Hey—we've moved. Visit
The Keyword
for all the latest news and stories from Google
Official Blog
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
Google India Women in Engineering Award 2008
January 17, 2008
Posted by Manoj Varghese, Human Resources Director, India
Diversity at Google means having a workforce that reflects the diversity of our customers' perspectives, ideas and cultures -- one that thinks and acts inclusively, and fundamentally values people's similarities and differences. As part of our ongoing commitment to encourage women to excel in computing and technology, the India team has taken our first steps: in December we launched the
Google India "Women in Engineering Award"
to recognize women in the field of computer science and engineering.
In its inception year, we have extended this award to recognized engineering schools across India; it is open to any woman student in computer science engineering who meets the
application criteria
. This initiative has been received positively, as has been indicated by the inundating queries and subsequent applications. The last date for applying is
January 31st
and we are looking forward to hearing from even more
applicants
.
After our panel reviews all applications, the winners will be announced in a little more than a month, on February 29th. The winners will be invited to visit the Google engineering office in Bangalore during first week of March for a conclave comprising of keynotes, panel discussions, tech talks, breakouts and an award ceremony.
We hope this award will encourage students to take up computer science engineering as their study, and perhaps
inspire
some of you to take this up as a career too.
Team Aquaduct wins Innovate or Die competition
January 16, 2008
Posted by Dan Reicher, Google.org team
The contest said to "Innovate or Die" – and Team Aquaduct lives! In fact, the San Bruno, California team – consisting of John Lai, Adam Mack, Brian Mason, Eleanor Morgan, Paul Silberschatz – is living in grand (prize) style today after winning the
first Innovate or Die Pedal-Powered Machine contest
.
Team Aquaduct was declared the winner out of 102 entries by building a unique and functional solution to provide rural communities with access to clean water. The quintet will share the $5,000 grand prize, and each will receive a Specialized Globe bicycle – as will all five of the finalist runners-up (
read more about all the winners
).
The contest encouraged people to evaluate environmental issues and develop ingenious solutions surrounding climate change. Many original and inspiring ideas emerged; make sure to visit the
YouTube Innovate or Die page
to view all of the entries.
And here's the video for Team Aquaduct's winning pedal-powered water transportation and filtration vehicle:
The iGoogle Themes API
January 15, 2008
Posted by Kevin Tom, iGoogle Product Manager
Since we launched themes on iGoogle last March, we've enjoyed seeing how people have connected with them. For instance, we've gotten fan mail for the "fox in the teahouse" theme, and seen some great blog posts generated when folks discover the Easter egg for each theme.
Users and developers alike have been clamoring to know when they can develop themes for the iGoogle homepage, and we're happy to say that today is the day! Whether you like outer space, cartoons, dogs, or anything else, you can now create your own theme and help personalize iGoogle for millions of people.
The Themes API lets you customize many portions of the iGoogle page. Your theme can also update the page's design based on variables, such as the time of day or location. This makes it easy to create a narrative that unfolds throughout the day, a landscape that changes as the sun rises and sets, or an abstract image that becomes more complex.
Anyone who can build a website can create an iGoogle Theme. We worked with designers Yves Behar, Mark Frauenfelder, Troy Lee, and John Maeda to create some
custom iGoogle designs
to show some great examples of the types of themes you can create.
Read more on the Google Code Blog
and
start creating your theme.
Earth-light by Yves Behar, founder of the San Francisco design studio fuseproject
The flow of information at the Googleplex
January 8, 2008
Posted by Bo Cowgill, Economics Group
Earlier
on this blog, we shared some exciting early results from our firm's implementation of
prediction markets
. At
last Friday's meeting
of the
American Economic Association
, we shared the results of a deeper study, "
Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence From Google
," that uses prediction markets to show how organizations process information and respond to external events. Here are some interesting findings:
Traders in the same location tend to make the same trades at the same time.
The trades of cubemates within a small radius is the best predictor we found. By using a record of historical office changes, we could observe that the correlation begins shortly after people are seated nearby. It makes sense, because the physical proximity enables easy communication. As Eric Schmidt (our CEO) and Hal Varian (now our Chief Economist)
advised in 2005
: "The best way to make communication easy is to put team members within a few feet of each other. No telephone tag, no e-mail delay, no waiting for a reply." As you can see below, our finding about the importance of proximity holds, even once we account for many other factors.
Although we did find strong correlations among professional and social contacts, these were substantially weaker than the correlations for micro-geography
. We also measured the influence that people on similar projects, in similar places in the organization and with similar demographic characteristics exert on each other. This helped establish that geographic proximity -- and not some other type of similarity -- was responsible for the correlations we saw.
Despite the markets'
strong forecasting abilities
, there is a slight optimistic bias driven mainly by new employees
. On average, outcomes that were good for Google were overpriced by 20%. This bias was strongest on days after appreciations in
Google stock
and, ironically, for outcomes under our own control! We also find biases against extreme outcomes and
short selling
. Given a range of five outcomes, the middle ones were typically overpriced and unprofitable by comparison with the outliers.
Although the proof is in the paper, nothing quite helps like a graphic. Below you can see a snapshot of trading in one of our offices. The areas where employees are making profitable decisions is green, and the areas where employees are making unprofitable decisions is red. There are about 16 profitable traders in that big green blotch in the middle!
Baby steps to a new job
January 4, 2008
Posted by Gretta Cook, Software Engineer, Google Seattle
In late 2004, Google opened an engineering office
near Seattle
, and my son Elliott was born. I had heard great things from my friends who worked for the company down in California, and I was eager to join their ranks in this new local office. But the timing was all wrong: I wanted to spend a few years at home with my new baby.
Elliott and I had lots of fun. We went to the park and the library together. We read nursery rhymes and played peek-a-boo. We baked muffins and did finger painting. We did not, however, debate the relative merits of our favorite cache replacement policies, or write and debug multithreaded C++ code. So by the time Elliott was ready to start preschool and I was ready to go back to work, I had to ask: Would I still be able to pass a Google interview, or had I forgotten all of my technical skills?
If I wanted to land the job, I had to get serious: I needed to brush up on my data structures and algorithms, my coding, not to mention general interview skills. For the next few months, I hired a babysitter to come and watch Elliott one afternoon a week. I split that time between studying my college computer science textbooks and participating in online coding contests. The coding contests were particularly valuable because they forced me to work through the design and coding stages quickly, just like in an interview. The details of the standard Java and C++ libraries came back to me as I scrambled to get my contest code to run before time was up. I even asked friends to do mock interviews with me so I could get used to writing code on a whiteboard again.
In the end, all of this paid off. My day of interviews went really well, and I got the job!
The Seattle-area office and Elliott turned three recently; they're both thriving. I feel very fortunate to have the two of them in my life. And I'd encourage anyone -- including new moms -- who is interested in
a job at Google
to go for it.
AdWords and local markets
January 3, 2008
Posted by Brynne Zuccaro, Channel Marketing Specialist, Local Markets
According to a
WebVisible-Nielsen survey
from October 2007, 74% of people use search engines to find information when purchasing a product or service from a local business. Yet millions of businesses don’t have websites, and even those that do, don’t often engage in search marketing because they lack the time, knowledge or resources. To address this gap, our AdWords Local Markets Team has partnered with companies including Yellow Pages directories, website developers and traditional media businesses to help create search-based ad products and strategies.
We recently hosted the first annual Local Markets Symposium at our Mountain View Googleplex, which brought together more than 150 current and prospective Google AdWords Authorized Reseller partners to discuss how we can bring the power of local online advertising to small and medium-sized businesses. An array of experts spoke, including Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, local advertising guru Greg Sterling, industry bloggers, a Wall Street analyst, as well as a panel of local AdWords advertisers. What became clear throughout the day is that there’s a tremendous opportunity for local merchants to grow their business through online marketing.
If you’re with a company seeking to promote the adoption of search engine marketing by small and medium-sized businesses, visit
our Google AdWords Authorized Reseller site
.
Update
Feb 25, 2010
: Fixed link to reseller site.
Front row for First in the Nation
January 3, 2008
Posted by Ginny Hunt, Google Election Program
Tonight when Iowans gather in living rooms and high school gyms to take the first step in selecting our U.S. Presidential nominees, Google and YouTube will give you a front row seat.
We're working together with local Iowan media organizations and political parties to bring you real time results and citizen-generated videos from the caucuses –- an up-close and personal perspective in the process to elect the next President.
Iowa caucus goers and out-of-state political pundits alike can upload videos of the Iowa Caucus to YouTube, giving you a direct view into this vibrant political scene. These Iowa Caucus videos can be found at the
Des Moines Register's
YouTube Channel
and span a variety of perspectives from predictions and personal reflections to interviews and candidate analysis.
And starting tonight (approx. 8-10 pm CST), you can use
Google Maps
to view real-time caucus results by county. The political parties in Iowa will be working with us to publish these results to our
Iowa Caucus map
as soon as they come in, so that everyone can access results online when Iowans finish caucusing.
To stay on top of campaign coverage, check out the
Google News Election
section, where you can also find the
Election 2008 Google gadget
for a one-stop shop to follow the campaign trail.
Labels
accessibility
41
acquisition
26
ads
131
Africa
19
Android
59
apps
419
April 1
4
Asia
39
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
Europe
46
faster web
16
free expression
61
google.org
73
googleplus
50
googlers and culture
202
green
102
Latin America
18
maps and earth
194
mobile
125
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
