Saturday, December 5, 2009

Googland

Googland

[G] This week in search 12/4/09

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 06:56 PM PST

Official Google Blog: This week in search 12/4/09

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

This week, we're pleased to bring you a number of great enhancements to the way you search. From the announcement of our new minimalist fade-in homepage to the new magazine layout of images in Universal Search, this week was filled with many highly visible changes. There are also more subtle changes like automatic spelling correction and our extended version of personalized search, both of which will enhance the speed and relevance of your web experience. Finally, there were a number of international changes that affect our users worldwide.

New Google homepage
On Wednesday, we announced our new minimalist homepage. Now, when you visit Google.com, only the logo, search box, and buttons are visible. After moving your mouse, the rest of the links and content "fade in". Read more about how we arrived at this design, including the thinking and experiments behind it.

Magazine layout for images in Universal Search
This week we also launched a new layout for images. When we're confident that we have great image results to deliver, we'll now show you a larger image and additional smaller images alongside. This new layout helps us to display more pictures than before, so you have more options to quickly choose from. As always, click on an image to see it full size on the original webpage.

Example searches: [ocelots], [prom hairstyles], [ewok] or [caduceus]


Automatic spelling correction
Starting this week, when we have high confidence that your query was misspelled, we go a step further than asking "Did you mean..." by automatically showing results for the corrected query, saving you a click. In case we did misinterpret the query, there will be a link at the top of the results to undo the auto-correction. So, the next time I'm visiting South Florida and accidentally search for [maimi restaurants], it's reassuring to know I'll quickly go straight to the results for what I really meant: Miami restaurants.

Extended Personalized Search
Starting this week, we are extending Personalized Search worldwide to users who are signed out of their Google accounts, and in more than 40 languages. Now when you search using Google, we will be better able to provide the most relevant results using 180 days of Google search activity from your browser. For example, since I always search for "ADA" and often click on results about the programming language, Google might show you those results before the American Dental Association results.

Site performance data in Webmaster Tools
It can be difficult for webmasters to figure out how fast their site loads and whether it's visible to users. So we've changed that. Now you can go to Google Webmaster Tools and get a glimpse of how quickly your site's pages on your site load. There are also recommendations on how to improve your site's performance based on our GFast plugin.

Finding and reading content written in other languages
Starting this week, it's even easier to search the global web by adding a translated search tool to the Search Options panel, so you can see results from other languages for your query. We'll automatically determine the best languages to translate your query in, then search and translate the results into your language. For example, if you're looking for a restaurant in Antwerp and would like to find local restaurant guides, use the Translated Search tool to search for [restaurant reviews antwerp].

Search Options now in even more languages
Following up on an earlier announcement, the Search Options panel is now available in 17 more languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Filipino, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Greek. In total, the Search Options panel is accessible in 40 languages — which covers over 98% of all search traffic.

Region tags next to results
When it consists of a country code such as ".fr" for France or ".co.jp" for Japan, the suffix of a domain name (known as top-level domains, or TLDs) can provide a valuable clue about the location of a website. However, for certain top-level domains like ".com", ".info", and ".org", it's not always as easy to figure out. This week, we added region information supplied by webmasters to the green address line on some Google search results, when that supplied country or region is outside the user's Google domain (such as google.ca). By providing more transparency about regional information, we hope to make it even easier for international visitors to identify which results are relevant to their query.

We hope you enjoyed this week's features. Stay tuned for what's to come!

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/this-week-in-search-12409.html

[G] SES Chicago Next Week

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 06:56 PM PST

Google Analytics Blog: SES Chicago Next Week

Come to the windy city next week and catch Google Analytics' fearless Senior Product Manager Phil Mui in action at the Search Engine Strategies Chicago conference. Phil will be presenting at two sessions on Monday at SES:
Also, the AdWords team will be there in force, presenting the Google Ads Factory Tour, a series of sessions designed to give advertisers practical tips they can use immediately to improve search and display performance. They'll also be holding a session on AdWords Optimization Tools as well as on The Next Generation of AdWords Bidding: Conversion Optimizer. Read more at the AdWords blog post, and register for SES here.


Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team
URL: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/12/ses-chicago-next-week.html

[G] Personalized Search for everyone

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 06:02 PM PST

Official Google Blog: Personalized Search for everyone

Today we're helping people get better search results by extending Personalized Search to signed-out users worldwide, and in more than forty languages. Now when you search using Google, we will be able to better provide you with the most relevant results possible. For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes. Other times, when I'm looking for news about Cornell University's sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others.

Previously, we only offered Personalized Search for signed-in users, and only when they had Web History enabled on their Google Accounts. What we're doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition enables us to customize search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser. It's completely separate from your Google Account and Web History (which are only available to signed-in users). You'll know when we customize results because a "View customizations" link will appear on the top right of the search results page. Clicking the link will let you see how we've customized your results and also let you turn off this type of customization.

Check out our help center for more details on personalized search, how we customize results and how you can turn off personalization. Learn more by watching our video:



Posted by Bryan Horling, Software Engineer and Matthew Kulick, Product Manager
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html

[G] Webinar on Basic Editing Techniques: Dec. 17, 2009

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 05:02 PM PST

YouTube Blog: Webinar on Basic Editing Techniques: Dec. 17, 2009

YouTube's Creator's Corner and Videomaker magazine are pleased to offer another free Webinar to help newer videographers get comfortable with every aspect of the production process. This time, the topic is Basic Editing Techniques, and it will take place on December 17, 2009, at 11 a.m. PT / 2 p.m. ET. You can register here for the free, hour-long seminar. (Once you've clicked the link, you'll be redirected to an external page provided by our partner, Webex. Please fill in the required information and click "Submit." You'll then be registered for the event.)

We want to make sure this session addresses the topics most useful to you, so we hope you'll take a minute to answer the survey in the top right corner of this blog: When it comes to editing techniques, what do you want to learn about? Check off as many topics that apply in the poll, or leave a comment beneath this blog post. The Videomaker team will consider your requests when putting together their presentation.

This Webinar follows the Basic Production Techniques course held in October.

Mia Quagliarello, Community Manager, YouTube, and Scott Memmott, Content Director, Videomaker


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/hNF0twpFOYE/webinar-on-basic-editing-techniques-dec.html

[G] When sources disagree: borders and place names in Google Earth and Maps

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 04:08 PM PST

Google Public Policy Blog: When sources disagree: borders and place names in Google Earth and Maps

Posted by Bob Boorstin, Director, Public Policy Team

Collecting and sharing the most accurate information about place names and borders is a tough task that every map maker faces. The first sources are the nations themselves, but when neighboring countries claim overlapping territories and conflicting place names, even showing the dispute on a map may be prohibited by local law. We continue to work hard on these issues, and thought it would be worth sharing our general approach on this blog.

We want to be transparent about the principles we follow in designing our mapping products, particularly as they apply to disputed regions. Last year, for example, we explained how we determine the names for bodies of water in Google Earth. For each difficult case, we gather a cross-functional group of Googlers including software engineers, product managers, GIS specialists, policy analysts, and geopolitical researchers. This process benefits from the local knowledge and experience of Googlers around the world.

We follow a hierarchy of values to inform our depictions of geopolitically sensitive regions:

Google's mission: In all cases we work to represent the "ground truth" as accurately and neutrally as we can, in consistency with Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. We work to provide as much discoverable information as possible so that users can make their own judgments about geopolitical disputes. That can mean providing multiple claim lines (e.g. the Syrian and Israeli lines in the Golan Heights), multiple names (e.g. two names separated by a slash: "Londonderry / Derry"), or clickable political annotations with short descriptions of the issues (e.g. the annotation for "Arunachal Pradesh," currently in Google Earth only; see blog post about disputed seas).


Authoritative references: While no single authority has all the answers, when deciding how to depict sensitive place names and borders we use guidance from data providers that most accurately describe borders in treaties and other authoritative standards bodies like the United Nations, ISO and the FIPS. We look for the references that are the most universally recognized for each individual case. For example, in the case of "Myanmar (Burma)" ISO and FIPS each use a different name, so we include both to provide a more complete reference for our users.

Local expectations: We work to localize the user experience while striving to keep all points of view easily discoverable in our products. Google Maps has launched on 32 region domains (e.g. maps.google.ca for Canada) and Google Earth is now available in 41 languages. Each domain and language user population is most familiar with a slightly different set of place names. For example, for the "Yellow Sea" or "West Sea," Chinese speaking users are conversant with the label Huáng Hǎi or 黄海 (Mandarin), while Korean users are used to the label Sŏ Hae or 서해 (Hangul). Carefully considering Google's mission, guidance from authoritative references, local laws and local market expectations, we strive to provide tools that help our users explore and learn about their world, and to the extent allowed by local law, includes all points of view where there are conflicting claims.

Sometimes these factors compete with one another. For example, is localizing a place name inconsistent with Google's mission? What happens when an authoritative references does not seem to represent the truth on the ground? What about when local user expectations don't match international convention, or when local laws prohibit acknowledging regional conflicts? These are questions we continue to think through in our efforts to provide comprehensive, authoritative, free, and, most importantly, useful products for our users.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/12/when-sources-disagree-borders-and-place.html

[G] Connect with AdSense via online webinars

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 01:17 PM PST

Inside AdSense: Connect with AdSense via online webinars

We often hear publishers ask for more information about using AdSense most effectively, and so in response, we've initiated a number of free, online webinars. If you haven't yet participated in a webinar, they focus on specific topics such as increasing your revenue with the AdSense program and taking advantage of new features. At the end of each webinar, you can also ask your questions live to our AdSense specialists.

There are still a number of upcoming webinars in 2009, and we encourage you to sign up soon. We've also created a short video about webinars featuring a few members of our Dublin-based team.



Posted by Kamil Tavas - AdSense Optimization Team
URL: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/12/connect-with-adsense-via-online.html

[G] Automatic Captioning in YouTube

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 11:09 AM PST

Official Google Research Blog: Automatic Captioning in YouTube

Posted by Christopher Alberti and Michiel Bacchiani, Google Research

On November 19, we launched our new automatic captioning and automatic alignment feature for YouTube. These features significantly reduce the effort it takes to create captions for videos on YouTube.

With YouTube expanding its index at a breakneck speed of about 20 hours of new material uploaded each minute, access to this vast body of video material becomes increasingly challenging. This is particularly true for people with hearing disabilities. A 2005 US census showed that 7.8 million people (or about 3 percent of the US population) have difficulty hearing a normal conversation, with 1 million unable to hear at all. Hence, increased accesibility by adding captions to YouTube videos makes the corpus available to a much larger audience.

In addition to expanded accessibility for those with hearing disabilities, the combination of captions with machine translation expands YouTube accessibility across the globe. If a caption track is available, it can be translated automatically in any of the 51 currently available languages. As a result, video content otherwise not accessible due to a language barrier can now be understood by a significantly larger user population.

Although captions are available in YouTube for hundreds of thousands of videos, it remains only a fraction of the the available corpus. Furthermore, only a tiny fraction of the avalanche of new video material getting uploaded is captioned. One reason for this lack of coverage is the effort it takes for a video uploader to generate captions. And this is where our new auto captioning and auto alignment features can benefit our uploaders. Auto-captioning uses automatic speech recognition technology to produce machine generated captions. Auto-alignment requires only a transcript--the uploader no longer has to sync that text with the video stream. To more concisely illustrate the use of these features, check out our help center article or this short video:



Modern-day speech recognition systems are big statistical machines trained on large sets of data. They do the best job recognizing speech in domains similar to their training data. Both the auto captioning and the auto alignment features use the speech recognition infrastructure that underlies Google Voice and Voice Search, but trained on different data. As an intial installment, for YouTube we use models trained on publicly available English broadcast news data. As a result, for now, the new features only work well on English material that is similar in style (i.e. an individual speaker who is speaking clearly).

The auto alignment features is available for all new video uploads, however the scope is limited to English material. The auto captioning feature is initially rolled out to a set of educational partners only. Although this is very limited in scope, the early launch makes the results of the system available to the viewers of this material instantly and it allows us to gauge early feedback which can aid in improving the features. We will release automatic captions more widely as quickly as possible.

Over time, we will work on improving the quality as well as the coverage of these features. Expansion will take place along two axes: additional languages will be made available and within each language we will cover much broader domains (beyond just broadcast news-like material). Since the content available in YouTube is so varied, it is difficult to set a timeline for this expansion. Automatic speech recognition remains challenging, in particular for the varied types of speech and background sounds and noise we see in the YouTube corpus. Therefore, to reach a high level of quality, we need to make advances in core technology. Although this will take time, we are committed to making that happen and to providing the larger community with the benefits of those developments.
URL: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/12/automatic-captioning-in-youtube.html

[G] Connecting Google Apps Education Edition with Blackboard

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 09:59 AM PST

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Connecting Google Apps Education Edition with Blackboard

Editor's note: George Kroner is a Developer Relations Engineer for Blackboard, a company that focuses on transforming and improving the educational experience at over 5,000 institutions worldwide. Through the work of Blackboard's community of over 1,000 educational tool developers, George sees many opportunities where Blackboard's and Google's open platforms can be paired together to provide better and more productive teaching and learning experiences.

Thanks to George for sharing these outlooks.

Technology has the potential to transform the educational experience and to connect students, instructors, and researchers in new ways. We think it's critical for schools and institutions to expose learners to these tools and practices to impart information literacy skills required to succeed in their careers – as students and beyond.

Sharing a strong belief in the power and possibility of open platforms, Google and Blackboard have recently teamed up to combine our platforms, and we wanted to share a few powerful examples of these integrations with you here.

Enhancing collaboration in the classroom. Earlier this summer, Northwestern University took the lead on developing a way to facilitate classroom activities by letting instructors embed Google documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and calendars into Blackboard course sites. Individuals enrolled in Blackboard courses are automatically added as collaborators to these documents, and single sign-on capabilities allow documents to be accessed without logging in twice.

A recent student newspaper article details how these new capabilities are being used in courses ranging from foreign language to world history enabling new models of academic collaboration and assessment. What Northwestern has accomplished exemplifies one of the best recent examples of tying together the unique capabilities of Google Apps for Education and Blackboard Learn.

Now, more than ten different institutions, Google, and Blackboard meet on bi-weekly calls to regularly discuss the future of the Bboogle project. Northwestern has also made this Blackboard plugin available through an open source educational tool community called OSCELOT for other clients to download and contribute back to.

Enabling coordinated collaboration. As part of a class project at Penn State University, a team of students examined ways to improve their online learning experience by integrating Blackboard with other systems. After some analysis, their top recommendation was to develop a solution that combined events from their multiple school-related and personal calendars into a single location.

By integrating with Google Calendar, they were able to create a Blackboard plugin that combines events from Google Calendar with academic course schedules, assignment due-dates, and group meeting times from Blackboard. Their plugin was also made available as an open source project at the end of the semester. More details, including user documentation, are available through OSCELOT at this link.

Connecting researchers where they teach. The London International Development Center was formed to connect researchers from the University of London's six Bloomsbury Colleges. Its mission is to find ways to solve complex problems relating to international development by bringing together scientists from interdisciplinary backgrounds. By creating a Google Spreadsheet that integrates behind the scenes with the familiar Blackboard user experience, the LIDC provided a way for researchers to search and connect with each other by name, college, and research interest.

Facilitating new ways to communicate. Google Wave represents a new way to approach group collaboration and communication, and thus the potential for impacting education using such a tool is significant. Imagine creating a course assignment within Blackboard that triggers a contextualized Wave of thought and conversation that can react to changes in course content within the LMS and relay thoughts and comments from subject matter experts around the world back into an assessable course discussion forum or blog.

Today we invite you to join a discussion of how you think Wave should be used to enhance educational experiences. Log into Wave and click this link to post your thoughts, then see your comments show up within the discussion forum in this Blackboard course.

The examples listed above are just the beginning of what's possible when combining the power of the Blackboard and Google platforms, and we salute the institutions that are on the cutting-edge, creating these integrations.

– George Kroner, Blackboard Developer Relations Engineer

Posted by Gabe Cohen, Google Apps Education Edition team

URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/12/connecting-google-apps-education.html

[G] Now on Google Finance: streaming news

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 09:59 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Now on Google Finance: streaming news

Ever since we launched real-time and streaming quotes on Google Finance last year, we've heard from users how vital that up-to-date information has been. Especially in today's volatile financial environment, current information can be the difference between a seizing an opportunity and missing it. Today, we've taken a big step towards improving access to current financial information: streaming financial and market news on Google Finance.

Streaming keeps information fresh

Streaming real-time quotes eliminates the 15- and 20-minute delays often associated with pricing data. Streaming the quotes keeps information on the page up to date, without having to reload.

Now, by streaming news as well, you'll see stories appear on Google Finance as they develop minute by minute, throughout the day. You can view news on the Google Finance homepage, or the dedicated news page. Updated news items will appear automatically in the News section. News will be streamed from 8am-5:30pm ET, 90 minutes before and after U.S. trading hours.

Up-to-date information across the site

As we deliver more information, we've worked to improve the way we display it. In the last few months, we've released a few other improvements to Google Finance designed to make financial information easier to access and more usable:
  • As you navigate throughout Google Finance, your recent quotes are streamed live in the left-navigation bar, so you don't need to keep checking the same tickers.
  • On company pages, all stock prices, index and sector comparisons as well as the interactive chart are streamed during market hours.
  • The new interactive Related companies page lets customize a table that compares companies along the dimensions you specify.
Financial information doesn't exist in a vacuum. News can stimulate trades, and trades of one stock can have broad market effects. Figuring how to organize all of that information and make it useful is crucial — and that's what we're working on.

There is still a long way to go, so stay tuned for more updates.

Posted by Andre Lebedev, Software Engineer and Ayan Mandal, Product Manager
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/now-on-google-finance-streaming-news.html
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