A galactic mentor

This month marks the 30th anniversary of the final quarter being dropped into the world’s first commercial video game, for it was in May of 1979 that Galaxy Game was removed from the Coffee House café at Stanford’s Tresidder student union. I spent a good part of five years feeding coins into Galaxy’s wondrous console, and in return it taught me and several other Silicon Valley denizens valuable lessons that laid the groundwork for much of what we have done since.

I met Galaxy Game in the Summer of 1974. My family had just moved to Palo Alto and I had no friends, so my brother and I rode our bikes around the Stanford campus looking for things to do. I was in 8th grade and the bowling alley got boring quickly, but next door, amidst students and lattes (also a novelty at the time) stood two large consoles, side by side, with odd-looking little black screens. Behind those screens sat a DEC PDP-11/20 powering a riveting game built on a simple concept: use a joystick and a couple of buttons (one for torpedoes, one for hyperspace) to destroy the other spaceships. Best of all, unlike its descendants such as Asteroids, Galaxy was a multi-player game. Those opposing spaceships were controlled by the people sitting next to you, and if you won the game you kept your quarter.

I knew a good deal when I saw one, so I hung around the Coffee House and got to know the game’s co-creator, a Stanford grad named Bill Pitts. That's how I got my first job in high-tech: in exchange for keeping the consoles clean, I got a few dollars per day and a bunch of insider tips about how to play. For example, if your torpedo was on course to destroy an opponent’s ship and that opponent escaped into hyperspace, you could follow him there, shoot again, and destroy him. Imagine the face of a graduate student who thinks he has outwitted that annoying kid, only to find when he releases his finger from the hyperspace button that his ship is nothing but fragments of white floating randomly into the blackness of space. Nothing on Wii matches it!

Galaxy's lessons have stayed with me. Its design was simple and easy to use but with the depth to satisfy the most committed players. Its on-screen dashboard fed players real-time information about fuel, torpedoes, and location, my first inkling that data is critical to making smart decisions.

Finally, in Galaxy achieving your goals sometimes required a jump to hyperspace. My opponents thought hyperspace was a last resort, a refuge from a losing path. I discovered that it was a way to win — high risk and scary, but with a huge payoff. So when in doubt, press the button and make the jump! At worst you’ll lose a quarter, but at best you’ll rule the Galaxy.

Posted by Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP, Product Management

Step into the spotlight with YouTube Insight

This post is the latest in an ongoing series on The Power of Measurement. Previous topics have covered ways to make your website as successful as possible through tools such as Analytics and Website Optimizer. – Ed.

Online video has become increasingly popular and it is now recognized as a very powerful medium for delivering a message. As more and more media companies and advertisers are embracing online video, and millions of people are uploading their own videos every day, building a following and reaching your target audience can be very challenging. We developed a free analytics tool, YouTube Insight, as one way to help you do just that. Since the launch of Insight just over a year ago, we've been adding more features to help you better understand how the YouTube community is interacting with your video and grow your audience.

Just like there is a "science" behind programming on TV, content owners and advertisers are becoming more sophisticated about how to gain optimal exposure for their content on YouTube. So how do you master this "science"? First, let's start with the basics. Monitoring viewing trends through Insight's "Views" tab can help you nail down the best time to upload your new videos. For example, Mondo Media uses Insight to monitor and predict surges in views of their strongest videos. They then time the launch of new episodes with these "waves" of traffic, making it easier for their existing audience to discover new favorites. Using Insight to increase their momentum on the site is one of the practices that have helped Mondo Media become the 6th most viewed YouTube Channel of all time.

Insight has even more sophisticated features, like the "Discovery" feature, which shows you how your viewers found your videos (i.e., through search, an embedded player, related videos or viral sharing). Just like with websites, figuring out how visitors are coming to your videos can help you grow your audience. Using "Discovery," the band Weezer was surprised to find out that many of their followers were actually techies and not indie rockers: a large number of people had discovered their "Pork & Beans" video on YouTube through the embedded player on tech blogs. This finding led them to optimize their marketing strategy and shift funds in their budget to tech blogs for promoting their summer tour.

Using "Discovery," you can also see which keywords are driving views and then advertise against these keywords using YouTube's Promoted Video product. You can see exactly how effective this method of promotion is and optimize your a spend in the future.

Understanding which parts of your video people liked can be difficult, so we created the "Hot Spots" feature in Insight to show you the ups-and-downs of viewership for every single moment of your video, compared to videos of similar length. The higher the graph, the hotter your video, meaning fewer viewers are leaving your video and they may also be rewinding to watch that point in the video again. Understanding which parts of your video your audience likes enables you to make better content. The better the content, the more likely it is that viewers will send your video to their friends, kicking off the cycle of virality and helping you grow your audience.

There are countless ways to use the data gathered from Insight to improve your YouTube numbers. Someone using YouTube to share a video of their vacation can just as easily use these tools as an advertiser working on a major campaign. And with our latest addition to YouTube Insight, you will no longer have to rely exclusively on the information you can get from the features described above. Last week we opened Insight, making your data exportable into CSV files. CSV files are open-format files that organize data so it can be moved and analyzed using common spreadsheet software such as Google Docs and Microsoft Excel. Now you can view and manipulate your data any way you like. Looking for ideas? Try comparing the view count for different videos side by side, mapping out where your viewers are coming from over time, or comparing discovery sources by country.

Good luck to all the hopeful YouTube stars among you!

Posted by Tracy Chan and Kenny Stoltz, YouTube Product Managers

The best and the brightest

I can't think of a better environment than academia for asking hard questions and trying to solve the unsolvable. It's at universities that graduate students perform some of the most exciting and game-changing research in computer science and technology. These university labs foster the students that are going to be the next innovators and leaders in research.

We started the Google Fellowship Program this year to support graduate students in their quest to discover and achieve great things. Our goal was to find the best and brightest PhD students and award them a unique fellowship that highlights their contributions to research and supports them through their graduate studies. Several top universities submitted their students for consideration by research scientists, distinguished engineers and executives at Google. The breadth of research covered by these students and the scope of their vision was astounding. Learning about them was exciting; choosing from among them was truly difficult.

After careful review, we are proud to announce the 2009 Google Fellowship recipients:

• Roxana Geambasu, Google Fellowship in Cloud Computing (University of Washington)
• Michael Piatek, Google Fellowship in Computer Networking (University of Washington)
• David Sontag, Google Fellowship in Machine Learning (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Ali Farhadi, Google Fellowship in Computer Vision Image Interpretation (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
• Nicholas Chen, Google Fellowship in Human-Computer Interaction (University of Maryland)
• Siddhartha Sen, Google Fellowship in Fault Tolerant Computing (Princeton University)
• Ryan Peterson, Google Fellowship in Distributed Systems (Cornell University)
• Eric Gilbert, Google Fellowship in Social Computing (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
• Micha Elsner, Google Fellowship in Natural Language Processing (Brown University)
• Subhransu Maji, Google Fellowship in Computer Vision Object Recognition (University of California, Berkeley)
• Nicolas Lambert, Google Fellowship in Market Algorithms (Stanford University)
• Han Liu, Google Fellowship in Statistics (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Lixia Liu, Google Fellowship in Compiler Technology (Purdue University)

These students exemplify excellence in all areas, and we look forward to the impact that they are sure to have on their fields and the world. The Google Fellowship will provide them with funding to cover their tuition and expenses, plus an Android-powered phone and a Google mentor. Our sincere congratulations to all of them!

Posted by Leslie Yeh Johnson, Google University Relations

Behind the scenes of the Search Options panel

On Tuesday, we announced 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.


We know that people search for a wide variety of things and we're continually thinking of new search features to help them find information more quickly and easily. The idea for the Search Options panel originated as a way to accommodate the functionality offered by these new features within the search results page. While it might seem like the panel was simple to put together, a lot of collaboration between design, research, and engineering happened behind the scenes in order to produce the best experience possible.

The team began by generating a broad range of directions, which we refined through design sessions and reviews. Confident about a handful of concepts, we began to seek out user feedback using eye-tracking and usability studies. These studies provided us with valuable feedback about how people understood the options in the panel and interacted with them.

Here's an example of an eye-tracking path that illustrates how a participant wanted to get a sense of the quality of the results before deciding what search option to apply:

After each study, we iterated on the designs, making changes to everything from the order and behavior of the options, to the location of the panel and the way people opened and closed it. We also paid close attention to the visual design of the options panel. We wanted it to feel familiar –- not only to work the way you expect from Google, but to look and feel like Google, too. Even though you just started using the panel, we hope it will seem as if it were there all along.

Below, you can see some of our initial concepts for the Search Options panel:

And here are examples of various iterations, once we had a firm concept in mind:


Once the designs were further solidified, we ran a number of tests with a small portion of our live searches to see how many visitors used the Search Options panel and which options were most popular. This quantitative research complemented qualitative feedback to give us a more complete idea of people’s understanding of Search Options. This process brought us to what you see today.

Even now that the Search Options panel has launched, the work is not over. We’ll continue to monitor how people interact with Google Search, find ways to improve the user experience, listen to your feedback, come up with new tools, and, who knows, maybe even add more wonder to the wonder wheel.

Posted by Jen Kozenski Devins, Jamie Divine, Melanie Kellar, and Marcin Wichary, User Experience Team

Bike to Work Day 2009

Almost every Friday, I jump on my bike in San Francisco and ride roughly 45 miles to get to work at the Google campus in Mountain View — it takes about 3 hours. Most people think I'm crazy, but seeing the sun rise over the bay and feeling the rush of the air as I speed down Cortland Hill at close to 30mph on my bike makes it all worth it.

Today and tomorrow, Googlers in 42 offices from around the world are joining me in celebrating Bike to Work Day. Google's participation in this national event began in 2003 with only a handful of participants. Through the years, the tradition has grown from a purely local event to one that involves numerous offices in competition to get the longest distance biked, the most bikers, and the greatest percentage of an office participating.

More than 500 Googlers in the San Francisco Bay Area participated, jumping on their bikes and leaving traffic behind. The benefits to us are clear; not only is biking great for health and fitness, but it also spares the earth a day of pollution.

To see us in action, check out the photo album below.



Posted by Debbie Leight, Product Marketing Manager

This is your pilot speaking. Now, about that holding pattern...

Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That's basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.

An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We've been working hard to make our services ultrafast and "always on," so it's especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We're very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we'll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won't happen again. All planes are back on schedule now.

Posted by Urs Hoelzle, SVP, Operations

Understanding health-related searches

As we blogged last summer, there are lots of experiments running on Google web search all over the world. Today we've started a temporary experiment that some people might find interesting: we're researching how Google users search the Internet when they or someone they know is feeling sick.

Understanding how people search when they're feeling sick is an important problem to solve, as it can help improve projects like Google Flu Trends, which uses aggregated search data to detect influenza epidemics. Statistics gathered in this experiment may also help Google deliver more relevant search results in the future. For example, someone who searches for [arthritis pain] to understand why an aging parent is experiencing joint pain might want to learn about nearby health facilities and potential treatments, whereas somebody who searches for [arthritis pain] because she is doing a research project might want results about how common arthritis is and what its risk factors are. Rather than make educated guesses about how many users are searching because they're sick, we're running this experiment to collect real statistics. This is not a permanent change, but a short-term experiment. A small percentage of random health-related searches will trigger the poll question.

For example, at the bottom of the search results for [headache], some users will see a survey which asks whether they were searching because they or someone they know has a headache:


Similarly, if you happen to search for [ibuprofen], a common anti-inflammatory drug, you might see a survey which asks whether you were searching because you or somebody you know is taking ibuprofen:


Data collected in this survey will be aggregated across thousands of users. Survey responses will be stored together with the original search query, but will not be associated with email addresses or other personally identifiable information. Survey data will not be used for advertising — it will only be used to help Google improve health-related search results and to help refine public health trends based on aggregated search queries, much like Google Flu Trends. You can learn more about how Google protects users' privacy at our Privacy Center.

For more information, please take a look at our FAQ.

Posted by Roni Zeiger, MD, Product Manager and Jeremy Ginsberg, Software Engineer