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GOOG-411 graduates from Labs
October 12, 2007
Posted by Jonathan Matus, Product Marketing Manager
A few years ago, my younger brother won a car in a raffle. He wanted to share this good news with the entire family, so he decided to keep it a secret until we were all together at dinnertime. But good news is hard to keep; he couldn't wait, and by lunchtime we all knew about our new car. And now we have some exciting news of our own that we just can't contain any longer.
Many of you explored
Google Labs
and discovered a local business info service that's totally free. It's called GOOG-411 and it helps callers find and connect with local businesses just by dialing 1-800-GOOG-411. It's a voice-based local search service, which means it uses speech-recognition algorithms to recognize what a caller is saying and then finds the local business information he or she is looking for. These algorithms had to be trained with real utterances, much like how a baby learns language by listening to its parents. Since its unveiling in April, GOOG-411 has successfully served millions of callers. And we owe a big thanks to everyone who took our speech recognition algorithms from infancy to adulthood!
People have been spreading the word about GOOG-411 to their friends and families. And now we're happy to report that our local business info service has officially graduated from Labs. To mark the occasion, we're celebrating with a
brand new website
that includes this fun video:
When you watch the video, pay extra attention to the people you meet at the end. One of them is the real voice behind GOOG-411. Think you can guess who it is? When you call 1-800-GOOG-411, listen closely and see if you can identify which team member shown in the video is the voice. Then, post your answer as a comment on
our YouTube page.
If you build it, they will eat it
October 12, 2007
Posted by Kevin McConvey, Cafe Director
To commemorate the first anniversary of our New York office in its current space, we decided to think big -- a giant scale-model cake of the entire block-long building. Our facilities manager, Laura Gimpel, and I came up with a plan to construct this tasty treat and serve it at last Thursday's anniversary celebration.
Our first step was to use
Google Earth
and
Street View
to get aerial views and photos of the building. Spanning an entire city block, the massive structure was originally constructed in 1932 to house the
Port Authority of New York
; today, it's Manhattan's second-largest building in square footage. Next, our pastry chef, Danita Holt, drew up the blueprints. After a few weeks of developing the plans, it was time to start pouring the foundation. The
actual production
took four days, with seven of us (two sous chefs, two pastry chefs, our executive chef, a line cook, and me) working on it. In total, we used 630 eggs, 105 pounds of sugar and 20 pounds of butter. The finished product was five feet long, three feet high and two feet wide. Now that's a lot of cake!
Perhaps even more challenging, we had to make sure there was no waste -- every last bite had to be eaten. The day after the celebration (when we did make a sizable dent), we served cake 'donuts' for breakfast. We got even more creative for lunch and offered an anniversary cake trifle and an amazing Oreo-infused anniversary cake pudding. Throughout the day, we put platters of leftover cake in the micro-kitchens, game room and library. The last of our creation was consumed on the balcony on Friday night around 7 p.m. by a group of hungry engineers.
This was one of the most memorable projects I've worked on so far. I can't wait to see what we do when our office turns two.
Anita Borg Scholarships expand to Canada
October 12, 2007
Posted by Michelle Levesque, Software Engineer
On my desk at work I have a little Canadian flag. I grew up in Toronto, Canada and attended school at the University of Toronto where I graduated with a degree in software engineering. Now I work in Mountain View designing tools to help improve our ads quality. But I've never forgotten where I'm from, and that's why I'm so excited that Google is announcing the expansion of our Anita Borg scholarship to Canada.
Dr. Anita Borg
(1949-2003) devoted her adult life to revolutionizing the way we think about technology and dismantling barriers that keep women and minorities from entering computing and technology fields. Her combination of technical expertise and fearless vision continues to inspire and motivate countless women to become active participants and leaders in creating technology. In honor of Dr. Borg's passion, for the past four years, Google has sponsored a
scholarship program
with the Anita Borg Institute for Women in the U.S., and more recently, in Europe and Australia.
This year, we're excited to announce the expansion of the program to include Canada, where we're very pleased to offer an opportunity to both undergraduate students and postgraduates, who may apply for CAD$5,000 scholarships. We're looking for women who will carry on the legacy of Dr. Borg, with strong academic backgrounds and demonstrated leadership qualities.
All scholarship recipients and finalists will be invited to visit the Google engineering office in New York City next April for a networking retreat featuring workshops with a series of speakers, panelists, breakout sessions and social activities.
Tell your friends, or apply yourself, at
www.google.ca/anitaborg
. The deadline for the Canada program is Monday, February 4, 2008.
China in real time
October 11, 2007
Posted by Katie Jacobs Stanton, Group Product Manager
Over the past few years, the Chinese stock markets have grown at a breathtaking pace. Not surprisingly, investors have demanded more access to data and information about Chinese stocks, particularly in real time. Google Finance has heard the clamor, and we're pleased to be able to improve our service for the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges by providing pricing data in real time. So if you're interested in
Yunnan Copper
,
Bank of China
, or you just want to search around, enjoy the additional data on
Google Finance
.
Now that the Chinese stock data is live, we're hoping our friends at the SEC will take note and approve the last sale proposal
we announced in January
. This proposal would allow us to offer our users free and unlimited access to real-time last sale prices for NYSE and Nasdaq stocks. As soon as the SEC approves, we'll flip the switch.
Our Corporate Equality effort
October 11, 2007
Posted by Megan Smith, VP of New Business Development, and Nicholas Creswell, University Programmes Manager, EMEA
Googlers care deeply about creating a workplace that affords equal treatment for all our staff, and while we do it regardless of any accolades we think our efforts might bring, recognition from outside organizations does mean a lot to us. Which is why we're really pleased about our
strong performance
in the U.S. Human Rights Campaign (HRC)
Corporate Equality Index
for the second year in a row. It's particularly exciting given that this is a time of rapid growth for our population of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees (whose group name is, naturally, Gayglers) around the world.
This summer marked the first time Gayglers coordinated a presence at Pride parades globally. In San Francisco, New York, and Dublin, we had the largest (and perhaps rowdiest) presence of any corporation, and
we went one further at Europride in Madrid
where we were the
only
global company present among 45 floats. We had lot of fun at all of the marches, and it was a great way to bring Gayglers and their friends together in the communities we call home. We're passionate about our
diverse workplace
, and we hope anyone who shares our commitment to equality will consider
joining us
.
Two more reasons to type in Hindi
October 11, 2007
Posted by Aditya Kulkarni and Balaji Gopalan, Software Engineers
As some of you have already noticed, we've combined Google Suggest with our
Indic transliteration
technology to give you a new way to search the web in Hindi.
You can type your queries using a regular English keyboard, and we'll show you suggestions and completions of your query in phonetically equivalent Hindi. This means that you can type "amit" and see Hindi suggestions like "अमिताभ" and "अमिताभ बच्चन". Once you're happy with one of the suggestions, you can click it to get search results in Hindi. Try this out on the
Google India Hindi homepage
and explore all the Hindi content available on the web.
Quite a lot of people have also asked for a Googley way to scrap your friends on orkut in Hindi. You can now type in Hindi the same way you do in
Blogger
and on the
Google India Labs
page. If you have selected "Hindi" in the "languages i speak" field in your
orkut profile
, you'll see the "Type in Hindi" checkbox on the scrap pages. Just check the box to start scrapping in your favorite tongue.
We're eager to hear your
feedback and suggestions
, so please
let us know
what you think. Don't forget to visit the
Google India Labs
page to see what we've been working on.
Google Search Appliance takes five
October 10, 2007
Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Program Management Director, Google Enterprise
Around here, we love
celebrating birthdays
, including those of our products. And so it was just about five years ago that the idea for the Google Search Appliance was born. It was simple: make search inside of businesses as easy and effective as searching on Google.com.
The
Google Search Appliance
has matured quite a bit
since then
. We started with intranet web servers, added security and more than 220 different file types, and found hundreds of partners and thousands of customers. Now, we're embarking on a new phase:
bringing universal search into the enterprise
in order to break down the information silos that have developed around business networks and information.
It feels good to take five years of experience and put it to work in the next generation, but we know we have plenty of room for improvement. That's why we've also launched
Google Enterprise Labs
. So tune in for a even closer look at what's to come.
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