Since Gmail launched in 2004 with, what was at the time, an unprecedented 1GB of storage per person, we've been focused on continuously improving the email experience with things like fast search to find messages quickly, mobile support, offline access and integrated IM, and voice and video chat. Gmail was really the beginning of how we're rethinking personal and group productivity, and over the last couple of years, business adoption has accelerated rapidly as the hosted suite has emerged as a powerful, affordable successor to on-premises business technology.
Today, more than a million businesses have moved beyond traditional software and hardware to cloud computing – where data and applications live online – and they're using the Google Apps suite not just for Gmail, but also for shared calendaring, collaborating on files without attachments, private video sharing and quickly deployable internal and external sites. IT managers are refocusing the money and time saved towards core projects that help their individual businesses become more competitive.
Today we're thrilled to share news about another exciting partnership: Valeo is deploying Google Apps to the company's entire office-based workforce.
This marks a significant moment for Google Apps, because Valeo has 30,000 Internet-connected employees, making this one of the largest enterprise deployments of Google Apps to date. Valeo is moving to the cloud with the support of Capgemini, one of the world's most highly regarded technology advisory firms. This deployment across Valeo's distributed workforce of 192 business entities in 27 countries and five continents demonstrates the vast scalability of Google Apps. Whether your company has just five employees in a single room, or tens of thousands of people scattered around the globe, Google Apps can easily provide powerful messaging and collaboration tools.
If you help make technology decisions where you work, we invite you to learn about Google Apps and join the million businesses that have already become more productive by rethinking their approach to technology.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
We have a Knol for Dummies.com winner!
Today, we're pleased to announce that the winner of our Knol for Dummies.com contest is "How to talk to your doctor" by Dr. Jennifer Frank, whose knol about "getting the most out of a short-but-sweet office visit" was selected for its quality, clarity, and usefulness. It will be featured on Dummies.com, and she will receive $1,000.
You can read Dr. Frank's knol here. Dr. Frank's tips on are just the type of authoritative content that makes great knols.
Congratulations also go to the four finalists, who will also be featured on Dummies.com:
Congratulations also go to the four finalists, who will also be featured on Dummies.com:
- How to Calibrate Lag in Guitar Hero by Tom Nolan
- How to Make the Best Barbecue Ribs Ever by Craig "Meathead" Goldwyn
- Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Getting a Grant (But Were Afraid to Ask) by Rita Hubbard
- How to Make Great Coffee by Stephen Buchwalter and Paivikki Buchwalter
A planetarium in your pocket
At today's Searchology event we were pleased to launch Google Sky Map for Android. Google Sky Map turns your Android-powered mobile phone into a dynamic window on the night sky. When you point your phone upwards you will see a map of the brightest stars, constellations and planets in that part of the sky. The next time you see a bright star and want to know what it's called, Sky Map can help you identify it.
Whether you are an aspiring astronomer or just want to impress your date, download Sky Map from the Android Market. For more information watch the video below or visit the Lat Long Blog.
Whether you are an aspiring astronomer or just want to impress your date, download Sky Map from the Android Market. For more information watch the video below or visit the Lat Long Blog.
More Search Options and other updates from our Searchology event
Today we are hosting our second Searchology event, to update our users, partners, and customers on the progress we have made in search and tell them about new features. Our first Searchology was two years ago, when we were excited to launch Universal Search, a feature that blended results of different types (web pages, images, videos, books, etc.) on the results page. Since then Universal Search has grown quite a bit, adding new types of results, expanding to new countries, and triggering on ten times as many queries as it did when we launched it.
But as people get more sophisticated at search they are coming to us to solve more complex problems. To stay on top of this, we have spent a lot of time looking at how we can better understand the wide range of information that's on the web and quickly connect people to just the nuggets they need at that moment. We want to help our users find more useful information, and do more useful things with it.
Our first announcement today is a new set of features that we call Search Options, which are a collection of tools that let you slice and dice your results and generate different views to find what you need faster and easier. Search Options helps solve a problem that can be vexing: what query should I ask?
Let's say you are looking for forum discussions about a specific product, but are most interested in ones that have taken place more recently. That's not an easy query to formulate, but with Search Options you can search for the product's name, apply the option to filter out anything but forum sites, and then apply an option to only see results from the past week. Just last week, at our Shareholders' Meeting, I had a woman ask me why she couldn't organize her results by time, with the most recent information appearing first. "Come back Tuesday," I wanted to say!
The Search Options panel also gives you the ability to view your results in new ways. One view gives you more information about each result, including images as well as text, while others let you explore and iterate your search in different ways.
Check out a video tour here:
We think of the Search Options panel as a tool belt that gives you new ways to interact with Google Search, and we plan to fill it with more innovative and useful features in the future.
Another challenging problem we have worked on is better understanding the information you get back from a search. When you see your results from a Google search, how do you decide which one has the best information for you? Or, how can we help you make the best decision about where to click?
We call the set of information we return with each result a "snippet," and today we are announcing that some of our snippets are going to get richer. These "rich snippets" extract and show more useful information from web pages than the preview text that you are used to seeing. For example, if you are thinking of trying out a new restaurant and are searching for reviews, rich snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the restaurant's price range:
In this example, you can quickly see that the Drooling Dog Bar B Q has gotten lots of positive reviews, and if you want to see what other people have said about the restaurant, clicking this result is a good choice.
We can't provide these snippets on our own, so we hope that web publishers will help us by adopting microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface. This will help people better understand the information you have on your page so they can spend more time there and less on Google. We will be rolling this feature out gradually to ensure that the quality of Google's search results stays high. If you are a webmaster and are interested in participating, visit the rich snippets help page to learn more.
We also showed a preview of a new tool that we're calling Google Squared. Unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared doesn't find webpages about your topic — instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet. We'll be opening it up to users later this month on Google Labs.
But as people get more sophisticated at search they are coming to us to solve more complex problems. To stay on top of this, we have spent a lot of time looking at how we can better understand the wide range of information that's on the web and quickly connect people to just the nuggets they need at that moment. We want to help our users find more useful information, and do more useful things with it.
Our first announcement today is a new set of features that we call Search Options, which are a collection of tools that let you slice and dice your results and generate different views to find what you need faster and easier. Search Options helps solve a problem that can be vexing: what query should I ask?
Let's say you are looking for forum discussions about a specific product, but are most interested in ones that have taken place more recently. That's not an easy query to formulate, but with Search Options you can search for the product's name, apply the option to filter out anything but forum sites, and then apply an option to only see results from the past week. Just last week, at our Shareholders' Meeting, I had a woman ask me why she couldn't organize her results by time, with the most recent information appearing first. "Come back Tuesday," I wanted to say!
The Search Options panel also gives you the ability to view your results in new ways. One view gives you more information about each result, including images as well as text, while others let you explore and iterate your search in different ways.
Check out a video tour here:
We think of the Search Options panel as a tool belt that gives you new ways to interact with Google Search, and we plan to fill it with more innovative and useful features in the future.
Another challenging problem we have worked on is better understanding the information you get back from a search. When you see your results from a Google search, how do you decide which one has the best information for you? Or, how can we help you make the best decision about where to click?
We call the set of information we return with each result a "snippet," and today we are announcing that some of our snippets are going to get richer. These "rich snippets" extract and show more useful information from web pages than the preview text that you are used to seeing. For example, if you are thinking of trying out a new restaurant and are searching for reviews, rich snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the restaurant's price range:
In this example, you can quickly see that the Drooling Dog Bar B Q has gotten lots of positive reviews, and if you want to see what other people have said about the restaurant, clicking this result is a good choice.We can't provide these snippets on our own, so we hope that web publishers will help us by adopting microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface. This will help people better understand the information you have on your page so they can spend more time there and less on Google. We will be rolling this feature out gradually to ensure that the quality of Google's search results stays high. If you are a webmaster and are interested in participating, visit the rich snippets help page to learn more.
We also showed a preview of a new tool that we're calling Google Squared. Unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared doesn't find webpages about your topic — instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet. We'll be opening it up to users later this month on Google Labs.
These features really explore search from a broad and entirely new perspective. Because we realize that when you can't quickly find just the exact information or content you need or want, it's our problem, not yours. And it's a problem with plenty of room left for innovation. Stay tuned.
Monday, May 11, 2009
18th International World Wide Web Conference
The 18th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2009) was recently held in Madrid. This is the forum in which Larry and Sergey introduced the "Google" search engine back in 1998. Conferences like WWW are highly beneficial for all attendees, as they provide a forum for constructive interactions and discussions among the diverse, global community that is contributing so much to the advancement of the web. As one of the major sponsors this year, Google contributed significantly in various scientific and social forums. Here's a short report of those activities:
- Google and the Prado Museum collaboration: In January 2009, we announced a collaboration between Google Earth and Spain’s Museo del Prado, which lets people zoom in on some of the gallery’s main portraits and view them in a resolution so fine -- up to 14,000 megapixels -- that even individual brush strokes and cracks in the varnish are clearly visible. The Prado Museum has become the first art gallery in the world to provide access to and navigation of its collection in Google Earth. The initiative includes 14 of the Prado’s most famous paintings -- works by Francisco de Goya, Diego Velázquez, Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Paul Rubens, and more. Such ultra-high resolution imaging, enabling users to virtually feel, see and be present with the original masterpieces, is just one way in which the web can make important contributions to the art community. To celebrate this, Google hosted an event at the Prado Museum, where guests received a guided tour of some of the main exhibits, and had the opportunity to network with fellow researchers, academics and engineers, as well as Google's own Vint Cerf.
- Research Contributions: Google contributed to the WWW conference by authoring or co-authoring several papers and presentations. I gave a keynote speech on The Continuing Metamorphosis of the web (you can read more about that topic on the Google Research blog). Some other papers to highlight are:
-- Estimating the ImpressionRank of Web Pages, Z. Bar-Yossef & M. Gurevich
-- Detecting The Origin Of Text Segments Efficiently, O. Abdel-Hamid, B. Behzadi, S. Christoph & M. Henzinger
-- What's Up CAPTCHA? A CAPTCHA Based On Image Orientation, R. Gossweiler, M. Kamvar & S. Baluja
-- Computer and iPhones and Mobile Phones, oh my! A logs-based comparison of search users on different devices, M. Kamvar, M. Keller, R. Patel, and Y. Xu
-- Collaborative Filterin for Orkut Communities: Discover of User Latent Behaviour, W. Chen, J. Chu, J. Luan, H. Bai, Y. Wang, and E. Chang.
-- Fast Dynamic Reranking in Large Graphs, P. Sarkar, A. Moore
-- WEB 2.0: Blind to an Accessible New World, J. Hailpern, L.Guarino-Reid, R. Boardman, S. Annam
-- How Opinions are Received by Online Communities: A Case Study on Amazon.com Helpfulness Votes, C. Danescu, G. Kossinets, J. Kleinberg, L. Lee
-- Bid Optimization for Broad Match Ad Auctions, E. E. Dar, Y. Mansour, V. Mirrokni, M. Muthukrishnan & U. Nadav
-- General Auction Mechanism for Search Advertising, G. Aggarwal, S. Muthukrishnan, D. Pal & M. Pal
- Best Paper Award and the Internet Monetization Track: The WWW program committee changed the best paper and poster process this year. They first chose several nominated papers from different tracks, and after seeking feedback from conference attendees, they chose their best paper: Ashish Goel's and Kamesh Munagala's Hybrid Keyword Search Auctions. The authors of this paper propose a unified approach to an auction for cost-per-click and cost-per-impression settings, and show promising properties of their proposed auction. The paper was presented in the Internet Monetization Track at WWW — a new track which, despite its short term at WWW, became very popular this year. Other tracks like web search, data mining, and the social web have been active at WWW for years and already attract many high-quality research papers. The best poster award went to a paper co-authored by Google's Monika Henzinger about Purely URL-based Topic Classification.
Energy and the Internet
There's been a lot of debate lately about the growing amount of energy needed to power the Internet, and we wanted to weigh in on the discussion. A few months ago, I first blogged about the about amount of energy used in one Google search. Our engineers crunched the numbers and found that an average query uses about 1 kJ of energy and emits about 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide. But those raw numbers don't really put the environmental impact of searching the Internet into perspective. To add some context, below is data about the C02 impact of some everyday activities and items compared to Google searching:
We work hard to provide our users with the fastest products using the least amount of energy. We have a team of dedicated engineers focused on designing and building the most efficient data centers in the world. In fact, through efficiency innovations, we have managed to cut energy usage in our data centers by over 50 percent, so we're using less than half the energy to run our data centers as the industry average. This efficiency means that in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will likely use more energy than we will use to answer your query.
And the energy used by computers is growing; people are more plugged-in today than ever before in history. There are more than one billion PCs and laptops currently in use, and that number is expected to grow to four billion by 2020. We've got cell phones, PDAs, iPods, and GPS devices — not to mention the data centers that store all of our digital information "in the cloud." The electricity needed to run all of our computers, gadgets, and gizmos is growing and now accounts for half of all ICT emissions. (ICT stands for "information and communications technology.")
Although the amount of energy used to power ICT is growing, it's important to measure all of the ways information technology helps us save energy too. A study by The Climate Group, in fact, shows that ICT emissions pay for themselves (PDF) (and then some) by enabling significant reductions in emissions by other sectors of the economy. After all, it's much more efficient to move electrons than to move atoms. "Virtual" tools like email, video-conferencing, and search engines replace more carbon-intensive activities like snail mail, business travel, and driving.
We can still make progress at improving computing efficiency across the industry, however, and Google is committed to doing so. In 2007 we co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a non-profit organization committed to reducing global CO2 emissions from the operation of computers by 54 million tons a year by 2010. Check out their website for more information on how you can reduce the environmental impact of your own computer use.
| Activity | Google Searches |
| CO2 emissions of an average daily newspaper (PDF) (100% recycled paper) | 850 |
| A glass of orange juice | 1,050 |
| One load of dishes in an EnergyStar dishwasher (PDF) | 5,100 |
| A five mile trip in the average U.S. automobile | 10,000 |
| A cheeseburger | 15,000 |
| Electricity consumed by the average U.S. household in one month | 3,100,000 |
We work hard to provide our users with the fastest products using the least amount of energy. We have a team of dedicated engineers focused on designing and building the most efficient data centers in the world. In fact, through efficiency innovations, we have managed to cut energy usage in our data centers by over 50 percent, so we're using less than half the energy to run our data centers as the industry average. This efficiency means that in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will likely use more energy than we will use to answer your query.
And the energy used by computers is growing; people are more plugged-in today than ever before in history. There are more than one billion PCs and laptops currently in use, and that number is expected to grow to four billion by 2020. We've got cell phones, PDAs, iPods, and GPS devices — not to mention the data centers that store all of our digital information "in the cloud." The electricity needed to run all of our computers, gadgets, and gizmos is growing and now accounts for half of all ICT emissions. (ICT stands for "information and communications technology.")
Although the amount of energy used to power ICT is growing, it's important to measure all of the ways information technology helps us save energy too. A study by The Climate Group, in fact, shows that ICT emissions pay for themselves (PDF) (and then some) by enabling significant reductions in emissions by other sectors of the economy. After all, it's much more efficient to move electrons than to move atoms. "Virtual" tools like email, video-conferencing, and search engines replace more carbon-intensive activities like snail mail, business travel, and driving.
We can still make progress at improving computing efficiency across the industry, however, and Google is committed to doing so. In 2007 we co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a non-profit organization committed to reducing global CO2 emissions from the operation of computers by 54 million tons a year by 2010. Check out their website for more information on how you can reduce the environmental impact of your own computer use.
Announcing the 2009 Anita Borg Scholars and Finalists
We're pleased to announce our 2009 Anita Borg Scholars and Finalists. We established the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in 2003 to encourage undergraduate and graduate women completing degrees in computer science and related fields to excel in computing and technology and become active role models and leaders in the field. This year, we're awarding 50 scholars and finalists in the U.S., 18 in Canada and 56 in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. We'll also be awarding scholarships to female students in Australia and New Zealand later this year.
In addition to receiving academic scholarships, all of our winners will be invited to participate in all-expenses-paid networking retreats featuring workshops, speakers, panelists, breakout sessions and social activities at Google offices.
For more information on the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship and other Google scholarship opportunities, visit our scholarships page.
Congratulations to all of our winners!
The 2009 U.S. Anita Borg Scholars
In addition to receiving academic scholarships, all of our winners will be invited to participate in all-expenses-paid networking retreats featuring workshops, speakers, panelists, breakout sessions and social activities at Google offices.
For more information on the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship and other Google scholarship opportunities, visit our scholarships page.
Congratulations to all of our winners!
The 2009 U.S. Anita Borg Scholars
- Dana Forsthoefel - Georgia Institute of Technology
- Divya Ramachandran - University of California-Berkeley
- Elaine Short - Yale University
- Isabel Mattos - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Jennifer Roberts - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Katherine Corner - University of Colorado at Boulder
- Leshell Hatley - University of Maryland College Park
- Manjari Narayan - Rice University
- Mary David - University of Southern California
- Natalie Freed - Arizona State University Main
- Norma Savage - University of California-Santa Barbara
- Ramya Raghavendra - University of California-Santa Barbara
- Saleema Amershi - University of Washington
- Sara Sinclair - Dartmouth College
- Sarah Cooley - Oregon State University
- Sarah Loos - Indiana University Bloomington
- Sheena Lewis - Northwestern University
- Xuexin (Alice) Zhu - Harvey Mudd College
- Yi-Chieh Wu - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- YoungJoo Jeong - Carnegie Mellon University
- Alyssa Daw - California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo
- Angela Yen - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Carrie Ruppar - Graduate Program TBD
- Chaitrali Amrutkar - Georgia Institute of Technology
- Cindy Rubio Gonzalez - University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Corey Toler-Franklin - Princeton University
- Ekaterina Gonina - University of California-Berkeley
- Jacinda Shelly - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Jennifer Harrison - Arizona State University
- Julia Schwarz - University of Washington
- Kelli Ireland - University of Pittsburgh
- Kristi Morton - University of Washington
- Krystle de Mesa - University of California, San Diego
- Kyle Rector - Oregon State University
- Manasi Vartak - Worcester Polytechnic Institute
- Margaret Leibovic - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Maria Kazandjieva - Stanford University
- Pinar Muyan-Ozcelik - University of California-Davis
- Rachel Sealfon - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Rachelle Fuhrer - University of California, San Diego
- Sarah Shiplett - Wellesley College
- Shilpa Arora - Carnegie Mellon University
- Sneha Popley - Texas Christian University
- Sonal Gupta - University of Texas at Austin
- Sujatha Nagarajan - University of Illinois at Chicago
- Supriya Vadlamani - Cornell University
- Tracy Chou - Stanford University
- Valerie Yoder - Westminster College
- Wendy Stevenson - Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
- Xia Zhou - University of California-Santa Barbara
- April Khademi – University Of Toronto
- Jenna Cameron – University Of Western Ontario
- Jing Xiang – University Of British Columbia
- Pooja Viswanathan – University Of British Columbia
- Barbara Macdonald – University Of Waterloo
- Fahimeh Raja – University Of British Columbia
- Gail Carmichael – Carleton University
- Kate Tsoukalas (withdrawn) - Simon Fraser University
- Katherine Gunion – University Of Victoria
- Marjorie Locke – University Of Western Ontario
- Melanie Tupper – Dalhousie University
- Michelle Annett – University Of Alberta
- Mona Mojdeh – University Of Waterloo
- Ozge Yeloglu – Dalhousie University
- Phillipa Gill – University Of Toronto
- Sarah Carruthers – University Of Victoria
- Somayeh Moazeni – University Of Waterloo
- Xiaoyuan XU – Simon Fraser University
- Zahra Ahmadian – University Of British Columbia
- Anna Magdalena Michalska - University of Warsaw (Poland)
- Bianca Madalina Milatinovici - RWTH Aachen (Germany)
- Chia Ching Ooi - University of Freiburg (Gemany)
- Christiane Lammersen - Technische Universität Dortmund (Germany)
- Christiane Peters - Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands)
- Daria Yartseva - Lomonosov Moscow State University (Russia)
- Ekaterina Volkova - Lomonosov Moscow State University (Russia)
- Elisa Rondini - University College London (U.K.)
- Katayon Radkhah - Technische Universität Darmstadt (Germany)
- Keghani Kristelle Kouzoujian - Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (Qatar)
- Keren Censor - Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (Israel)
- Kira Radinsky - Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (Israel)
- Iulia Ion - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (Switzerland)
- Ligia Nicoleta Nistor - University of Oxford (U.K.)
- Maja Temerinac-Ott - University of Freiburg (Germany)
- Marian George - Alexandria University (Egypt)
- Moran Yassour - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel)
- Regina Bohnert - Universität Tübingen (Germany)
- Selen Basol - Sabanci University (Turkey)
- Suzan Bayhan - Bogazici University (Turkey)
- Tali Treibitz - Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (Israel)
- Adrienn Szabo - Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary)
- Anastasia Shakhshneyder - Novosibirsk State University (Russia)
- Andreea Voicu - Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands)
- Anna Astrakova - Novosibirsk State University (Russia)
- Anna Sperotto - University of Twente (Netherlands)
- Anna Katarzyna Zych - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (Switzerland)
- Birgit Vera Schmidt - Graz University of Technology (Austria)
- Didem Gozupek - Bogazici University (Turkey)
- Elena Smirnova - INRIA Sophia Antipolis (France)
- Franziska Huth - Saarland University (Germany)
- Gaya Nadarajan - The University of Edinburgh (U.K.)
- Irina Calciu - Jacobs University Bremen (Germany)
- Kerstin Bauer - Technische Universität Kaiserslautern (Germany)
- Laia Subirats i Mate - Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain)
- Limor Leibovich - Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (Israel)
- Lina AL Kanj - American University of Beirut (Lebanon)
- Lu Feng - University of Oxford (U.K.)
- Lucia Fedorova - Czech Technical University (Czech Republic)
- Maria-Camilla Fiazza - University of Verona (Italy)
- Maya Kabkab - American University of Beirut (Lebanon)
- Melinda Toth - Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary)
- Naama Elefant - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel)
- Nadezda Osadchieva - Bauman Moscow State Technical University (Russia)
- Natalia Criado - Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Spain)
- Nina Kargapolova - Novosibirsk State University (Russia)
- Noga Zewi - Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (Israel)
- Noura Yousef Salhi - Birzeit University (Palestine)
- Oana Tifrea - Vienna University of Technology (Austria)
- Rehab Khalid Alnemr - Hasso Plattner Institute (Germany)
- Riina Maigre - University of Technology (Estonia)
- Talya Meltzer - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel)
- Tamar Aizikowitz - Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (Israel)
- Unaizah Hanum Obaidellah - University of Sussex (U.K.)
- Yana Momchilova Mileva - Saarland University (Germany)
- Yimeng Yang - University of Twente (Netherlands)
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