This week in search 2/28/10

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.

This week, we had a number of exciting announcements:

Refine your searches by location
Location can tremendously aid the way you search, so we were pleased to add the ability to refine your searches by location to the Search Options panel. Say you're big on the outdoors and want to find bike rental information, bicycling blogs or the closest sporting goods store. There's a good chance you're looking for information that's relevant to your region, city or even a city you're visiting on vacation. That's where this tool can help. One of the really useful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don't have to worry about adding a city name (e.g., "Berkeley") to your query and missing webpages that are in a similar region (e.g., "East Bay", "Oakland") but might not specifically mention the city in your search.

Example search: [bike stores] - Click on "Show options" to adjust the location. You can narrow the location down to near you, the city you're in, the region or state. You can also select "Custom Location" and enter it directly.

Fetch as Googlebot Mobile added to Webmaster Tools Labs
Last October, we launched Webmaster Tools Labs, and it has been a huge success. Malware Details have helped thousands of users identify pages on their site that may be infected with malicious code, and Fetch as Googlebot has given users more insight into our crawler. Today, we're happy to introduce an additional Labs feature to our line-up: the ability to fetch pages as Googlebot-Mobile.

This was a common request from users with mobile-specific sites, and we thought it was a great idea. We have two mobile options: cHTML (primarily used for Japanese sites) and XHTML/WML. We're excited to bring you this feature based on your feedback, and we look forward to launching more of them in future. Let us know what you think!


Facebook in real-time search
Starting this week we added Facebook content to real-time search in the U.S. Real-time search, which we launched in December, helps you tap into the most relevant, freshest search results on the web, many of which are just seconds old. With this latest addition, you can access the news, photos and blog posts that Facebook fan pages publish to the world. You can find the Facebook Pages updates in our real-time mode by clicking on "Show Options" and then "Latest" or "Updates."

Example search: [facebook]

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more next week!

Posted by Gabriel Stricker, Director, Global Communications & Public Affairs

Google Adds Local Search Filter

Google's crowded "search options" sidebar has a new feature: restricting the results to sites related to nearby businesses. Google already determines your location and it shows results appropriated for your location, but now you can see only local search results.

There are 3 filters that help you restrict the results to a city, a region or a state. If Google can't find your location or you want to find results for a different location, click on "custom location" and enter a city.





Google Blog says that this feature is useful because the search engine no longer has to match your keywords to find a location.

Location has become an important part of the way we search. If you're a foodie looking for restaurant details, food blogs or the closest farmer's market, location can be vital to helping you find the right information. Starting today, we've added the ability to refine your searches with the "Nearby" tool in the Search Options panel. One of the really helpful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don't have to worry about adding "Minneapolis" to your query and missing webpages that only say "St. Paul" or "Twin Cities."

The local search filter for web pages is not new: it used to available in Google Maps and as a Google Search experiment.

Refine your searches by location

Location has become an important part of the way we search. If you're a foodie looking for restaurant details, food blogs or the closest farmer's market, location can be vital to helping you find the right information. Starting today, we've added the ability to refine your searches with the "Nearby" tool in the Search Options panel. One of the really helpful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don't have to worry about adding "Minneapolis" to your query and missing webpages that only say "St. Paul" or "Twin Cities." Check it out by doing a search, clicking on "show options" and selecting "Nearby."


You can choose to see results nearby either your default location or a custom location, and you can narrow down to results at the city, region or state level. Try these examples:

[things to do on st. patrick's day] - In the Minneapolis region
[food blogs] - Near you
[farmers market] - Near the city of Ithaca
[dmv] - In the same state as Tucson

The new "Nearby" search option is available now on the google.com domain in English.

Posted by Jackie Bavaro, Product Manager

Translate Web Pages in Google Chrome

Google Chrome 5's dev build has a feature that detects the language of a web page and lets you translate it without opening a new page. The feature is borrowed from Google Toolbar, but Google Chrome is the first browser that translates web pages without requiring an add-on.

When you visit a page written in another language, Chrome shows an infobar that asks if you want to translate the web page. You can ignore the message, change the language that was automatically detected or translate the web page. If you click on "Translate", Google Chrome will translate the page and will no longer prompt you when you click on a link from the page.




"Look for the blue translation bar at the top of the page, whenever you come across a page written in a language that doesn't match the browser interface language you've selected. Translation is currently available for 52 languages. If you choose to translate a page, the text of that page is sent to Google's translation service for translation. Your cookies are not sent along with that request and, if the page you are on is encrypted with SSL, Chrome also sends the translation request over SSL," explains Google.

If you click on the "Options" button, Chrome lets you disable translation for the current language or for the site you're visiting. For now, there's no option to disable the feature or to manage a blacklist of domains and languages.

While this feature is brilliant and it work for almost any web page, including web apps like Gmail or Google Docs, I'm not sure if it's a great idea to translate pages encrypted with SSL. Someone could click on the "Always translate" option and inadvertently send confidential information to Google's servers.

To try this feature, install Chrome dev channel, a buggier and less polished version of Chrome, or wait until a stable Chrome 5 build is released. A similar implementation is available in Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox. There's also a Chrome extension for translating web pages.

{ Thanks, Jason. }

Barcelona: Mobile First

Last week at Mobile World Congress, where more than 55,000 people gathered in Barcelona to see what the coming year holds for mobile phones and computers, Eric Schmidt had the unique opportunity to reflect on achievements in the mobile space, and to discuss what lies ahead - both for the industry and for Google. With the continued growth of smartphone usage -- increasing by more than 30% year over year, with mobile web adoption proceeding at a rate that is eight times faster than the equivalent point ten years ago for the desktop, with more than half of the new Internet connections coming from mobile devices -- it's clear that we're experiencing a fundamental shift in how we access information.

So how did we get here and what's in store?

Back in December, I pointed to the convergence of three trends: computing, connectivity, and cloud computing. Eric described these in more detail last week. Basically, devices are getting smaller, faster, cheaper, and more powerful; the same is true of processors. Today, roughly 700 million public servers are connected by the Internet, and this pervasive connectivity is being driven further into our daily lives, as evidenced by individuals, companies, and even the US Embassy in Beijing increasingly relying on services like Twitter to constantly share information. Finally, cloud computing not only is essential for storage of sophisticated amounts of data, which can be accessed by multiple devices, but also is paving the way for a new generation of applications and powerful, interlinked systems. These three waves are not new, nor is their intersection. What is new, however, is that the point of intersection is now a phone - a phone that's blazingly fast, is connected to the Internet, and leverages the power of the cloud. Comparing today's possibilities with what was possible 25 years ago, and then thinking ahead 25 years from now, it's incredibly exciting to imagine what we might be able to do.

Clearly, the mobile phone is the iconic device of the moment, and we're encouraging a new rule: Mobile First. When we announce new services for desktop computers, such as real-time search, we will debut an equally powerful mobile version. We will take advantage of this new class of smartphone, which is more sensory, acts as an extension of you, is aware of location, and can hear you, speak to you, take pictures and return information in a matter of seconds. We opened the year with a new model for purchasing a mobile phone, and since then, we've also made it possible to see a list of nearby businesses from google.com, developed a web app for Google Voice, made ads more useful by including a clickable local phone number, let you attach location to your Buzz posts, and we're just getting started. You can look forward to seeing support for more languages in Google Search by voice - German is coming soon. We're working to make it possible to take a picture of text and translate it to any of the 52 languages supported in Google Translate, and we have lots of other ideas up our sleeves.

We're proud to be part of this shift and excited to broaden expectations for what's possible on a mobile device.

Update, 5:16PM 3/1/10 - This video has been updated to include an introductory video that played before Eric's speech.

Posted by Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering, Mobile

Google and Antitrust Accusations

Google's popularity in search has been a constant problem in the recent years, especially for competitors and authorities. Some even called Google a search monopoly, even if there are many other search engines. Changing your search engine is certainly easier than switching to a new browser or a new operating system, but for many people Google is synonymous with web search.

The most recent complaints are from three European sites. Wired reports that "the European Commission has acknowledged receipt of three antitrust complaints against Google. Google claims it has done nothing wrong, and disclosed that British price comparison site Foundem, French legal search engine eJustice.fr and Microsoft-owned Ciao from Bing were the complainants."

The three sites complained that Google abused its dominant position to promote its own services, while competing sites were penalized. Google says that it doesn't manipulate search results: "We understand how important rankings can be to websites, especially commercial ones, because a higher ranking typically drives higher volumes of traffic. (...) Our algorithms aim to rank first what people are most likely to find useful and we have nothing against vertical search sites -- indeed many vertical search engines like Moneysupermarket.com, Opodo and Expedia typically rank high in Google's results."

An interesting document submitted by Foundem to the Federal Communications Comission claims that Google uses "universal" search results to promote its own services:

"In May 2007, Google introduced what it calls "Universal Search" — a mechanism for automatically inserting its own services into prominent positions within its natural search results. (...) Universal Search transforms Google's ostensibly neutral search engine into an immensely powerful marketing channel for Google's other services. When coupled with Google's 85% share of the global search market, this gives Google an unparalleled and virtually unassailable competitive advantage, reaching far beyond the confines of search."

The document shows how Google Maps and Google Product Search became more popular after Google introduced Universal Search, while concluding that "Google can divert traffic from its competitors to its own services largely at will."

It's obvious that Google's services are better represented in search results pages than 3 years ago: videos are frequently promoted to the top results page and most videos are hosted by YouTube, many searches return local search results from Google Maps, Google Books results are only indexed by Google and they're sometimes artificially promoted. Universal Search made Google's specialized search engines more visible.


Even if some might think that Google Search, Google Maps and Google News are completely different services, they're complimentary products that work better together. If you enter a query like [ny pizza], it makes sense to show local businesses from New York instead of search results that match the query. Google could show results from Yahoo Maps or Bing Maps, but it wouldn't be able to improve the quality of search results.

Google's competitors miss that Google doesn't have to send users to other web pages. Google's goal is to show the most relevant answers for a query. Sometimes the answer is displayed while you type a query, in other situations the answer can be found in the snippets or in the new rich snippets.

Google Squared is an example of advanced search engine that aggregates facts from the web and uses them to generate descriptive collections. Google reveals the sources, but few people actually click on the links.


As search engines become smarter, web pages will only become footnotes for automatically generated responses.

A meeting of the minds: Google's 2010 EMEA Faculty Summit

As the world's premier athletes assembled in Vancouver for the Winter Games, Googlers in the equally snowy Zurich, Switzerland were preparing for a prestigious event of a different sort. On February 8, 100 top academics from 62 leading universities throughout EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) descended upon our Zurich engineering headquarters for our third annual Faculty Summit — three days of in-depth technical presentations, discussions and networking sessions, all targeted at strengthening partnerships with EMEA's foremost computer science thinkers. Like their athletic counterparts in Vancouver, Faculty Summit attendees face big challenges. EMEA is a huge and very diverse region where companies and universities alike have huge mountains to climb. By sharing information about our projects, plans and initiatives, we hope to foster mutually beneficial relationships with our academic colleagues and their universities — working together to solve the big problems and drive technology forward.


We designed the Summit to allow maximum potential for debate, networking and reflection. Attendees participated in day-long "stream" discussions on themes ranging from privacy and security — with the participation of leading researchers such as Ross Anderson (University of Cambridge) — to natural language technologies, featuring NLP expert Fred Jelinek (Johns Hopkins University). Academics selected from a range of opt-in "teach the teacher"-style workshops on Google tech (including mobile platforms, MapReduce and web technologies). Additional events included a Google Wave demo geared towards educational use and special sessions for guests from Africa and the Middle East, showcasing Google's ongoing work in these regions. This year, we added extra time for 1-1 break-out sessions, in which academics and Google engineers met, chatted and developed ideas in an intimate, face-to-face setting.

The Summit also gave us a chance to see long-term relationships maturing and generating concrete outcomes inside and outside academic settings. Notable guests included keynote speaker Professor Andy Hopper, Head of the Cambridge Computer Lab, whose research initiative Computing for the Future of the Planet (CFTFP) received a Google Focused Research Award earlier this month. Andy's project promises major results in the areas of privacy and green computing research. We were also happy to welcome back former Google Visiting Faculty member Professor Hannah Bast (University of Freiburg). Hannah recently completed a year-long sabbatical with our Zurich development team for Transit in Google Maps, contributing major improvements to an application that started out as a 20 percent project and is now available in over 400 cities around the world. Privacy and security expert Dr. Frank Stajano (University of Cambridge) — our newest Visiting Faculty member — and Sara Adams, Anita Borg Scholar, former Google intern and current software engineer, joined us from the Munich office where they're working on privacy-related projects. We also had several Faculty Research Award winners in attendance, including Dr. Simon Harper (University of Manchester), Dr. Miles Osborne (University of Edinburgh), Lawrence Muchemi (University of Nairobi) and former Visiting Faculty member Dr. Hinrich Schuetze (University of Stuttgart). The Faculty Research Award supports academics working within universities on areas of mutual interest; for instance, Lawrence's Award-funded project creates a new mobile application development course for Kenyan students, while Hinrich and his Stuttgart team are improving search engine results by investigating the structure of queries. Hinrich, Lawrence and our other awardees offer examples of how partnerships can lead to amazing results, on local to global scales. We hope their stories inspired both academic and Googler attendees to take advantage of existing programs and help build new opportunities for all tech users.

Our engineering teams in EMEA and our academic partners have lots of work to do in 2010. This year's Faculty Summit offered an opportunity to explore new solutions, kick-start collaboration and prove, yet again, that our combined efforts always yield results far greater than the sum of their parts! For more information about how Google supports university programs and partnerships, check out our Google Research site and stay tuned for news of the North America Faculty Summit — planned for late July.

Posted by Nelson Mattos, VP, EMEA Product and Engineering

Six new features have graduated from Gmail Labs

Six Gmail Labs have graduated and are now features of Gmail

1. Search Autocomplete - Gmail will suggest terms to help you find your item more quickly.
2. Go To Label - If you have keyboard shortcuts enabled, typing in the search box will autocomplete and suggest a label name.
3. Forgotten Attachment Detector - Gmail looks for phrases in your email that suggest you meant to attach a file and alerts you if it looks like you forgot an attachment.
4. YouTube Previews - If you receive a message with a YouTube link in it, you can now watch the video right below the message.
5. Custom Label Colors - Create your own custom label color.
6. Vacation Dates - Set your dates in advance, enable vacation responder and Gmail will turn it on when the date arrives.

Editions included:
Standard, Premier, Education and Partner Editions

Languages included:
All languages supported by Gmail
* Search Autocomplete and Go To Label in English only

For more information:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/gmail-labs-graduation-and-retirement.html

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Better Gmail Search

Gmail's blog announced that 6 labs features have graduated (Search Autocomplete, Go To Label, Forgotten Attachment Detector, YouTube Previews, Custom Label Colors, Vacation Dates), while 5 other features are retired from Gmail Labs (Muzzle, Fixed Width Font, Email Addict, Location in Signature, Random Signature). Google says that "these decisions were made based based mainly on usage," so that's the reason why obscure features like Muzzle, a quick way to hide Gmail chat status messages, or Email Addict, which blocked Gmail's interface for 15 minutes, were removed.

The good news is that 2 labs features will greatly improve Gmail search: "Search Autocomplete" and "Go To Label". If you have many labels, it's difficult to find one of your labels, especially if you added the label to the "more" dropdown. "Go To Label" adds a keyboard shortcut that lets you quickly open a label: type "g l" and then type the first letters of the label you want to find.


Gmail integrated "Go To Label" with the search box, so the keyboard shortcut only adds "label:" to the search box. If you don't like keyboard shortcuts, just type "label:" in the search box, followed by the first letters of a label.

The autocomplete feature is not useful only when you want to open a label you've created. You can also use it for built-in labels like "unread", "starred", "chat", "buzz", "muted". Type the first letters of the word "unread" and you should find a quick link that shows all your unread messages.


If you use Gmail's advanced search operators, the autocomplete feature shows common values for the operators. Type the "is" operator and Gmail shows a list of built-in labels.


Gmail's search box lets you restrict the results to messages that have attachments or to messages that include a certain type of attachment. Type "has" and you'll see a list of options that show messages with photo attachments, documents, videos or calendar events. You can also type natural language queries like: "photos", "documents", "attachments".


The search box is now the quickest way to find messages from one of your contacts: type the name of a contact or only the first letters from the name and you can read all the conversation with that person. If you want to restrict the results to the messages received from a contact, type "from:" before entering the name.


The other 4 graduated features have a more limited use:

* "Attachment Detector" shows a warning when you use words like "attached", "attachment" in a message without actually attaching a file.


* "YouTube Previews" lets you watch inside Gmail the YouTube videos linked from a message.

* "Custom Label Colors" is useful if you have many labels and the 24 color combinations offered by Gmail aren't enough.

* "Vacation Dates" improves Gmail's vacation responder by adding the option to enter the first day and the last day of your vacation.

Serious threat to the web in Italy

In late 2006, students at a school in Turin, Italy filmed and then uploaded a video to Google Video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate. The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police. We also worked with the local police to help identify the person responsible for uploading it and she was subsequently sentenced to 10 months community service by a court in Turin, as were several other classmates who were also involved. In these rare but unpleasant cases, that's where our involvement would normally end.

But in this instance, a public prosecutor in Milan decided to indict four Google employees —David Drummond, Arvind Desikan, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes (who left the company in 2008). The charges brought against them were criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video's existence until after it was removed.

Nevertheless, a judge in Milan today convicted 3 of the 4 defendants — David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes — for failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. All 4 were found not guilty of criminal defamation. In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload. We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question. Throughout this long process, they have displayed admirable grace and fortitude. It is outrageous that they have been subjected to a trial at all.

But we are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.

These are important points of principle, which is why we and our employees will vigorously appeal this decision.

Posted by Matt Sucherman, VP and Deputy General Counsel - Europe, Middle East and Africa

Google Earth now available for Android

(Cross-posted from Google LatLong)
As we hinted at last month, we knew Nexus One was going to be a great platform to showcase the rich (and technically demanding!) features of Google Earth. With a 1GHz processor, advanced 3D graphics, and Android 2.1, Nexus One packs a lot of performance in a thin package. Ever since we got our hands on one, we have been putting it through its paces, drawing complex scenes of 3D imagery, terrain, roads, and other layers, and Nexus One never misses a beat. Now that we have put the final touches on the app, we are happy to announce that the latest member of our family is ready for the world -- Google Earth for Android. This is our fastest mobile version of Google Earth yet, with a smooth framerate and a beautiful 800 x 480 screen.

With the release of Google Earth for Android, we are also introducing the Roads layer, a very popular feature of the desktop version of Google Earth. Now you can get a better sense of where you are with road labels drawn on top of the satellite imagery.

In addition, we have taken advantage of the integrated voice recognition capabilities of the Android platform to provide the best Google Earth experience yet -- a pocket globe that responds to your every command. Try speaking "Eiffel tower" or "best burrito Mission district of San Francisco." Maybe you're trying to find some nice lodging for an upcoming getaway to Lake Tahoe. Just say "romantic getaway Lake Tahoe." With Google Earth for Android, we have brought together the convenience of Google Search by voice with the power of Google Local Search to make it easier than ever to navigate the globe and find whatever you are looking for.



As with other versions of Google Earth, you can also browse photos, places, and local businesses, whether it is in your local community or on the far side of the globe. Click on an icon to see photos, videos, and read about prominent places in the world. You can easily customize your version of Google Earth to display the layers that most interest you.

In addition to Nexus One, Google Earth will be available in Android Market on most devices that have Android 2.1 or later versions. So as devices such as Droid get updated to Android 2.1, others will also be able to fly to the far reaches of the globe with a swipe of their finger.

Download Google Earth for Nexus One today by searching for Google Earth in the Android Market.

Posted by Peter Birch, Product Manager

The next generation of ad serving for online publishers

Today, we're announcing the next generation of ad serving technology for online publishers — DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP).

For the past few years, we've been investing in a suite of solutions — AdSense, ad-serving technology and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange — to help online publishers make the most money possible from their content, whether they sell advertising directly through their own sales force, through an ad network such as AdSense, or a combination of both.

For major online publishers — including social networks and online communities, entertainment sites, e-commerce sites and news sites — managing, delivering and measuring the performance of ads on their websites can be a hugely complicated process. A publisher's ability to manage this process can have a significant impact on how much money they make from their online content.

Imagine you're a major online publisher with a popular global surfing website and an ad sales team. Every second of every day, you have difficult decisions about what ads to show and how to measure their relative performance. For example:

• In the same ad space, a surfboard wax advertiser may want to run a static image ad for your Australian readers, while an airline offering flights to Hawaii may want to run an expandable interactive ad for your American readers.
• A fast-food restaurant wants to run their burger ads before noon and their pizza ads in the afternoon.
• You've sold 10 different surfboard makers a million ad slots at slightly different prices; now you have to allocate them across your various webpages to fulfill all these orders over the next two weeks.
• One of your surfing tournament reviews is linked to by a popular news site and you have a surge in traffic. Your sales team couldn't predict this, so you're potentially left without any ads for thousands of readers. You want to fill this ad space by selling it via an ad network which has ads available.

This is really just scratching the surface. Managing ad space can involve faxes, emailed orders, the manual scheduling of different ad campaigns across multiple sites and difficult decisions about how to allocate ad space most effectively.

Major online publishers use ad serving technology to manage the complex process of how and when the ads they have sold appear on their websites. In recent years, we've invested significantly in our ad serving products — DoubleClick's DART for Publishers for large publishers and Google Ad Manager for growing publishers. Thousands of major online publishers use these products to serve billions of ad impressions every day.

But we see an opportunity to improve ad serving even further by combining Google's technology and infrastructure with DoubleClick's display advertising and ad serving experience. Since we acquired DoubleClick in March 2008, our engineering and product teams have been working with online publishers to tackle the obstacles that prevent them from maximizing revenues from their websites.

The upgraded DFP includes a wide variety of features that will help publishers to get the most value out of their online content:

• A new interface that has been completely redesigned to save time and reduce errors.
• Far more detailed reporting and forecasting data to help publishers understand where their revenue is coming from and what ads are most valuable.
• Sophisticated algorithms that automatically improve ad performance and delivery.
• A new, open, public API which enables publishers to build and integrate their own apps with DFP, or integrate apps created for DFP by a growing third-party developer community (apps under development today include sales, order management and workflow tools).
• Integration with the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange's "dynamic allocation" feature, which maximizes revenue by enabling publishers to open up their ad space to bids from multiple ad networks. Dynamic allocation is described in this document [PDF].

DFP comes in two flavors, tailored for different publishers' needs: DoubleClick for Publishers, for the largest online publishers, and DFP Small Business, a simple, free version designed for growing online publishers. We'll be upgrading current DART for Publishers publishers to DoubleClick for Publishers over the next year as we continue to add features and modules, and we'll be moving Google Ad Manager customers to DFP Small Business in the coming weeks.

To reflect our continued investment in DoubleClick's products, as well as the central role of DoubleClick's technology products within Google's display advertising business, we're also today unveiling some changes to the DoubleClick logos — including typeset changes, incorporating a new "by Google" theme and retiring the "DART" brand.

The upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers is a perfect example of our continuing innovation in this area, and we believe that it will add significant value to online publishers' content. You can read more about the features of the upgraded DFP on the DoubleClick blog and on the DFP website.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

This week in search 2/21/10

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.

This week, real-time search took center stage, along with a surging interest in the Winter Games in Vancouver.

Real-time search in Russia and Japan
Since the release of real-time search in December, we've seen that finding real-time content — often the only source of online information at the time — can be quite profound. For example, recently when California experienced a few earthquakes, real-time content appeared in search results just seconds after the ground shook. As you can imagine, getting this functionality out to the rest of the world has been a top priority. Because of this, we recently launched real-time search with Russian and Japanese, the first of the languages we plan to support. We want to bring you this functionality globally, so stay tuned as we add more countries.

MySpace in real time
Also in real-time news, starting this week we officially added MySpace content to real-time search. Now you can tap into the pool of news, photos and blog posts that MySpace users have chosen to publish to the world. These updates are all ranked to reflect the most relevant, freshest results, many of which are just seconds old. In all, real-time search includes more than a billion documents and processes hundreds of millions of changes daily. We're quite excited to offer this enhancement so that real-time search becomes even more useful. You can find the MySpace updates in our real-time mode by clicking on "Show Options" and then "Updates."

Example search: [myspace]

Better site searches for Images
Based on feedback from users and webmasters, we have improved the [site:] operator for Google Images. In the past, the [site:] operator filtered based on the image URL, not based on the URL of web pages linking to the images. Now, the operator will run your search over web sites that include images, no matter where the images themselves are hosted, which removes a lot of noise from your results and gives you more control over what you're searching for.

Example searches: [site:digg.com space shuttle], [site:morbidanatomy.blogspot.com], [site:flickr.com/photos/polvero]

Trends in searching for the Winter Games
It's been a week since the Winter Games in Vancouver began, and it's clear you have great interest in finding out more about the games. From women's downhill to curling rules, we've seen searches rise as people everywhere watch the quest for gold. Check out Google Trends to see what's of greatest interest now.

Hope you enjoyed this week's features. Stay tuned for what's next!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

Google Apps highlights – 2/19/2010

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.

Over the last couple of weeks we've been busy adding new functionality to make communicating and sharing with Google Apps easier than ever, whether you use Google Apps for work, for school or at home.

Web clipboard for Google Docs
As more and more people are getting work done in the cloud with Google Docs, a common stumbling block has been copying and pasting formatted content between documents, spreadsheets and presentations. On Wednesday we made this a whole lot easier with a web clipboard for Google Docs. Just highlight what you want to copy, select from the web clipboard menu, move to your other Google Docs window and choose what you want to paste from the web clipboard menu. Your pasted content will retain its original formatting so you don't have to spend time reformatting.


New saving buttons in Google Docs
One of the most frustrating things about using traditional software is losing your work if something unexpected happens before you remember to save. Google Docs helps solve this problem by frequently saving your latest changes automatically. Still, we've heard from people that they want that extra reassurance that autosave is happening, and to be able to manually save their work more easily. New saving buttons in Google Docs do just that. The buttons let you know when your document is fully saved, in the process of being autosaved or has unsaved changes that haven't been picked up by autosave yet. Now, if there are unsaved changes the "Save now" button is clickable.

Google Buzz
Last week we launched Google Buzz, a new way to start conversations about things you find interesting, like photos, videos, webpages or whatever might be on your mind. Buzz lets you share right from Gmail, or from your mobile phone. You can connect other sites you use like Twitter, Picasa, and Google Reader, and you can post buzz privately or publicly. Since we released Google Buzz, we quickly made a number of improvements based on input from users, and we're committed to keep improving it. Individuals can use Google Buzz now, and we plan to make it available to businesses and universities using Google Apps within a few months.

Google Apps Script for Google Sites
Google Apps Script lets you create programmatic interactions between a whole variety of Google services including contacts, calendars, email, finance data, spreadsheets and more. Businesses often use scripts to automate repetitive processes. Last week, we added Google Sites to the list of products that you can control with scripts. Now, instead of manually updating the content in a site, you can use Google Apps Script to automatically populate pages in your site with calendar data, contact information and data from the other services that work with Google Apps Script. Scripts can even add attachments and be used to update the sharing preferences for your site.

Who's gone Google?
With 3,500 employees, Lincoln Property Company is one of the largest property management firms in the United States. Recently, Lincoln Property made the decision to switch to Google Apps from their complex and costly Novell Groupwise email infrastructure. Not only will they save an estimated $200,000 per year, they'll finally be able to equip every single employee with email, instant messaging and calendars — not just the 950 desk-based workers who previously had email access.

The Google Apps train keeps rolling in the education space as well. Seven million students around the world are now using Google Apps at school! DePauw University and Davenport University are just a couple of the most recent schools to switch to Google Apps.

Hope you're enjoying the latest round of new capabilities, whether you're using Google Apps with friends and family, with work colleagues or with classmates. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Update Feb 22: Corrected "gone Google" list.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Shopping smarter with Google Shopper

We're happy to announce a new Android application called Google Shopper. Shopper lets you find product information quickly by using your phone's camera. It can recognize cover art of books, CDs, DVDs, and video games, along with most barcodes. You can also speak the name of the product you're looking for. Use Shopper to make smart decisions about what to buy, what price to pay, and where to buy it. You can star items for later and share them with friends. Shopper also saves your history so you'll always have product and price information at your fingertips, even when you don't have a signal.

Here's an example search based on the Effective Java: Programming Language Guide.

To see Google Shopper in action, watch this video:

To download Google Shopper to your Android-powered phone, scan the QR Code below, or search for "Shopper" on Android Market. You'll see a green icon for Shopper by Google. Click install and happy shopping!

For more information about Google Shopper, take a look at our Google Labs page. We hope you send us your feedback.

Posted by Daniel Switkin and Farhan Shamsi, software engineers

Google Voice, explained

(Cross-posted from the Google Voice Blog)

Google Voice is about giving you more control over your communications, through dozens of features — ranging from call screening to voicemail transcription to the ability to send and receive SMS by email.

While we've heard from users that they love our growing list of features, we're conscious of the fact that Google Voice can seem overwhelming to people trying it for the first time.

So we've created a short video that gives an overview of what Google Voice can do.



In addition, we've created a set of short videos that dive into more detail about ten features of Google Voice:

1. Voicemail transcription
2. One number
3. Personalized greetings
4. International calling
5. SMS to email
6. Share voicemails
7. Block callers
8. Screen callers
9. Mobile app
10. Conference calls

The videos show why you might want to use each feature and basic instructions for getting started. And each video focuses on just one topic so you can learn about the features that matter to you.

Finally, we just launched our own YouTube channel at youtube.com/googlevoice. You can view all of the videos mentioned above in a custom video gadget we built for this channel, which will help you keep track of which videos you've already watched.

We hope these videos help you get the most out of Google Voice.

Posted by Jason Toff, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Tag Clouds for Google Maps Photo Layer

Google Maps has a photo layer that shows high-quality images from Panoramio. Finding photos from almost any place in the world makes Google Maps more useful, but sometimes there are too many photos to choose from.

Now you can filter the photos displayed by Google Maps using the tag cloud generated by Google or using your own query. Restrict the photos to panoramas, landscapes, nature or buildings to create a custom photo layer.

Jonah Jones says that this is not the only improvement: "the photos now appear in piles when there are lots of views of the same scene". That means Google groups related images, so that they don't clutter the map.

Microsoft on Google Apps

Microsoft posted some videos on YouTube that discuss the disadvantages of using Google Apps in an organization, while recommending businesses to try Microsoft's solutions.

Microsoft suggests that Google Apps is not an enterprise-class service because it's incomplete, has simple tools that lack basic features like copy & paste, Google Docs is not fully compatible with Microsoft Office, while Google Apps is an "one-size-fits-all cloud service".

"Google Apps provides oversimplified applications that limit how productive your people can be. In fact, Google's own executives admit they don't believe their tools can replace Microsoft Office. That means your business may require extra tools just to complete your IT portfolio. Google Apps also has an unfamiliar and inconsistent user experience. Features are sometimes released unannounced and some aren’t even supported, which can increase support calls and risk for your business. Also, Google Apps is delivered exclusively online, so users need to be connected to the internet to get the most out of their tools," says Microsoft.

Microsoft's conclusion is that "Google Apps offer an attractive initial license cost, but it can increase operational costs in other ways. For example, you may have to deploy additional technologies to integrate Google into your organization, which raises costs."






Google has its own site that compares Google Apps with Microsoft Exchange. Google's main selling points are that Google Apps costs less than Microsoft Exchange, it doesn't require maintenance and it offers an excellent email solution. "Google Apps bring speed, flexibility, anytime, anywhere access and ease of use to employees – along with the cost savings based on Google's economies of scale and leadership in cloud computing."

Google Apps is far from perfect and Google Docs is certainly not a Microsoft Office replacement, but Google Apps is constantly improving and has many business-oriented features. To see how fast Google improves its products, watch Microsoft's videos and find the limitations that have already been addressed by Google: remote wipe for mobile devices, scheduling calendar resources, better copy/paste experience in Google Docs.

Microsoft's recent initiatives validate Google's online services: Microsoft Office Live and online Exchange compete with Google Apps:

"Cloud services from Microsoft make it easier for you to respond to shifting business needs, while we take care of a lot of the IT management burdens that can suck up your time—and your money. You don't have to worry about updates, service packs, or upgrades. We handle it for you, so you're running the most secure, up-to-date software."

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

New web clipboard for Google Docs that improves copy and paste

This new clipboard temporarily stores items you’ve copied in the cloud, then allows you to paste them with proper formatting into documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

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

Languages included:
All languages supported by Google Docs

How to access what's new:
While editing in Google Docs, select the item that you want to copy. Use the new clipboard menu to copy the item in question. Then, go to your other document, spreadsheet or presentation, and use the clipboard menu there to paste the item into the document.

Please note that while items in your web clipboard are available across browsers and across sessions, they do expire after a month.

For more information:
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/02/web-clipboard-for-google-docs.html

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Translating Text Using Google Goggles

Google tests a very useful feature: translating text using Google Goggles, the visual search mobile app available for Android phones. Instead of visiting Google Translate and typing the text you want to translate, you could use your phone's camera to photograph the text, send the photo to Google's servers and get the translation.

This feature is not yet available because it's quite difficult to perform OCR (optical character recognition) on a photo, especially if you don't even know the language of the text.

"Right now this technology only works for German-to-English translations and it's not yet ready for prime time. However, it shows a lot of promise for what the future might hold. Soon your phone will be able to translate signs, posters and other foreign text instantly into your language. Eventually, we're hoping to build a version of Google Goggles that can translate between all of the 52 languages currently supported by Google Translate — bringing even more information to you on the go," says Hartmut Neven.


Google tests an API for Google Docs that lets you perform OCR on a high-resolution image, but the results aren't impressive. Maybe the OCR service should be released in Google Labs.

What to expect at Google I/O 2010

Back in January, we announced the start of early registration for Google I/O (our annual developer conference), and our team was excited to publish our new website for this year's event. Today, we're excited to give you a quick update on what's in store for this year's Google I/O and a brief look at what we've announced in the past five weeks.

• 63 sessions to be led by the engineering teams behind all the products to be featured at I/O, including Android, Google Chrome, Google Web Toolkit and Google Wave. We'll have over 80 sessions listed by May.
• 58 companies are listed on the Developer Sandbox page, and we expect over 150 companies to participate in the Sandbox at I/O.
• 99 speakers, including Google engineers and prominent web development experts from other companies.
• We introduced our very first I/O BootCamp, which sold out in just two days.

Of course, some things will stay under wraps until the event itself, but we're excited to share some Google I/O planning details with you in advance.

We'll be teaming up with Maker Faire again this year for our After Hours evening party. Google I/O attendees will get to preview some of the amazing DIY projects that will be showcased at Maker Faire in San Mateo just a couple of days after I/O, and discounted Maker Faire tickets will be available during After Hours. We've also invited the organizers of Gadgetoff. They'll be bringing along exciting, interactive gadgets, robots and vehicles.

Whether you're already developing apps using products like App Engine, or wondering how to get started on your first Android app, we hope to see you at Google I/O in May. To learn more and to sign up, visit code.google.com/io.

Posted by Joyce Sohn, Google Developer Team

Integrating translation into Google Goggles

(cross-posted with Google Translate Blog)

Yesterday, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Eric Schmidt and I demonstrated a prototype version of Google Goggles that showcases the potential of integrating Google's machine translation and image recognition technologies. In the video below, you'll see how we use Goggles to take a picture of a German menu and instantly translate the text into English:

You may wonder what's happening in the background. On the simplest level, this prototype connects the phone's camera to an optical character recognition (OCR) engine, recognizes the image as text and then translates that text into English with Google Translate.

Right now this technology only works for German-to-English translations and it's not yet ready for prime time. However, it shows a lot of promise for what the future might hold. Soon your phone will be able to translate signs, posters and other foreign text instantly into your language. Eventually, we're hoping to build a version of Google Goggles that can translate between all of the 52 languages currently supported by Google Translate — bringing even more information to you on the go.

Posted by Hartmut Neven

A picture's worth a thousand (translated) words

Imagine being in a foreign country staring at a restaurant menu you can't understand, a waiter impatiently tapping his foot at your tableside. You, a vegetarian, have no idea whether you're about to order spaghetti with meatballs or veggie pesto. What would you do? Well, eventually you might be able to take out your mobile phone, snap a photo with Google Goggles, and instantly view that menu translated into your language. Of course, that's not possible today — but yesterday at the Mobile World Congress we demonstrated a prototype of Google Goggles that has the power to do just that. It's still in an extremely early stage, but we thought we'd share this demo with you because it shows just how powerful a smartphone can be when it's connected to our translation technologies. For more information and to watch the demo, check out our brand-new Google Translate blog.

Posted by Andrew Gomez, Associate Product Marketing Manager

How to Disable Google Buzz

Google Buzz is a service that integrates with many Google products, so it's quite difficult to completely disable it. For example, to use Google Buzz, you need to have a searchable Google Profile.

While you can click on "turn off Buzz" in Gmail, you don't disable Buzz. The setting only hides the Buzz section and you can display it again by clicking "turn on Buzz".

Fortunately, Google added a new option that lets you disable Buzz, but you need to delete your Google Profile. Go to the profile editing page, scroll to the bottom of the page and select "Delete profile and disable Google Buzz completely". Google claims that "this will disable Google Buzz integration in Gmail and delete your Google profile and Buzz posts. It will also disconnect any connected sites and unfollow you from anyone you are following."


Even if you delete the profile, you'll still be able to create another profile later and you won't lose your Google account. After clicking the red link, Google shows a new page that informs you that "you are about to delete your public profile, including any Buzz posts you have made and your connected sites settings". There's also a strange option enabled by default: "unfollow me from anyone I am following in Buzz, Google Reader, and other Google products".

It seems strange to see that the mass unfollowing is optional, considering that you are about to disable Google Buzz completely. The option also shows that there's a connection between Buzz followers and Reader followers, but I don't see why you need to unfollow from everyone in Google Reader to disable Google Buzz.


After you click on "Yes, delete my profile and posts", you'll notice that you didn't actually disable Google Buzz completely. You've deleted all your posts, removed your connections and the people you were following, but the Buzz section from Gmail is still there and you still have the same followers. Now you can click "turn off Buzz" and you'll disable Google Buzz.

It would be great to be able to remove Google Buzz from the "edit services" page, without having to delete the profile and remove Google Reader followers, while still seeing the Buzz section in Gmail.

Update: The option to delete your Google Buzz data can also be found in Gmail's settings.

Seven million students have gone Google...and we're road tripping!

Since the fall of 2009 we've seen more and more students and faculty take advantage of Google Apps Education Edition. We've seen our active users grow — first we had 5 million, then 6 million, and today we're happy to announce that we've crossed the 7 million mark. With so many students and faculty using Google Docs, Google Sites and Gmail to collaborate and share their academic work, we figured it's the perfect time to hit the road and help more schools see Google Apps in action.

Beginning in April, the Google Apps Education team will travel to universities across the southern and eastern U.S. to meet with regional CIOs and IT directors in higher education. We'll be hosting these events with some great universities using Google Apps, including Hofstra, Columbus State University, the University of South Florida, Texas Southern University and the University of Virginia.

At every stop, the host universities will share how their students and/or faculty use Google Apps, and show how they've deployed and connected Apps within their technology infrastructure. We'll be devoting a lot of time for questions and we'll have plenty of demos from the Google Apps team. If you're a university CIO, CTO or IT Director in New York, Florida, Georgia or Virginia (or nearby!) and would like to join us at a roadtrip stop, please let us know via this contact form. We hope to see you there!

Google Apps Education Edition CIO Roadtrip - Spring 2010

4/16: Hofstra University
(in conjunction with the New York Higher Education Technology Forum)
Hempstead, NY

4/19: University of South Florida
Tampa, FL

4/21: Columbus State University
Columbus, GA

4/23: University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA

Early June: Texas Southern University
Houston, TX

Posted by Jason Cook, Google Apps Education team

Google. No Configuration Needed

Google usually releases products that don't require a lot of configuration. Sometimes Google's services try to be clever and use some existing data to derive the settings. Here are some examples of features that would normally require user input, but Google decided that it's not necessary:

1. Google Desktop has a small feed reader that shows the latest posts from your favorite sites. Google decided that it's too complicated to manually subscribe to each site, so the feed reader subscribes to all the sites you visit.

2. Google Chrome lets you customize your favorite search engines, but it adds all the sites you visit to the list of search engines, assuming that you've used their search pages. "Google Chrome automatically saves a list of the search engines you've encountered while browsing the Web. For example, if you visit http://www.youtube.com, the browser auto-detects and adds the YouTube search engine to your list of search engines that you can access from the address bar," explains Google.

3. Gmail automatically adds email addresses to your contact list. If you've sent an email to someone, Gmail adds the email address to the contact list. "Email addresses are automatically added to your Contacts list each time you use the Reply, Reply to all, or Forward functions to send messages to addresses not previously stored in your Contacts list. If these addresses don't appear immediately, try waiting a few minutes or signing out of your account and signing back in," mentions Gmail's help center.

4. Gmail Chat's default settings help you add many people to your buddy list without having to invite them. "If there are other Gmail users whom you frequently email, you'll be able to chat and see each other online without having to send an invitation. Gmail automatically determines which contacts you'll be able to talk to without having to invite each other," informs Google Chat Help. It's not clear Google defines "frequently", but 2-3 email messages are enough to have a new buddy.

5. The initial version of Google Reader's friend sharing subscribed to the shared items of all your Gmail Chat friends. Even if the shared items were public, they weren't automatically sent to other people unless they subscribed to your feed. At that time, many Google Reader found the new feature intrusive or only annoying. "I think the basic mistake here (...) is that the people on my contact list are not necessarily my "friends". I have business contacts, school contacts, family contacts, etc., and not only do I not really have any interest in seeing all of their feed information, I don't want them seeing mine either. This is a major privacy problem," explained a user.

Google addressed the issues eight months later. "You've given us lots of feedback on the way our experimental sharing features work and we heard you loud and clear: you want more control over your sharing. We've been working hard to create a more flexible way to let you choose who to share with; you can now manage a Friends list within Reader, separate from your Gmail chat contacts."

6. Google Buzz's original implementation made the same mistake as Google Reader's friend sharing, but the changes affected more people. As Gmail's blog admits, Google Buzz automatically subscribed you to some of your Gmail contacts and automatically connected Google Reader shared items and public Picasa Web albums. "With Google Buzz, we wanted to make the getting started experience as quick and easy as possible, so that you wouldn't have to manually peck out your social network from scratch."



Sometimes features that don't require configuration have side-effects that might affect your user experience or your privacy. Gmail clutters the contact list and makes it difficult to manage, Gmail Chat automatically determines your friends using basic heuristics, while Google Buzz starts to share your public photos and favorite blog posts with the people automatically added to Gmail's chat list. A clever service might save you time, but it shouldn't make important decisions for you.

Server Clipboard in Google Docs

Bogdan, a reader of this blog, spotted a new Google Docs feature: server clipboard. It seems to be an implementation of Google Cloudboard, an online clipboard that should help you copy content between Google services like Gmail, Google Calendar or Google Docs. Cloudboard should make it easy to copy a spreadsheet in a Google Docs document or copy a Google Calendar event in a Gmail message.


I couldn't find this feature in Google Docs, so it's probably a test. Hopefully, the new clipboard will work well in all browsers without having to change advanced settings. Right now, if you click on Edit/Copy in Firefox, Google Docs shows this message: "Your browser does not allow access to your computer's clipboard. Instead, please use Ctrl-C for Copy, Ctrl-X for Cut and Ctrl-V for Paste, or use Edit menu above the browser toolbar".



Update. Some details from Google's help article:

"There are a few specific cases in which the best way to copy and paste is using the server clipboard menu. When you copy a selection using this menu, the content you copy is stored and associated with your Google Account. That means you can copy more than one selection and then choose which one to paste later; it also means you can copy something on one computer and then paste it on another."

The article mentions that you might see "different formats that you can choose from to paste what you've copied (for example, HTML or plain text)".

It's also interesting to see that Google stores all the content you copy to the server clipboard for 30 days.

"Content you copy to the server clipboard is stored on Google's servers and remains there until 30 days have passed since you last took action on (for example, copied) a given content selection. Even if a document is deleted, anything you copied from that document to the server clipboard will still exist on Google's servers for that 30-day period. You can delete all items stored on the server clipboard by clicking the drop-down menu and selecting Clear all items."