This week in search 1/31/10

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

From Google Squared enhancements to search becoming more social, this week brought a slew of exciting and (we hope) useful search feature releases:

Social Search
Sometimes, there might be relevant content on the web from people in your social circle. For example, learning what your friend thinks about the latest gadget or exotic travel location (e.g. in his or her blog) can help enhance your search experience. Until recently, there was no easy way to find this type of content published by your friends. Last October, we launched Social Search in Google labs to help solve this problem.

After a large number of users opted in and tried out the feature, Social Search has graduated and is available in beta for all signed-in users on google.com in English. We also added this feature to Google Images and gave you a way to visualize your social circle. To learn more about Social Search and how to get better social search results check out this post or this video.

Google Squared single item landing page
Last year we launched Google Squared, an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet. For categorical searches like [us presidents] or [dog breeds], Google Squared produces the type of extracted facts you might be interested in, and presents them in a meaningful way. Starting this week, Google Squared has a new design to better handle queries looking for a single thing, like a specific president or a particular breed of dog. The page is now easier to read and includes multiple images, and you can still add, remove or change the type of facts that are visible.

Example searches: [barack obama] and [boston terrier]

Better labels for Time/LIFE images
In late 2008, we worked with Time/LIFE to digitize several million archival images never been seen before, and made them available in Image Search. At that time, many images in the collection had descriptions and labels and were easy to search for. But some had less descriptive information, making them more difficult to find. Now it's possible for knowledgeable users to label images and enrich the collection. Over time, we hope the Google community will make the quality of image search better than ever before.

Example: [Cincinnati baseball]. Note the "labels" in the bottom righthand corner.

We hope you enjoy the variety of new features this week.

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search

Popular Images on Google Image Search for mobile

Google is always looking to make it easier for you to search and explore the web on your phone. We recently launched Near me now, which lets you explore what's around you from the Google home page, and a category browse feature on Local Search with categorized business listings. Today, we're happy to announce Popular Images which lets you browse and find interesting images.

This feature is accessible from Google Image Search on Android-powered devices and iPhones in the US. To try it out, go to www.google.com on your phone browser and click on "Images". Under the search box, you will see a few of the top images along with a link to "Browse Popular Images".

Clicking the link opens up a categorized list of image searches and corresponding images.

We have organized popular images across a few categories like Movies, Sports, Cars & Bikes, Music, and Cartoons. You can click on individual categories to see related images corresponding to what's popular on Google Image Search. The queries are automatically categorized with an algorithm that will continue to improve over time. One special category is Trends, which shows image queries from Google Trends that have especially high recent activity.

Give it a try and have fun exploring images.

Posted by Jignashu Parikh and Varun Sharma, Google Mobile Engineering

New Click to Call Phone Numbers in Mobile Ads

Sometimes when you're searching for a local business on your mobile device, you're not looking for their website, but rather to connect by phone. After searching for a restaurant, you might want to call and make a reservation. Or, after searching for a video store, you might want to find out if they have the video you want. Calling the business is now easier thanks to a feature that allows advertisers to add a clickable local phone number to their mobile ads. If you're using an iPhone, Android, or other smartphone, you just click the number to call the business.
What's more, the ads and phone numbers you see are based on your location. So, if a store or restaurant has multiple locations, you'll be calling the nearest one, and not making reservations in some other city. You can use My Location to make sure you get search results that are tailored to your location.

Of course, if you're going to be in another city next week and you want to call ahead to make your reservation, include the city in your search query to get the most relevant results.

If you're an advertiser and would like to learn more about how to add a clickable phone number to your ads that appear on mobile devices, check out this post on the Inside AdWords blog for more details.



Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Product Manager, Mobile Ads Team

Unicode nearing 50% of the web

About 18 months ago, we published a graph showing that Unicode on the web had just exceeded all other encodings of text on the web. The growth since then has been even more dramatic.

Web pages can use a variety of different character encodings, like ASCII, Latin-1, or Windows 1252 or Unicode. Most encodings can only represent a few languages, but Unicode can represent thousands: from Arabic to Chinese to Zulu. We have long used Unicode as the internal format for all the text we search: any other encoding is first converted to Unicode for processing.


This graph is from Google internal data, based on our indexing of web pages, and thus may vary somewhat from what other search engines find. However, the trends are pretty clear, and the continued rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the processing for the many languages that we cover.

Searching for "nancials"?
Unicode is growing both in usage and in character coverage. We recently upgraded to the latest version of Unicode, version 5.2 (via ICU and CLDR). This adds over 6,600 new characters: some of mostly academic interest, such as Egyptian Hieroglyphs, but many others for living languages.

We're constantly improving our handling of existing characters. For example, the characters "fi" can either be represented as two characters ("f" and "i"), or a special display form "fi". A Google search for [financials] or [office] used to not see these as equivalent — to the software they would just look like *nancials and of*ce. There are thousands of characters like this, and they occur in surprisingly many pages on the web, especially generated PDF documents.

But no longer — after extensive testing, we just recently turned on support for these and thousands of other characters; your searches will now also find these documents. Further steps in our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

And we're angling for a party when Unicode hits 50%!

Posted by Mark Davis, Senior International Software Architect

Google's Privacy Principles

Thursday, January 28th marks International Data Privacy Day. We're recognizing this day by publicly publishing our guiding Privacy Principles.

• Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.
• Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
• Make the collection of personal information transparent.
• Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
• Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.

We've always operated with these principles in mind. Now, we're just putting them in writing so you have a better understanding of how we think about these issues from a product perspective. Like our design and software guidelines, these privacy principles are designed to guide the decisions we make when we create new technologies. They are one of the key reasons our engineers have worked on new privacy-enhancing initiatives and features like the Google Dashboard, the Ads Preferences Manager and the Data Liberation Front. And there is more in store for 2010.

You can find out more about our efforts at the Google Privacy Center and on our YouTube channel.

Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, Engineering & Research

Supporting students from under-represented backgrounds in the pursuit of a technical education

(Cross-posted with the Google Students Blog)

We know firsthand how vital a good science or math education is to building products that change the world and enrich peoples' lives. We're committed to supporting students in their pursuit of the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields — particularly those from traditionally under-represented backgrounds.

Over time, we've dedicated time, people, and financial resources to organizations, events and schools to help advance this mission — and we're excited to share that we rounded out 2009 with a donation of $8 million to a variety of organizations who share our dedication to this cause. Our efforts were focused in four key areas:

Starting in high school
STEM education at an elementary and high school level builds technical skills early and encourages interest in technology. To support the ongoing education of these subjects, we identified more than 600 high schools with significant populations of students from under-represented and economically disadvantaged backgrounds and are providing laptops to their computer science and math departments. We are also offering laptops to some of the most promising students in these schools. In a time when many of these schools are experiencing decreased funding, we wanted to support their continued commitment to learning and teaching these subjects, and recognize the exceptional work done by teachers in these communities. If you're interested in learning more about our efforts in this field, check out Google Code University (CS tutorials for students and teachers) as well as our tools, tips and lesson plans for K-12 educators.

Growing promising talent
We've worked with over 200 outstanding students as part of our FUSE, CSSI, BOLD and BOLD Practicum summer programs. To help the alumni of our 2009 summer programs pursue their studies, we awarded former program participants with school-based scholarships. We hope that this support for tuition will lessen the financial burden on these students and their families, reduce work-study commitments and free them up to explore other educational opportunities, like studying abroad.

Advancing technical knowledge through universities
We have close relationships with universities around the world — not only do we employ their alumni, but they are also a source of groundbreaking research and innovation. We awarded grants ranging in size from $20k to $100k to 50 U.S.-based universities with whom we already have relationships and directed these funds toward departments that are closely aligned with promoting under-represented minorities in technology. We hope to expand this effort both to more U.S.-based universities and to universities around the world in the future.

Partnerships with the organizations that make it happen
Our commitment to promote women and under-represented minorities in technology is shared by dozens of local and national organizations around the country. We awarded grants to 22 partner organizations, almost all of which we have worked with in the past. These organizations are on the front lines, making sure that under-represented groups have the support, resources and contacts they need. You'll find a list of these organizations with a quick overview of the work they focus on here.

This was a terrific way to close out 2009 and we look forward to attracting and encouraging more students from traditionally under-represented backgrounds to pursue studies and careers in science, technology, engineering and math. In the meantime, you can find news especially for students on the Students Blog and by following us on @googlestudents.

Posted by Shannon Deegan, Director, People Operations

Search is getting more social

Late last year we released the Social Search experiment to make search more personal with relevant web content from your friends and online contacts. We were excited by the number of people who chose to try it out, and today Social Search is available to everyone in beta on google.com.

We've been having a lot of fun with Social Search. It's baby season here on our team — two of us just had little ones, and a third is on the way. We're all getting ready to be parents for the first time and we have lots of questions. So, what do we do? We search Google, of course! With Social Search, when we search for [baby sleep patterns], [swaddling] or [best cribs], not only do we get the usual websites with expert opinions, we also find relevant pages from our friends and contacts. For example, if one of my friends has written a blog where he talks about a great baby shop he found in Mountain View, this might appear in my social results. I could probably find other reviews, but my friend's blog is more relevant because I know and trust the author.

While we've been enjoying Social Search (and having babies), we've been hard at work on new features. For example, we've added social to Google Images. Now when you're doing a search on Images, you may start seeing pictures from people in your social circle. These are pictures that your friends and other contacts have published publicly to the web on photo-sharing sites like Picasa Web Albums and Flickr. Just like the other social results, social image results appear under a special heading called "Results from your social circle." Here's what it looks like:
Looking at the screenshot, you may notice two new links for "My social circle" and "My social content." These links will take you to a new interface we've added where you can see the connections and content behind your social results. Clicking on "My social circle" shows your extended network of online contacts and how you're connected.


Clicking on "My social content" lists your public pages that might appear in other people's social results. This new interface should give you a peek under the hood of how Social Search builds your social circle and connects you with web content from your friends and extended network. You can check out your social circle directly by visiting this link. (Note that it may take some time for the connections and content to update.)

We think there's tremendous potential for social information to improve search, and we're just beginning to scratch the surface. We're leaving a "beta" label on social results because we know there's a lot more we can do. If you want to get the most out of Social Search right away, get started by creating a Google profile, where you can add links to your other public online social services. Check out this short video to learn more:



The new features are rolling out now on google.com in English for all signed-in users, and you should start seeing them in the next few days. Time to socialize!

Posted by Maureen Heymans, Technical Lead for Social Search, and Terran Melconian, Technical Lead for Social Image Search

Google Chrome's Content Filtering

A recent Chromium build added some new options that let you filter content from web pages. A new dialog titled "Content Settings" adds new features for managing cookies, JavaScript content, images, plug-ins and pop-ups.

For example, you can enable an option that clears cookies when you close the browser, a feature that's available in many other browsers. Other features let you disable images, JavaScript or plug-ins for a list of sites. If these settings are exposed via an API, developers will be able to build extensions like NoScript.



I tried to enable some of the new features, but they didn't work in the most recent Chromium build (revision 37221).

Thumbnail view, Spelling correction and new Maximum File Size in Google Docs

The following new features have been released in Google Docs:
- Thumbnail view in the Docs List which allows you to preview your Docs.
- Spelling correction when searching for a doc.
- Upload any file limit increased from 250MB to 1GB.

Editions included:
Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions

Languages included:
All languages supported by Google Docs

How to access what's new:
- Thumbnail view: This option is shown in the Docs List as a new button beside the view options in the top right.
- If you make a mistake when typing the search query for a document, you'll now get a suggestion for the correct word.
- When you upload any type of file that isn't being converted to a Google Document, the individual file limit is now 1GB.

For more information:
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/01/thumbnail-is-worth-about-one-hundred.html

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New Google Sites Data API Features

Create and share Google Sites using the Data API.

- The Site feed now allows you to list, update and create sites. It also allows you to copy sites and site templates.
- The ACL (Access Control List) feed allows you to manage permissions. Everything that you are able to do in the sharing settings for a site, you can now do with the API.

Editions included:
Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions

How to access what's new:
Updated code at http://code.google.com/apis/sites/

For more information:
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/01/create-and-share-google-sites-with-new.html

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Offline Installer for Google Earth

Downloading Google Earth is more complicated than it should be. At least if you want to download only Google Earth and save the installer for a future use. By default, Google downloads a small setup file that installs Google Earth, Google Chrome and Google Updater. Even if you disable the option "Include Google Chrome, a fast new browser for Windows and Mac", you'll still download a Web installer.

Here's how to download the standalone installer for Google Earth:

1. Go to Google Earth's homepage and click on "Download Google Earth".

2. At the bottom of the page, there's a small message: "Customize your installation with advanced setup." Click on "advanced setup".


3. Disable this option: "Allow Google Earth to automatically install recommended updates."


4. Click on "Agree and download" and you'll get the offline installer. The direct download link for the Windows version is: http://dl.google.com/earth/client/advanced/current/GoogleEarthWin.exe.

The advanced setup page offers two other interesting options: installing Google Earth for all user accounts and the full setup for Google Earth 5.0.

Google Chrome should add a similar page that lets you download the standalone installer and a version that installs the software for all user accounts. This page still offers the standalone setup, but it's an old version. Right now, Google Pack is the only option to install Chrome for multiple user accounts.

{ Thanks, Brian. }

Google Docs Grid View

Now that you can use Google Docs to store files, you'll upload a lot of files from your computer and treat Google Docs as an online version of Windows Explorer (or any other file manager). Unlike Windows Explorer, Google Docs had a single view for displaying files: the details view.

If you don't like to see the date when a file was last modified or the number of collaborators, you can switch to the new thumbnail view. Google Docs generates thumbnails for documents, spreadsheets, presentations, photos and PDF files, while showing standard icons for other file types.


"We recently finished rolling out the upload and store any file feature, so everyone should now be able to upload, store, and share any file in Google Docs. We also increased the maximum file size based on your feedback, so you can now uploads files up to 1 GB in size," mentions Google Docs Blog.

Of course, there are many other improvements that would make Google Docs more useful: increasing the free quota to at least 10 GB, adding support for any file type to the API and making it easier to access your files by mapping Google Docs as a network drive.

Tip: you can use the new grid view for shared folders by adding &layout=grid to the URL. Here's an example.

{ Thanks, Pascal. }

Google Voice comes to iPhone and Palm WebOS

A few weeks ago, Alex Nicolaou, Engineering Manager, wrote about the benefits of the fast and feature-rich iterative web app. Delivering Google services via mobile browsers has worked well for the Gmail team, so we decided to follow the same approach with Google Voice.

Today, we're excited to introduce the Google Voice web app for the iPhone and Palm WebOS devices. This HTML5 application provides you with a fast and versatile mobile experience for Google Voice because it uses the latest advancements in web technologies. For example, AppCache lets you interact with web apps without a network connection and local databases allow you to store data locally on the device, so you don't lose data even when you close the browser.

One of the great benefits of web applications is that you don't need to download and install an app on your phone. Instead, simply point your mobile browser to m.google.com/voice and sign in to your Google Voice account.

Then you can make calls from your phone that show your Google Voice number as the caller ID. You can also listen to voicemail and read voicemail transcripts, send and receive text messages for free, and take advantage of the low international call rates offered by Google Voice.



For quick access to the most important features like "Dialer", "Compose SMS", "Inbox" or "Contacts," you can add shortcuts to your iPhone home screen or Palm Launcher -- so cheap calls and messaging will be just a single click away. And because the Google Voice web app uses advanced features of modern HTML5 browsers, it offers native app-like performance and speed.

For more information visit m.google.com/voice or take a look at the Google Mobile Help Center. Please note, the web app is compatible with all versions of Palm WebOS and iPhone OS 3.0 and higher.

A Google Voice account is required to use the app, and Google Voice is currently only available in the United States. To learn more about Google Voice or request an invite, visit www.google.com/voice or read the Google Voice blog.

Posted by Marcus Foster, Product Manager and David Singleton, Engineering Manager

10 Must-Have Google Chrome Extensions

The Windows version of Google Chrome 4 is out of beta and you can finally try the features that were previously available in Chrome's beta and dev channels. Google will automatically update the browser to the latest version (4.0.249.78), but you can also click on the wrench button, select "About" and manually update the browser.

The most important feature released in Google Chrome 4 is the support for extensions. Chrome extensions are easier to create than Firefox extensions because they're nothing more than web pages that use Chrome's APIs. That's why you can install or disable extensions without having to restart the browser, that's why extensions use separate processes and this is one of the reasons why Chrome extensions are more limited and don't have a consistent interface.

Google Chrome has built-in support for user scripts, so you don't need to install an extension like Greasemonkey. Chrome can convert user scripts into extensions, so many Chrome extensions are just glorified Greasemonkey scripts.

To install an extension, visit Google Chrome's extension gallery and pick one of the 1,861 extensions that are currently available. Here are some of the most useful extensions that add missing features to Google Chrome:

1. RSS Subscription Extension. Detecting and previewing feeds is a standard feature in most browser, but not in Google Chrome. This extension shows an orange icon in the Omnibox when it detects feeds and lets you subscribe to one of the feeds using your favorite feed reader. You can select one of the popular feed reader that are available by default (Google Reader, iGoogle, Bloglines and My Yahoo) or you can add another feed reader.



2. Email this page. Firefox's contextual menu has an option called "send link" that lets you send a link to the current page using your favorite mail client. This extension has a similar functionality, but it only lets you pick the default mail client and Gmail.

3. Google Dictionary shows the definition of a word when you double-click on it. It only support monolingual dictionaries and a small number of languages, but it's useful if you want to find the definition of a word without opening a new page.



4. Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer - a simple extension that detects the links to PDF, PPT and TIFF files and opens the files in Google Docs, so you can view them without installing additional software.

5. Slideshow - a great way to view the images from sites like Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Facebook, and Google Images in a slideshow.



6. Empty New Tab Page - a simple extension that replaces Chrome's new tab page with a blank page.

7. FlashBlock disables Flash content for all web pages and replaces it with a placeholder. Click on the placeholder and you'll enable the Flash element. This way, you'll no longer see Flash ads, annoying Flash animations and other unnecessary objects that slow down your browser.

8. AdBlock hides ads using frequently-updated filter lists. You can whitelist domains and subdomains using Ctrl+Shift+L.

9. Secure Login Helper redirects you to the HTTPS login pages for sites like Twitter, Facebook and Twitter.

10. Smooth gestures - use mouse gesture to perform actions like going back one page, going to the top of a page or opening the last close tab. Mouse gestures are intuitive and you can customize them.




If you found other great Chrome extensions, mention them in a comment.

Track Page Changes Using Google Reader

Not all web pages offer feeds and sometimes it's useful to monitor web pages and find the latest information. A great service that offer this feature is Page2Rss, which provides a feed for each monitored web page.

A similar feature is now available in Google Reader and it's cleverly integrated: click on "Add subscription", type the address of a web page and Google Reader will automatically generate a feed if it can't detect one.


"We provide short snippets of page changes to help you quickly decide if the page is worth revisiting and we're working on improving the quality of these snippets," says Brian Shih.

"Reader may not always detect updates to your content. Currently, only English-language content in HTML format is supported. In addition, updates to content in frames are not detected; nor are updates to content that requires sign-in to view," mentions a help center article, which also informs that webmasters can prevent Google from monitoring web pages by using the features that block Googlebot from crawling or caching web pages. This suggests that Google Reader's page monitoring uses data from Google's search index and the changes may not be detected quickly if the web page is not popular or it doesn't change often.

Since I rarely visit Google's homepage, generating a feed for google.com or for other international Google homepages is a great way to track all the doodles and the promotional messages.


For now, Page2RSS offers more features (posts have better titles, you can view a cached version of the page), but Google Reader is more reliable. For example, Page2RSS doesn't show the latest changes for google.com.

Tip: to find the URL of the feed generated by Google, click on "show details" and you'll find a URL like:

http://www.google.com/notificationservice/webchanges/webfeeds/11009120664050806769

Extensions, bookmark sync and more for Google Chrome

Today we're excited to introduce a new stable release of Google Chrome for Windows, which includes two of the browser's most frequently requested features: extensions and bookmark sync.

Extensions let you add new features and functions to your browser. Some provide one-click access to some of your favorite web applications like eBay and digg, or news and information sources such as NPR and Time.com. Others are useful tweaks for performing common online tasks such as browsing photos, getting directions or shopping.

We previously launched extensions on the beta channel, and many new extensions have since been contributed by developers from all over the world. Now you can browse over 1,500 in our extensions gallery and install them on the stable version of Google Chrome.


Bookmark sync is a handy feature for those of you who use several computers — say, a laptop at work and a desktop at home. You can enable bookmark sync to synchronize your bookmarks on all of your computers so that when you create a bookmark on one computer, it's automatically added across all your computers. This means that you won't need to manually recreate the bookmark each time you switch computers.

You can read more about today's stable release — including performance improvements — on the Google Chrome Blog. Or if you want a look under the hood at what this update means for web developers (including new HTML and Javascript APIs), check out the Chromium blog.

To those using Google Chrome on Linux, extensions are enabled on the beta channel. And for those using Google Chrome for Mac, hang tight — we're working on bringing extensions, bookmark sync and more to the beta soon. Those currently using the stable version for Windows will be automatically updated within the next week (or you can check for updates manually).

If you're on a PC and haven't tried Google Chrome yet, you can download Google Chrome and give all these new features a whirl.

Posted by Nick Baum, Product Manager

This week in search 1/22/10

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.

The Google that you used today is actually better than the Google that you used yesterday. On a daily basis, we make a number of algorithmic enhancements and release other search features that ultimately make finding what you're looking for quick, easy and enjoyable. Here are a few of the exciting feature releases this week:

Hours and menu information in universal search
Want to know when your favorite museum is open? Interested in ordering in and need to quickly check the menu for that restaurant around the corner? This week we were excited to launch hours and menu information in local results for universal Google search. Now you can add the words "hours" or "menu" to your search to get back the information you want in a snap.

Example searches: [computer history museum mountain view hours], [sushi sakae burlingame menu]

Rich Snippets for events
What are Rich Snippets? They show brief annotations that webmasters make to summarize what's on the page so you can see it at a glance on your search results page. So far we've launched improved snippets for two formats: reviews and people. Today, we unveiled a new Rich Snippets format for events. The next time you're searching for events, you'll see how the new format lists them as search result snippets, along with dates, locations and links directly to pages about those specific events. And, as webmasters implement the new markup on their webpages, you'll begin to see these event results more frequently.

Example search: [concerts in san jose]

Answer highlighting
Earlier today, we were excited to release the answer highlighting feature, which helps you get to information more quickly by delivering the likely answer to your question in boldface type right in search results. If the pages returned for these searches contain a simple answer to a factual-based search, the snippet will more often include the relevant text in boldface for easy reference. Read more about answer highlighting here.

Example searches: [who is the author of 1984], [p.s. i love you release date], [terminator salvation director]

We hope that you enjoy the features we launched this week — and that they make your search experience even better than yesterday.

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search

Write better knols with object embedding and PicApp

During the past couple months, the Knol team has been steadily adding improved tools to help you create better knols. Most notably, we've greatly expanded the number of embeddable objects to help you make your knols more graphical and interactive. We've been excited by the many uses we're seeing, and today we have one more to add to the list: PicApp.

We think it's important for a publishing platform like knol to provide people with the best possible tools for expression, so we've quietly added a large number of new embeddable objects for maps, docs, spreadsheets, forms, slideshows, presentations, videos, gadgets and more. Embeddable objects help you make better knols. For example, our equation object helps you add richly formatted mathematical expressions right in your knols. We really liked the cleanly embedded equations in this knol from the Public Library of Science. Similarly, our calendar object enables you to easily share details about upcoming dates, like swing dance lessons in Oregon.

Even with all these embeddable objects, there's still more to do. For example, one frequent complaint is that it is still difficult today to find appropriately licensed, high-quality imagery to include in your articles. To help solve this problem, we've worked with PicApp to add 10 million high quality stock images via our improved picture picker. The new picker enables you to search for creative and editorial images from PicApp's comprehensive, high-quality stock imagery repositories such as Getty Images. The service and use of the images is free.

Below is a snapshot of a sample search using the PicApp search API.


The feature just launched last month, and several authors have already made use of this new capability to strengthen their writings. For example, this knol about Gary McKinnon uses images found via PicApp, along with embedded videos, and even a feedback form to get input from the audience.

We hope you enjoy the image picker and other new embeddable objects. As always, you can read our release notes for a full list of new features.

Posted by Cedric Dupont, Product Manager

Bringing Project CARE to veterans in Washington, D.C.

It's sometimes easy to take the little things in life for granted: a haircut, a shower, shoes or even a phone number. Sometimes life doesn't turn out the way we planned, and those little luxuries become much harder to come by.

Project CARE is a program to provide free Google Voice phone numbers and voicemail accounts to homeless individuals. The Google Voice team has been offering this program in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than two years, and we're excited to bring Project CARE to a new city.

On Saturday, Google Voice will join dozens of other Washington, D.C. organizations at the Winterhaven Homeless Veterans Stand Down at the D.C. Veterans Affairs Medical Center to try and make life a little easier for hundreds of veterans in the Washington, D.C. area. We will be handing out Project CARE cards and helping attendees set up unique phone numbers and voicemail accounts, which they can use when applying for jobs or filling out medical forms, or share with family.

In today's connected world, many of us don't think twice about picking up the phone to place or receive a call. However, for a homeless individual, a phone number can be an important lifeline, connecting you with prospective employers, health care providers, family and friends. We hope these Project CARE phone numbers provide homeless veterans with a way to reconnect with those they've lost touch with over the years.

Posted by Vincent Paquet, Senior Product Manager, Google Voice

Understanding the web to make search more relevant

Last year at our second Searchology event, we announced Google Squared and Rich Snippets, two approaches to improve search by better understanding the web. Today, we're kicking off the new year with two improvements based on those technologies. First, we're applying the research behind Google Squared to add a new "answer-highlighting" feature to search, and second we're expanding Rich Snippets to include events.

Answer highlighting in search results

Most information on the web is unstructured. For example, blogs integrate paragraphs of text, videos and images in ways that don't follow simple rules. Product review sites each have their own formats, rating scales and categories. Unstructured data is difficult for a computer to interpret, which means that we humans still have to do a fair amount of work to synthesize and understand information on the web.

Google Squared is one of our early efforts to automatically identify and extract structured data from across the Internet. We've been making progress, and today the research behind Google Squared is, for the first time, making search better for everyone with a new feature called "answer highlighting."

Answer highlighting helps you get to information more quickly by seeking out and bolding the likely answer to your question right in search results. The feature is meant for searches with factual answers, such as [meet john doe director], [john lennon died], or [what was the political party of president ford]. If the pages returned for these queries contain a simple answer, the search snippet will more often include the relevant text and bold it for easy reference.

Consider the example, [empire state height]. The first search result used to look like this:

With today's improvements, the answer —1250 ft, or 381 m — is highlighted right in the search result:

This kind of quick answer only makes sense for certain kinds of searches. For example, the answer to [history of france] can't readily fit in a search snippet. However, for the kinds of information you can easily put in a table, we've been able to take what we've learned from Google Squared to make search better for a wide range of queries. Answer highlighting is rolling out during the next couple days on google.com in English.

Rich Snippets for events

Sometimes the easiest way to understand somebody is by having a conversation. The web is similar. As much as we're happy with the progress we're making with Google Squared, we also appreciate that a great way to understand web pages is to simply ask webmasters to teach us (and other search engines) about their content. To that end, we continue to make improvements to our search results with Rich Snippets, enabling webmasters to annotate pages with structured data in a standard format.

So far we've launched improved search result snippets for reviews and people. When your search results contain web pages with review information, you might see the number of user reviews on the page and the average rating in the search result. When your search contains a public profile page about a person from a social networking site, you may see the person's location and occupation, or a list of her friends.

Today, we're announcing support for a new Rich Snippets format for events. The new format improves search results by including links to specific event names, dates and locations. Here's an example of a new event result from livenation.com if you search for [irving plaza]:


The new result format provides a fast and convenient way to identify pages with events and click directly to the ones you find interesting. If you're into Hip Hop Karaoke, you can quickly find out when and where the next show is in Irving Plaza, and click for more info. We've been working with a few sites to ramp them up for our initial launch, but it will take time for other webmasters to start implementing the new markup. Check out our blog post on Webmaster Central for more details.

Posted by Kavi Goel and Noah Weiss, Product Managers

Google Apps highlights – 1/22/2010

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label "Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

The Google Apps team has had another productive couple of weeks. We released a number of helpful new features, and were happy to welcome new customers to the future of computing.

Upload any file to Google Docs
Last Tuesday, we began rolling out the ability for you to upload any type of file to Google Docs, not just documents, spreadsheets, presentations and PDFs. This lets you access and share anything up to 250MB from the cloud. You get 1GB of storage for uploaded files for free, and you can purchase additional storage for file uploads. (Additional storage plans are coming soon for schools and businesses, too.)


Google Apps Premier Edition customers can also use the Google Documents List Data API to programatically add files to Google Docs, and purchase third-party applications so employees can sync files between their computers and Google Docs.

Default https access for Gmail
In the past, you had the option to always use https encryption in Gmail to help protect your data as it travels between your browser and our servers. After evaluating the trade-offs between security and latency, as of last week https encryption is now the default in Gmail.

If you trust your network's security and want to disable always-on https for performance reasons, you can change your preferences in Gmail settings. Employees and students whose admins have not already defaulted their entire organizations to https will also see this option. The Gmail sign-in page will still always use https to help keep your password safe.

Who's gone Google?
Sanmina-SCI is a leading Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) provider to many industries including the communications, medical, defense and aerospace, industrial and renewable energy sectors. Sanmina-SCI rigorously evaluated and smoothly deployed Google Apps to their multi-lingual, global workforce of 15,000 employees. Not only did Sanmina-SCI achieve significant cost savings over upgrading their outdated Microsoft Exchange environment, deploying Google Apps has resulted in better customer service, streamlined business processes and increased flexibility.

We also witnessed a flurry of schools going Google after winter break. A very warm welcome to North Carolina State University, the Byron School District, Griffith University, Seattle Central Community College and Macquarie University!

If your school or business is ready to go Google too, take a look at our tips and best practices for deploying Google Apps.

We hope these updates help you get even more from Google Apps. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Serving better ads in Gmail

In Standard Edition Google Apps accounts, ads are served in Gmail just like in regular Gmail accounts. These ads are often related to the email you are viewing. Sometimes, there are no good ads that are relevant to the email. From now on, you will sometimes see ads that are related to a recent email and not necessarily the email you are viewing.

Editions included:
Standard Edition

Languages included:
All languages supported by Gmail

How to access what's new:
This change is being rolled out automatically so there is no action to take.
Note: This change will also apply to Premier and Education edition ONLY if the domain administrator has enabled the serving of ads for that domain.

For more information:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/serving-better-ads-in-gmail.html
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6603

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YouTube Music Discovery

YouTube's Labs added an interesting service with a very long name: YouTube Music Discovery Project and Playlist Creation Tool. Let's just call it YouTube Music Discovery.

Type the name of an artist and YouTube generates a playlist that includes music from the artist you've entered and from similar artists. For example, I entered "Bjork" and YouTube added music from Radiohead, Air, Massive Attack and Aphex Twin. After the playlist is generated, you can remove some of the songs, add new songs, save the playlist or watch all the videos.


Playlists are far from perfect: there are too many songs from the same artists, there are few obscure songs and the transition between songs is not always smooth. YouTube Music Discovery Project won't replace Pandora or Last.fm radios, but it's a simple way to find music from your favorite artists and to discover similar artists.

"A search for Pearl Jam results in a playlist stocked with Eddie Vedder & Co., plus videos by fellow Seattle grunge all-stars like Nirvana and Soundgarden and ’90s rockers like Smashing Pumpkins and Black Crowes. Not much for discovery as the vast majority of Pearl Jam fans are already well aware of these other bands, but the Pearl Jam list might introduce fans to the handful of obscure Screaming Trees music videos that YouTube suggests," notices Rolling Stone.

A similar feature is available for the existing YouTube playlists: click on "Recommend videos based on this playlist" and YouTube suggests 8 related videos.

Blogger Static Pages

Blogger in Draft, Blogger's version that includes experimental features, added a frequently-requested feature: static pages. "Blogger Pages lets you to publish static information on stand-alone pages linked from your blog. For example, you can use Pages to create an About This Blog page that discusses the evolution of your blog, or a Contact Me page that provides directions, a phone number, and a map to your location."

You can create up to 10 static pages and they're automatically added to the blog's sidebar. Blogger uses the same editor for editing posts and pages, but pages have a different URL format and they're displayed in a separate list.

I tried to create a static page for this blog, but it uses a custom template and I couldn't find the "Edit Pages" section. Even when I manually entered the URL: http://draft.blogger.com/pages.g?blogID=<BLOG_ID> and tried to create a page, Blogger returned an error message and couldn't create the page.

YouTube's HTML5 Player

Now that at least 3 important browsers support HTML5's video tag, YouTube added an experimental feature that lets you replace the Flash player with a native player. The main benefit is that your browser plays videos without using Adobe's Flash plug-in, which might slow down your computer and even crash your browser. Another benefit is that videos are treated like images and can be customized using standard CSS features.

For now, YouTube uses the h.264 video codec, so the only browsers that support YouTube's HTML5 player are Safari 4 and Google Chrome. Firefox only supports the Ogg Theora format, which is an open format.

"Our support for HTML5 is an early experiment, and there are some limitations. HTML5 on YouTube doesn't support videos with ads, captions, or annotations and it requires a browser that supports both the video tag and h.264 encoded video," explains YouTube.



YouTube also updated the Flash player and made it easier to switch to a different version of the video.


{ Thanks, Wulf. }

New imagery of Port-au-Prince

(Cross-posted with an update from the Google Lat Long Blog)

In the wake of the devastating Haiti earthquake, aid organizations have been hard at work on the ground and citizens around the world have pitched in to help in whatever way they can. On the Geo team, we've been looking for ways we can help relief efforts using our mapping tools. Last week, thanks to our partner GeoEye, we published updated satellite imagery of Haiti in Google Earth and Google Maps which illustrated the devastation and current conditions on the ground. This data was made available for public consumption and also to assist relief efforts including those by many UN organizations and the Center for Interdisciplinary Geospatial Information Technologies.

With the hope of furthering awareness and relief efforts, we arranged for a collection of the Port-au-Prince area at even higher resolution (approximately 15cm) to complement the existing imagery. Here are some examples of the kind of detail this new dataset can convey:

click to see full-size

These images were gathered on Sunday (January 17). You can currently view the imagery in Google Maps in Satellite mode. It will also be available via the Google Maps API and in Google Map Maker. As of this morning, this high-resolution imagery is now available as the base imagery in Google Earth (all previous imagery of Haiti will be included in the Historical Imagery feature) and has been published in the Haiti Earthquake KML layer. We're also making this imagery directly available to relief organizations.

We've also updated the Haiti Earthquake KML layer (download for Google Earth) with additional information, including more imagery from GeoEye, Digital Globe, and NOAA, as well as earthquake epicenters and other maps. Aid groups can also download Map Maker data as well.

Posted by Matt Manolides, Senior GIS Strategist

Highlight Google Search Keywords

If you like Google Toolbar's highlighter, but you don't want to install the add-on or the toolbar doesn't support your browser, try the Word Highlight Greasemonkey script. After performing a Google search, the script highlights the keywords and lets you quickly find their occurrences. Click on the arrows displayed next to each keyword to find the next match and use the map to visualize the distribution of the keywords.


My favorite feature is that you can use the word highlighter even when you're not searching the web. Press Ctrl+/, type the keywords and the script will highlight them.

The script can be installed in Firefox (it requires Greasemonkey), Chrome 4 Beta, Opera, Safari (it requires GreaseKit).

Helping computers understand language

This post is the latest in an ongoing series about how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users. - Ed.

An irony of computer science is that tasks humans struggle with can be performed easily by computer programs, but tasks humans can perform effortlessly remain difficult for computers. We can write a computer program to beat the very best human chess players, but we can't write a program to identify objects in a photo or understand a sentence with anywhere near the precision of even a child.

Enabling computers to understand language remains one of the hardest problems in artificial intelligence. The goal of a search engine is to return the best results for your search, and understanding language is crucial to returning the best results. A key part of this is our system for understanding synonyms.

What is a synonym? An obvious example is that "pictures" and "photos" mean the same thing in most circumstances. If you search for [pictures developed with coffee] to see how to develop photographs using coffee grinds as a developing agent, Google must understand that even if a page says "photos" and not "pictures," it's still relevant to the search. While even a small child can identify synonyms like pictures/photos, getting a computer program to understand synonyms is enormously difficult, and we're very proud of the system we've developed at Google.

Our synonyms system is the result of more than five years of research within our web search ranking team. We constantly monitor the quality of the system, but recently we made a special effort to analyze synonyms impact and quality. Most of the time, you probably don't notice when your search involves synonyms, because it happens behind the scenes. However, our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports. We took a set of these queries and analyzed how precise the synonyms were, and were happy with the results: For every 50 queries where synonyms significantly improved the search results, we had only one truly bad synonym.

An example of a bad synonym from this analysis is in the search [dell system speaker driver precision 360], where Google thinks "pc" is a synonym for precision. Note that you can still see that on Google today, because while we know it's a bad synonym, we don't typically fix bad synonyms by hand. Instead, we try to discover general improvements to our algorithms to fix the problems. We hope it will be fixed automatically in some future changes.

We also recently made a change to how our synonyms are displayed. In our search result snippets, we bold the terms of your search. Historically, we have bolded synonyms such as stemming variants — like the word "picture" for a search with the word "pictures." Now, we've extended this to words that our algorithms very confidently think mean the same thing, even if they are spelled nothing like the original term. This helps you to understand why that result is shown, especially if it doesn't contain your original search term. In our [pictures developed with coffee] example, you can see that the first result has the word "photos" bolded in the title:


(Note that because our synonyms depend on the other words in your search and use many signals, you won't necessarily always see the word "photos" bolded for "pictures", only when our algorithms think it is useful and important to bold.)

We use many techniques to extract synonyms, that we've blogged about before. Our systems analyze petabytes of web documents and historical search data to build an intricate understanding of what words can mean in different contexts. In the above example "photos" was an obvious synonym for "pictures," but it's not always a good synonym. For example, it's important for us to recognize that in a search like [history of motion pictures], "motion pictures" means something special (movies), and "motion photos" doesn't make any sense. Another example is the term "GM." Most people know the most prominent meaning: "General Motors." For the search [gm cars], you can see that Google bolds the phrase "General Motors" in the search results. This is an indication that for that search we thought "General Motors" meant the same thing as "GM." Are there any other meanings? Many people can think of the second meaning, "genetically modified," which is bolded when GM is used in queries about crops and food, like in the search results for [gm wheat]. It turns out that there are more than 20 other possible meanings of the term "GM" that our synonyms system knows something about. GM can mean George Mason in [gm university], gamemaster in [gm screen star wars], Gangadhar Meher in [gm college], general manager in [nba gm] and even gunners mate in [navy gm].

Here are screenshots of those disambiguations of GM in action:

As a nomenclatural note, even obvious term variants like "pictures" (plural) and "picture" (singular) would be treated as different search terms by a dumb computer, so we also include these types of relationships within our umbrella of synonyms. Pictures/picture are typically called stemming variants, which refers to the fact that they share the same word stem, or root. The same systems that need to understand that "pictures" and "photos" mean the same thing also need to understand that "pictures" and "picture" mean the same thing. This is something that is even more obvious to a human but is also still a difficult task for a computer. An example of how this is difficult are the words "animal" and "animation," which share the same stem and etymology, but don't mean the same thing in standard use. Another tricky case that is very dependent on the other words in the query is "arm" vs. "arms." Arms might seem like the plural of arm, but consider how it might be used in a search: [arm reduction] vs. [arms reduction]. Google search is smart enough to know that the former is about removing fat from one's arm, and the latter is about reducing stockpiles of weaponry, and that arm/arms are dangerous synonyms in that case because they would change the meaning. These subtle differences between words that seem related is what makes synonymy very hard to get right.

Here are some other examples of synonyms we thought were interesting:

[song words], "lyrics" is bolded for "words".
[what state has the highest murder rate], "homicide" is bolded for "murder".
[himalayan kitten breeder], Google knows that "cat breeder" is the same as "kitten breeder".
[dura ace track bb axle njs], Google knows that "bb" here means "bottom bracket".
[software update on bb color id], "blackberry is bolded for "bb".
[bb cream dark], Google knows here that bb means "blemish balm".
[southeastern usa bb fitness & figure], "bodybuilding" is bolded for "bb."

Lastly, language is used with as much variety and subtlety as is present in human culture, and our algorithms still make mistakes. We flinch when we find such mistakes; we're always working to fix them. One of the best ways for us to discover these problems is to get feedback from real users, which we then use to inspire improvements to our computer programs. If you have specific complaints about our synonyms system, you can post a question at the web search help center forum or you can tweet them with the hash tag #googlesyns. You can also turn off a synonym for a specific term by adding a "+" before it or by putting the words in quotation marks.

Posted by Steven Baker, Software Engineer

Avast Added to Google Pack

Google added a new antivirus software to Google Pack and this time the program doesn't try to convince you to buy a paid version. Google Pack added the free version of the Avast antivirus, but only for the following languages: French, German, Italian, Czech, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, and Polish. I installed the software using the Italian interface, but both Google Pack and Avast were installed in English.

For some reason, the English version of Google Pack lets you install a different security software: Spyware Doctor with Anti-Virus, which replaced Norton Security Scan. Both Spyware Doctor and Norton Security Scan offered limited or no real-time protection and Spyware Doctor used an outdated signature database.



"The Avast Free Antivirus included in the Google Pack is the same as our regular Avast Free Antivirus. Following the philosophy of Google and Avast, the product is fully featured and does not constantly try to up-sell users to a premium product," explains Vincent Steckler.

The most recent tests from AV-Comparatives.org show that Avast, Avira and Microsoft Security Essentials are the best free antivirus software. "This year, avast! showed big improvements in its detection rates (esp. in the second half of 2009) and reduced its number of false alarms. Its on-demand scanning speed is one of the fastest. The recently released avast! v5 includes further enhancements (like a new graphical user interface) and new protection features."

In December, Avast's blog announced that the software will offer users the option to install Google Chrome. Some may call it software bundling, but it's not as disingenuous as the Google Earth promotion. "Starting in mid-November, we will be giving our new users an option to install Google Chrome when installing Avast. We are not forcing Chrome on users. It is entirely up to the user–to download/install and nothing is hidden."