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
Google Checkout for Non-Profits in 2010
December 21, 2009
Over the past couple of years,
Google Checkout for Non-Profits
has helped thousands of organizations collect millions of dollars in donations to support various causes. Today we’re pleased to announce that we’ll be extending free donation processing until 2011 for those non-profits who are also members of our
Google Grants
program. All other non-profits can continue to process donations according to Checkout's
standard fee structure
. To find out more and to learn about an experiment we did on suggested donation amounts, please read our post on the
Google Checkout Blog
.
Posted by Prem Ramaswami, Product Manager and Patrick Moor, Software Engineer
This week in search 12/18/09
December 18, 2009
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.
For Google, the quality of search has always been about getting you the exact, most relevant answer you were looking for in the shortest amount of time -- what we call "time-to-result." These notions of relevance and speed have been baked into our product development and are always a top priority for us. Every day we work through design, observations, and analytics to make sure that the Google you use today is better than the Google you used yesterday. In fact, at any given time we're conducting between 50 and 200 search experiments, all of which are focused on getting you the exact result you're looking for -- faster. And, given that 20% of Google search queries are ones we haven't seen in the past 90 days, and there are well over 300 billion web pages to crawl, you can imagine the extent of that challenge!
With 2009 coming to a close (not to mention the first decade of the millennium), now is a good time to look back over the evolution of time-to-result with a nod towards what's to come in 2010 and beyond.
In the beginning of the decade, many of us were like student drivers: we used search to navigate the web feeling apprehensive and deliberate with navigation (the excruciating wait times with dial-up modems didn't make it easy either!) Since then, we've all learned how to search better and faster, especially as the web has developed and diversified over time. As more and different types of information came online, we searched for it -- news, video, books, and maps became part of our daily search diet. Today, the majority of Internet users have become experienced web warriors, armed with broadband access, faster computers, and blazing fast browsers, and the time it takes to get the perfect search result has increasingly become more and more important. As a result, Internet usage behavior across the web has shifted -- and not just on Google. Recently, for example, Akamai
published a study
which found that Internet users in 2009 expect web pages to load twice as fast as they did in 2006. This expectation of latency is not limited to web page load time. Research firm
Tubemogul found
that more than 81 percent of all online video viewers click away if they encounter a video that's rebuffering. Speed matters now more than ever -- we don't have the time or tolerance to wait.
Our own years of testing have conclusively shown that when speed of a feature or product improves, usage, quite simply, goes up. During the early development of Google Maps for mobile, we went with compressed tiles over uncompressed map tiles, a difference barely perceptible to the human eye. The compression resulted in two to three times the increase in speed, and ultimately doubled usage of maps. But it's not just about actual latency -- it's also about
perceived
latency. During the development of Google News, which is quite a dynamic and complicated page, we broke the results page into smaller blocks of HTML, appearing above and below the fold. This smart tabling dramatically improves the way you perceive the page's load time. Although Google News takes about 8 seconds to fully load due to the richness of the page, the results you first see above the fold are there nearly instantly, thus altering that perception of latency.
So, it's clear speed and latency enhancements are an important focus for us, especially since they make the experience you have with our products much more useful and enjoyable. Above all else, we care about getting you an answer as fast as possible, and we do this through not only improving our search results but also by working with the web community to speed up the entire web. 2009 brought some incredible advancements that are worth noting.
In 2009, our "under the hood" infrastructure focus became more pronounced, as we kicked off our
Make the Web Faster
campaign. Our goal has been simple, to make the web browsing experience as fast as turning the pages of a magazine. To help increase browsing speeds, we released projects such as
Page Speed
to help webmasters optimize their sites, and
Google Public DNS
, to help people obtain faster, safer, and more valid DNS results. Finally, we started work on
SPDY
, pronounced "SPeeDY" -- a new protocol designed to minimize latency. The notion of these "under the hood" improvements are vital to building a faster web. But what about the relevance and comprehensiveness of the actual "result" aspect of time-to-result?
Early this year, we saw a lot of evidence that people are getting much more sophisticated in their searching, asking Google to solve harder problems (for example, by making longer and more complex queries). For this reason, in 2009 alone we have released many improvements: nearly 500 ranking changes; well over 100 UI changes; tripled how much you see in local universal results; brought personalized search to all users; and tripled the frequency with which you see images when you enter a query. To better help you choose from the results we improved the way that we summarize the results by dynamically varying the length of the description, creating jump-to shortcuts that take you straight to the relevant section of a page, and displaying the site hierarchy to inform you of the context of the page within the website. To save time and keystrokes, we now show you
universal search features in Suggest
; try searching for for weather, currency conversions, or flight status. This dramatically improves your ability to benefit from previous queries, getting you answers more quickly and easily than ever before. And just last week, we brought speed to a whole new level with realtime search -- so that you can find information that is literally just seconds old.
As these "time-to-result" efforts continue to emerge in 2010, we'll keep pushing the envelope on indexing speed, accuracy, and comprehensiveness. And that means you can expect the search experience to get more social, more personal, more interactive, and more ubiquitous -- getting you the information you're exactly looking for when and where you need it. Ultimately, the faster you get what you're looking for, the more enriched your life will be, and that makes us very happy. So what's the ultimate goal in the future? Allowing only a single barrier to instantly getting you the search result you're looking for -- the speed of light.
Here's to a great 2009, and an even greater 2010 in search!
Posted by Jack Menzel, Group Product Manager, Search
Tips and tricks for deploying Google Apps
December 18, 2009
Has your company, school or organization decided to "
go Google
" — but not yet fully "gone?" Perhaps you'd like more guidance on the technical, marketing or training details? Or maybe you could use some resources to help you deploy? Making the decision to go Google can be the easiest part, but we realize that it sometimes takes a little boost to finish the process, which is where we come in.
Our Google Apps Deployment team has assisted hundreds of organizations — large and small — make the switch to Google Apps. To ensure that your implementation is a success, we've developed step-by-step tools to guide you through the process, and best practices to make your transition as smooth and easy as possible. Here are some of the resources you can explore when going Google:
Sign up for a
Deployment Training Webinar
. In this live session, a deployment specialist will walk you through the deployment planning steps and use cases.
Take advantage of our deployment guides, which include creative examples and templates, to help with your technical and marketing rollout:
For enterprises
For small/medium businesses
For schools
Recently, we also launched two learning sites to jump start your transition to Google Apps: the customizable
Google Enterprise Launch Site
for large enterprises and the
Apps Learning Center
for small businesses. You can find out more about these Google site templates in the
Enterprise Deployment Site
.
To find answers to your technical questions about Google Apps, visit the
Administrator Help Center
. We also provide overviews and videos for integration and migration tools, including
Microsoft Outlook Sync
,
Google Blackberry Enterprise Server Connector
and
Lotus Notes Migration
.
We hope these resources help with your move to Google Apps, and we can't wait to welcome you to the Google Apps family.
Posted by Cindy Chin, Google Apps Deployment Specialist
Carbon offsets at Google
December 17, 2009
As leaders from around the world meet in Copenhagen to address global climate change this month, we thought it was a good time to reflect on our own carbon footprint. In 2007, we committed to become a
carbon neutral company
. We know that it isn't possible to write a check and eliminate the environmental impact of our operations. So what does “carbon neutrality” mean to us?
First, we aggressively pursue reductions in our energy consumption through energy efficiency, innovative infrastructure design and operations and
on-site renewable energy
. Our Google designed data centers use
half the energy
of typical facilities. We're also working to accelerate the development of economic, clean renewable energy at scale through research and development, investment and policy outreach. At this time, however, such efforts don't cover our entire carbon footprint. Therefore, since 2007 we've gone a step further and made a voluntary commitment to buy carbon offsets to cover the portion of our footprint that we cannot yet eliminate — which is what we mean by "carbon neutrality."
So what exactly is a carbon offset? The idea behind an offset is that we pay someone to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in a specific, measurable way, thus offseting an equal climate impact on our side. To determine our impact, we calculate our annual carbon footprint, which is then verified by an independent third party. We include direct energy consumption (like natural gas) and electricity use, employee commuting, company vehicle use, business travel and estimates of carbon emissions from building construction and from the manufacturing of servers used in our datacenters. We then buy an equivalent number of carbon offsets.
While carbon offsets seem simple in principle, in practice they are surprisingly complicated. In particular, it's often difficult to say whether or not the offset project results in emissions reductions that would have happened anyway. We find ourselves asking whether the project in fact goes beyond "business as usual." In the world of offsets, this concept is referred to as "
additionality
." Carbon offsets have a mixed reputation because some projects are not additional. Here at Google, we have set a very high bar to ensure that our investment makes an actual difference in reducing greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing offsets that are real, verifiable, permanent and additional.
To date, we have selected high quality carbon offsets from around the world that reduce greenhouse gas emissions — ranging from landfill gas projects in Caldwell County, NC, and Steuben County, NY, to animal-waste management systems in Mexico and Brazil. Our funding helps make it possible for equipment to be installed that captures and destroys the methane gas produced as the waste decomposes.
Methane
, the primary component in natural gas, is a significant contributor to global warming. We chose to focus on landfill and agricultural methane reduction projects because methane's impact on warming is very well understood, it's easy to measure how much methane is captured and the capture wouldn't happen without our financing (for the projects we're investing in, they couldn't make enough money selling the gas).
We need fundamental changes to global energy and transportation infrastructure to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions over the long term. In the meantime, the projects to which we contribute offer measurable emissions reductions and allow us to take responsibility for our carbon footprint. To that end, we're always looking for good emissions-reduction projects to support. If you have a landfill gas or agricultural methane carbon offset project you think we should consider, please visit
this page
for more information about how to participate in our latest carbon-offset procurement round.
Posted by Alice Ryan, Green Energy Project Manager
Go thataway: Google Maps India learns to navigate like a local
December 17, 2009
Have you ever been lost? Perhaps you missed a turn because a street sign was poorly labeled, hard to see in the dark, or just not where it should have been? These are problems we've all faced, but they're especially complicated in India, where street names are not commonly known and the typical wayfinding strategy is to ask someone on the street. Without road names, it's difficult to produce a set of directions that makes sense. Just take a look at this screenshot of Google Maps directions in India in 2008 and you'll get the picture:
To solve this problem, this week we
launched
an improvement to
Google Maps India
that describes routes in terms of easy-to-follow landmarks and businesses that are visible along the way. We gathered feedback from users around the world to spark this improvement to our technology, and we thought we'd give you a glimpse at our thinking behind this launch.
We knew from previous studies in several countries that most people rely on landmarks — visual cues along the way — for successful navigation. But we needed to understand how people use those visual cues, and what makes a good landmark, in order to make our instructions more human and improve route descriptions. To get answers to these questions, we ran a user research study that focused specifically on how people give and get directions. We called businesses and asked how to get to their store; we recruited people to keep track of directions they gave or received and later interviewed them about their experiences; we asked people to draw us diagrams of routes to places unfamiliar to us; we even followed people around as they tried to find their way.
We found that using landmarks in directions helps for two simple reasons: they are
easier to see
than street signs and they are
easier to remember
than street names. Spotting a pink building on a corner or remembering to turn after a gas station is much easier than trying to recall an unfamiliar street name. Sometimes there are simply too many signs to look at, and the street sign drowns in the visual noise. A good landmark always stands out.
We also discovered that there are three situations in which people resort to landmarks.
The first is when people need to
orient
themselves — for instance, they just exited a subway station and are not sure which way to go. Google Maps would say: "Head southeast for 0.2 miles." A person would say: "Start walking away from the McDonald's."
The second situation is when people use a landmark to
describe a turn
: "Turn right after the Starbucks."
The third use, however, is the most interesting. We discovered that often people simply want to
confirm
that they are still on the right track and haven't missed their turn.
Giving people this sense of confidence while they explore an unfamiliar territory became one of the goals of our redesign. Over the course of several months, the team brainstormed various ways of presenting the information contained in Google Maps in a way that would be useful for people. We then settled on a design that added some landmarks to describe the turns and confirm the route.
The next step was to put this design to a test with drivers in Bangalore, India. The results were eye-opening. While we were on the right track with introducing landmarks, we still relied on street names too heavily. Drivers wanted more confirmation. They wanted to compare what they saw on Google Maps with what they saw from the driver's seat, every step of the way.
We added more landmarks along routes and reduced the visual prominence of street names, and the result was our final
design
:
Now Google Maps India gives you directions like a local would. Happy wayfinding!
Posted by Olga Khroustaleva, User Experience Researcher, Google Maps
Translate Google Sites with one click
December 17, 2009
Google brought translation features to many of our products in 2009, including
Google Docs
and
Gmail
and we're happy to add one more before the New Year. To make it easier for people around the globe to read the site you created with
Google Sites
, we've integrated with the
Google Translate Element
. Now, whenever someone visits a Google Site in another language, they will be given the option to translate the content into the language of their choice. All they have to do is click on the translate link at the bottom right-hand side of the page. Now, the content on your site can be translated into 51 languages, allowing you to reach a whole new audience. Check out this before and after for a Korean school's website below (or
try it out
for yourself).
Before
After
We hope this feature helps expand your Google site's reach to more people.
Posted by Michael Cheng, Software Engineer, Google Sites
Transliteration goes global
December 17, 2009
Most of us use a keyboard to enter text; it's one of the most basic activities we perform on a computer. However even this simple activity can be cumbersome in many parts of the world. If you've ever tried to type in a non-Roman script using a Roman keyboard, you know that it can be difficult to do. Many of us at Google's Bangalore office experienced this problem firsthand. Roman keyboards are the norm in India, making it difficult to type in Indian languages. We decided to tackle this problem by making it very easy to type phonetically using Roman characters and we launched this service as
Google Transliteration
.
Using Google Transliteration you can convert Roman characters to their phonetic equivalent in your language. Note that this is not the same as translation — it's the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other. For example, typing "hamesha" transliterates into Hindi as:
, typing "salaam" transliterates into Persian as:
and typing "spasibo" transliterates into Russian as
. Since our initial launch for a single Indian language, we've been hard at work on improving quality, adding more languages and new features.
Today we are pleased to introduce a new and improved version of Google Transliteration, available in
Google Labs
or at
http://www.google.com/transliterate
.
In this new version, you can select from one of seventeen supported languages:
Arabic
,
Bengali
,
Greek
,
Gujarati
,
Hindi
,
Kannada
,
Malayalam
,
Marathi
,
Nepali
,
Persian
,
Punjabi
,
Russian
,
Sanskrit
,
Serbian
,
Tamil
,
Telugu
and
Urdu
. You can also compose richly formatted text and look up word definitions with our dictionary integration. If the default transliteration is not the word you wanted, you can highlight it to see a list of alternatives. For even finer-grained control, we provide a
unicode
character picker to allow character-by-character composition.
Google Transliteration is integrated into
several Google properties
and we have an
API
and
bookmarklets
to extend this capability to other websites. A solution we initially built to solve a problem we saw here in India is now being used in many other parts of the world as well - one small example of the scale and leverage that technology can bring in today's increasingly globalized environment. As with all labs products, we will continue to improve the technology and try out new features. We would love to hear from you, so do
let us know
what you think.
Posted by Nilesh Tathawadekar and Mohammed Aslam, Software Engineers
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
