This week in search 5/30/10

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

Safety, security and privacy are important parts of the search equation for us at Google, particularly as we continue to bring you the best possible search experience on the web. Security in particular can be an important part to your interaction with the Google search box, so we're always looking for ways to make changes and enhancements to that interaction secure. Especially as we all spend more time online, the importance of security has taken center stage. So in addition to this week's secure search enhancement, you can read our latest news and insights at our Online Security Blog.

More secure searches
Years ago we added Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption to products ranging from Gmail to Google Docs, as part of our effort to advance the safety and security of our products for you. Now you have a new choice to search more securely using https://www.google.com. When you use this https address, an encrypted session is established between your browser and Google that uses an SSL connection. Just like on an online banking page, the "https" confirms that you are using a more secure connection that will help protect your search terms and your search results from being intercepted by a third party. For more information on this security enhancement, read our announcement.

Example of encrypted search: [flowers]

Whether you're planning a trip by train or scouring the real-time web, this week's roundup also includes two search enhancements that should greatly improve the richness of yor search results -- no matter what you're looking for.

Images in real-time search updates
Ten blue links on a search results page can provide you with a lot of really helpful information, but sometimes you're searching for content that is richer than a textual web page. For instance, what are people saying about Lady Gaga's latest garb? Until now, it's been hard to get this kind of rich visual detail that's really fresh. So this week we began rolling out a feature for images in real-time search. When searching for the latest content across the real-time web, you'll be able to quickly see the images people are talking about right now (based on URLs of those images in their public updates.) To view this new feature, click on "Updates" in the lefthand panel when you complete a search. Then click on "Updates with images."

Example search: [pac-man doodle]

Transit search enhanced
Often when we search, it's to get from point A to point B, such as when the best route is by train. Then it's important to know the specific details of the train station near you, like which lines it serves. Now you can easily get this information in the lefthand panel on Google Maps by searching for the transit station. The lines are colored and grouped by transit type to make it easier to find the line you're looking for. For rail trains, you can see the departure time directly. For other types of transit like subways, buses and commuter trains, you can click on the line name to get the next departure time of each direction—all without having to leave the current page.

Example search: [Broadway-Lafayette St Station]

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned next week for more search news. Search on!

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search

Happy 1st birthday, Google Wave!

Last week, we opened sign-ups for Google Wave to everyone as part of Google Labs and made it available for all Google Apps domains. Here is the quick (seven minute) update on the state of the product from this year's Google IO conference:



Today, it's been a full year since the Wave team first got on stage at the Moscone Center and demoed a new vision for communication and collaboration to a crowd of developers. In a guest article on the Huffington Post last week, Lars described innovation and working on Google Wave as a rollercoaster—and this year has certainly been a fascinating ride. For the past year, I've had the pleasure and the challenge of explaining why this new technology is useful. Unlike some other products that I have also been lucky enough to work on, Wave is not a more advanced approach to a known application like webmail or the browser. It's actually a new category, which can be kind of hard to wrap your head around.

I work in Wave every day, and we have identified a number of clear use cases for getting things done in groups at businesses and at schools. But people also ask me how I use Wave outside of work to understand how they should start using it themselves. As it turns out, the ways I use Wave aren't revolutionary or groundbreaking—I communicate about everyday things, but it is these incredibly ordinary and important communications that are transformed in unexpected ways when you use Wave.

I wave with my family—with my mom, who is across the country, and with my sister who is a graduate student. We're all on different schedules and very rarely all online at the same time. In one wave, we decided what to wear for a friend's wedding—adding suggestions for each other with links and pictures, updating the wave as we had side conversations and made decisions. My mom and I chatted about my dress choice when we were both online, and then my sister was easily able to catch up later, adding her ideas. It kept all three of us up to speed in one place, rather than having several phone conversations, emails and chats. Sharing these small personal projects in a wave removes the little bits of friction to make the discussions more dynamic and productive.


From talking to other people who use Google Wave, I know I'm not alone. I've been struck by the really personal nature of communicating and working together in Wave, and the emotional response people have to their first uniquely wavey experience, what we call the "Wave a-ha moment." For many people it's the live typing that does it; for others it's the first time they create an in-line reply, embed a YouTube video or edit someone else's text.

You really do have to try it to believe it, though—so if you checked out Google Wave six months ago and found yourself at a bit of a loss, take another look. The product is much faster and more stable and we have templates and tutorials to help you get started. Next time you find yourself taking notes while you are on the phone, do it in a wave and add your colleagues, or pull a couple friends or family members onto a wave for a small project... like going to the movies.

So head to wave.google.com and sign in. You can get more updates on our blog and even share your stories (ordinary or otherwise) with wave.stories@googlewave.com.

Wave on!

Posted by Anna-Christina Douglas, Product Marketing, Google Wave

We’ve officially acquired AdMob!

Last Friday, we said that mobile advertising was moving fast. So are we! Today, we closed our acquisition of AdMob. Omar Hamoui has built a great team and great products at AdMob and we’re thrilled to officially welcome them to Google.

We’ll now begin the process of bringing our products and teams together in the best way, and building new products and features together. We’re working to make this integration happen as fast and as seamlessly as possible. We’ll actively keep our clients up-to-date as we bring our businesses together — stay tuned!

It’s clear that mobile advertising is becoming a much larger part of our clients’ and partners’ strategies and with this acquisition, it’s now a central part of our own business. In continuing to invest in this highly competitive area, we’ll be bringing together our technology, resources and expertise in search advertising with AdMob’s innovative solutions for advertising on mobile websites and in mobile applications.

Mobile search is central

One of the key ways that people find and access information on their mobile devices, just like on the desktop, is through search. As smart phones have proliferated, we’ve seen dramatic increases in mobile search volume. Over the past two years, Google's mobile search volumes have grown more than fivefold, at an accelerated pace. In the first three months of 2010, people with smartphones with “full” WebKit browsers (such as the iPhones, Android devices and Palm Pre) searched 62 percent more than they did in the previous three months.

Increasingly, people aren’t just typing search queries into their mobile devices. They speak them, they take photos of them and they even translate them from different languages.

In addition to traditional search ads on mobile devices, we’ve worked to develop entirely new search ad formats. “Click-to-call” search ads, for example, have been really popular. They enable advertisers to include a local business or national phone number directly in their ad text that you can click to reach the business directly via phone. This is a really great way for you to easily get information from a relevant business (say, a local restaurant), and a highly effective way for advertisers to connect with interested customers.

With many more advances to come, search advertising will remain the central way that many businesses connect with consumers on mobile devices.

Mobile websites and apps

In addition to search, another key way that people access information is through mobile websites (accessed through a browser) and mobile apps (available through Apple’s App Store, the Android Marketplace and more).

Mobile display and text ads make it easy for publishers and developers to make money from their mobile websites and apps, and enable advertisers to extend the reach of their campaigns to relevant mobile content. In this area, AdMob has been a real pioneer and has innovated at a tremendous pace, building a successful business and working with thousands of advertisers, publishers and developers.

AdMob was one of the first companies to serve ads inside mobile applications on the Android and iPhone platforms. They’ve developed a host of engaging and creative ad units for Android and iPhone apps—for example, interactive video ad units and expandable rich media ads. Google has also been developing new features for in-app ads. For example, last week, we announced that we’ll be making “click-to-call” ad formats available to developers who run AdSense in their mobile apps. With Google and AdMob starting to work together, there’s lots more innovation to come in this area.

The future

It’s clear that mobile advertising is growing incredibly fast with lots of businesses innovating at great speed. Every day, more marketers are looking to take advantage of the mobile-specific capabilities, extended reach, great returns and value that mobile advertising provides. Advertisers are now starting to see mobile as an essential part of their overall campaigns, not just a silo-ed experiment on the side.

We want to unleash agencies’ and advertisers’ creativity on all mobile devices and deliver them better results from their campaigns, drive better returns and more choice for publishers and developers, and help people get better ads and more free mobile content.

We believe that mobile advertising can play a significant role in every single marketing campaign. We’re passionate about the unlimited possibilities in this space. Today, with AdMob, our work to make them a reality begins.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, Vice President of Product Management

Stock Repurchase
As previously announced, Google intends to repurchase in the open market a number of shares equal to the number of shares issued in the transaction and issuable upon exercise of outstanding options to purchase common stock issued by AdMob. The repurchase program is expected to commence shortly after the completion of the acquisition. The repurchases will be funded from available working capital.

Google Buzz for mobile now available on more devices

Back in February, we launched Google Buzz for mobile, a tool to start interesting conversations when you are out and about. One of the most popular ways to access Google Buzz for mobile is through the web application (by going to buzz.google.com in your phone’s browser). When Buzz launched, it was only available for devices running Android 2.0+ and iPhone. Not any more! Today we’re a releasing an XHTML version of the Buzz website which can be accessed from many other mobile devices, including those running Android pre-2.0, Blackberry, Nokia S60, and Windows Mobile.

Just type buzz.google.com in your browser. Then when you log in using your password, you will be able to view the stream of buzz posts, post publicly or privately, comment or like a post, and more. On the BlackBerry platform, you can also enable location through your browser settings. This will allow you to get to the Nearby view, where you’ll find geo-tagged posts near you. In addition, you can tag your post with your location. Please note that location features might not work on some devices.

Android pre-2.0 devices can now run the same web app as newer versions of Android. You can also switch to the XHTML version if needed, and we will remember your preference.

We have worked hard to make Google Buzz for mobile accessible on more devices in more locations. It is now available in 37 languages through buzz.google.com and we’re excited to bring it to mobile devices with browsers that don’t support the HTML5 capabilities the webapp uses. We hope that you enjoy using Google Buzz on the go!

Update 5/27/2010 11:17: This new webpage is also functional on Palm WebOS phones.

Posted by Alex Kennberg, Software Engineer, Google Mobile

Watch efforts to stop the oil spill live and submit your ideas

As millions of gallons of oil pour into the Gulf of Mexico from the BP oil leak, ideas for stopping the leak and cleaning up the aftermath are needed. Today BP began their “top kill” procedure, which will attempt to send mud and cement into the well to block the flowing oil. You can watch what’s happening through a live stream of the leak on PBS NewsHour’s YouTube channel, the Google Oil Spill crisis response page or below.

You can submit your ideas on the best way to stop and clean up the oil spill via Google Moderator by 2:00 p.m. PT on Thursday, May 27.

Posted by Meryl Stone, Product Marketing Manager, Google.org

Congratulations to Aadith Moorthy, the 2010 National Geographic Bee Champion

Tswana is a Bantu language spoken by the largest ethnic group in what landlocked country?

The production of yerbe maté, a tea made from an evergreen plant, is important to the economy of Misiones. This province is located in which country that borders Paraguay?

The Øresund Bridge, opened in 2000, connects Copenhagen, Denmark with what Swedish city?

The largest city in northern Haiti was renamed following Haiti’s independence from France. What is the present-day name of this city?

Aadith Moorthy tackled these and other questions to win this year’s National Geographic Bee held today in Washington, D.C. While he missed his first question of the day, he didn’t let that get get in his way. His win is the culmination of many months of preparation and local competitions that began last fall at schools across the country.

Aadith is a 13-year-old 8th grader from Palm Harbor, Florida and attends the Palm Land Middle School. When not studying geography, he is a South Indian classical (Carnatic) music concert singer. At the beginning of the final round, he gave the audience a taste of his talent when Alex Trebek, the host of the Bee, asked him to sing on the spot.

We’re proud that Google is this year’s sponsor of the National Geographic Bee. This contest exemplifies the importance of being geographically literate and showcases just how well these students understand the world around them. This skill-set will be a vital asset as they continue their education and careers. As you can tell from the questions above, it’s not just a matter of memorizing state and country capitals!

I had the great opportunity to speak at both the preliminary and championship rounds of the Bee and was impressed by the dedication of the teachers who made special efforts to train their school finalists and the depth of knowledge of the students. This is contest with important implications for their future lives and careers.

We’re excited to follow all of the 54 finalists to see where in the world they land.



Answers: Botswana, Argentina, Malmö, Cap-Haïtien

Posted by Brian McClendon, VP of Engineering, Google Earth and Maps

Where Have I Been? Get Your Answer with the Google Location History Dashboard

When I was young, I used to imagine that there was a string attached to me, and that one day I’d be able to see my whole life’s travels laid out on a globe. Thanks to my phone, Google Latitude, and Google Location History, I’ve been able to pull a virtual string behind me for a few months. Alas, I can’t entertain myself for too long with just a piece of string. Today we’re launching an experimental new view in Beta for Google Location History to visualize your location history in a different -- and hopefully more interesting -- way than just a string of locations.

If you’ve already chosen to enable Location History, the new dashboard view will try to highlight interesting trends from your existing location history, such as trips you’ve taken, places you’ve visited, time spent at home vs. out, and more. Ever wonder how much time you’ve spent at work recently compared to six months ago, or where it was that you stopped on your last road trip? Just check out Location History for some of the answers.

For example, I took a look at my dashboard, and it reminded me that my brother and I watched the Oakland A’s win on the final at-bat on April 17th.



If you’re a road warrior like me, the dashboard can help you remember your trips and where you stopped along the way. Here’s an example of a trip I took to New York to get a little work done and visit some friends just west of Central Park.


Speaking of being a road warrior, sometimes I do wonder how long my string is. I at least know how long it is since I started using Latitude and Location History -- about 21,000 miles or 10% of the distance to the moon!


We’re really excited to make Latitude and your location more useful to you, but we definitely understand that your privacy is important. Just as before, Google Location History is entirely opt-in only and your location history is available privately to you and nobody else. Additionally, you may be asked to periodically re-enter your password when opening any Location History page, even if you’re signed in to your Google Account already (just to make sure you’re really you). Of course, you may always delete any or all of your location history in the Manage History tab or disable Location History at any time.

To try out the new dashboard yourself, enable Google Latitude in the background on your phone, turn on Google Location History, and wait a few days (up to a week) to build up enough history for the dashboard to begin showing information. This is just one interesting way you can do more with your location, but we don’t expect it to be the last. With last week’s launch of the Google Latitude API, we hope to soon see people create even more cool ways for you to choose how to use your location and location history.

The Location History dashboard’s information is still experimental and in Beta so you may notice some initial issues with accuracy around its estimates. We’re working on improving the Location History dashboard and Latitude location updating overall, so you’ll notice improvements for both over time. You may also want to try turning on WiFi or GPS on your phone to improve location history accuracy. Visit our Help Center to learn more or tell us your feedback and questions in our Help Forum. Give us suggestions and vote on other people’s on the Mobile Product Ideas page!

Posted by Andrew Kirmse and Kenny Leftin, Software Engineers, Google Mobile Team

Migrating from Microsoft Outlook® is now even easier for end-users with new Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook® tool

Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook® is a new end-user tool that moves email, calendar and contact data from Outlook® profiles, PST files and Exchange accounts to Google Apps.

With Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook®, you can:
- Import mail, calendars, and personal contacts, either all at once or in separate stages
- Import only mail sent before or after a specific date
- Skip importing Junk E-mail and Deleted items
- Exclude specific mail folders from being imported (requires running the command-line utility)
- Monitor the progress of your migration
- Easily pause and resume the migration
- Run subsequent migrations that import only new data (not data that's already been imported)

Editions included:
Premier and Education Editions

Languages included:
US English

How to access what's new:
- In the Google Apps control panel > Advanced Tools > User email uploads section, select the checkbox for ‘Allow users to upload mail using the Email Migration API’.
- Download the tool, install and migrate the data.

For more information:
Download page
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/05/introducing-google-apps-migration-for.html
Admin Help Centre
End-user Help Centre


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The 2010 Doodle 4 Google winner: Makenzie Melton’s Rainforest Habitat

Your millions of online votes helped us pick the winners of this year's Doodle 4 Google competition. Today, we're pleased to announce the results.

Congratulations to Makenzie Melton, a third grader at El Dorado Springs R-2 Schools in El Dorado Springs, Missouri. Her winning design, entitled "Rainforest Habitat,” expressed her concern that "the rainforest is in danger and it is not fair to the plants and animals.” Makenzie’s design triumphed over more than 33,000 student submissions from all over the country. Makenzie’s colored-pencil creation beautifully embodied this year’s theme.


Makenzie received a $15,000 college scholarship, a netbook computer and a $25,000 technology grant for a new computer lab at her school. Her doodle will also be featured on the Google.com homepage tomorrow, May 27, for millions of people to enjoy all across the country.

Our congratulations also go out to other three national finalists. They were selected as having the best doodle in their grade groups by the online public vote, and each student will receive a netbook computer:

Grades 4-6
Raymundo Marquez, Grade 6, of Nellie Mae Glass Elementary, Eagle Pass, Texas for his doodle entitled "Save Our Rainforest." The background of Raymundo’s work depicts deforestation and the effects it can have on our land. He says, “we will eventually have less oxygen and clean air. We need to unite to protect not just our lives, but the lives of all the rare and beautiful plants and animals that live there.”

Grades 7-9
Vance Viggiano, Grade 7, Heritage Home School Academy, Long Valley, New Jersey, for his doodle entitled "The Love of Art." Vance says, “If I could do anything, I would... enrich the world with an intense passion for art and the everlasting joy it provides. Art embodies the creator's expression, and offers exquisite exuberance towards both the artist and the viewers, also serving to soothe an ailing soul in distress.”

Grades 10-12
Bevan Schiffli, Grade 11, Highlands School, Highlands, North Carolina, for her doodle entitled "Branch Out." Bevan says, “My doodle expresses my desire to understand other views and cultures. I want to branch out to gain a strong sense of the world; not only in one perspective, but many. My wish is to show people my experiences through a pursuit of art/design in my future career.”

Our four winners were announced at an event today at the Google New York office and were celebrated at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, where we also unveiled an exhibit of the 40 regional winners that will be on view until August 15, 2010. The finalists were treated to a day in New York City, including doodle classes with our doodle team and the opportunity to meet some of this year’s expert jurors who helped judge this year’s final doodles around the theme “If I Could Do Anything, I Would..." Judges at today’s event were well known artists and animators from Disney, the Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates and Peanuts gang, Barbie/Matell and the Sesame Street Workshop.

A special thanks to all those who voted and helped us select this year's winner. Thank you to all those creative kids out there who submitted entries — and the teachers and principals who work so hard to get their students recognized. We hope you'll doodle with us next year!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products and User Experience

Faster find and more in new Google documents editor

New features in new Google documents editor now available

- Faster find
- Headings in the toolbar
- Bookmarks in the link dialogue

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

Languages included:
All languages supported by Google Docs

How to access what's new:
- Faster find: Press Ctrl+F (⌘+F on Macs) to see a dropdown box where you can type the word or phrase you’re looking for in your document. As you type, all the matches in the doc will get highlighted and you can press your' enter' key to jump to the next match. For more advanced options or to replace text, access the ‘Find and Replace’ dialogue from the ‘Edit’ menu.
- Headings in the toolbar: Paragraph styles have been added to the toolbar to quickly apply formatting changes to your text.
- Bookmarks in the link dialogue: If you’ve added bookmarks to your document, you’ll also see these bookmarks as options when you create a new link.

For more information:
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/05/faster-finding-and-other-document.html
How to enable the new editor

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Find Microblog Updates with Images

Google added a new advanced search option that lets you restrict the posts from sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz to updates that link to images. You only need to select "updates" in Google's left sidebar and click on "updates with images".


The new search filter is useful to find photos from recent events, personal pictures and random images from all over the world.


{ spotted by Google.org.cn. Thanks, TomHTML. }

Save PDF Files in Google Docs

What do you do if you find an interesting PDF file previewed online using Google Docs Viewer? To save it in Google Docs, you had to download the file and upload it to Google Docs. Now you can just click on "Save in Google Docs" and the document is instantly added to your account.

This could be useful if you receive a PDF attachment in Gmail and you want to save it in Google Docs. You just need to click on "View" and then on "Save in Google Docs".


{ Thanks, Bill. }

Google Chrome 5 Stable Released

Google launched the first stable version of Google Chrome that's available for Windows, Linux and Mac. Google's browser has been initially released for Windows and then it was ported to Linux and Mac.

As this image shows, it wasn't easy to port a complex Windows application to other operating systems:


... but the results are surprisingly good:



The Mac version has a polished UI and great features that aren't available in Safari: full-screen mode, bookmark sync, extensions and themes. Some Windows users would probably like to see the menu from Google Chrome for Mac.

Chrome's Linux version has improved a lot since the first dev channel release and will probably compete with Chromium, the open-source version of Google Chrome. For those who don't like the GTK+ theme, Chrome lets you enable the classic theme from Windows.

Chrome 5 has many small new features: extensions in incognito mode, reordering toolbar buttons, disabling individual plug-ins, native geolocation, new bookmark manager which is now a web page, zoom settings saved for each domain, Integrated Windows Authentication and more. It's also much faster than Chrome 4. An important missing feature is the built-in Flash plug-in, which will be added in a future update, when Adobe launches Flash 10.1.

Add-ons for Disabling Google Analytics Tracking

Google released plug-ins for Internet Explorer 7+, Firefox 3.5+ and Chrome 4+ that disable Google Analytics tracking. Google Analytics is by far the most popular free service for getting statistics about the visitors of a site and it's used by a lot of sites, including this blog. Even if the service doesn't show personal information about the visitors and it only provides aggregated data, some people are concerned that Google can track the sites they visit using a seemingly innocuous Google Analytics script.

Google explains that Google Analytics uses first-party cookies to track visitor interactions, so the data can't be aggregated for all the domains. "The Google Analytics Terms of Service, which all analytics customers must adhere to, prohibits the tracking or collection of [personal] information using Google Analytics or associating personal information with web analytics information."

Those that are concerned about their privacy can install an add-on and permanently disable the script. After installing the add-on, you'll notice that the browser still sends a request for this file: http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js when visiting a page that uses Google Analytics, but it no longer sends information to Google Analytics.


If a lot of users install the add-on, website owners will no longer have accurate stats, they'll no longer be able to find if their content is popular and what sections of their site still need some work. Even if Google didn't release opt-out add-ons, users could still block Google Analytics by adding an entry to the HOSTS file, but the add-ons make it easier to opt-out.

Google also added a feature for website owners: Google Analytics can now hide the last octet of the IP address before storing it. "Google Analytics uses the IP address of website visitors to provide general geographic reporting. Website owners can now choose to have Google Analytics store and use only a portion of this IP address for geographic reports. Keep in mind, that using this functionality will somewhat reduce the accuracy of geographic data in your Analytics reports. "

Evolving from beta to stable with a faster version of Chrome

After a bit of evolution and lots of work from the team, we’re thrilled to introduce a new stable version of Chrome for Windows, Mac and Linux. Since last December, we’ve been chipping away at bugs and building in new features to get the Mac and Linux versions caught up with the Windows version, and now we can finally announce that the Mac and Linux versions are ready for prime time.

Google Chrome for Windows

Google Chrome for Mac

Google Chrome for Linux

The performance bar for all three versions keeps getting higher: today’s new stable release for Windows, Mac and Linux is our fastest yet, incorporating one of our most significant speed improvements to date. We’ve improved by 213 percent and 305 percent in Javascript performance by the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks since our very first beta, back in Chrome’s Cretaceous period (September 2008). To mark these speed improvements, we’ve also released a series of three unconventional speed tests for the browser:



(If you’re interested in how we pitted Chrome against the forces of a potato gun, lightning, and the speed of sound, take a look behind-the-scenes in this video, or read the full technical details in the video’s description drop-down in YouTube).

You may also notice that today’s new stable release comes with a few new features, including the ability to synchronize browser preferences across computers, new HTML5 capabilities and a revamped bookmark manager. For more details, read on in the Google Chrome Blog.

If you haven't tried Google Chrome since the stone age, check out this brand new stable release. If you're already using Chrome, you'll be automatically updated to this new version soon. To try it right away, download the latest version at google.com/chrome.

(First dev, then beta, now stable! Many thanks to Christoph Niemann)

Posted by Brian Rakowski, Product Manager, Google Chrome

Google’s U.S. economic impact

(Cross-posted to the Google Public Policy Blog)

In 1978, people told Douglas Twiddy he was crazy when he started renting out vacation homes in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. More than 30 years later, his son Ross is using our AdWords advertising program to help attract prospective renters — and grow his small business, Twiddy. Thanks in part to AdWords, in just the past two years the company has added 100 new homes to its listings and hired 16 full-time employees, and it brings on another 50 seasonal employees each year.

This week is National Small Business Week, and Ross will be with me on Capitol Hill in Washington today to share his story and help unveil something that means a tremendous amount to me: a new report detailing, for the first time ever, Google’s economic impact in all 50 states.

People think of Google first and foremost as a search engine, but it’s also an engine of economic growth. In our report, we’re announcing that in 2009 we generated a total of $54 billion of economic activity for American businesses, website publishers and non-profits. Over the years people have asked us whether we could quantify our economic impact on a state level, and we’re pleased to do that for the first time with this report, which you can download at google.com/economicimpact.

In a time of tighter budgets and a slow economic recovery, we’re glad to support so many small businesses and entrepreneurs across the country by helping them find new customers more efficiently and monetize their websites through targeted advertising.

Here’s a video from me and our Chief Economist, Hal Varian, with more background on where we get the numbers:



The report is filled with really wonderful stories about the direct economic impact that AdWords, AdSense, Google Grants and our search engine have across the country. These are the stories of entrepreneurs across the country growing their businesses with Google. And this morning Googlers are hosting events in 10 other cities across the country (Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Oakland, Portland (OR), Raleigh and Seattle) to help share those stories. Ladies and gentlemen, start your economic engines!

Posted by Claire Hughes Johnson, Vice President, Global Online Sales

Send Links from Google Chrome to an Android Phone

One of the most interesting APIs in Android 2.2 allows developers to create applications that can receive messages from servers. "Android Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM) is a service that helps developers send data from servers to their applications on Android devices. The service provides a simple, lightweight mechanism that servers can use to tell mobile applications to contact the server directly, to fetch updated application or user data."

To try the new APIs, you can install an Android app and a Chrome extension that let you send a link from the browser to your phone and automatically open the URL in Android's browser. Install the Android application, register your device and enable "launch browser/maps directly". Then install the Chrome extension, click on the icon and log in to the same Google account used in Android. Now you can send links to your phone by clicking on a button in Google Chrome.


The application requires Android Froyo, which is only available for Nexus One at the moment.

Adobe Reader for Android

After releasing Flash Player for Android, Adobe launches a PDF reader for Android. The applications is available in the Android Market and it can be installed only if your phone runs Android 2.1 or later and it has at least 256 MB of RAM and a 550 MHz processor.

Nexus One already comes with a document viewer based on Quickoffice, but the application doesn't do a great job at previewing PDF files. Adobe Reader for Android opens PDF files much faster than Quickoffice and it has a better zooming feature.

"Adobe Reader for Android offers multi-touch gestures, like pinch-and-zoom, as well as double-tap-zoom, flick-scrolling and panning. We've also added a reflow mode, which will take text-heavy documents with wide margins, and automatically wrap the content for easy viewing on smaller screens," explains Adobe.

The application doesn't include basic features like search or support for password-protected files, but it's snappy, documents are readable and the applications opens in full screen. There aren't many free PDF viewers for Android and Adobe's application is clearly the best right now.

Comment on Any Google Reader Shared Item

Google Reader simplified the commenting feature so that anyone can comment on a shared item. "Up until now, someone had to be in a designated sharing group to be able to comment on a post, even if you were sharing publicly. To make things a lot simpler, we've made it so that if you can see a shared item, you can comment on it."

An important side-effect is that Google Buzz users can comment on any post shared in Google Reader, assuming that the shared items are connected to a Buzz profile. Since you can now comment on a Google Buzz post by replying to a message in Gmail, you could share a blog post in Google Reader and one of your Buzz followers could post a comment from in Google Buzz and then reply to your answer from Outlook, Thunderbird or from the Gmail mobile app for Blackberry.

If you don't like Google Reader's interface, there are desktop apps like FeedDemon, NetNewsWire or Liferea that import your Google Reader subscriptions and synchronize your actions with Google Reader. That means you could share a blog post in FeedDemon and someone could post a comment from Google Buzz or from an application that uses Google Buzz API.

While people can post comments to a Google Reader shared item in Google Buzz, you'll still see the comments in Google Reader. It's not really important where you find a great article and where you comment.


In other news, Google Reader will drop support for outdated browsers (IE6, Firefox < 3.0, Safari < 4.0, Chrome < 4.0) and will remove the offline mode powered by Google Gears starting on June 1. Why not remove offline support when Google Reader implements the same feature in HTML5?

Google Reveals AdSense's Revenue Share

Google revealed an important secret: the revenue shares for two AdSense services. Until now, publishers didn't know the percentage of the revenue that is paid by Google.

"AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. (...) We pay our AdSense for search partners a 51% revenue share, worldwide, for the search ads that appear through their implementations."

It's interesting to note that the revenue share for AdSense for content has never changed since the service was launched, back in 2003.

Sevices like Google Search, AdWords and AdSense are usually treated as black boxes, since Google rarely reveals specific information about its algorithms.

Google AdSense's help center still says that "each AdSense publisher receives a percentage of the cost an advertiser pays for user clicks or impressions on their ad. This percentage is referred to as the revenue share. Google does not disclose the revenue share for AdSense."

Google's financial results for the first quarter of this year, show that only 30% of Google's total revenue is from partner sites and the traffic acquisition cost (TAC) is 26% of the revenue. "The majority of TAC is related to amounts ultimately paid to our AdSense partners, which totaled $1.45 billion in the first quarter of 2010." Google's partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense, of $2.04 billion. Obviously, 1.45/2.04~=0.71, which is very close to the AdSense for Content revenue share.

Flash in Android Froyo

Google has started updating Nexus One phones to Android Froyo and a pre-release version of the update file is already public. I updated my phone using a pre-rooted version from Modaco which doesn't require the stock recovery image.

Even if it's not included in Android, the Flash runtime is one of the few applications that require Android 2.2. Right now, you can install from the Android Market the first beta release for Flash 10.1.

Whether you love it or hate it, installing Flash changes the way you look at a mobile phone. HTML5 may be the future, but a lot of websites use Flash for playing video, music, games and interactive content. Instead of getting messages that recommend you to install the Flash plug-in, you'll see the actual content.

The trouble with Flash on a mobile phone is that most Flash content is designed for a computer and it's difficult to use on a device with a small screen. Video players have small buttons and it's challenging to click on one of them, some websites serve high-quality videos that aren't appropriate for a slow Internet connection, clicking on a Flash object is a disrupting experience because you might open a new page, pause a video or display the Flash content in full-screen.

I've tried to open many sites that use Flash and the experience isn't smooth. Animations are sometimes choppy, web pages load much slower, scrolling web pages that use Flash is slow and there's a lot of lag when zooming a page with Flash content. In some cases, the browser is no longer responsive for a few seconds and you need to wait until you can switch to another page. Fortunately, Adobe managed to optimize the code and using Flash doesn't drain your phone's battery much faster.

The version you can install from the Android Market is not the final release, but don't expect too many changes until next month. It's nice to have options, so I recommend to install the Flash runtime and to change the browser settings so that plug-ins are loaded "on-demand". This way, web pages will continue to load fast and you'll only display Flash content when necessary.

PAC-MAN rules!

We've been overwhelmed — but not surprised :) — by the success of our 30th anniversary PAC-MAN doodle. Due to popular demand, we’re making the game permanently available at www.google.com/pacman.

Thanks to NAMCO for helping to make this wonderful collaboration happen. Enjoy!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

Gmail's Spam Filter No Longer Effective?

Yahoo has recently quoted a study of the Fraunhofer Institute which concluded that Yahoo Mail and Hotmail have better spam filters than Gmail.

"The Fraunhofer Institute, an independent research firm, found that Yahoo! Mail users saw the least amount of spam out of the five providers tested, with nearly 40% less spam than Hotmail and 55% less spam than Gmail – meaning Gmail users in the study saw more than twice as much spam as Yahoo! Mail users."

If the results are accurate, then either Gmail's spam detection technology is no longer state of the art or Yahoo and Microsoft have dramatically improved their spam filters. Last time I checked, most of the messages from the inbox of my Hotmail account were spam.


John Mueller, from Google, says that Gmail's spam filter is quite effective: "When I first got my Gmail account (it seems like such a long time ago), I purposely signed up to all kinds of mailing lists to try out the filter. It seemed like a fun idea -- but then I noticed that I actually wanted to keep my Gmail account :). About one spammy message comes through each month, but the most important part is that I haven't lost anything that I was waiting for."

I rarely get spam messages that aren't flagged by Gmail, but the spam filter is not perfect. Sometimes Gmail flags legitimate messages as spam, so the algorithms are too aggressive.

What do you think? Is Gmail worse than Yahoo Mail or Hotmail when it comes to filtering spam?

Update: Here's Fraunhofer's press release with a link to the study. Unfortunately, it's in German. (Thanks, Lazlo.)

Update 2: Apparently, the study was sponsored by Microsoft and Yahoo's conclusions are misleading. The "prestigious" Fraunhofer Institute counted all the spam messages received by six users and Gmail users happened to receive more spam messages than Yahoo Mail and Hotmail users. The study admits that Yahoo Mail and Gmail detected correctly all the spam messages, while Hotmail couldn't detect 23% of the messages.

Yahoo concluded that "independent empirical studies done by the prestigious Fraunhofer Institute show that Yahoo! Mail is #1 in blocking malware and spam from reaching mailboxes. It's official. No one fights spam harder, smarter, or better than Yahoo! Mail." But so is Gmail, according to Fraunhofer's irrelevant study.

Google Secure Search

Google launched a new version of Google Search that uses an encrypted connection to Google's servers. "With Google search over SSL, you can have an end-to-end encrypted search solution between your computer and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party. This provides you with a more secure and private search experience," explains Google.

Google search over SSL works for web search, but since Google has a unified interface for search, it also works for video search, book search, blog search, news search. You won't be able to use image search, product search and Google Maps, which aren't yet properly integrated with the new Google interface.

The main benefit of using the SSL version of Google search is that the communication between your computer and Google's servers is encrypted. This is especially useful if you're using a public computer, an open WiFi network or you're using Google for sensitive searches. An interesting side-effect is that browsers no longer send referrals when you're clicking on search results that don't use SSL.

Google Secure Search has a special logo, which never changes for special occasions, and the URL is https://www.google.com.


I used WireShark, a free packet sniffer, to compare the standard HTTP interface with the new HTTPS version. As you can see, if you use Google Search over SSL, even the URL is encrypted, so your query is a secret for everyone, except Google:


If you'd like to use Google SSL as the default search engine in Chrome, go to the Settings dialog, click on the "Manage" button next to the list of search engines, add "Google SSL" and make it the default search engine. The downside is that Google Chrome will no longer show suggestions when you type your query. Google Chrome should use this in the incognito mode.


For Firefox, try this search plug-in, while for Internet Explorer, you can create a search provider using the URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=TEST.

{ via Google Blog }

Google Special Award Winners @ Intel ISEF 2010

Last Thursday evening, we announced the winners of our Google Special Awards at the Intel ISEF 2010 Special Awards Ceremony. With applications from 17 project fields ranging from behavioral and social sciences to microbiology, judging these great projects was extremely difficult. Submissions like a bio-inspired photonic fuel cell and a new way to treat waste water using fungus showcased the ingenuity and imagination of the world’s next generation of scientists. In fact, we were so blown away by the caliber of the project submissions that hours before the award ceremony, we decided to give some additional awards. In addition to the three $10,000 category prizes, we awarded six runner-up prizes of $1,000 each. And since so many of our applications were in the Secret Change Agent category (an award for the project that has the most potential to positively impact society and make the world a better place), we selected two winners, who each received $10,000!

Please join us in congratulating the 10 finalists and finalist teams who were awarded the Google Special Awards. Their accomplishments represent the bright future of science and technology and we’re thrilled to be along for the ride.

Google Special Award Winners & Runner-ups

Category #1: CS Connect: applying computer science to further scientific inquiry in your field

Runner-ups ($1,000 each)
Ritik Malhotra and Tony Ho (Mechanical Engineering), ages 17, San Jose, CA
Engineering a Novel Genetics-Based Disease Detection Mechanism Designed Using an Ontology-Driven Semantically Annotated Microarray Repository with Thermal Gradient Focusing Mass Spectrometry

Christopher Nielsen (Electrical Engineering), age 16, Alberta, Canada
Robust Displacement Estimation Employing Inexpensive Webcam Based Optical Flow

Winner ($10,000)
Joon Suk Huh (Physics), age 17, South Korea
Finding the Minimum Energy Conformation of Protein-like Heteropolymers by Greedy Neighborhood Search

Category #2: The Future of Energy: contributing to a cleaner, brighter tomorrow

Runner-ups ($1,000 each)

Lyric Gilett (Energy and Transportation), 18, Texas
Novel Method: Detecting High Energies in Sonoluminescense

Max Keller (Energy and Transportation), Age 17, Minnesota
Decomposing Energy

Winner ($10,000)
Dheevesh Arulmani (Energy and Transportation), Age 14, Ontario, Canada
Bio-Inspired Photonic Fuel Cell

Category #3: Secret Change Agent: making our world a better place through innovative change

Runner-ups ($1,000 each)
Xiangbo Meng (Plant Sciences), age 17, Beijing, China
Aqueous Extract of Lemon Leaves as a Novel Powerful Insecticide Against Trialeurodes Vaporariorum (Whitefly)

Sonia Rao (Microbiology), age 17, Missouri
Bacterial Silencing: The Discovery of Quorum Quenching Soil Microbes for the Development of Antimicrobial Compounds

Winners ($10,000 each)
William Lopes (Microbiology), age 20, Brasil
Utilization of the Fungus Aspergillus Niger on Wastewater Treatment II

Karoline Elis Lopes Martins (Environmental Management), age 18, Brasil
Construction of a Continuous Flow SODIS system with PET Bottles Integrated to a Water and Waste-Water Treatment System

For a full listing of the Intel ISEF Grand Award and Special Award winners, visit the Intel ISEF 2010 homepage here.

Posted by Dolores Bernardo, Talent & Outreach Programs Manager

Keeping up-to-date on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill

(Cross-posted on the Lat Long blog)

It is estimated that at least 6 million gallons of oil have leaked into the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon explosion a month ago. Cleanup efforts are underway, but the oil has spread extensively around the Gulf and along the southern U.S. coastline. Oil has begun washing up on the beaches of Louisiana and the delicate wetlands along the Mississippi River, and can spread to Florida and throughout the Gulf as weather conditions change. This sequence of images, coming from NASA’s MODIS satellites, illustrates the movement and growth of the oil slick over the past few weeks:

April 25, 2010

April 29, 2010

May 9, 2010

May 17, 2010

The last image, taken earlier this week (on May 17), shows the coastal areas currently at risk from the spreading oil, and can help those working on the wide range of relief efforts.


You can view this and other MODIS imagery in Google Earth by downloading this KML. You can also view additional imagery and find other resources and news at our oil spill crisis response page.

Posted by Pete Giencke, GIS Data Engineer

Gmail contextual gadgets now launched in the Google Apps Marketplace

Gmail contextual gadgets are web applications that render in your Gmail web interface when triggered by certain cues. These gadgets enable users to make better informed business decisions faster by delivering relevant information to their inbox and where they can take action right from the email interface.

For example, the Google Docs preview gadget is shown when an email contains a Google Doc URL, allowing users to both preview and edit the document directly in the message view.

Editions included:
Standard, Premier and Education Editions

Languages included:
US English

How to access what's new:
- Administrators can access the Google Apps Marketplace via the control panel if already added. They can add the Marketplace to the control panel by clicking on 'Add services', or visit http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/.
- Apps that use Gmail contextual gadgets can be found by searching the marketplace and refining for apps that feature ‘Mail integration'.

For more information:
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/05/putting-email-in-context-with-gmail.html

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Google Apps highlights – 5/21/2010

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.

It’s been an active and exciting week on the Google Apps team, including the release of several new features at Google I/O, our annual developers conference.

Google Calendar gets a new look
The Google Calendar team has been doing some spring cleaning. On Wednesday, we revealed Google Calendar’s new cleaner design. We streamlined text that appears in the interface, made the controls more compact and created more space on screen to display information from your calendar.


New themes for forms in Google Docs
We also spruced up forms in Google Docs with the addition of 24 new themes for online surveys that you create. As you’re editing your form, just click the “Theme” button to browse the gallery and change the look and feel of your form.


Drag images into Gmail messages
On Tuesday, we simplified a common action: inserting images in a Gmail message. If you use Google Chrome, now you can drag images files from your computer’s desktop or folders onto the body of a message you’re composing, and Gmail will add the image to your message. You can easily resize the image right in the Gmail compose window before hitting “Send.”


Google Voice open to students
We’ve heard from many students how Google Voice makes it easier to deal with the process of getting a new dorm phone number and moving back and forth between school and home each year. Voicemail transcriptions that students can glance at while in class are also useful. To help more students take advantage of these tools, last Friday we opened up Google Voice for students with .edu email addresses. Try it out!

Google Wave (Labs) open to all
Google Wave is a new team collaboration application that brings discussion and debate right into the context of content people are working on together. For the last year, Google Wave has been available to a limited set of testers and early users, but on Wednesday we moved Wave to Google Labs and now anyone can sign up. If you use Google Apps at your business, school or organization, your IT manager can enable Wave from the Google Apps control panel now, too.



More Google applications coming for Google Apps customers
Speaking of new applications for businesses, schools and organizations, we also just announced that starting this summer, Google Apps customers will be able to sign into Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, Google Reader, AdWords and many more Google services with their Google Apps accounts. If you’re the Google Apps administrator for your organization, read more about how this change will work and sign up to start testing. We welcome your feedback.


Contextual gadgets in Gmail
Gmail can already display previews of documents, videos and photo albums so you don’t have to switch back and forth between windows, and now Google Apps customers can add other contextual gadgets from the Google Apps Marketplace. There are already gadgets for project management, social networking, rich contact profiles and much more, and we hope developers will build their own contextual gadgets with the new Gmail API.



Apps Script
Google Apps Script lets customers automate business processes ranging from expense approvals to time-sheet tracking to ticket management and order fulfillment. On Tuesday we launched Google Apps Script improvements, including Java database connectivity, custom user interfaces for scripts, the ability to invoke scripts from any web page and integrations with more Google services, like Google Maps. To help you get started with scripts, we also released a new set of script templates with pre-built functionality.

Google Calendar Connector for Lotus Notes®
Many companies still using old legacy technologies are looking to make a seamless switch to the cloud, and now Lotus Notes customers can move to Google Apps in phases, at their own pace. Last week we launched the Google Calendar Connector for Lotus Notes®, which allows businesses to switch to Google Apps department by department. Google Apps users in your organization can look up free/busy info for coworkers still on Lotus Notes and vice versa.

Who’s gone Google?
Thousands more businesses and schools have “gone Google” since our last update, including Arista Networks (where Andy Bechtolsheim serves as Chairman) and Smart Furniture. Both of these companies had a common motivation for moving to Google Apps: being able to focus their precious resources on core business challenges by letting technology experts at Google handle the day-to-day operations of running an email system.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Search more securely with encrypted Google web search

Update June 25, 2010: Since we introduced our encrypted search option last month, we’ve been listening closely to user feedback. Many users appreciate the capability to perform searches with better protection against snooping from third parties. We’ve also heard about some challenges faced by various school districts, and today, we want to inform you that we’ve moved encrypted search from https://www.google.com to https://encrypted.google.com. The site functions in the same way. For more information on this change, please read on here.

As people spend more time on the Internet, they want greater control over who has access to their online communications. Many Internet services use what are known as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections to encrypt information that travels between your computer and their service. Usually recognized by a web address starting with “https” or a browser lock icon, this technology is regularly used by online banking sites and e-commerce websites. Other sites may also implement SSL in a more limited fashion, for example, to help protect your passwords when you enter your login information.

Years ago Google added SSL encryption to products ranging from Gmail to Google Docs and others, and we continue to enable encryption on more services. Like banking and e-commerce sites, Google’s encryption extends beyond login passwords to the entire service. This session-wide encryption is a significant privacy advantage over systems that only encrypt login pages and credit card information. Early this year, we took an important step forward by making SSL the default setting for all Gmail users. And today we’re gradually rolling out a new choice to search more securely at https://www.google.com.

When you search on https://www.google.com, an encrypted connection is created between your browser and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network. The service includes a modified logo to help indicate that you’re searching using SSL and that you may encounter a somewhat different Google search experience, but as always, remember to check the start of the address bar for “https” and your browser lock indicators:

Today’s release comes with a “beta” label for a few reasons. First, it currently covers only the core Google web search product. To help avoid misunderstanding, when you search using SSL, you won’t see links to offerings like Image Search and Maps that, for the most part, don’t support SSL at this time. Also, since SSL connections require additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server, your experience with search over SSL might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience. What won’t change is that you will still get the same great search results.

A few notes to remember: Google will still maintain search data to improve your search quality and to provide better service. Searching over SSL doesn’t reduce the data sent to Google — it only hides that data from third parties who seek it. And clicking on any of the web results, including Google universal search results for unsupported services like Google Images, could take you out of SSL mode. Our hope is that more websites and services will add support for SSL to help create a better and more consistent experience for you.

We think users will appreciate this new option for searching. It’s a helpful addition to users’ online privacy and security, and we’ll continue to add encryption support for more search offerings. To learn more about using the feature, refer to our help article on search over SSL.

Posted by Evan Roseman, Software Engineer