Stories by Googlers

10/10/2008 03:36:00 PM

I recently had the chance to interview several long-time Googlers about the early days. To commemorate our 10th birthday, we've been revisiting our memories by digging into company lore. As fun as it has been to look back, of course we've also got our sights firmly set on what lies ahead.

Vint Cerf has some predictions about the interplanetary Internet, while Kai-Fu Lee talks about the growing ubiquity of cloud computing. Also featured are stories from early Googlers, like Craig Silverstein's memories of a certain famous garage, and Marissa Mayer's reflections on the spirit that has carried over from our formative years.

So take a few minutes to watch this blended tale of startup quirkiness and big dreams. And if you like, feel free to comment on YouTube.




Posted by Joscelin Cooper, Google Blog Team

Getting around your neighborhood with Google Maps

10/08/2008 08:02:00 AM

When I moved to the Bay Area last year, everything was new to me. I didn't know Los Altos from Los Gatos, good eateries in my neighborhood, or how to get to where I wanted to go. Whether you're moving to a new area, traveling to a new place, or simply exploring a new part of town, this may sound familiar to a lot of people.

There's a simple solution: turn to Google Maps to find local information. We've gathered a lot of useful info about local businesses so you can find everything you need in one place. You can find neighborhoods and see if they're close to downtown, parks or other places of interest. If you're moving into a new home, you can look for nearby supermarkets, hardware stores, restaurants and other places that will help you settle in. Almost every business listing includes the phone number, website, store hours, price and more. Most also have user reviews and photos.

And it turns out I wasn't the only one who turned to Google Maps to learn more about my town. Watch this video to see how Google Maps helped Ryan, a fellow newcomer to the Bay Area:



Even if you know your hometown like the back of your hand, odds are you'll want to go somewhere new at some point. Not only can you find out the address of a specific location and get directions to it before even heading out the door, but you can virtually explore the neighborhood with Street View (available in many cities in the U.S., Japan, and Australia), or check out live traffic conditions. You can also use the "Send" feature of Google Maps to text the address to your phone or email directions to friends.

Watch this video to see all the things you can do:



And don't forget, with Google Maps for mobile, you can access all of this great information on the go.

Posted by Cathy Tang, Google Maps and Earth

The Presidential debate: Expanding the town hall

10/08/2008 02:18:00 AM

As we promised, here's an update on the search patterns we observed during last night's presidential debate. While a few lucky citizens were able to ask the candidates questions directly, millions of others used Google to find their answers.

Similar to last Thursday, people sought to understand the meaning of several words mentioned in the debate: morass, commodity, junket, cynicism, and cronyism to name a few. In the chart below you can see four of the most popular queries during the debate. People were quite interested in both Meg Whitman and Warren Buffett, who were mentioned as potential candidates for the Secretary of Treasury, but the biggest rising query was Senator McCain's paraphrasing of Theodore Roosevelt's motto. Both candidates spoke against genocide while discussing the role of the United States as a peacekeeper, and as we saw in the vice presidential debate, nuclear energy and weapons were prominent topics.

Queries occurred as the candidates talked, but
the query volume dropped after 90-minute debate ended.

Here's an additional view on queries for each of the candidates, charting queries from swing states (which had no more than a 5% gap between votes for George Bush and John Kerry in the 2004 election) and non-swing states. Swing states generated proportionally more queries for the candidates than non-swing states. Both candidates peaked at the end of the debate, with McCain showing a larger spike while Obama has a larger overall volume.

Queries for the presidential candidates form a higher fraction of all queries in swing states.

We also were curious how queries for Senator Biden and Governor Palin during their debate compared to queries for Senators McCain and Obama last night. As you see here, searches on the candidates during the VP debate came out on top:

Queries containing "Biden" and "Palin" had higher peaks during last week's debate
than did "McCain" and "Obama" queries last night.

Using Google Hot Trends you can see some of the more interesting things people were researching during this debate. Visit Google Election Trends to learn about longer-term election-related Google search queries, and read our previous post for the earlier VP debate queries.

Posted by Jeffrey D. Oldham, Software Engineer, and Fred Leach, Customer Labs Analyst

I clicked to buy and I liked it

10/07/2008 02:35:00 PM

When you view a YouTube video with a great soundtrack, you often see comments from YouTube users asking about the name of the song and where they can download it. Or when users watch the trailer for an upcoming video game, they want to know when it will be released and where they can buy it.

Today, we're taking our first steps to providing YouTube users with this kind of instant gratification, by adding "click-to-buy" links to the watch pages of thousands of YouTube partner videos. Click-to-buy links are non-obtrusive retail links, placed on the watch page beneath the video with the other community features. Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos quickly and easily, now users can click-to-buy products -- like songs and video games -- related to the content they're watching on the site. We're getting started by embedding iTunes and Amazon.com links on videos from companies like EMI Music, and providing Amazon.com product links to the newly-released video game Spore(TM) on videos from Electronic Arts.

This is just the beginning of building a broad, viable e-commerce platform for users and partners on YouTube. Our vision is to help partners across all industries -- from music, to film, to print, to TV -- offer useful and relevant products to a large, yet targeted audience, and generate additional revenue from their content on YouTube beyond the advertising we serve against their videos. And those partners who use our content identification and management system can also enable these links on user-generated content, by using Content ID to claim videos and choose to leave them up on the site.

These retail links are being gradually added to our library of music videos and are currently only available to users in the United States, but our goal is to slowly but surely expand the program to additional content and product partners, as well as our international users. We'll be experimenting with the UI over time to make sure this works for our community, and we'll continue to innovate based on your feedback. We're just getting started, so stay tuned for other innovative new features and product options soon.

YouTube partners interested in this program should contact their partner manager.

Posted by Glenn Brown, YouTube Strategic Partner Development Manager, and Thai Tran, YouTube Product Manager

Knol debates: See both sides, get involved

10/07/2008 10:04:00 AM

As the election season builds to a climax, the candidates have been engaging in a number of debates. With all the excitement, we wanted to get involved, so we've started our own set of debates on our new tool Knol. The debates on Knol are meant to offer a variety of in-depth opinions from experts so you can really understand all sides of an issue.

Our first debate focuses on the economy. Economists from the Cato Institute and the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) have offered opening arguments on what should come next now that the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act is law. Take a look to see what they think -- but don't stop there. As with most articles in Knol, these are open to collaboration, so you can rate what you read, submit comments, write full responses (i.e. reviews),  or even suggest edits to the author by making changes right in the knol itself. These experts are using Knol because they want to collaborate with readers, and they are committed to updating the articles based on your input.

In addition, there's a forum where you can suggest additional topics that you'd like to see debated in our new tool Google Moderator.  As we prepare for the election, experts from leading think-tanks including Cato, EPI, the Heritage Foundation, and the Center for American Progress Action Fund will conduct similar debates on the issues you find the most important.

We hope these knols help inform your decision on election day, and we encourage you to voice your opinion.

Posted by Matt Ghering, Product Marketing Manager

New Technology Roundtable series

10/06/2008 02:44:00 PM

We've just posted the first three videos in the Google Technology Roundtable Series. Each one is a discussion with senior Google researchers and technologists about one of our most significant achievements. We use a talk show format, where I lead a discussion on the technology.

While the videos are intended for a reasonably technical audience, I think they may be interesting to many as an overview of the key challenges and ideas underlying Google's systems. And of course they offer a glimpse into the people behind Google.

The first one we made is "Large-Scale Search System Infrastructure and Search Quality." I interview Google Fellows Jeff Dean and Amit Singhal on their insights in how search works at Google.

The next title is "Map Reduce," a discussion of this key technology (first, at Google, and now having a great impact across the field) for harnessing parallelism provided by very large-scale clusters computers, while mitigating the component failures that inevitably occur in such big systems. My discussion is with four of our Map Reduce expert engineers: Sanjay Ghemawat and Jeff Dean again, plus Software Engineers Jerry Zhao and Matt Austern who discuss the origin, evolution and future of Map Reduce. By the way, this type of infrastructure underlies the infrastructure concepts in our recent post on "The Intelligent Cloud."

The third video, "Applications of Human Language Technology," is a discussion of our enormous progress in large-scale automated translation of languages and speech recognition. Both of these technology domains are coming of age with capabilities that will truly impact what we expect of computers on a day-to-day basis. I discuss these technologies with human language technology experts Franz Josef Och, an expert in the automated translation of languages, and Mike Cohen, an expert in speech processing.

We hope to produce more of these, so please leave feedback at YouTube (in the comments field for each video), and we will incorporate your ideas into our future efforts.

[Cross-posted on the Google Research Blog.]

Posted by Alfred Spector, VP of Research and Special Initiatives

The VP debate: Candidates, questions, and queries

10/06/2008 06:34:00 AM

If information is the currency of democracy, as Thomas Jefferson allegedly said, then during last Thursday's vice-presidential debate between Senator Biden and Governor Palin a lot of people used Google Search to get a bit wealthier, metaphorically speaking. Using Google Hot Trends, we can see some of the more interesting things that people were researching, and you can do the same to follow along yourself during tomorrow night's second presidential debate (9 PM ET). But first, here's what people were curious about during the VP match.

Many people were simply interested in understanding the meaning of particular terms. Governor Palin called Senator McCain a "maverick" several times, sending many viewers to Google to query definition of maverick, what is a maverick, and define:maverick.

As the debaters spoke, voters queried for more information.

When Biden mentioned that the "theocracy controls the security apparatus" in Iran, users searched for the meaning of theocracy — as they did when he spoke of the windfall profits tax.

Getting these definitions got a bit tougher when the candidates couldn't even agree on pronunciation. Discussion about a certain type of energy caused a flurry of queries: nucular vs nuclear, nuclear pronunciation, palin nucular, and even nukular. And when Senator Biden talked about the "7,000 madrasses built along [the Pakistani-Afghan] border", the queries ranged from madrass, madrases, madrasa, and even madras, a major city in India that's most definitely not on the Pakistani-Afghan border.

Governor Palin's claim that "Israel is in jeopardy of course when we're dealing with Ahmadinejad as a leader of Iran" led viewers to try to learn more about this leader even if they could not spell his name. They searched for [Achmadinijad], [Akmadinijad], [Akmadinajad], and the correct Ahmadinejad. Some did not even try, instead looking for [president Iran] and [Iran leader]. The Governor also referred to General McKiernan, the U.S. military leader in Afghanistan, as "McClellan", sending viewers in search of McClellan, general in Afghanistan, General McClellan Afghanistan, and general Afghanistan surge. Some searchers eventually did find the correct general, but not that many.

Historical references abounded. When Senator Biden claimed "This is the most important election you will ever, ever have voted in, any of you, since 1932", some people wanted to know what it was about the 1932 presidential campaign between Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt that was so special. And twice as many them wanted to know about that "shining city on a hill", a phrase from Ronald Reagan's farewell address that was originally coined in 1630 by John Winthrop.

When Senator Biden offered a civics lesson ("Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the Executive Branch") many people checked, and learned that Article I of the Constitution describes the legislative branch of the U.S. government. The executive branch is described in Article II. Others just searched directly for the role of vice president and vice president duties.

People searched on clean coal and took a look at Senator Biden's position (as the candidate asked them to) with queries like Biden clean coal.

These are some of the more interesting queries, but which were the most popular ones? Among the candidates, Senator Biden was a big winner. Searches on him soared more than 70-fold, compared to a week earlier. Governor Palin, much more of a search favorite in the weeks leading up to the debate, only saw a 6x jump, but her volume outpaced Senator Biden's.

Searches for the VP candidates peaked near the debate's end.

Beyond names, two search terms which triggered the most searches were [nuclear] (a 130x spike compared to a week earlier) and [maverick] (70x). [Register to vote] was also quite popular; we even have a special site for that.

The Commission on Presidential Debates, which hosts the debates, has stated its objective as providing "the best possible information to viewers and listeners". From Google's perspective — the little search box on viewers' and listeners' computers and mobile phones — the vice presidential debate did a pretty darn good job.

We'll give you an update on tomorrow night's debate later this week. In the meantime, keep an eye on the most recent queries yourself on Google Hot Trends; they change frequently and will start to reflect the debate's talking points soon after it finishes.

Posted by Jeffrey D. Oldham, Software Engineer; Fred Leach, Customer Labs Analyst; and Betsy Masiello, Economics Analyst

Amazon conservation in San Francisco

10/04/2008 06:47:00 AM

For most of us, today is another Saturday. For a chief of the Surui tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, it's a unique day, because San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has issued a proclamation declaring October 4th as "Chief Almir Surui Day."


Chief Almir and the Amazon Conservation Team will be in the Bay Area to attend the world premiere of a documentary film by Denise Zmekhol called Children of the Amazon. They'll also participate in a unique panel tomorrow, October 5th.

In June, a team of Googlers went to the Amazon to train indigenous people including Chief Almir's Surui tribe on how to use Google Earth, You Tube and other Internet tools to show the world what's at stake with deforestation in the Amazon. The tribes are using this knowledge to preserve their history, culture, and develop a long-term sustainability plan to protect their rainforest and create economic opportunity.

Filmmaker Zmekhol joined us on the trip and filmed dozens of hours of footage. Out of this footage has come a story about cloud computing from under a lush canopy of Amazon rainforest, where a group of emerging technologists are eager to share their story about their culture and their plan to preserve their forest and their way of life. (Learn more about our trip here.)



Posted by Tanya Keen, Google Earth Outreach

Browse what the world is saying on Blog Search

10/01/2008 03:41:00 PM

Did you know that millions of bloggers around the world write new posts each week? If you're like me, you probably read only a tiny fraction of these in Google Reader. What's everybody else writing about? Our Blog Search team thought this was an interesting enough question to look into. What we found was a massive mix: entertaining items about celebrities, personal perspectives on political figures, cutting-edge (and sometimes unverified) news stories, and a range of niche topics often ignored by the mainstream media.

Today, we're pleased to launch a new homepage for Google Blog Search so that you too can browse and discover the most interesting stories in the blogosphere. Adapting some of the technology pioneered by Google News, we're now showing categories on the left side of the website and organizing the blog posts within those categories into clusters, which are groupings of posts about the same story or event. Grouping them in clusters lets you see the best posts on a story or get a variety of perspectives. When you look within a cluster, you'll find a collection of the most interesting and recent posts on the topic, along with a timeline graph that shows you how the story is gaining momentum in the blogosphere.

In this example, the green "64 blogs" link takes you inside the cluster and shows you all the blog posts for a story.


We've had a great time building the new homepage and we hope you enjoy using it. Please give it a try and let us know if you have comments or suggestions. We're launching in English only today, but plan to add new features and support for more languages in the coming months, so stay tuned.

Posted by Michael Cohen, Product Manager

Now's the time: Register to vote

10/01/2008 01:35:00 PM

Political participation is at an all-time high this election season, and a record number of voters have already started to cast ballots -- a few even camped out in Ohio to be the first in line for early voting yesterday.

But roughly 1 in 4 Americans still aren't registered to vote, according to the most recent Census report. Now is the time -- voter registration deadlines are less than a week away in most states.

We're trying to help increase participation by making sure you have easy access to voting information. Google's Voter Info Map currently puts registration, absentee and early voting information in one place. (If you're on a phone, you can check out our mobile version at m.google.com/elections.)

We're working closely with state and local election officials, the Voting Information Project and the League of Women Voters to centralize official voting information. Stay tuned for more posts on the project and details on how you can help confirm your local polling place address.



Leonardo DiCaprio, will.i.am, Tobey Maguire, Forrest Whitaker and a few of their friends put together the first in a series of public service announcements to encourage young Americans to register to vote -- and they include a link to our Voter Info Map.



As the Internet plays a greater role in helping people participate in elections, we're excited to help out. And you can, too. Help make sure everyone is ready for election day by reminding your friends and family to register and vote.

Posted by Katie Jacobs Stanton, Google Elections Team