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Hello from A2
July 30, 2008
We set up shop in Ann Arbor, Mich. nearly two years ago. And we’ve been so busy, we’ve barely had time to say hi. But before we tell you about the interesting things we're doing in
our new location
, we figure you might want to know a little bit more about our state and our town.
Sandwiched between two Great Lakes, peppered with forestry, and teeming with kindhearted Midwesterners,
Michigan
is the kind of place you'd be lucky to visit and we get to live here. Not only that, but we’re located in
Ann Arbor
, a town with a great progressive story:
Popular Science
magazine ranked Ann Arbor in the
top 25 greenest cities
in America.Some 50,000 trees grow along Ann Arbor streets, and city parks boast another 50,000. And while no trees actually grow in the Google office, our cheeks do seem to be turning a nice leafy shade of green — probably from walking and biking to work as part of Ann Arbor’s Commuter Challenge, swapping paper for reusable dishes in our cafeteria, and educating ourselves on composting and recycling.
On Oct. 14, 1960, President John F. Kennedy
announced his proposal
for the Peace Corps on the front steps of the Michigan Union, in downtown Ann Arbor. Nearly 50 years later, we "A2ooglers" feel a similar sense of urgency — but this time, it’s a desire to work with our very own state, from soup kitchens to river cleanups. We’re also connecting local schools and businesses with Google products.
In the first Rose Bowl Game in 1902, University of Michigan (located in Ann Arbor) defeated Stanford 49 - 0. Like our Wolverine neighbors, we're burning with competitive spirit — one that’s given birth to office teams for kickball, soccer, volleyball, tennis, basketball, skiing, ultimate Frisbee and trivia.
Forgive us our moment of boosterism, but there's more:
AARP Magazine recently named Ann Arbor the
healthiest hometown in America
, based on 20 factors ranging from the community's water purity to the eating habits of its citizens.
According to Forbes.com, Ann Arbor is America's
4th Smartest City
.
Oprah Winfrey included a brisket sandwich from our own Zingerman's Deli on her
Top Sandwiches in America.
Ann Arbor ranks in the
top 21 cities for cyclists
, says
Bicycling
magazine.
And
even more
...
Inside our walls, you’ll find a team that's committed to our AdWords advertisers — from identifying potential advertisers, to assisting current ones with day-to-day challenges, to strategizing with others for the future. That’s who we are. We’d love to have you
join us
.
Posted by Eileen Duffy, AdWords Associate
Back to school with more than 1 million users worldwide
July 30, 2008
Google Apps is rapidly gaining momentum in education. We now have more than a million people on campuses worldwide actively using Google's suite of email, calendar and docs to share information and study. This makes perfect sense. Schools have always been a proving ground for innovative ideas. And as we prepare for the new school year, we are happy to welcome more than a dozen universities across the U.S., joining the thousands of other schools that have already embraced cloud computing in education. Here are the new additions:
Collin County Community College District
Francis Marion University
George Washington University
Indiana University
Kean University
Kent State University
Kishwaukee College
Loyola Marymount University
Montgomery County Community College
New Jersey Institute of Technology
University of Florida
University of San Diego
University of Virginia
This is really just the beginning. As we continue working to make it easier to communicate and collaborate online, we are going to meet with some of the top technology experts -- the students themselves. For the entire month of September, we are heading "
App to School
" by embarking on a cross-country bus tour to visit campuses, listen to students and learn more about how cloud computing is helping education. Please check out our
Enterprise blog
for more info.
Posted by
Jeff Keltner
, Business Development Manager, Google Apps
More transparency in customized search results
July 30, 2008
As we continue to refine our search algorithms to deliver more relevant results, we strive to be as open as possible about
how we use data
to improve your search experience. Today, we're rolling out a new feature in Google Web Search that will help you better understand how your search results are already customized. Over the next few days, you may start to see messages like this in the upper right corner of your search results page (click on the image to view larger):
You can click the "More details" link to get to a page like this:
You'll see these new messages whenever your search results have been customized based on one or more of the following types of information:
Location.
By default, we identify your approximate city location based on your computer's
IP address
and use it to customize your search results. If you'd like Google to use a different location, you can sign into or create a Google Account and provide a city or street address. Your specific location will be used not only for customizing search results, but also to improve your experience in Google Maps and other Google products.
Recent searches.
We take into account whether a particular query followed on the heels of another query. Because recent search activity provides such valuable context for understanding the meaning behind your searches, we use it to customize your results whenever possible, regardless of whether you're signed in or signed out. In order to customize your results and show you the customization details, we keep the most recent query on your browser for a limited time. After that, the information is removed from your browser and disappears immediately if you close your browser.
Web History.
If you're signed in and have
Web History
enabled, we customize your search results based on what you've searched for in the past on Google, and what web sites you've visited. One important note about Web History: it belongs to you and you have complete control over it. You can remove specific items or pause the service at any time. And if there's a particular search that you'd rather not have personalized based on your Web History, you can also just temporarily sign out of your Google Account.
This new feature doesn't change anything at all about how you search on Google and the results you get; it just gives you more of a behind-the-scenes look at how we customize your search experience. We consider this to be an important step in our
commitment to transparency
, and we hope you find it informative and useful.
Posted by Rachel Garb, Product Manager
Goodbye to Randy Pausch, a great teacher
July 26, 2008
Randy Pausch
, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and a good friend of Google, passed away last night. In addition to being recognized as a pioneer in virtual reality research, he became widely known as a gifted teacher and a mentor to many. Millions of people saw his inspiring "
Last Lecture
" on YouTube. Read more about Randy and his contributions on our
Research Blog
.
Posted by Kevin McCurley, Research Scientist
Ragogmakan (Google) goes to the Amazon
July 25, 2008
Last month, a group of Googlers traveled to Brazil, to conduct our first-ever project in the Amazon. Organized by our
Google Earth Outreach
team, we went at the special invitation of Amazon Chief Almir Naramayoga Surui, who'd invited us down to train his people on using Google Earth, YouTube, blogs and other Internet tools in order to preserve their history and culture, protect their rainforest, and create a sustainable future for their tribe.
This was an unusual request, especially because until recently, the Surui Indians used stone tools and hunted and fished with bows and arrows. But as we considered this request, we realized that it was very much within the mission of Google Earth Outreach, which helps people around the world learn how to use Google Earth and Maps for public benefit. We had previously collaborated with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to
map destroyed villages in Darfur
, with UNHCR to show
"A Refugee's Life"
, with Appalachian Voices to illustrate
mountaintop removal coal-mining
, and with the Jane Goodall Institute to
follow chimpanzees in Tanzania
. Maybe, we thought, it was time to go to the Amazon.
"New Technologies and Indigenous Peoples" - the logo
created by the Surui for our partnership
We learned from Chief Almir that just as the Amazon rainforest is disappearing at an alarming rate, so too are the indigenous peoples who live there. This loss of biological and cultural diversity, of natural resources, habitats and human beings, has profound consequences both locally and globally. Al Gore has called the Amazon rainforest "the lungs of the planet" for the vital role it plays in consuming carbon dioxide and producing oxygen for all of us to breathe. Chief Almir explained that his tribe had already begun replanting thousands of hectares of their forest which had been illegally logged by outsiders. He hopes that through this project, they will be able to participate in the emerging carbon offset marketplace. And he wants to use Google Earth, YouTube and blogs to give the world a virtual tour of these projects, to raise awareness, and educate other tribes in how to do the same thing.
So we spent several months preparing special training materials. We partnered closely with the Amazon Conservation Team, who'd previously taught the Surui how to GPS-locate their significant sites that the Surui now wanted to map in full 3D, in Google Earth. Along the way, we found that many people asked us these questions: "So why is Google going to the Amazon?" "Why are you trying to train Indians?" "Won't technology harm their culture?" "Are Amazon Indians even capable of learning to use the Internet?"
Without giving away too much of the story, the answer to the last question is YES. During the trainings, we were moved to see how committed the young Surui students were to learning everything they possibly could. Their first two web searches were "Povos Indigenas do Brasil" (Indigenous peoples of Brazil) and "Desmatamento Amazonia" (Deforestation of the Amazon). They succeeded in importing their cultural map into Google Earth (see image), as the starting point for their virtual tour. They showed their warrior spirit in their very first
YouTube video
. They began building a Google Site. All of these are now works in progress, and when they are ready to release to the world, we expect that they will be unlike anything anyone has seen before.
The Surui call Google "ragogmakan", or "messenger", because they are using our tools to get their message out. Although we traveled to the Amazon rain forest expecting to be the teachers, there are lessons for all of us in the story of the Surui. As they engage with the modern world, they are making choices about what to adopt, adapt or reject. If we pay attention, we may have as much to learn from them as they from us.
Read more on the
Lat Long blog
, and experience the story of our trip on the
Google Earth Outreach site
.
Surui cultural map
Posted by Rebecca Moore, Manager, Google Earth Outreach
We knew the web was big...
July 25, 2008
We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just
how
big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!
How do we find all those pages? We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow the links on those new pages to even more pages and so on, until we have a huge list of links. In fact, we found even more than 1 trillion individual links, but not all of them lead to unique web pages. Many pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. Even after removing those exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.
So how many unique pages does the web really contain? We don't know; we don't have time to look at them all! :-) Strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite -- for example, web calendars may have a "next day" link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a "new" page. We're not doing that, obviously, since there would be little benefit to you. But this example shows that the size of the web really depends on your definition of what's a useful page, and there is no exact answer.
We don't index every one of those trillion pages -- many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content similar to the calendar example that isn't very useful to searchers. But we're proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and our goal always has been to index all the world's data.
To keep up with this volume of information, our systems have come a long way since the first set of web data Google processed to answer queries. Back then, we did everything in batches: one workstation could compute the PageRank graph on 26 million pages in a couple of hours, and that set of pages would be used as Google's index for a fixed period of time. Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it'd be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.
As you can see, our distributed infrastructure allows applications to efficiently traverse a link graph with many trillions of connections, or quickly sort petabytes of data, just to prepare to answer the most important question: your next Google search.
Posted by Jesse Alpert & Nissan Hajaj, Software Engineers, Web Search Infrastructure Team
Knol is open to everyone
July 23, 2008
A few months ago we
announced
that we were testing a new product called
Knol
. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Today, we're making Knol available to everyone.
The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information
resides in people's heads
: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.
The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It's their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.
With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call "moderated collaboration." With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it!
Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People
can
submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements.
We are happy to announce an agreement with the
New Yorker m
agazine which allows any author to add one cartoon per knol from the
New Yorker
's extensive cartoon repository. Cartoons are an effective (and fun) way to make your point, even on the most serious topics.
Everyone knows something. See what people are writing about, then tell the world what you know:
knol.google.com
Posted by Cedric Dupont, Product Manager and Michael McNally, Software Engineer
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