In December of this year, representatives from nations around the globe will gather in Copenhagen to discuss a global agreement on climate change. The objective is to reduce global warming emissions sufficiently in order to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change and to support the global community in adapting to the unavoidable changes ahead. Denmark will act as host for this fifteenth Conference of the Parties under the United Nations’ Climate Change Convention, known as COP15.
In collaboration with the Danish government and others, we are launching a series of Google Earth layers and tours to allow you to explore the potential impacts of climate change on our planet and the solutions for managing it. Working with data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we show on Google Earth the range of expected temperature and precipitation changes under different global emissions scenarios that could occur throughout the century. Today we are unveiling our first climate tour on Google Earth: "Confronting Climate Change," with narration by Al Gore. Stay tuned for more tours in the coming weeks!
Together with the Danish government, we're also launching our YouTube COP15 channel. On the channel, you can submit your thoughts and questions on climate change to decision-makers and the world through an initiative called "Raise Your Voice." These videos will be broadcast on screens around the conference in December and rated by viewers of the channel. The top-rated contributions will be aired globally during the COP15 CNN/YouTube debate on December 15th, and the top two submissions will win a trip to Copenhagen. We look forward to seeing your videos!
Posted by Benjamin Kott, Green Business Operations and Jonas Vang, Industry Analyst
You might have noticed an unexplained set of doodles on the Google homepage and a couple tweets from our official Twitter stream, @google, over the last two weeks. On September 5th, we posted a doodle with the abduction of our second 'o' and a coded tweet from its alien captors: 1.12.12 25.15.21.18 15 1.18.5 2.5.12.15.14.7 20.15 21.19, which translates into "All your O are belong to us" (a nod to the Japanese video game, Zero Wing).
Ten days later, the UFO returned. This time, it was to leave its mysterious mark on the fields.
While the link from the doodle to a search for "crop circles" didn't provide any more clues, we also tweeted the lat/long coordinates of Horsell Commons, the location of the first alien landing in H.G. Wells 1898 classic, The War of the Worlds. Some of you figured out what we were doing, but we weren't ready to reveal it all just yet.
Now, we're finally acknowledging the reason for the doodles with an official nod to Herbert George, who would be 143 years old today.
Inspiration for innovation in technology and design can come from lots of places; we wanted to celebrate H.G. Wells as an author who encouraged fantastical thinking about what is possible, on this planet and beyond. And maybe have some fun while we were doing it.
The invasion of the logo by alien crafts and pods makes our series complete, but you'll have to read the book to find out how Wells' story really ends.
Hundreds of thousands of advertisers use search advertising — short, highly relevant text ads alongside search results on Google and other search engines — to grow their businesses. Thanks to a decade of innovation, search advertising is an open platform that allows businesses to easily connect with customers.
As you browse the web today, you'll also see "display advertising," such as videos, images and interactive ads. Like search ads, these connect users with products, services and ideas that interest them. For advertisers, display ads are vital in boosting awareness and sales. For websites and online publishers, they help fund investments in online content and the web services that we all use.
But with a multitude of display ad formats, and thousands of websites, it often takes thousands of hours for advertisers to plan and manage their display ad campaigns. With this complexity, lots of advertisers today just don't bother, or don't invest as much as they would like.
On the other side of the equation, some publishers are left with up to 80% of their ad space unsold. It’s like airlines flying with their planes mostly empty. And for the ad space that they do sell, publishers also have to deal with the complexity of managing thousands of advertisers and campaigns.
We believe that a better system built on better technology can help grow the display advertising pie and benefit everyone.
Three principles underpin our approach to the display advertising field:
1. Simplify the system for buying and selling display ads: For example, our DoubleClick ad serving products help advertisers and publishers manage campaigns and ad formats across thousands of websites and from thousands of advertisers.
2. Deliver better performance that advertisers and agencies can measure: We're building a host of new features to help advertisers to run display ad campaigns across the Google Content Network (comprising hundreds of thousands of AdSense partner sites) and on YouTube. We're also developing better measurement and reporting technology so they can figure out what's working and what's not.
3. Open up the ecosystem: We want to democratize access to display advertising and make it accessible and open, like search advertising. We recently launched the Display Ad Builder to help businesses easily set up and run display ad campaigns. 80% of advertisers who use that product have never run a display ad campaign before.
We've been working hard to put these principles into practice, and today we're excited to announce the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange, a step towards creating a more open display advertising ecosystem for everyone. The Ad Exchange is a real-time marketplace that helps large online publishers on one side; and ad networks and agency networks on the other, buy and sell display advertising space.
These publishers and ad networks manage and represent large volumes of ads and ad space from lots of advertisers and websites. By bringing them together in an open marketplace in which prices are set in a real-time auction, the Ad Exchange enables display ads and ad space to be allocated much more efficiently. This improves returns for advertisers and enables publishers to get the most value out of their online content.
An explanation of the Ad Exchange is here (PDF). You can read in more detail about the features of the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange on the DoubleClick blog.
AdWords advertisers will be able to run ads on sites in the Ad Exchange, using their existing AdWords interface. This means more high quality sites for AdWords advertisers to run display ads on. Similarly, our AdSense publishers will benefit from more high-quality display advertisers coming through the Ad Exchange. You can read more about these benefits on the AdWords Blog and the AdSense Blog.
To find out more about our overall display advertising vision and the many services and features we've been investing in across the Google Content Network, YouTube and DoubleClick, check out the video below:
We believe that growing the display advertising pie for everyone will greatly enhance the web experience for advertisers, publishers, and ultimately users. The DoubleClick Ad Exchange will help create a more open marketplace and is a major step towards that vision.
Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Product Management
Last month we launched a new feature of AdWords called Bid Simulator. Bid Simulator takes some of the guess work out of cost per click (CPC) bidding by estimating the number of clicks or impressions you could have received if you had used a different maximum CPC bid. Today, I thought I would take the opportunity to help you make the most of this new feature by explaining how to use the data from Bid Simulator to maximize the profit from your marketing investment.
In general, when you increase your maximum CPC bid for keywords on search you are able to generate more clicks to your site. This may be because your new bid qualifies you to appear higher up in the Sponsored Links on the search results page, or because your higher bid qualifies your ad to appear in new, more expensive auctions. The goal for you as an advertiser is to decide whether or not these additional clicks come at a cost that is still profitable for you.
To make this decision, you need to compare your expected value per click to your incremental cost per click. Your value per click is how much a click for a particular keyword is worth to you, on average. Your incremental cost per click is how much extra you are paying, on average, for the extra clicks you are getting from your higher bid. When your value per click is higher than your incremental cost per click it makes sense to increase your bid. On the other hand, if your value per click is lower than your incremental cost per click, you probably want to decrease your bid.
To learn more, you can watch the tutorial video below. In the video, I'll show you how to calculate these values, how to interpret them and how to use the data to maximize the profit from your marketing investment. My team and I are always looking for ways to help make the AdWords auction easier to understand so if you have other topics that you'd like us to address, please leave a comment on the video and we may be able to make it a topic for a future video.
Watch it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRx7AMb6rZ0
The image above is a CAPTCHA — you can read it, but computers have a harder time interpreting the letters. We tried to make it hard for computers to recognize because we wanted to give humans the scoop first, but we're happy to announce to everybody now that Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to help protect more than 100,000 websites from spam and fraud.
Since computers have trouble reading squiggly words like these, CAPTCHAs are designed to allow humans in but prevent malicious programs from scalping tickets or obtain millions of email accounts for spamming. But there’s a twist — the words in many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books. Computers find it hard to recognize these words because the ink and paper have degraded over time, but by typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text.
In this way, reCAPTCHA’s unique technology improves the process that converts scanned images into plain text, known as Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This technology also powers large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search. Having the text version of documents is important because plain text can be searched, easily rendered on mobile devices and displayed to visually impaired users. So we'll be applying the technology within Google not only to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products but also to improve our books and newspaper scanning process.
That's why we're excited to welcome the reCAPTCHA team to Google, and we're committed to delivering the same high level of performance that websites using reCAPTCHA have come to expect. Improving the availability and accessibility of all the information on the Internet is really important to us, so we're looking forward to advancing this technology with the reCAPTCHA team.
Posted by Luis von Ahn, co-founder of reCAPTCHA, and Will Cathcart, Google Product Manager
The 2008 elections demonstrated how technology can increase political participation, and now we're beginning to see the power of Web 2.0 come to government.
On the heels of last week's Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C., we're excited to launch Google for the Public Sector, a one-stop shop of tools and tips that local, state and federal government officials can use to help promote transparency and increase citizen participation.
The site helps government agencies:
Make your website, and the information it offers, easier to find. For example, in less than 50 technical staff hours, Arizona's Government Information Technology Agency made hundreds of thousands of public records and other webpages "crawlable" to search engines and visible in Google search results.
Visualize your information and tell your story in Google Earth & Maps to the hundreds of millions of people who use them. The State Department runs an interactive Google Map of Secretary Clinton's travels, which shows where she has been and includes photos and videos.
Use the power of online video to engage millions of potential viewers and give constituents a voice. In the U.S. alone, the Senate, House of Representatives, White House, and federal government, among others, all have YouTube channels.
According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, nearly four out of five American Internet users go online to find government information. Technology will help play a key role in making this information accessible, useful and transparent.
Posted by Ginny Hunt, Public Sector Project Manager
At Google Chrome's first birthday just two weeks ago, we looked forward to an action-packed year for the browser and the web. Thanks to a full year of great feedback from our users, we're kicking off our second year of Google Chrome with a brand new stable release. This release comes hot on the heels of 51 developer, 21 beta and 15 stable updates and 3,505 bugfixes in the past year.
For you, that means significant speed improvements for the browser as well as a fresh redesign of some of its most loved features. To walk through the top highlights in the spirit of a September of epic sporting tournaments, here's a play-by-play comparison of our brand new release against our previous releases.
A wicked serve, volley, and return: Fast, fast and fast
This new release of Google Chrome is faster than ever, as we continue to provide a modern browser that starts up quickly from your desktop, and is fast to load web pages and web applications.
Notably, we've improved by more than 150% in Javascript performance since our very first beta, and by more than 25% since the most recent stable release.
The V8 and SunSpider benchmarks measure Javascript performance for browsers
Your playbook for the web: The New Tab page
When you download and fire up this latest release of Google Chrome, you'll notice that the New Tab page sports a new look:
The redesigned, new New Tab page
The old New Tab page, which we're now retiring
We've redesigned the New Tab page so that it's easy to use and easily customizable, following some rigorous testing on the most recent beta channel release. Now you can rearrange thumbnails of your most-visited websites by simply clicking and dragging your mouse. Additionally, you can pin thumbnails to a spot so they don't disappear even if your browsing habits change. This way, you can easily get to the websites you care about with just one click.
You can do even more to customize your New Tab page — for example, you can hide parts of the page you don't want to see, or even opt for a simple list view of all your most visited websites. In addition, we've added handy tips to the bottom of the New Tab page to help you get the most out of Google Chrome.
As we bid adieu to the old, New Tab page, let us know what you think about the redesigned New Tab page — we'd love to hear your feedback.
With just a few deft strokes: The Omnibox
We've also improved one of the most used and loved features of Google Chrome, the Omnibox. Because it's a search bar as well as the web address bar, the multi-talented Omnibox helps you get to the sites you're looking for with just a few keystrokes. With this release, we've optimized the presentation of the drop-down menu and added little icons to help you distinguish between suggested sites, searches, bookmarks, and sites from your browsing history.
The new Omnibox drop-down menu
Bringing the cutting edge to the field: HTML5 capabilities
We're very excited about HTML5 becoming standard in modern browsers, and continued to add HTML5 capabilities to this stable release. We're particularly excited about the <video> tag in HTML5, which makes embedding videos in a page as simple as embedding regular images. The <video> tag also allows video playback without a plug-in.
You can give the <video> tag a whirl in Google Chrome and also check out our 50th Chrome Experiment, which uses HTML5 <audio> and <canvas> tags. It's great to see the great innovations that come from the use of open standards, and we'll continue to bring the latest and greatest in web technologies quickly to users through Google Chrome.
And finally, a photo finish with style: Deck your browser with Themes
After testing out Themes for Google Chrome in the beta channel, we're finally releasing it in this stable release. Themes allow you to deck out your browser with colors, patterns and images. We'll be bringing more Themes for the browser soon, but in the meantime, you can change the theme of your browser by visiting the Themes Gallery.
Theme preview: Star Gazing
If you haven't tried Google Chrome recently, we invite you to download and browse the web with this new stable release. Many of the improvements in this release were inspired by the responses from users, so we're all ears if you have any feedback. If you're already using Google Chrome, you'll be automatically updated to this new version soon, but if you're itching to try this right away, download the latest version at google.com/chrome.
Posted by Anthony Laforge, Program Manager, Google Chrome
In collaboration with the Danish government and others, we are launching a series of Google Earth layers and tours to allow you to explore the potential impacts of climate change on our planet and the solutions for managing it. Working with data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we show on Google Earth the range of expected temperature and precipitation changes under different global emissions scenarios that could occur throughout the century. Today we are unveiling our first climate tour on Google Earth: "Confronting Climate Change," with narration by Al Gore. Stay tuned for more tours in the coming weeks!
