We've moved!
Check out News from Google
for all the latest updates.
Official Blog
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
Search for "me" on Google
April 21, 2009
It's no secret that from time to time many of us have searched on Google for our name or someone else's. When searching for yourself to see what others would find, results can be varied and aren't always what you want people to see — whether it's someone else with your name, or the finishing time from that 5K you ran back in 2002. We want to make that better and give you more of a voice.
To give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name, we've begun to show Google profile results at the bottom of U.S. name-query search pages. These results offer abbreviated information from user-created Google profiles and a link to the full profiles. We've also added links so it's easy to search for the same name on MySpace, Facebook, Classmates and LinkedIn.
Don't have a Google profile? Just search for [
me
] and follow the instructions at the top of the page to create one. In just a few minutes, you can create a public profile that represents you and that appears when people search for your name on Google. Check out
www.google.com/profiles
to learn more.
Posted by Brian Stoler, Software Engineer
GSA contest results are in
April 21, 2009
Back in February we
announced
a contest to discover how "findable" the
Google Search Appliance (GSA)
is in offices across the U.S. The GSA gives businesses of all shapes and sizes the power of universal search. In order to discover exactly how the GSA is helping businesses, we asked our customers to submit photos of their shiny yellow box with an explanation of how enterprise search has made their job easier.
The results are in and we have chosen two grand prize winners who will attend an all-expenses paid trip to the
Google IO Conference
in May. Check out one of the winning photos below from
WellStar Health Systems
, one of the largest not-for-profit health care systems in the Southeast, based in the Atlanta area. You can read their story and more on the
Enterprise Blog
.
Keeping "operations" running smoothly
Posted by Dave Kim, Associate Product Marketing Manager
Hard at play in Google Labs with Similar Images and Google News Timeline
April 20, 2009
At Google, we are constantly researching, designing, and brainstorming about the next big idea, and when we think we've found something compelling, we often use our "
20-percent time
" to build a working version. Back in 2002, we created
Google Labs
to give these budding experiments a home where users could try them and share their thoughts with us. Some of our most popular products began this way, including Google Maps, iGoogle, and Google News.
In keeping with our long-standing tradition of bringing new ideas to our users early in the development process, we're proud to welcome two new innovations to Google Labs:
Similar Images
and
Google News Timeline
.
Similar Images
Image Search is a tool you can use to find just about any kind of image, but it can sometimes be difficult to find the right image if you can't describe it in words. The new Similar Images feature was developed with just this in mind. Using it you can now find images that look like an existing result simply by clicking on a link. Using visual similarity, you don't have to refine the text of your search, instead, you can just click on the link of an image you like. For example, if you search for [
jaguar
], you can use the "Similar images" link to quickly narrow your search.
Image Search results will vary for the query [
jaguar
]:
With one click, we can help you find more pictures of the [
cat
]:
Or more pictures of the brand of [
car
]:
You might try exploring the pyramids of
Egypt
or discovering the
Forbidden City
. Or you might go shopping for an elegant
evening gown
or that perfect pair of
shoes
. So if you see an image you like, but you're stumped on how to describe it, just click the "Similar images" link to see more like it.
Interested in learning more? Check out this video tour.
Google News Timeline
Google News Timeline organizes information chronologically by presenting results from Google News and other data sources on a zoomable, graphical timeline. You can navigate through time by dragging the timeline, setting the time scale to days, weeks, months, years, or decades, or just including a time period in your query (i.e., "1977"). To see this in action, check out the results viewed by month in the
summer of 2006
.
Google News Timeline can present results from lots of different sources, including both recent and archival news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, and sports scores and media like music and movies. You can view multiple sources simultaneously, allowing each source to lend context to the others. Try out some of our favorite queries like [
jack nicholson movies
], [
barack obama quotes
], and [
baseball news photos
]. To read more, check out our post on the
Google News Blog
.
Google Labs reloaded
These are just two examples of Google's innovation at play, with plenty more to come. In order to keep up with our engineers, we decided it was time to remodel Google Labs to make room for more — you guessed it — innovation! We started with the foundation: we rebuilt the service from scratch using
Google App Engine
, and we moved it to a new home at
www.googlelabs.com
. We also redesigned the website to make it easy and fun to discover new experiments as they arrive and to follow them as they evolve. We even added an
RSS feed
and an
iGoogle gadget
to make it easier to stay up to date.
When you visit the site, you can also hear from the innovators themselves and share your thoughts, helping us shape your favorite experiments into future Google products. So come early and come often and bring your adventurous spirit — after all, we're building these experimental products and features for you!
Posted by Chuck Rosenberg, Similar Images, Andy Hertzfeld, Google News Timeline, and Michael Cohen, Google Labs
Introducing the Google Lime Scholarship
April 15, 2009
Today, we're pleased to announce the most recent addition to our scholarship programs, the Google Lime Scholarship for Students with Disabilities. We're partnering with
Lime
to offer scholarships to students with disabilities who are pursuing university degrees in the field of computer science in Canada or the U.S. Lime is a not-for-profit organization that brings together global corporations and people with disabilities, bringing to light an untapped source of talent. Scholarships will be granted for the 2009–2010 academic year, and recipients will be invited to attend an all-expenses-paid retreat at the Googleplex in Mountain View in 2010.
We hope that this program will increase opportunities for students with disabilities and encourage them to pursue careers in computer science. We also hope to foster long-lasting relationships through which these students can support each other over the course of their academic studies.
The deadline to apply for this year's Lime Scholarship is June 1, 2009. For complete details, visit
www.google.com/jobs/scholarships
.
Posted by Meghan O'Farrell, Talent and Outreach Programs Specialist
YouTube Symphony Orchestra: from idea to reality
April 15, 2009
(Cross-posted from the
YouTube
Blog
)
Today represents the final culmination of an idea many months in the making: a first-class global orchestra brought together by YouTube. This week, over 90 musicians from around the world -- including a Spanish guitarist, a Dutch harpist and a Lithuanian birbyne player — have gathered in New York City in preparation for tonight's historic YouTube Symphony Orchestra performance at Carnegie Hall. And today on YouTube's homepage, we are proud to present the world premiere of Tan Dun's composition "Internet Symphony, Eroica," as selected and mashed up from nearly 3,000 video submissions from around the globe.
Maestro — the mash-up, please!
Along with the "Eroica" premiere, we're also posting exclusive behind-the-scenes footage of the preparation leading up to tonight's performance. Learn more about the
YouTube Symphony Orchestra
by watching candid vlogs, early rehearsals with conductor and creative director
Michael Tilson Thomas
, and meet-and-greets between the musicians lucky enough to participate in this once-in-a-lifetime event. Many thanks to our "Vlog Squad" team of classical musicians (
Caeli Smith
,
Jeremy Denk
, and
Eiko Sudoh
), and to
Harmony Films
, who are currently putting together a full-length documentary on the YouTube Symphony Orchestra.
And for those of you who can't make it to New York in time for the big show, don't fret. We'll be posting the full performance from Carnegie Hall on YouTube tomorrow at
www.youtube.com/symphony
.
Posted by Michele Flannery, YouTube Music
An ARIA for Google Moderator
April 13, 2009
From time to time, our own
T.V. Raman
shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.
Google-AxsJAX was launched in late 2007 as a library for access-enabling Web-2.0 applications. Since then, we have released accessibility enhancements for many Web-2.0 applications via the
AxsJAX site
as early experiments that have eventually graduated into full-fledged products. Just recently we
posted
about using the AxsJAX library to provide ARIA enhancements for Google Calendar, Google Finance and Google News. Now we are happy to share an early AxsJAX extension for
Google Moderator
that enables fluent eyes-free use of the tool.
For details about AxsJAX enhancements, see the
AxsJAX FAQ
. Briefly, you need Firefox 3.0 and a screenreader that supports W3C ARIA to take advantage of these enhancements. Users who do not have a screenreader installed can most easily experience the results by installing
Fire Vox
, a freely available self-voicing extension for Firefox.
You can activate the AxsJAX enhancement for Google Moderator either by clicking on the link that says "Click here for ARIA enhanced Google Moderator" or by
accessing the ARIA-enhanced version directly
. After enabling the enhancement, you can use Google Moderator via the keyboard, with all user interaction producing spoken feedback via W3C ARIA.
Here is a brief overview of the experience:
1. The user interface is divided into logical panes — one listing topic areas, and the other listing questions on a given topic. At times (e.g., before a meeting), you may find an additional
Featured Question
pane that shows a randomly selected question that you can vote on.
2. Users can ask new questions under a given topic, or give a thumbs-up/thumbs-down to questions that have already been asked.
3. Use the
left
and
right
arrow keys to switch between the two panes. You hear the title of the selected pane as you switch.
4. Use
up
and
down
arrows to navigate among the items in the selected pane. As you navigate, you hear the current item.
5. Hit
enter
to select the current item.
6. The current item can be magnified by repeatedly pressing the
+
(or
=
) key. To reduce magnification, press the
-
key.
7. When navigating the questions in a given topic, hit
y
or
n
to vote a question up or down.
8. When navigating items in the topic pane, hit
a
to ask a question. Once you confirm your request to post the question, it will show up in the list of questions for that topic so that others can vote that question up or down.
Please visit the
Google Group for accessibility
to provide feedback. This AxsJAX extension is still a work in progress, so we'd love to hear from you as we continue to work out the kinks.
Update on 4/14:
Clarified in the second and third paragraphs that you do not need to install this enhancement. You can access it directly from Google Moderator.
Posted by Posted by T. V. Raman, Research Scientist, and Charles L. Chen, Software Engineer
Will it lens?
April 10, 2009
Not long ago, a bunch of us in our
Santa Monica office
pooled together the money to buy a four-foot by three-foot
Fresnel lens
. We've since been spending our lunch hours out in the sun playing with it.
A normal lens this big would be several feet thick and weigh a proverbial ton (the right-hand image below). However, it's possible to remove much of the inside of a lens and collapse down the shape without introducing too much distortion (the left-hand image):
Fresnel (pronounced "freh-NELL") lenses are used in overhead projectors and lighthouses. We've been using ours, however, to see what happens when you focus 1,000 watts of sunlight onto a single point. It's like when you were a kid and tried to burn ants with a pocket magnifying glass — but 400 times stronger. We built a wooden frame to keep the lens flat and focused, and a stand to hold it steady:
The light in the focal point is so bright that you can't look directly at it without welding goggles.
The lens maker claimed you could melt a penny with it, so that was the first thing we tried:
Modern pennies are made of zinc with a copper coating. The bottom row shows what happens when you put a penny in the focal point of the lens: the inside melts away and the coating stays intact (zinc melts at 693
kelvins
, copper melts at 1,356 K). But if you heat it just enough, the metals mix and you make brass (the gold-colored penny in the middle). Older pennies (those minted before 1982) are almost entirely copper, so they didn't melt (top row).
We also had an aluminum can:
The water we poured in boiled quickly, while the can itself became so brittle that we poked holes through it with nothing more than sunlight.
Then we tried cooking. Popcorn did both what you'd expect and not quite what you'd expect: when you really focus the light on it, it kinda pops but mostly burns. However, if you don't put it directly in the focal point, so the light is spread over a larger area and doesn't heat it up as quickly, you can get a whole bunch of kernels to pop without burning too much.
The steam/smoke coming up from the kernels really highlighted the spectra from the lens beautifully. Our yield was very low (lots of unpopped kernels for each popped one), but at least we had real popcorn!
When we tried to cook bacon, about a third ended up well done, a third was burnt, and a third was uncooked. Cooking with the lens is difficult because it heats stuff up too hot too fast. But the well-cooked parts tasted great, so we added an egg:
(We didn't lens the spoon; we used it to eat the egg afterwards.)
It's been fun experimenting with different lensing techniques and items and we've learned a lot (including where the nearest fire extinguisher is!). These are just the highlights — we've lensed gourds, soap, gummy bears, CDs — you name it. Next on our list: marshmallows!
We've got more details and more pictures of our results on
Alan's personal blog
. If you have ideas of other things we should try lensing, we'd love to hear suggestions.
Posted by Alan Davidson and Dustin Boswell, Software Engineers
Mosaic: bringing diverse perspectives together
April 10, 2009
This is the next post in our
Interface series
, which takes a look at valuing people's similarities and differences in the workplace. For more information on how Google fosters an inclusive work environment, visit
Life at Google
on our Jobs site. – Ed.
Since joining Mosaic, our diversity initiatives group in the
Boston office
, we've seen firsthand how even a small group of Googlers dedicated to a cause can make a real difference. Mosaic was created in 2007 when a few Boston Googlers were talking informally over lunch about how to increase the diversity in our rapidly growing office. Since then, we've made great strides in growing our membership and highlighting the creativity and varied experiences of our colleagues. The idea even spread to other Google offices, with several Mosaic chapters opening across the U.S.
Over the past year, Mosaic Boston has participated in Google's university recruitment efforts by holding three open houses to encourage traditionally underrepresented students from the Boston area to apply for careers at Google. This past summer, we hosted two enthusiastic interns as part of
Google's BOLD
(Building Opportunities for Leadership & Development) diversity internship program to explore opportunities in the technology industry. We watched their leadership skills grow as they organized events such as a career panel and product demos for high school students through Mosaic.
Most recently, we co-hosted a lunch-and-learn with esteemed Harvard Business School professor
David Thomas
, co-author of "Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America." Down-to-earth and engaging, Professor Thomas presented his findings about minorities and women who had "made it" in corporate America, stressing the need to build wide networks of support, find strong mentors and develop a niche within a company that meshes with one's personal values. His message reminded us of how important it is for Mosaic to provide these opportunities for our own community here at Google. You can
watch the video
from his visit on the Authors@Google YouTube channel.
As both Googlers and members of Mosaic, we feel empowered and excited to live out our values in our workplace. To us, this means anything from inviting authors to speak and training non-profits on how to use Google Apps, to throwing a Brazilian Carnaval-themed edition of our weekly company meeting complete with
capoeira performers
, caipirinhas, and authentic Brazilian food. We're excited about what Mosaic has accomplished so far and can't wait to see what's next. In the meantime, we continue to be committed to providing personal and professional growth for the members of our diversity group, as well as doing our part to keep Google an inclusive place to work.
Boston Mosaic team with capoeira performers
Posted by Priti Sanghani and Mariam Shaikh, AdWords Account Associates
Send a video message with Google Latitude
April 9, 2009
If you're like us, you never tire of finding fun ways to send a simple message (what's the challenge, after all, in just flipping open your phone?). Here's our latest idea: spell out the words with Google Latitude.
After you watch the video, feel free to send your own Latitude message by creating
a custom video
for a friend. You can also check out the
Google Mobile Blog
to learn about some of the other creative ways people are using Latitude.
Posted by Heaven Kim, Product Marketing Manager
Designing lean, green, energy-saving machines
April 9, 2009
Last week Google hosted a
Data Center Efficiency Summit
, bringing together approximately 160 industry leaders to share insights and best practices. Since it was April Fool's Day, we threw in a few jokes to keep the atmosphere fun (
oil-cooled data center
, anyone?), but the topic is serious: How can the IT industry keep growing while also exercising good environmental stewardship?
We disclosed for the first time details about the design of our
ultra-efficient data centers
. We also provided a first-ever video tour of a Google
container data center
as well as a
water treatment facility
. We detailed how we measure data center efficiency and discussed how we reduced our facility energy use by up to 85%. The engineers who developed our efficient battery backup solution even brought an actual
Google server
to the event.
By the end of the day, we narrowed in on a recurring theme: Reducing resource use through efficiency efforts is not just good for the environment, it saves money too. And it is this economic advantage which makes efficient data centers not just green, but truly sustainable.
For a tour of a Google container data center check out the video below or watch the entire summit:
part 1
,
part 2
, and
part 3
.
Posted by Jimmy Clidaras, Principal Engineer
Labels
Africa
19
Android
58
April 1
4
Asia
39
Europe
46
Latin America
18
accessibility
41
acquisition
26
ads
131
apps
418
books + book search
48
commerce
12
computing history
7
crisis response
33
culture
12
developers
120
diversity
35
doodles
68
education and research
144
entrepreneurs at Google
14
faster web
16
free expression
61
google.org
73
googleplus
50
googlers and culture
202
green
102
maps and earth
194
mobile
124
online safety
19
open source
19
photos
39
policy and issues
139
politics
71
privacy
66
recruiting and hiring
32
scholarships
31
search
505
search quality
24
search trends
118
security
36
small business
31
user experience and usability
41
youtube and video
140
Archive
2016
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2007
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2006
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2005
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2004
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Feed
Google
on
Follow @google
Follow
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
Follow
