views)
3. Miley Cyrus - Party In The U.S.A. (54+ million views)
4. The Lonely Island - I'm On A Boat (48+ million views)
5. Keri Hilson - Knock You Down (35+ million views)

Then, to determine the fastest rising search terms for each month, we examined the billions of queries that people searched for on YouTube (through December 15):

Fastest Rising YouTube search terms by month (Global):
January: inauguration
February: christian bale
March: the climb
April: susan boyle
May: pacquiao vs hatton
June: michael jackson thriller
July: michael jackson
August: usain bolt
September: kanye west
October: paranormal activity
November: bad romance
December: tiger woods

Fastest Rising YouTube search terms by month (U.S.):
January: obama inauguration
February: on a boat
March: watchmen
April: susan boyle
May: pacquiao
June: michael jackson thriller
July: wedding
August: send it on
September: kanye west
October: paranormal activity
November: adam lambert
December: tiger woods

There are a lot of interesting nuggets in here. The fastest rising U.S. search term in July was [wedding], clearly related to JK Wedding Entrance Dance, the third Most Watched YouTube video of the year. And while [michael jackson] was Google's fastest rising search term in 2009, [michael jackson thriller] was the faster rising search on YouTube. Movie trailers ("New Moon," "Watchmen," "Paranormal Activity") and inspirational moments (Susan Boyle, Usain Bolt) were popular, as were sensational celebrity scandals (Christian Bale, Kanye West, and most recently, Tiger Woods).

We hope to expand these lists in the future, so if there are any "Most Watched" categories you'd like to see in 2010, let us know by leaving a comment on the YouTube Blog.

*Note: Some music videos may be unavailable in your country due to copyright restrictions.

Posted by Jamie Davidson, Associate Product Manager

Live on YouTube: Leaders answer your questions in the CNN/YouTube Climate Debate

2009-12-15T00:00:00.000-08:00

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

Today, at 8 a.m. ET, a panel of world climate leaders, among them former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and journalist Thomas Friedman, will gather in Copenhagen and answer the top questions that you submitted to the CNN/YouTube Climate Debate channel.

You can watch them address the issues that matter to you in real-time: We'll be live-streaming the debate at www.youtube.com/cop15.

Thank you for making this event truly international. We received thousands of questions from Italy to Brazil, Nigeria to New Zealand. To get a scope of just how many countries are represented, see this map, which depicts global submissions through a Google Earth layer.

And if you didn't have a chance to submit a question, but still want to raise your voice about climate change, we encourage you to join the discussion on Twitter during the debate using hashtag #cnnytdebate.

Posted by Steve Grove, Head of News & Politics, YouTube

The top ten ways to get your business ready for the holidays

2009-12-14T15:20:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, we jump-started the holiday shopping season with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Like us, you probably browsed the shops and sites for the coolest products and best shopping deals for your holiday purchases. But if you're a business or an advertiser, you probably know that some of the biggest shopping weekends of the year are approaching — and you need to get your business ready for the rush!

If you're as geeky as we are, you're probably doing everything you can to figure out how to best use the tools available on the web to find the right customers and effectively measure the results from the money you spent on marketing.

At T-minus ten days before Christmas, its not too late to look over your holiday campaigns and we’d like to share with you our top 10 holiday tips — a quick checklist to help you make use of important data now and improve your holiday campaigns.

Consider it a gift from one geeky data whiz to another!

1. Update your wishlist:
Use the Search-based Keyword Tool to find keywords that you never thought of incorporating into your campaign for the holidays. (Here is a how-to guide for how best to use the tool: Monetize The Long Tail of Search).

2. Know what's hot this season:
Research on Insights for Search to see what the “Rising Searches” are and understand how people are searching for your brand (and your competitors!).

3. Read the wish lists:
Who could be looking for you? Type your website URL into Google Ad Planner to see who is looking for your site, broken down by demographic categories like age and gender.

4. Follow the reindeer:
Where else are they going? Use Ad Planner to find other websites that share the same demographics as yours. Putting display ads on that site might be a great way for you to target that audience!

5. Build new toys:
Create new AdWords campaigns for your holiday lines and products. Incorporate new keywords and keep in mind the trends you found on Insights for Search.

6. Train the elves:
Test your AdWords campaigns by introducing new holiday promotions. Then, test your promotions — a promotion for "30% off" might resonate better with your customers than "Buy One Get One Free."

7. Check your list twice:
Use Google Analytics to better understand where your traffic is coming from during the holiday season. Find out who's coming to your website, when they're coming and where they're coming from.

8. Map out the route:
How long are people staying on your website? Use Google Analytics to understand your purchasing cycle. Which pages have the highest bounce rate? And which pages are people leaving the quickest?

9. Test run on the sleigh:
Run experiments using Website Optimizer on the landing pages you have linked from your ads. Make sure the images are in the right place and that they're not a distraction for your customer. Play around with the size of the image and the image type.

10. Does the chimney work?:
Test different versions of your purchase page to find out what works best. Change the "purchase" button on your webpage. Pick different colors — bright versus dark colors — and vary the button sizes. Try out different text on your button. See which of these variations lead to the most clicks to conversions.

We wish you a happy, data driven holiday season.

Posted by Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist

A deep dive on display advertising

2009-12-14T13:47:00.000-08:00

2009 has been a busy year for Google in the area of display advertising — that is, the image, video and interactive ad formats that run across the web.

Our goal is to improve display advertising on the web for everyone. We're working to help advertisers get better results from their display ad campaigns, enable publishers to make more money from their ad space and deliver better, more relevant ads (and, ultimately, more ad-funded web content) to users.

To achieve these goals, in 2009 we released a host of new features for display advertisers on the Google Content Network and on YouTube, launched the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange and made significant enhancements to our ad serving products.

On Tuesday December 15 at 10am PT, we're hosting an educational webcast for analysts, investors and press about our display advertising business. This is our second educational webcast — the first, on search advertising, was held in September.

The webcast will be available at investor.google.com, and a replay will be available on the same website. If you're interested in hearing about our efforts in this space, please feel free to tune in.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, Vice President of Product Management

Making URLs shorter for Google Toolbar and FeedBurner

2009-12-14T12:31:00.000-08:00

This morning, we launched updated versions of the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner that offer a new URL shortening service from Google called the Google URL Shortener. We mentioned our URL shortener as a feature in both announcements, so we wanted to say a little more about how this product works and why we're offering it.

People share a lot of links online. This is particularly true as microblogging services such as Twitter have grown in popularity. If you're not familiar with them, URL shorteners basically squeeze a long URL into fewer characters to make it easier to share with others. With character limits in tweets, status updates and other modes of short form publishing, a shorter URL leaves more room to say what's on your mind — and that's why people use them.

First, we think people who use the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner will benefit from a shortener that is easily accessible — making it faster and easier to share, post and email links. Second, we've built this on Google's global infrastructure to offer the following benefits:

Stability: Google's scalable, multi-datacenter infrastructure provides great uptime and a reliable service to our users.
Security: As we do with web search, shortened URLs are automatically checked to detect sites that may be malicious and warn users when the short URL resolves to such sites.
Speed: At Google we like fast products and we've worked hard to ensure this service is quick. We'll continue to iterate and improve the speed of Google Url Shortener.

Google URL shortener is not a stand-alone service; you can't use it to shorten links directly. Currently, Google URL Shortener is only available from the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner. If the service proves useful, we may eventually make it available for a wider audience in the future.

We're excited about enabling this functionality — try it for Toolbar and FeedBurner!

Posted by Muthu Muthusrinivasan, Ben D'Angelo and Devin Mullins, Software Engineers

Share any web page from your Toolbar (and more)

2009-12-14T12:27:00.000-08:00

Hello from the Google Toolbar team! Before we head off for the holidays, we wanted to give you some new features to play with.

We've been busy working on even more ways to make web browsing easier and more fun. First off is our new Share feature in Toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox. This makes it easy for you to share any page on the web with your friends over various social networks, blogs or email.

For example, I love Top Chef and have been following it all season. Last week was the season finale and I wanted to share head judge Tom Colicchio's great write-up with my friends. Using Toolbar, I just clicked on the Share button and selected Twitter. Toolbar created a new window with the page's title, space for my comments and a link to the page (automatically shortened by Google's new URL shortener, goo.gl).

You can just as easily share to Blogger, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Gmail or other services. For those you use frequently, you can save a step by adding them as buttons in the settings option in the Share menu. We've also integrated with more local social networks — for example, if you're in Japan, you can share with your friends on Hatena.

With this new release, we've also "graduated" the My Location feature from Toolbar Labs. It's now available in Toolbar for Internet Explorer (Firefox already has a similar feature built in to the browser). After you authorize Toolbar to detect your location, you can simply search [coffee] and Toolbar will return search results targeted to your location. This is done without associating location information with your Google Account. Thanks to everyone who helped us test it!

Here's a video demo of these features.

Last but certainly not least, Google Sidewiki is now available in nearly all Toolbar languages, and as a Chrome extension.

To try it out, download our latest release, code-named Dangermouse. And follow us on Twitter at @googletoolbar and @googlesidewiki to stay updated with the latest Toolbar and Sidewiki news.

Posted by Mina Radhakrishnan, Toolbar Product Manager

Cloud apps, big city: LA goes Google

2009-12-14T05:30:00.000-08:00

This fall we've seen lots of government agencies decide to make the switch to cloud computing, joining the many businesses already using Google Apps for email and collaboration at work. Today we'd like to officially welcome another customer to the mix: the City of Los Angeles. Starting today, Los Angeles will be equipping 34,000 city employees with Google Apps for email and collaboration in the cloud.

The story of Los Angeles moving to Google Apps started early this year, when the city's Chief Technology Officer, Randi Levin, and her team at the Information Technology Agency (ITA) looked to replace their aging, on-premise system with more secure, productivity-focused technology. After calling for proposals and carefully evaluating over 14 different ones, Randi and the ITA decided to revamp the city government's email technology by adopting Google Apps. Los Angeles' going Google will help the city on a number of fronts. The cloud computing system will improve the security and reliability of city email, transitioning from servers in the City Hall basement to hosted, secure data centers. Employees will also have a new avenue for collaboration with Google Apps in the cloud: sharing docs, sites and videos and editing them together in realtime as they work on making the city run more smoothly and efficiently and thus better serving Angelenos city-wide. Furthermore, Randi and her team realized that moving to Apps would mean less taxpayer money spent on IT — valuable budget that can be rededicated to other city efforts over the next few years.

Check out this video to hear more from Randi on Los Angeles and Apps.

Los Angeles is the second-largest city in the U.S., and the latest in a string of cities, like Washington D.C. and Orlando, FL, to go Google. With this switch to the cloud, Los Angeles joins the group of leaders on the innovation front — not only with regard to budget but technology as well. Bringing in cloud applications will make city work more efficient, which is great for Los Angeles residents too. Read more from Randi on the Google Enterprise blog, and stay tuned to follow Los Angeles' Google Apps story, and to learn about other governments moving to the cloud.

Posted by Matt Glotzbach, Product Management Director, Google Enterprise

This week in search 12/11/09

2009-12-11T16:01:00.000-08:00

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.

What a busy week for Google! From the launch of real time, to the addition of universal search features in Suggest, searching on Google just got a whole lot better this week.

Real-time search
Want to know what people are saying about [google chrome] right now? Or maybe you're wondering if things can get any worse for [tiger]? With Google's real-time search, you can find out what's happening right now. Once you've entered a query, you can also click on "Latest results" or select "Latest" in the Search Options menu for a full page of the latest web, blogs, news and updates. You can also restrict your results to "Updates" mode which shows only short form content from our partners that we announced on Monday, which will include Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca. Finally, you can also check out the common topics people are publishing to the web in real-time by going to the "Hot Topics" section in Google Trends. Real-time search is live worldwide in English, and is available on mobile too from google.com and google.com/trends on Android and iPhone.

Check out the video from our real-time search announcement here.

Universal search features in Suggest
Google Suggest learned a new trick this week, or rather 10 of them. To save time and keystrokes, we now show universal search features in Suggest for a range of straightforward questions, including ones for: weather, flight status, local time, area codes, package tracking, answers, definitions, calculator, unit conversions, and currency conversions. So the next time you start searching on Google for [weather in wichita], the [alaska area code], or look to [define dichotomy], chances are you won't even need to hit enter to see the answer. Though these features are available for Google.com users in English so far, we're working hard to expand them to our international users.

Google Similar Pages beta on the Chrome extensions gallery
Ever find yourself enjoying the webpage you're looking at, but curious to discover other pages similar to it? Or trying to find more pages about a topic, but struggling to come up with the right query? We certainly do, which is why we're excited to introduce the Google Similar Pages beta Chrome extension to help do just that. We use the same data for this as for the "Similar" link you see next to web search results, which you may have seen next to the Cached link for many web search results. But this Chrome extension is portable -- so you can use it to see similar page wherever you are on the web, not just on the Google search results page.

Quick Scroll on the Chrome extensions gallery
This week we released a Chrome extension called Google Quick Scroll. Once installed, this tool lets you use Google's search capabilities even after leaving our results page. For some queries, after you click on a result and the page you're visiting is done loading, the Quick Scroll panel will pop up in the lower right corner of your screen. The panel highlights the most relevant content on the page, based on what you just searched for on google.com. Clicking one of the bits of text in the panel will scroll you directly to that part of the page. This should save you from scrolling around or using Control-F to manually hunt for the relevant content on the page. The Quick Scroll panel won't appear for all queries or results; it'll only pop up when we think that relevant content for your search is buried down the page or hard to find.

After you've installed the tool, try these example queries and results:
[does flap of butterfly wings affect weather] - click on result from en.wikipedia.org
[visiting berber villages in morocco] - click on result from www.gonomad.com
[evidence universe expands and contracts] - click on result from www4.ncsu.edu

Google Quick Scroll, like all extensions, requires the Beta version of Chrome 4, and can be installed from the Chrome Extensions Gallery here.

More Transit information in search results
We know a lot of people rely on public transit to get where they're going, and we want to make it even easier for you to find the right stop for your travels. Starting this week, when you search for local businesses in cities where public transit is popular, we'll show you nearby public transit stops in the map appearing at the top of your results. For example, if you wanted to visit [heidelberg nyc], we now show you that it's near the 86th Street station. If you were in Germany, you might want to take the tram to the National Theater stop for [hofbrauhaus munich]. Clicking on the station name will take you to Google Maps with your query and the transit stop highlighted, so that you can easily get full directions.

Stay tuned for more great posts for the remainder of 2009!

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

Ad policies — the year in review

2009-12-11T14:34:00.000-08:00

We’ve always said that a top priority for us is making sure that your search results are relevant, useful and safe. Of course, this commitment to a positive search experience extends to the ads you see on Google too. Earlier this week we took a stand to fight Internet scams, and in recent months, we've also put a new procedure in place to eradicate "scammy" ads. But that's not all we've done in the past year to help you get the best possible information from our ads.

Given that there are hundreds of thousands of businesses running ads through our AdWords system, you can imagine that reviewing all the ads is no easy feat! That's why we have both automated and manual ways to check them, and advertising policies meant to ensure that the ads you see on Google — and on partner sites that show our ads — are appropriate, fair, consistent and of the highest quality. We regularly review and update our guidelines to make sure they continue to provide the best user experience. Here's a recap of the improvements we’ve made in 2009.

Making sure the ads work
When you click on an ad for a holiday gift basket, you probably want to go directly to a website with gift basket choices. That's why we have link policies to ensure that the URLs in our ads actually get you to the sites you want to visit. For example, our updated Display URL policy helps advertisers better organize the URLs in their AdWords campaigns to make sure that when you click on an ad for gift baskets, a webpage with gift baskets is exactly where you go.

Making sure the ads are legitimate
To protect you from unsavory online entities that hope to victimize folks, we've shared tips to help you avoid falling for scams that sound too good to be true, and have taken recent legal action against fraudulent online schemes. To make sure that the ads are safe, we've also increased our efforts to detect scam ads and remove them from our system. For example, we’ve recently implemented a new process for permanently disabling AdWords accounts that attempt to harm users by doing things like installing malware on your computer, or offering free services that bait you into accepting hidden fees. This practice better protects users and is even stricter than our previous process of disapproving scam ads and disabling their domains. We're now trying to proactively prevent suspicious characters from creating new accounts with us regardless of their websites.

Making sure the ads are appropriate
We try to make sure that the ads you see aren't obtrusive, inappropriate or offensive. Our editorial policies help verify that ads meet basic grammar, spelling and composition rules. For example, we don't allow excessive punctuation or capitalization, because it would be really annoying if all ads were littered with lots of exclamation points or used all caps for their messages.

Our content policies make sure that the types of things offered in ads are appropriate. There are some things we don't allow because they are not legal in many countries — like child pornography and drugs — and other things we don't allow because they're offensive and considered socially unacceptable. To help us figure out where to draw these lines, we consider factors such as legal regulations, public sentiment and general codes of ethics and values.

Our commitment to appropriate ads also applies to the sites we accept to our AdSense program. We want website owners who have news and shopping-related information on their sites to be able to show you relevant ads. But we don't like sites that do inappropriate things, like repurpose copyrighted material without permission or automatically initiate unwanted downloads. To protect users and ensure we work with good sites, we take a look at website content and practices in accordance with our AdSense policies, and don't allow sites that violate the policies in the program. We act quickly to weed out the non-compliant sites so that someone who's looking online at sites that, for example, have illegal content like child porn or engage in shady invalid click activity won't see ads from Google there.

As new issues crop up, we revisit our content policies to make sure they're comprehensive and help to show you the best ads we can. Over this year, for instance, we've updated our global alcohol policy and U.S. trademark policy to give you additional relevant ad options. You can find more information about these changes and all our other policies on our Advertising Policies page.

To make good on our promise to show you ads and sites that help you find what you want, we enforce our advertising policies in both automated and manual ways. These are rules that aren't meant to be broken, so when we discover violations, we stop any offending ads from running. We also encourage users who’ve had a poor experience with an ad to report it, so we can look into it and take any necessary action.

While we've done a lot in 2009 to make ads better and more useful, we recognize that our systems aren’t always perfect. We'll continue to work hard in 2010 to show you only the most relevant, high quality and safe ads possible.

Posted by Alana Karen, Director, Online Sales and Operations

Google Apps highlights – 12/11/2009

2009-12-11T12:30:00.000-08:00

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.

We've been busy over the last three weeks adding new functionality to make communicating and sharing with Google Apps easier than ever, whether you use Google Apps for work, for school or at home.

Google Docs search improvements
In the past, when you searched for a document, spreadsheet, presentation or PDF in your Google Docs list, the results were a set of exact matches arranged by "last modified date". Since Tuesday, we now provide personalized search results in Google Docs, sorted by relevancy — a combination of factors including whether you're an author on the document and if the file is explicitly shared with you. Search in Google Docs also supports stemming and synonyms now, so even if your search terms aren't quite exact, you can still find what you're looking for.

Offline Gmail graduates from Labs
After making many improvements to Offline Gmail since it first launched as a Labs feature (like the new ability to add attachments while offline), on Monday Offline Gmail graduated from Labs. Now it's easier to for Gmail users to enable offline access and adjust their preferences. Just to to the the "Offline" tab in Gmail's "Settings" area.

Picasa Web Albums connects with Eye-Fi
On Monday we announced a special offer to help you make even better use of our new overflow storage plans for photos and personal email. For a limited time, we'll send you a free Eye-Fi card (a $95 value) when you buy 200 GB of paid Google storage for $50. The Eye-Fi card offer lets you wirelessly upload photos and videos to Picasa Web Albums or to your computer, right from your camera, no cables required!

Collaborative albums in Picasa
You've been able to collaboratively manage online albums in Picasa Web Albums together with friends and family since August, and on Tuesday we released an update so you can upload to collaborative albums directly from the Picasa software. From Picasa, you can also now manage the collaboration settings for your online photo collections.

Google Groups for businesses and schools
Also on Tuesday, we launched Google Groups for businesses and schools using Google Apps. Employees and students can now set up group aliases without taxing IT administrators for support, and group members can browse and search archives of messages sent to the alias. Group aliases also make it easier to share items like documents, spreadsheets, presentations and sites with a whole list of people at once, instead of adding recipients who should have access individually. You can watch an overview of what's new on YouTube.

Improvements to BlackBerry support for businesses and schools
Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server enables "push" email, contacts and calendar for BlackBerry devices. Two weeks ago, we added new functionality so businesses can support 500 BlackBerry devices per server — doubling the previous capacity. This lets businesses support fewer servers for BlackBerry users. We also added support for BlackBerry Professional Software, which is used by smaller companies to support up to 30 BlackBerry devices.

Who's gone Google?
I'm happy to offer a warm welcome to Mattson Technology, LCC International Inc., Fresno State University, The University of Delaware, St. Joseph's College and the thousands of other businesses and schools that made the switch to Google Apps in the last few weeks!

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

Two new features enhance search beyond the results page

2009-12-11T10:16:00.000-08:00

On Monday, when Amit Singhal introduced Google real-time search, he talked about bringing you information at the speed of light. But speed isn't just about the time it takes the results to load, or even the time it takes us to index new information — it's about the time it takes to get you the information you're looking for.

That's why this week we're making two more improvements to satisfy your information needs more quickly: we're adding universal search features to Google Suggest, and we've released a powerful new extension for Google Chrome called Google Quick Scroll. Both features are examples of ways we want to extend the power of Google search beyond the results page.

Universal search features in Google Suggest
Let's say you're planning a vacation to Belgium for the holidays. Most vacation planning includes many simple questions: What's the weather? Is my flight on time? How many euros can I get for $100? For a long time we've provided answers to these kind of questions in one simple place with universal search features on the results page. Building on the improvements we made to Google Suggest earlier this year, now we're adding these features to the list of suggested search terms beneath the search box.

For example, let's say you want to visit the capital of Belgium, but you can't remember what it is. Type "capital of belgiu" in the search box and you'll immediately find your answer (Brussels) before you're even done typing. Similarly, you can type, "weather brus" and quickly decide how much warm clothing to bring (a lot!).

This kind of information will appear in Suggest either above or below the suggested search terms for a variety of queries. For example, you can type "delta 140" to see the flight status. You can also quickly discover the current time, figure out how many Euros you'll get per dollar, or even brush up on metric conversions. In total, there are currently 10 universal search features available in Google Suggest: weather, flight status, local time, area codes, package tracking, answers, definitions, calculator, currency and unit conversions — and we plan to add additional features in the future.

Quick Scroll to the information you're looking for
Many queries aren't as simple as [weather brussels], so in addition to adding universal search features to Google Suggest, this week we released a new Google Chrome extension called Quick Scroll which enables you to use Google's search capabilities even after leaving our results page.

After clicking a result, most searchers end up scrolling around looking for the relevant sections of the page. You may have learned to use the find feature in your browser (Control-F on a PC or Command-F on a Mac) to search for specific words on the page. The browser find function is a useful tool, but it's limited to matching the exact words you type, and most people don't know about it. With Quick Scroll, the process of finding relevant content and scrolling to it happens automatically, as an extension of your Google search.

Continuing our prior example, let's say you've heard that, in Belgium, Belgian waffles are served by street vendors, but you want to be sure. You do a search for [belgian waffles served by street vendors?] and click on the first result. With Google Quick Scroll, a small black box appears in the lower right hand corner of the browser with a couple snippets of text from the page that might be relevant to your query. In this case one of the snippets says, "In Belgium, it is served warm by street vendors." Click on the text snippet and Quick Scroll will take you right to that part of the page with the relevant text highlighted.

Apparently, Belgian waffles are in fact served warm by street vendors (yum!). In the screen shot, you can see that the highlighted section doesn't include the exact phrase "belgian waffles served by street vendors," so in this case the browser find command wouldn't actually be able to take you to the information you're looking for. Like Google Search, Quick Scroll analyzes things like proximity, prominence and position of the words to identify the most relevant content. You can think of it like a personal assistant who reads webpages before you do and highlights the parts you might want to read. If several sections of the page have useful content, Quick Scroll will show you multiple text excerpts from different portions of the page and you can click on any of them to scroll to that spot.

To use Quick Scroll or any other Chrome extension, you need the beta version of Chrome 4. Once you have it, you can install Quick Scroll from the extensions gallery. Because it's not always needed, you may notice that Quick Scroll doesn't appear for every result. If Google detects that the entire page is relevant to your query, then there's no need to scroll to a specific section.

With universal search features in Google Suggest and Google Quick Scroll, we hope you save precious seconds for many of the searches you perform. As Amit said on Monday, "seconds matter."

Posted by Ruth Dhanaraj & Matias Pelenur, Software Engineers

Panelists for CNN/YouTube Climate Debate announced; CO2 Cube "Powered by YouTube" unveiled

2009-12-10T11:56:00.000-08:00

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

Last week, we announced the CNN/YouTube Climate Debate in Copenhagen, an effort to make sure that your voice is included in the climate debate — and that your questions are posed to decision-makers on an international stage. Today, we want to inform you that panelists will include former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, journalist Thomas Friedman, U.N. Executive Secretary Yves de Boer and author Bjorn Lomberg.

To submit your question for these leaders, upload a short video of yourself posing the question and submit it here: www.youtube.com/cop15. We've already seen some top-notch video questions like this one from Angela in Italy who wants to know about the consequences of climate change, and this question from Mo in Florida who is concerned about the cost of going green:

The top questions will be posed to leaders during the debate, and also projected onto the CO2 Cube, a 3-story art installation now residing in the center of Copenhagen, built to represent one metric ton of carbon and powered by YouTube videos related to the climate crisis. Here's an in-depth look at this stunning artistic display:

You can submit your video at www.youtube.com/cop15 and vote on questions for potential inclusion in the debate and on the Cube. The debate will be live-streamed in full on the COP 15 channel, and onto the Cube, on December 15 so make sure to watch and see if world leaders answer your question.

Posted by Ramya Raghavan, Nonprofits & Activism, YouTube

Seeing the forest through the cloud

2009-12-10T07:06:00.000-08:00

Today, at the International Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen, we demonstrated a new technology prototype that enables online, global-scale observation and measurement of changes in the earth's forests. We hope this technology will help stop the destruction of the world's rapidly-disappearing forests. Emissions from tropical deforestation are comparable to the emissions of all of the European Union, and are greater than those of all cars, trucks, planes, ships and trains worldwide. According to the Stern Review, protecting the world's standing forests is a highly cost-effective way to cut carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. The United Nations has proposed a framework known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) that would provide financial incentives to rainforest nations to protect their forests, in an effort to make forests worth "more alive than dead." Implementing a global REDD system will require that each nation have the ability to accurately monitor and report the state of their forests over time, in a manner that is independently verifiable. However, many of these tropical nations of the world lack the technological resources to do this, so we're working with scientists, governments and non-profits to change this. Here's what we've done with this prototype to help nations monitor their forests:

Start with satellite imagery
Satellite imagery data can provide the foundation for measurement and monitoring of the world's forests. For example, in Google Earth today, you can fly to Rondonia, Brazil and easily observe the advancement of deforestation over time, from 1975 to 2001:

(Landsat images courtesy USGS)

This type of imagery data — past, present and future — is available all over the globe. Even so, while today you can view deforestation in Google Earth, until now there hasn't been a way to measure it.

Then add science
With this technology, it's now possible for scientists to analyze raw satellite imagery data and extract meaningful information about the world's forests, such as locations and measurements of deforestation or even regeneration of a forest. In developing this prototype, we've collaborated with Greg Asner of Carnegie Institution for Science, and Carlos Souza of Imazon. Greg and Carlos are both at the cutting edge of forest science and have developed software that creates forest cover and deforestation maps from satellite imagery. Organizations across Latin America use Greg's program, Carnegie Landsat Analysis System (CLASlite), and Carlos' program, Sistema de Alerta de Deforestation (SAD), to analyze forest cover change. However, widespread use of this analysis has been hampered by lack of access to satellite imagery data and computational resources for processing.

Handle computation in the cloud
What if we could offer scientists and tropical nations access to a high-performance satellite imagery-processing engine running online, in the “Google cloud”? And what if we could gather together all of the earth’s raw satellite imagery data — petabytes of historical, present and future data — and make it easily available on this platform? We decided to find out, by working with Greg and Carlos to re-implement their software online, on top of a prototype platform we've built that gives them easy access to terabytes of satellite imagery and thousands of computers in our data centers.

Here are the results of running CLASlite on the satellite imagery sequence shown above:

CLASlite online: This shows deforestation and degradation in Rondonia, Brazil

from 1986-2008, with the red indicating recent activity

Here's the result of running SAD in a region of recent deforestation pressure in Mato Grosso, Brazil:

SAD online: The red "hotspots" indicate deforestation

that has happened within the last 30 days

Combining science with massive data and technology resources in this way offers the following advantages:

Unprecedented speed: On a top-of-the-line desktop computer, it can take days or weeks to analyze deforestation over the Amazon. Using our cloud-based computing power, we can reduce that time to seconds. Being able to detect illegal logging activities faster can help support local law enforcement and prevent further deforestation from happening.
Ease of use and lower costs: An online platform that offers easy access to data, scientific algorithms and computation horsepower from any web browser can dramatically lower the cost and complexity for tropical nations to monitor their forests.
Security, privacy and transparency: Governments and researchers don't want to share sensitive data and results before they are ready. Our cloud-based platform allows users to control access to their data and results. At the same time, because the data, analysis and results reside online, they can also be easily shared, made available for collaboration, presented to the public and independently verified — when appropriate.
Climate change impact: We think that a suitably scaled-up and enhanced version of this platform could be a promising as a tool for forest monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) in support of efforts such as REDD.

As a Google.org product, this technology will be provided to the world as a not-for-profit service. This technology prototype is currently available to a small set of partners for testing purposes — it's not yet available to the general public but we expect to make it more broadly available over the next year. We are grateful to a host of individuals and organizations (find full list here) who have advised us on developing this technology. In particular, we would like to thank the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for their close partnership since the initial inception of this project. We're also working with the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), a consortium of national government bodies, inter-governmental organizations, space agencies and research institutions through GEO's Forest Carbon Tracking (FCT) task force. Last month together we launched the GEO FCT portal and are now exploring how we can also together bring the power of this new technology to tropical nations.

We're excited to be able to share this early prototype and look forward to seeing what's possible.

Posted by Rebecca Moore, Engineering Manager, Google.org and Dr. Amy Luers, Environment Manager, Google.org

PBS NewsHour comes to YouTube

2009-12-09T12:52:00.000-08:00

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

After nearly 35 years on air, PBS NewsHour recently re-launched its broadcast program and website in an effort to provide viewers with NewsHour content wherever, whenever and however they want to access it. As part of this transformation, the nightly news program is starting a major new initiative with YouTube.

The PBS NewsHour channel on YouTube (http://youtube.com/pbsnewshour) will host nightly reports from the NewsHour television broadcast, posted the same night the broadcast airs on PBS. The NewsHour will also post web-original videos featuring its new online correspondent Hari Sreenivasan. These news segments will be archived on the NewsHour YouTube channel, ensuring that those looking for video of past news events will easily be able to find it.

The launch of the PBS NewsHour channel is the latest in a series of PBS and NewsHour projects with YouTube, including last year's Video Your Vote project that encouraged voters to film and post their experience at the polls during Election Day 2008. The project attracted more than 2,500 videos from across the country, which PBS was able to incorporate into its Election Night coverage.

While the new NewsHour program, website and YouTube channel represent the evolution of how we consume the news in the 21st century, the journalism within will continue to engage, inform and enlighten Americans about the issues and events that directly affect their everyday lives — just as it has from the very beginning.

Posted by Jim Lehrer, anchor of NewsHour, and Obadiah Greenberg, YouTube Strategic Partner Manager

Join this group: Google Groups joins Google Apps

2009-12-08T21:00:00.000-08:00

Blogs, wikis, social networks, YouTube and Twitter are changing how many of us connect with others. Yet within most businesses, especially large corporations, the software hasn't evolved much over the last decade. While traditional business technologies give companies the necessary security and controls, they do so at the expense of rapid innovation. Businesses shouldn't have to make this compromise.

This is one reason why customers are so enthusiastic about Google Apps. It offers enterprise-grade security and control while letting businesses instantly tap into a swift stream of innovation, based on services tested by hundreds of millions of people around the world. We've launched over 100 improvements to Google Apps in the last year, and the pace of innovation continues to increase.

Today, we're happy to announce the launch of Google Groups to Google Apps Premier and Education Edition users. Google Groups is one of our most widely used applications, enabling everyone from the local hiking club to the family next door to create mailing lists and discussion forums. Now employees within a company can create groups for their departments, their teams or their projects. Employees can use these groups as mailing lists, but they can also share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, calendars, videos and sites with groups, instead of many individual recipients. They can choose to receive communications directly to their email inbox, in a digest format, or in the Groups forum view, and can access all the information in the groups archive, without the intervention of an IT administrator.

Google Groups is a boon for IT administrators too. After enabling the new service from the administrative control panel (add "user-managed groups"), users can start managing their own groups without burdening administrators for support. Administrators can still set group policies and manage other group settings. If you want to learn more, check out our post on the Enterprise Blog.

Google Groups is just one of the many consumer features that we've tailored for the enterprise since we launched Google Apps for businesses nearly three years ago, and we're looking forward to bringing more innovation to our customers in the months and years ahead.

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps

Faster apps for a faster web: introducing Speed Tracer

2009-12-08T19:14:00.000-08:00

Do you ever wonder what's going on inside the browser when a webpage doesn't load or respond as quickly as it should? Many developers do, especially when trying to build powerful web applications for their users.

But up until now, it's been difficult for developers to identify problems in a slow-to-respond application. So, tonight at Google Campfire One, we're happy to announce that we're adding a new tool to Google Web Toolkit called Speed Tracer.

Speed Tracer is a Google Chrome extension that enables developers to identify performance problems in their web apps using a "Sluggishness Graph," in combination with many other metrics. In the spirit of clean, simple design, developers need only look at the Y-Axis of their application's Sluggishness Graph to see how they're doing:

If the y-axis is close to zero, then the app is fast
If the y-axis registers around 100%, then the app is, well, sluggish

And in either case, Speed Tracer provides lots of additional data to help diagnose any particular performance issue.

We think developers will find that Speed Tracer looks under the covers of web applications like never before. In fact, we even used Speed Tracer to optimize the performance of Speed Tracer itself! (It's really an HTML5 application after all, built with Google Web Toolkit, and deployed as a Google Chrome extension.) If you're a web developer, download and install Speed Tracer on the Google Chrome Developer Channel.

This is one of many other improvements in GWT 2.0 — which we released at this evening's Campfire — that make building web applications fast, and the applications you build run even faster. Check out the Google Code Blog for more information and to watch our Campfire One developer announcement.

Posted by Bruce Johnson, Engineering Director

Exploring a new, more dynamic way of reading news with Living Stories

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

There's been no shortage of talk recently about the "future of news." Should publishers charge for news online? How do they replace lost sources of revenue such as classified ads? How will accountability journalism endure? And, even more fundamentally, will news survive in the digital era? These are questions we're deeply interested in, and we've been exploring potential solutions. But what's often overlooked in these debates is the nature of the news story itself and the experience of how it's read online. We believe it's just as important to experiment with how news organizations can take advantage of the web to tell stories in new ways — ways that simply aren't possible offline.

While we have strong ideas about how information is experienced on the web, we're not journalists and we don't create content. So over the last few months we've been talking to a number of people to help develop the concept of something that we and some others in the industry call the "living story." Today, on Google Labs, we're unveiling some of the work we've done in partnership with two world-class news organizations: The News York Times and The Washington Post. The result of that experiment is the Living Stories prototype, which features new ways to interact with news and the quality of reporting you've come to expect from the reporters and editors at The Post and The Times. We're excited to learn from this experiment, and hope to eventually make these tools available to any publisher that wants to use them.

The idea behind Living Stories is to experiment with a different format for presenting news coverage online. News organizations produce a wealth of information that we all value; access to this information should be as great as the online medium allows. A typical newspaper article leads with the most important and interesting news, and follows with additional information of decreasing importance. Information from prior coverage is often repeated with each new online article, and the same article is presented to everyone regardless of whether they already read it. Living Stories try a different approach that plays to certain unique advantages of online publishing. They unify coverage on a single, dynamic page with a consistent URL. They organize information by developments in the story. They call your attention to changes in the story since you last viewed it so you can easily find the new material. Through a succinct summary of the whole story and regular updates, they offer a different online approach to balancing the overview with depth and context.

This project sprang from conversations among senior executives at the three companies. We shared thoughts about how the web can work for storytelling, and the Times and Post shared their core journalistic principles. The Living Stories started taking shape over the summer after our engineering and user interface teams spent time in the newsrooms of both papers. We're providing the technology platform, the Times and Post's journalists are writing and editing the stories, and we're continuously collaborating to make the user interface fit with their editorial vision.

Over the coming months, we'll refine Living Stories based on your feedback. We're also looking to develop openly available tools that could aid news organizations in the creation of these pages or at least in some of the features. If you're a news reader, we'd love to hear your thoughts. If you're a news organization, we want to hear your comments on the Living Story format. If you decide to implement this on your site, we would love to hear about that too. At the very least, we hope this collaboration will kick off debate and encourage innovation in how people interact with news online. To learn more about Living Stories, check out the video below.

Posted by Neha Singh, software engineer, and Josh Cohen, senior business product manager

Google Chrome for the holidays: Mac, Linux and extensions in beta

2009-12-08T09:00:00.000-08:00

There was nothing more excruciating for me as a kid than seeing the presents pile up under the Christmas tree but knowing that I couldn't open them until Christmas morning. On the Google Chrome team, we've had the same feeling as we've been working to get betas ready for Mac, Linux and extensions. It's been a long time coming, but today we can check the top three items off our users' wish lists.

Google Chrome for Mac (Beta)
We've been working hard to deliver a first-class browser for the Mac — it took longer than we expected, but we hope the wait was worth it! We wanted Google Chrome to feel at home on the Mac, so we've focused on uniting our clean, simple design with subtle animations and effects to create a snappy and satisfying browsing experience on OS X. As you might expect, the speed of Google Chrome for Mac is something we're very proud of. If you have a Mac, try installing the beta and see how fast it launches — there's hardly even time for the icon in the dock to bounce!

For more details on this beta release of Google Chrome for Mac, read on in the Google Mac blog or watch this video from one of our engineers, Mike Pinkerton:

Google Chrome for Linux (Beta)
At Google, most engineers use Linux machines, so we certainly heard loud and clear how much they wanted Google Chrome for Linux. Just like Google Chrome for Windows and Mac, we focused on speed, stability and security, but we also wanted a high-performance browser that integrated well with the Linux ecosystem. This includes tight integration with native GTK themes, updates that are managed by the standard system package manager, and many other features that fit in natively with the operating system where possible.

Google Chrome for Linux in various GTK themes

Just as important, we've had quite a bit of help from the open source community. More than 50 open source contributors have worked on Chromium and they've been especially helpful on delivering our Linux version of Google Chrome. For more details on the beta release of Google Chrome for Linux, check out the Chromium blog.

Extensions in Google Chrome for Windows and Linux (Beta)
When we first launched Google Chrome in September 2008, we knew that we wanted to make it easy for you to customize the browser with extensions. We also wanted to make extensions easy to create and maintain, while preserving Google Chrome's speed and stability. Extensions on Google Chrome accomplishes all these goals: they are as easy to create as web pages, easy to install, and each extension runs in its own process to avoid crashing or significantly slowing down the browser.

If you're on a PC or a Linux machine, you can check out more than 300 extensions in the gallery, including a few cool, useful and cute extensions. Extensions aren't quite beta-quality on Mac yet, but you will be able to preview them on a developer channel soon. And if you're a web developer, you can learn more about writing extensions for Google Chrome on the Chromium blog.

Extensions installed on Google Chrome (for PC or Linux)

We hope the betas for Mac, Linux and extensions were some of the things on your wish list this year. We'd like to say thanks to Mac and Linux users who gave our early developer versions of Google Chrome a test drive on these platforms, as well as developers who wrote great extensions for Google Chrome. And in case you're wondering what we'd like for the holidays, we're always eager for feedback — and I wouldn't mind a brand new extension that makes it snow on demand!

Posted by Brian Rakowski, Product Manager

Fighting fraud online: taking "Google Money" scammers to court

2009-12-08T00:00:00.000-08:00

"Use Google to Make 1000s of Dollars!" or "Easy Cash with Google: You Could be Making up to $978 a Day Working from Home!" You may have seen offers like these using Google's name or logo that sounded too good to be true. Unfortunately, nearly all of them are, and, despite hundreds of consumer complaints and our own efforts to keep these sites from tricking people, some scams continue. To fight back, we're working to stop various fraudulent "Google Money" schemes, and this week filed suit against Pacific WebWorks and several other unnamed defendants.

Google hasn't created or endorsed any of the sites like those described in our complaint. Misleading ads try to take advantage of consumers in the midst of a difficult economy, and as the economic situation has worsened, the problem has only grown. As far as we can tell, thousands of people have been tricked into sending payment information and being charged hidden fees by questionable operations.

Even as we're taking legal action to try to cut these sites off at the source, we're still working constantly to remove scammy URLs from our index, and we'll permanently disable AdWords accounts that provide a poor or harmful user experience, whether or not they use Google's trademarks illegally. That said, we can't guarantee that schemes like these won't pop up, like the proverbial "Whack-A-Mole", someplace else online — either on a different network or under a different name.

We can solve only part of the problem — the rest is up to you. Just as you should be careful about giving out financial information in the real world, you should be skeptical and review any offers online before sending any information, and always be on guard when presented with an offer that seems too good to be true. Below is a significantly abridged list of some names that we know are suspect. For more tips on how to spot a scam online or what to do if you think you or someone you know has been tricked, check out this earlier post.

Although there's no secret kit that can guarantee riches, many people really do make money online. In our experience, the best way to build a business on the web is to really serve users — offer useful products and services or write about something you have a passionate interest in. If you are wondering if a particular program is legit, Google's business and advertising programs can be found from our home page, and the best place to find real jobs at Google is google.com/jobs.

Names to be wary of: Google Adwork, Google ATM, Google Biz Kit, Google Cash, Earn Google Cash Kit, Google Fortune, Google Marketing Kit, Google Profits, The Home Business Kit for Google, Google StartUp Kit, and Google Works.

Posted by Jason Morrison, Support Engineer (Search Quality Team), and Stacey Wexler, Senior Litigation Counsel

Happy holidays from Picasa Web Albums and Eye-Fi

2009-12-07T18:30:00.000-08:00

(Cross-posted from the Google Photos Blog)

I used to take a lot of photos with the best intentions of sharing them with friends and family. But most of the time they just sat on my camera's memory card, never quite making it to my computer, let alone to my friends and family.

Three weeks ago we made extra storage more affordable for Picasa Web Albums and Gmail, and now we're making it easier to get your photos in the cloud and share them, right in time for holiday picture snapping. We've partnered with Eye-Fi, makers of WiFi-enabled memory cards that make it easy to upload photos directly from your camera to Picasa Web Albums — no cables required. For a limited time, when you buy 200 GB of Google paid storage for $50 you'll get a free 4GB SDHC Eye-Fi card (a $95 value). The Eye-Fi card lets you wirelessly upload photos and videos directly to Picasa Web Albums or to your computer. It even includes automatic geotagging, so you'll know exactly where your pictures were taken. And you won't need to worry about running out of space — 200 GB is enough storage for a hundred thousand original resolution photos. Visit picasa.google.com/eyefi.html to get yours today.

By using Eye-Fi and Picasa Web Albums together, you can automate your photo sharing: photos are wirelessly uploaded and shared with the people that matter. Based on my experience as an avid Eye-Fi user, here's some tips on setting it up:

Configure the Eye-Fi card to send photos to an active album (in my case, "Axe Family 2009 Lifestream")
After the first photo posts to the album, share this album with individuals or a group (I created a "Family" group)
Whenever the Eye-Fi card uploads photos to Picasa Web Albums, the people on the album's shared list are automatically notified via a daily digest email.
Advanced tip: If you add yourself to the group, you'll get the digest email as well to remind yourself to curate your photos (delete bad pics, add captions, etc).

Eye-Fi can even make the holidays more fun: With nearly instant access to photos of her grandkids, my mother-in-law felt like she was with us this Thanksgiving, even though she was two thousand miles away!

Posted by Brian Axe, Product Manager

Celebrating Computer Science Education Week

2009-12-07T14:13:00.000-08:00

(Cross-posted on the Google Research Blog)

Today kicks off the nation’s first Computer Science Education Week. The goal of this week is to encourage students to learn about the discipline that powers the computers, applications and technology they use everyday. Computer Science Education Week emphasizes that our society's aspirations will be met by individuals who have an increasingly deep understanding of computer technology.

We've been thinking about ways that Google could help with computer science education for several years. After all, our search engine has been used in education since its inception — how many essays, research papers and theses begin with a Google search? Today, we'd like to summarize some of what we've been doing at Google to advance CS education. Our efforts focus on four strategic areas, with an emphasis on computing in core curriculum.

Use of Google tools to support teaching and learning
Having a web-based shared document, spreadsheet or presentation that students in a group or class can all view and edit online has had an enormous impact on collaboration in education. So we provide a free suite of our communication & collaboration applications designed especially for schools and universities. We also used our tools and infrastructure to build and support a community of teachers who have developed classroom content and activities around these applications.

Increasing the access to and quality of Computer Science curriculum
We have many people at Google who know about all areas of computer science, many with backgrounds and experience in education. With this deep base of computer science knowledge, we developed Google Code University to help faculty update their undergraduate computer science curriculum, and the Summer of Code, which gives students the opportunity to develop programs for various open source software projects.

Integrating computing curriculum across K-12 core subjects
A group of Google engineers and K-12 "teaching fellows" is working on building and testing models of curriculum to encourage innovation. These curriculum models revolve around "computational thinking", a problem-solving technique that draws on the thinking and analysis skills that computer scientists use everyday. Our goal is to integrate computational thinking across subject areas in K-12 by connecting these skills, which are already a part of core curriculum, more explicitly to computer science. We're also taking this a step further by integrating simple programming concepts in appropriate areas of core K-12 curriculum, such as algebra. Our hope is that by making computer science more visible and showing its connection to every subject area, students will experience the full power and utility of technology in areas of interest to them. Integrating CS into other subjects will also have the key added benefit of leveling the playing field, so that many more students will have the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of computing.

Supporting organizations and individuals through community outreach
We've also worked for years with teachers and nonprofits to build early interest in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields. Besides providing financial support and sponsorship for many external organizations, we've developed a number of scholarship and intern programs to increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities in STEM and computer science. In addition to these formal programs, every day Googlers all over the world organize visits with students at nearby schools and community centers to teach, present workshops and tech talks, and to share their personal stories on how they became computer scientists and engineers.

We're absolutely delighted to be a co-sponsor of the first Computer Science Education Week. As a company, we've benefited so much from advances in computer science and the creativity of computer scientists. We also know that the next great innovators in computer science are out there, ready to be inspired to create technologies that change our world and benefit our society. We urge our children, parents, teachers and educational institutions to pay more attention to this critical field, and we will continue to do our share.

Posted by Alfred Spector, VP Research and Special Initiatives and Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

Relevance meets the real-time web

2009-12-07T11:31:00.000-08:00

Search is a natural starting point for discovering the world's information, and we strive to bring you the freshest, most comprehensive and relevant search results over an ever expanding universe of content on the multitude of devices you use to access it.

That's why today, at the Computer History Museum, we're excited to share a few new innovations in the areas of real-time, mobile and social search that we feel are important steps in the evolution of information access.

First, we're introducing new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we'll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.

Try searching for your favorite TV show, sporting event or the latest development on a recent government bill. Whether it's an eyewitness tweet, a breaking news story or a fresh blog post, you can find it on Google right after it's published on the web.

Here's how it looks:

Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it's happening, even if it's not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn't know about it beforehand. For example, in the screen shot, the big story was about GM's stabilizing car sales, which shows under "News results." Nonetheless, thanks to our powerful real-time algorithms, the "Latest results" feature surfaces another important story breaking just seconds before: GM's CEO stepped down.

Click on "Latest results" or select "Latest" from the search options menu to view a full page of live tweets, blogs, news and other web content scrolling right on Google. You can also filter your results to see only "Updates" from micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and others. Latest results and the new search options are also designed for iPhone and Android devices when you need them on the go, be it a quick glance at changing information like ski conditions or opening night chatter about a new movie — right when you're in line to buy tickets.

And, as part of our launch of real-time on Google search, we've added "hot topics" to Google Trends to show the most common topics people are publishing to the web in real-time. With this improvement and a series of other interface enhancements, Google Trends is graduating from Labs.

Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day. Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we're announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago.

The new features will be rolling out in the next few days and will be available globally in English. You can try them out today by visiting Google Trends and clicking on a "hot topic," which in most cases will bring you to a search results page with the new real-time feature.

Here's a first look at our real-time search:

We have also made some new strides with mobile search. Today's sensor-rich smartphones are redefining what "query" means. Beyond text, you can now search by a number of new modes including voice, location and sight — all from a mobile device. So we've been working to improve technology that takes advantage of these capabilities.

Starting today, we're extending our voice search capabilities on Android devices to recognize Japanese. In addition, we're using the location of your mobile phone to launch some helpful features, like showing you "what's nearby." Finally, at our event this morning, we demonstrated Google Goggles, a visual search application that lets you search for objects using images rather than words, using your camera phone. For more information on these mobile innovations, check out the Google Mobile Blog.

As we've written before, search is still an unsolved problem and we're committed to making it faster and easier for people to access a greater diversity of information, delivered in real-time, from across the web. I'm tremendously excited about these significant new real-time search features.

Update on 12/8: Check out the video from our Search Event:

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

Explore a whole new way to window shop, with Google and your mobile phone

2009-12-07T06:00:00.000-08:00

What if you could decide where to shop, eat or hang out, with a little help from local Google users?

It might take you a while to ask them all, so to make it easier we've launched a new effort to send window decals to over 100,000 local businesses in the U.S. that have been the most sought out and researched on Google.com and Google Maps. We're calling these businesses the "Favorite Places on Google" and you'll now start to find them in over 9,000 towns and cities, in all 50 states. You can also explore a sample of the Favorite Places in 20 of the largest U.S. cities at google.com/favoriteplaces. Each window decal has a unique bar code, known as a QR code that you can scan with any of hundreds of mobile devices — including iPhone, Android-powered phones, BlackBerry and more — to take you directly to that business's Place Page on your mobile phone. With your mobile phone and these new decals, you can easily go up to a storefront and immediately find reviews, get a coupon if the business is offering one or star a business as a place you want to remember for the future. Soon, you'll be able to leave a review on the mobile page as well, just like on your desktop.

To scan the codes, you'll need a phone with a camera and an app that can read QR codes. For Android-powered devices, including the Droid by Motorola, we recommend using the free Barcode Scanner app. For iPhone, we have found the $1.99 QuickMark app to work best, and starting today, we're partnering with QuickMark to offer the app for free for the first 40,000 downloads. For other devices, we recommend searching for "QR reader" in your app marketplace, if it has one, or searching for the model of your phone and [qr reader] on Google. BeeTagg and NeoReader are two other apps that we've found to work well with the decals.

Here's a video that shows you how this all works:

This launch is part of our overall effort — online and offline — to provide you with the best local business results whenever you're trying to figure out where to go, whether it's a trendy Cuban restaurant in Philly, a comics shop in L.A., a hip hotel in NYC or a little bit of photographic history in Rochester, N.Y.

We plan to periodically send out new waves of window decals to qualifying businesses. If you own or manage a business and were selected as a Favorite Place, you may have already received your decal or, for most of you, it will arrive by mail in the next one to two weeks. If you weren't selected in this round, your first step is to claim your listing with Google's Local Business Center for free. That will help us determine that your business information is correct. Then, you can enhance your local business listing by adding enhanced content like photos and videos.

To explore a gallery of several hundred Favorite Places in 20 U.S. cities, to learn more about how to use the QR codes and to find out how your business can get involved, check out google.com/favoriteplaces.

Posted by Ryan Hayward & David Kim, Product Marketing Managers

Climate tools for Copenhagen and beyond

2009-12-07T03:00:00.000-08:00

Representatives from around the world arrived in Copenhagen, Denmark today to negotiate a successor treaty for the Kyoto Protocol. This 15th Conference of Parties (COP15) has been called the most important conference in a decade.

In fact, in an unprecedented initiative, 56 major newspapers in 45 countries published a shared editorial calling on politicians and negotiators gathering in Copenhagen to strike an ambitious deal on combating climate change. The editorial appeared in 20 languages including Chinese, Russian and Arabic. It asserts that the Copenhagen summit has the power "to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it."

So in honor of this important event, we've built a number of new tools to give delegates — and you at home — easy access to useful information to help visualize and explore data and issues relating to climate change.

In September we launched a series of new Google Earth climate change layers and tours in collaboration with the Danish government. Check out these tours to explore the effects of climate change and get a better understanding of the scenarios that could unfold if we don't stop this environmental threat. The tours were developed together with leading environmental organizations and individuals including The World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace as well as Al Gore, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and others.

Over the past weeks, many of you have already uploaded personal statements of your hopes (and fears) for our planet through YouTube and the Raise Your Voice campaign. Now the search is on for the best video and text questions to be delivered to global leaders and climate activists who will come together in Copenhagen to answer the top-ranked questions from the YouTube channel in a townhall produced by CNN International. Voting with Google Moderator will continue until December 14th.

An Australia-based Googler also recently launched a tool called Show your Vote which puts the supporting voices for a global deal right on a Google Map. This tool can be integrated into any website to help drive the outreach and collect votes, and can already be found on UNFCCC, COP15.dk and WWF Earth Hour.

And if you're in Denmark with us, check out two unique installations powered by Google and YouTube. The first, a giant CO2 CUBE, is an art installation that visualizes one metric ton of carbon dioxide and has YouTube videos streaming on its walls. The second is an interactive Google Earth simulator made up of flat-screen panels and controlled with a free roam Space Navigator 6-axis joystick. (It's cool, trust us.) Welcome to Copenhagen!

Posted by Jonas Vang, Sr. Industry Analyst and Benjamin Kott, Green Business Operations