Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Googland

Googland

[G] What You Watched and Searched for on YouTube in 2009

Posted: 16 Dec 2009 01:14 AM PST

YouTube Blog: What You Watched and Searched for on YouTube in 2009

This year has been the biggest yet for online video, and for the first time we're sharing our official Most Watched lists and some of the fastest-rising search terms on YouTube. Some moments were big (President Obama's inauguration), some small (a Minnesota wedding party erupts into dance), some expected ("New Moon"), some surprising (Susan Boyle) — but all of them inspired, entertained and connected millions of people around the world via YouTube.

For these lists, we looked at view counts of YouTube's most popular videos this year (in some instances we aggregated views across multiple versions of the same video):

Most Watched YouTube videos (Global):
1. Susan Boyle - Britain's Got Talent (120+ million views)
2. David After Dentist (37+ million views)
3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views)
4. New Moon Movie Trailer (31+ million views)
5. Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views)

Most Watched music videos on YouTube (Global)*:
1. Pitbull "I Know You Want Me" (82+ million views)
2. Miley Cyrus "The Climb" (64+ million views)
3. Miley Cyrus "Party in the U.S.A." (54+ million views)
4. The Lonely Island "I'm On a Boat" (48+ million views)
5. Keri Hilson "Knock You Down" (35+ million views)

Then, to determine the fastest rising search terms for each month, we examined the billions of queries that people searched for on YouTube (through December 15):

Fastest Rising YouTube search terms by month (Global):
January: inauguration
February: christian bale
March: the climb
April: susan boyle
May: pacquiao vs hatton
June: michael jackson thriller
July: michael jackson
August: usain bolt
September: kanye west
October: paranormal activity
November: bad romance
December: tiger woods

Fastest Rising YouTube search terms by month (U.S.):
January: obama inauguration
February: on a boat
March: watchmen
April: susan boyle
May: pacquiao
June: michael jackson thriller
July: wedding
August: send it on
September: kanye west
October: paranormal activity
November: adam lambert
December: tiger woods

There are a lot of interesting nuggets in here. The fastest rising U.S. search term in July was [wedding], clearly related to "JK Wedding Entrance Dance," the third Most Watched YouTube video of the year. And while [michael jackson] was Google's fastest rising search term in 2009, [michael jackson thriller] was the faster rising search on YouTube. Movie trailers ("New Moon," "Watchmen," "Paranormal Activity") and inspirational moments (Susan Boyle, Usain Bolt) were popular, as were sensational celebrity scandals (Christian Bale, Kanye West and, most recently, Tiger Woods).

We hope to expand these lists in the future, so if there are any "Most Watched" categories you'd like to see in 2010, let us know by leaving a comment below.

Jamie Davidson, Associate Product Manager, recently watched "Top 10 quirky science tricks for Christmas parties."

*Note: Some music videos may be unavailable in your country due to copyright restrictions.


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/gWP3zFxirVo/what-you-watched-and-searched-for-on.html

[G] What you watched and searched for on YouTube in 2009

Posted: 16 Dec 2009 12:39 AM PST

Official Google Blog: What you watched and searched for on YouTube in 2009

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

This year has been the biggest yet for online video, and for the first time we're sharing our official Most Watched lists and some of the fastest-rising search terms on YouTube. Some moments were big (President Obama's inauguration), some small (a Minnesota wedding party erupts into dance), some expected ("New Moon"), some surprising (Susan Boyle) — but all of them inspired, entertained and connected millions of people around the world via YouTube.

For these lists, we looked at view counts of YouTube's most popular videos (in some instances we aggregated views across multiple versions of the same video):

Most Watched YouTube videos (Global):
1. Susan Boyle - Britain's Got Talent (120+ million views)
2. David After Dentist (37+ million views)
3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views)
4. New Moon Movie Trailer (31+ million views)
5. Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views)

Most Watched music videos on YouTube (Global)*:
1. Pitbull - I Know You Want Me (82+ million views)
2. Miley Cyrus - The Climb (64+ million views)
3. Miley Cyrus - Party In The U.S.A (54+ million views)
4. The Lonely Island - I'm On A Boat (48+ million views)
5. Keri Hilson - Knock You Down (35+ million views)

Then, to determine the fastest rising search terms for each month, we examined the billions of queries that people searched for on YouTube (through December 15):

Fastest Rising YouTube search terms by month (Global):
January: inauguration
February: christian bale
March: the climb
April: susan boyle
May: pacquiao vs hatton
June: michael jackson thriller
July: michael jackson
August: usain bolt
September: kanye west
October: paranormal activity
November: bad romance
December: tiger woods

Fastest Rising YouTube search terms by month (U.S.):
January: obama inauguration
February: on a boat
March: watchmen
April: susan boyle
May: pacquiao
June: michael jackson thriller
July: wedding
August: send it on
September: kanye west
October: paranormal activity
November: adam lambert
December: tiger woods

There are a lot of interesting nuggets in here. The fastest rising U.S. search term in July was [wedding], clearly related to JK Wedding Entrance Dance, the third Most Watched YouTube video of the year. And while [michael jackson] was Google's fastest rising search term in 2009, [michael jackson thriller] was the faster rising search on YouTube. Movie trailers ("New Moon," "Watchmen," "Paranormal Activity") and inspirational moments (Susan Boyle, Usain Bolt) were popular, as were sensational celebrity scandals (Christian Bale, Kanye West, and most recently, Tiger Woods).

We hope to expand these lists in the future, so if there are any "Most Watched" categories you'd like to see in 2010, let us know by leaving a comment on the YouTube Blog.

*Note: Some music videos may be unavailable in your country due to copyright restrictions.

Posted by Jamie Davidson, Associate Product Manager
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/what-you-watched-and-searched-for-on.html

[G] Rocking the Grid: The Globus Alliance's Second Google Summer of Code

Posted: 15 Dec 2009 07:00 PM PST

Google Open Source Blog: Rocking the Grid: The Globus Alliance's Second Google Summer of Code

The Globus Alliance is a community of organizations and individuals developing fundamental technologies behind the "Grid," which lets people share computing power, databases, instruments, and other on-line tools securely across corporate, institutional, and geographic boundaries without sacrificing local autonomy. We first participated in Google Summer of Code™ in 2008 and we found the experience extremely productive both for the Globus Alliance and the individual mentors, so we wanted to confirm the value of the program for the students who took part. We contacted our eight students from last year to find out what impact Google Summer of Code had on their lives and careers. While many of our students still remembered the experience fondly, and said it was valued highly by prospective employers, there were two students who had particularly remarkable stories.

AliEn Grid Site Dynamic Deployment and Working at CERN

Last year, Artem Harutyunyan, mentored by Tim Freeman, developed a set of scripts on top of Globus Nimbus to dynamically deploy an entire AliEn Grid site (AliEn is the Grid infrastructure which is used by scientists participating in the ALICE experiment at CERN). His collaboration with the CERN and Globus Nimbus folks went beyond his Google Summer of Code work, and resulted in a new framework, called CernVM Co-Pilot, for execution of 'pilot' Grid jobs on cloud resources. His work is currently used in production to run Grid jobs from CERN'S ALICE experiment, and there are plans to extend it for the execution of ATLAS and LHCb jobs. Artem also co-authored two papers on his work: "Dynamic AliEn Grid Sites on Nimbus with CernVM" was presented at the 17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP 2009) in Prague, and "Building a Volunteer Cloud", which includes a description of CernVM Co-Pilot, was presented during the Latin American Conference on High Performance Computing in Mérida, Venezuela.

Holder-of-Key Single Sign-On

Joana M. F. Trindade, mentored by Tom Scavo, spent last summer implementing a Holder-of-Key Single Sign-On profile handler for the Shibboleth Identity Provider in Globus GridShib. And, since then, things have just been getting better for her. Thanks to her outstanding summer work, she was offered an appointment as a Visiting Scholar at UIUC, where she worked on researching fault injection in virtual machines with Professor Ravi Iyer. After six months in that position, Joana was offered admission into the masters program at UIUC, where she is currently working with Professor Marianne Winslett. More importantly, Joana tells us that participating in Google Summer of Code gave her a renewed sense of confidence in her research abilities, having previously thought that her academic background was insufficient to gain admission into a top-tier university in the US. Joana tells us that "After Google Summer of Code, I regained that hope, and I must say I'm really happy to have found a topic in Globus to which I could contribute, and that in turn opened so many doors for me."

Congratulations Artem and Joana for all you have achieved!

Lessons Learned

Our first Google Summer of Code last year also had its fair share of challenges, including two students who didn't make it through the program, but it gave us the opportunity to learn a lot about how to mentor and manage summer students. We were fortunate to be selected again this year as a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization, which allowed us to apply everything we learned. First of all, we required students to provide more information about their background and the project they were proposing. Last year our student application form was essentially a blank form saying "Tell us about your project here," so this year we presented prospective students with more specific questions. We also decided to check in with our students more often which, at least in one case, allowed us to identify a problem between a student and a mentor early on, giving us time to deal with it constructively before the midterm.

In the end, applying what we learned during last year's Google Summer of Code and as well as the Mentor Summit had a noticeable effect. We were fortunate to be given ten students to mentor, and all ten students passed. Furthermore, our mentors report that practically all the code written by the students has either already been released or will be released soon. In fact, overall, we felt that this year's students rocked. Here's a summary of their summer work.

Going Beyond a Single Cluster

The Globus Nimbus cloud toolkit allows you to turn your cluster into an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud. However, it was mainly geared towards managing a single cluster. Not any more! Adam Bishop, mentored by Ian Gable, worked hard over the summer to add new components enabling multiple cluster support for Nimbus. He developed a series of production-quality plugins, which have already been committed to the Nimbus source repository, that publish the state of Nimbus cluster back to a Globus MDS Registry. This allows the availability of cloud resources across multiple Nimbus clusters to be gathered together into a single registry, which is the first step towards adding cross-cluster support to Nimbus.

Spilling Over Multiple Clusters

Another student, Jan-Philip Gehrcke, mentored by Kate Keahey, also spent the summer with his head in the clouds, but in a good way: he developed the Clobi project, a job scheduling system supporting virtual machines (VMs) in multiple IaaS clouds, with support for Globus Nimbus and Amazon EC2 clouds. In a nutshell, there are many scientific applications that are typically run as "jobs" on a compute cluster. Jan-Philip's project allows these jobs to be submitted to a cloud instead of to a traditional compute cluster. The most interesting use case is when a site operates a Globus Nimbus cloud and, during peaks in demand for computational capacity, extends its capacity momentarily by spilling the jobs over to a second (or third, or fourth, ...) cloud such as Amazon EC2. Although Clobi is not tied to any particular application (its design is generic and should be useful whenever it's convenient to distribute jobs across different clouds), the motivating application for Clobi is ATLAS Computing (for the LHC's ATLAS experiment at CERN). In fact, by the end of the summer, Jan-Philip was able to run a common ATLAS Computing application (the so-called "full chain") successfully with Clobi. If you want more details about Clobi, check out this blog post written by Jan-Philip.

Incremental GridFTP Transfers

Enough about clouds, let's move on to the exciting topic of data. Globus GridFTP is a high-performance, secure, reliable data transfer protocol that is pretty good at moving data. Fast. Of course, there's always someone who wants to go even faster, like Shruti Jain, mentored by Michael Link. Shruti took globus-url-copy, the GridFTP client, and added a 'sync' feature that allows a local and remote file to be synchronized, by sending only the changed sections of the file. This results in more effective bandwidth utilization by avoiding redundant data transfers.

Checksummed GridFTP Transfers

Remember Mattias Lidman? We certainly do. In last year's Google Summer of Code, he developed a compression driver for the Globus XIO input/output library (which GridFTP depends on) to compress/uncompress data as it passes through it. However, although moving data faster is all good and well, it's not worth much if it somehow gets corrupted in-flight. So this year, Mattias, mentored by Joseph Bester, continued to work on Globus XIO and developed a Checksum Driver. Mattias's driver checksums GridFTP data streams allowing both ends of a GridFTP transfer to verify the integrity of the data.

CQL Queries Builder

You know one really cool thing grids are used for? Cancer research. The Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, or caBIG®, is an information network enabling all constituencies in the cancer community – researchers, physicians, and patients – to share data and knowledge. caGrid is the underlying service-oriented infrastructure that supports caBIG, and it relies heavily on the Globus Toolkit. Some of the data services in this architecture use a query language called CQL that is, well... complicated. To make life easier for scientists, Monika Machunik, mentored by Wei Tan, wrote a plug-in for Taverna (an open source tool used by scientists to design and execute workflows) for constructing CQL queries, allowing scientists to focus on their work rather than on the intricacies of the CQL language.

GridWay-Google Maps Mashup

Grids require coordinating resources across multiple organizations, and the Globus GridWay meta-scheduler is a great tool to do just that. However, coordinating hundreds or even thousands of machines across dozens of sites can get a bit messy using the console-based tools included with GridWay. Carlos Martín, mentored by Alejandro Lorca, tackled this problem by creating an interactive GridWay-Google Maps mashup, allowing the administrators and users of a GridWay installation to get a quick snapshot of the status of multiple sites and the jobs running in them, as shown in this screenshot:



Carlos used the Google Web Toolkit to develop this application, which is totally decoupled from GridWay, making it easy to install it alongside existing installations of GridWay. In fact, you can download the GridWay+Google Maps application and check out its documentation, including more screenshots, at the application's page on the GridWay site.

GridWay GUI

Srinivasan Natarajan, mentored by Jose Luis Vazquez-Poletti, worked on a more administration-oriented GUI for GridWay, allowing users to compose, manage and control their jobs instead of using the command line interface. This GUI includes a host of other features, such as host and user monitoring, filtering account statistics and execution history information, and support for processing DAGMan workflows, including visualizing dependencies between jobs in the workflow.



Both of the GridWay projects were presented in several sessions, including one on nuclear fusion, at the EGEE'09 conference in Barcelona, Spain back in September.

GridFTP Benchmarking

How about we get back to the subject of data management? The recent addition of UDT (UDP Data Transfer) support to GridFTP has made even faster transfer speeds possible. You guessed it: here's another student who couldn't resist the need for speed this summer. Jamie Schwettmann, mentored by Raj Kettimuthu, sought to characterize the performance of GridFTP over 10Gb/s networks, specifically to measure the speed increase given by UDT as compared to TCP transfers, as well as a number of other considerations such as CPU and memory overhead at both ends of the transfer. In doing so, they decided to develop an automated GridFTP benchmarking and throughput optimization utility called globus-transfer-test, which takes URL pairs from a list or on the command line, and allows for varying input parameters such as parallelism level, transfer type (memory-to-memory, disk-to-disk, etc), TCP Buffer Sizes, MTU sizes, and all other standard globus-url-copy options (except multicasting) and when possible, compares with other performance and throughput utilities such as iperf or scp. Designed for general use by users or administrators as well as to carry out our performance characterization, globus-transfer-test aims to provide enough information to optimize GridFTP options for maximizing throughput between grid sites. This common need has allowed collaboration with many other projects and organizations in the course of development and testing, including the US ATLAS Project, TeraGrid, and OSCER. Jamie even presented a poster on her project at the 2009 Oklahoma Supercomputing Symposium.

AJAX Framework for Globus Web Services

Many of the components in Globus are web services, which are not exactly human-readable creatures. Fugang Wang, mentored by Tom Howe, developed a JavaScript API that enables accessing Globus services from a web client using AJAX. Fugang's framework, which includes a backend service that mediates service requests to the Globus toolkit and an AJAX web client to access this services, makes life easier for Globus developers and users by allowing them to interact with Globus services from the comfort of their web browsers.

Secure Cloud Communications

And we'll end with the ever-popular subject of data management. Melissa Weaver, mentored by John Bresnahan, developed a PSK driver for Globus XIO. She first developed a program that, using OpenSSL libraries to encrypt and decrypt data using a stream or block cipher of the user's choice, allowed her to experiment with different lengths of keys and initialization vectors and different file sizes to make performance measurements. Then, she developed the XIO PSK driver itself, which used the results of the first program to implement an RC2 block cipher to ensure any communication between computers, once a connection has been set up, is secure.

High energy physics experiments at CERN! Cancer research! Nuclear fusion! Cloud computing! Fast data transfers! Oh my! Oodles of congratulations to our mentors and students for all their hard work and for making this such an awesome Google Summer of Code for the Globus Alliance!

By Borja Sotomayor, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Chicago and Google Summer of Code Organization Administrator
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/12/rocking-grid-globus-alliances-second.html

[G] Mapping India on Google's Internet Bus

Posted: 15 Dec 2009 06:39 PM PST

Google LatLong: Mapping India on Google's Internet Bus


Throughout December, Google Map Maker team members are touring around India with Google's Internet Bus to show people how to create maps of their local villages and towns. The Internet Bus Project is an initiative to educate people about the Internet, and how it can be beneficial to their lives. The customized Internet-enabled Google bus travels to towns and cities across India and takes the Internet experience to the people.

interior of the bus

When the Google Internet Bus last week made its grand entrance into the province of Kerala (after having completed the journey through Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka), the paradise of waving palms, sprawling backwaters and wide sandy beaches, bus visitors were able to view their home and neighborhood and use Google Map Maker to map their home towns and favorite destinations.


You can see other pictures of this leg of the Internet Bus tour here. The bus is traveling through the following cities throughout December:
  • Kochi/Ernakulam - December 5, 6, 7, 8
  • Allapuzha - December 10, 11
  • Kollam - December 12, 13
  • Thiruvananthapuram - December 14, 15, 16, 17
  • Thrissur - December 19, 20
  • Pallakad - December 21, 22
  • Kozhikode - December 23, 24, 25
  • Thalassery - December 26, 27
If you are from Kerala or visiting Kerala during this time, hop along for the ride and discover the art of map making on the Google Internet Bus!

Posted by Ajith Kumar, Google Map Maker Program Manager
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/12/mapping-india-on-googles-internet-bus.html

[G] Happy holidays from the Picasa team

Posted: 15 Dec 2009 03:39 PM PST

Official Google Docs Blog: Happy holidays from the Picasa team

A lot of people who Google Docs also use Picasa Web Albums, so we wanted to let you know about a special offer. We made extra storage for Gmail and Picasa Web Albums more affordable about a month ago, and now we've partnered with Eye-Fi to make it even easier to get your photos into the cloud. Eye-Fi offers WiFi-enabled memory cards that let your existing camera access wireless networks, so it's easy to upload photos and videos right to Picasa Web Albums or straight to your computer -- no cables required. For a limited time, when you buy 200 GB of Google paid storage for $50, you'll get a free Eye-Fi card (a $95 value) with free shipping.

Visit picasa.google.com/eyefi.html to get yours today, and happy holidays from the Picasa team!


Posted by: Zach Yeskel, Product Marketing Manager
URL: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2009/12/happy-holidays-from-picasa-team.html

[G] More Google Web Elements for you

Posted: 15 Dec 2009 03:39 PM PST

Inside AdSense: More Google Web Elements for you

We've posted a few times about Google Web Elements and how they can benefit you as a publisher. Today, we're excited to announce new features for Google Web Elements, including the addition of 3 three new elements for Google Translate, Reader, and Orkut. For publishers, this means 3 new options for engaging your users and making your website more interactive.

To read more about the new features and how to get started, hop on over to the Google Code Blog.

Posted by Christine Tsai - Web Elements Team
URL: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/12/more-google-web-elements-for-you.html

[G] One button to merge all duplicate contacts

Posted: 15 Dec 2009 03:39 PM PST

Official Gmail Blog: One button to merge all duplicate contacts

Posted by Dominik Marcinski, Software Engineer

Managing a big address book can be a challenge, so it's no surprise that the top request for Google contacts is a fast, easy way to merge duplicate contacts. You've been able to merge contacts one-by-one for a while, but now we've added a single button that merges all your duplicate contacts at once. To clean up your contact list in one fell swoop, just click the "Find duplicates" button in the contact manager, review the merge suggestions (and uncheck any suggestions you don't want merged), and hit the "Merge" button.


If you've been considering getting all your contacts into Gmail or syncing your Gmail contacts to your phone, now's the time to do it. As we've written about previously, you can sync your contacts to a wide variety of devices (including Android, iPhone, Blackberry, SyncML, etc). So if you were dreading spending hours getting your contacts in order, now you can do it with a couple clicks.

URL: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/one-button-to-merge-all-duplicate.html

[G] Go beyond just a few stars: See what makes a business shine

Posted: 15 Dec 2009 02:55 PM PST

Google LatLong: Go beyond just a few stars: See what makes a business shine


Today, we launched a new feature to rank and show distinguishing aspects for businesses on their Place Pages. By taking a look at a Place Page, you can quickly get a better sense of what people are saying about a business and view relevant snippets about each specific aspect (say, the price, the service, or the infamous deep dish pizza) from all over the web. You can then dive deeper by going to the source and reading the full reviews. The new color-coded bars will give you a simple numeric overview of the how the business rates on each feature.
Let's say your in-laws are visiting over the holidays and you want to take them to a nice dinner while they're in town. You've heard that a new restaurant has great steak, but you want to be sure the ambiance and decor meet your standards for a special occasion.

You can check Peter Luger Steakhouse Place Page to see what reviewers are saying:

Or what if you want to get your sister a spa day for the holidays -- you may want to know if the spa specializes in massages, facials, or pedicures -- and of course, you want to make sure it rates very high on service to make sure she's pampered.

Here's what people are saying about Kabuki Springs and Spa:
Looks like a great place to get a stone massage!

In order to help you find the best of what people are saying, we've improved our ability to find reviews of places, searching more quality sources of information from across the web. We look for pages that talk about particular places and analyze content on those pages that express a sentiment (i.e., a positive or negative comment) about that place. We display snippets of the sentiment to help you discover the best sources of information about the specific topic of interest.

Place Pages help to organize and make accessible all the world's information about a particular place. We hope that these sentiment snippets will help make your browsing - and maybe even your holiday planning - a little easier.

Posted by Andrew McCarthy and Diego Nogueira, Local Search team
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/12/go-beyond-just-few-stars-see-what-makes.html

[G] Digital Literacy Tour to launch in Fairfax, VA

Posted: 15 Dec 2009 02:55 PM PST

Google Public Policy Blog: Digital Literacy Tour to launch in Fairfax, VA

Posted by Scott Rubin, Sr. Manager, Public Policy Communications

A few weeks ago we unveiled a set of child safety videos and this week we're kicking off our first-ever Digital Literacy Tour in the US at Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax, Virginia.

With so many kids online, we want to help families learn how to navigate the Internet in a safe, responsible, and healthy way. Teens are becoming more adept at using the Internet and they're outpacing their parents and teachers. We know that sometimes adults are hesitant to discuss these topics, for fear that they know too little. That's why we think it's important to talk to the family, not just teens. Parents and educators have a tremendous opportunity to engage their kids about their online activity and need to understand what they can do to help keep their kids safe.

Google has teamed up with iKeepSafe, a leading online safety organization, to develop an in-class curriculum that goes along with our animated video series to bring to local communities. Topics include reading web sites for truth or fiction; online citizenship; general Internet safety; and playing and staying safe on YouTube.

This Thursday, December 17, we will be piloting the new curriculum in three separate training sessions with middle and high school students. We'll also be training a group of volunteers from the local chapter of Optimist International who will develop teen mentors to continue to deliver the program in surrounding communities. After the new year, we'll be back to discuss safety tools and tips with parents from Robinson Secondary.

If you'd like attend the Thursday event and observe a training please RSVP here. The event begins at 10am, please see the RSVP form for other important information.

We think it's essential for kids to understand how to be responsible online citizens and hope these discussions will be an important part of their education. Stay tuned as we make our way around the U.S. over the next year.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/12/digital-literacy-tour-to-launch-in.html

[G] More information, fewer clicks

Posted: 15 Dec 2009 12:29 PM PST

Google LatLong: More information, fewer clicks


Earlier this year, we proclaimed that "1000 is the new 10" when we began showing small dots on the map for all your local search results. This has been a great way to get a better understanding of the density of certain listings - for example, figuring out where the theater district is in a city you want to visit - but sometimes you may realize that one of the dots seems to be in the exact spot you'd like to go. We've now added the ability to hover over items on the map to quickly get more information about a place without clicking.

For example, if you search for "blueberry pancakes in san francisco", you'll find that there are a lot of options available. Hovering your mouse over these results now gives a tooltip, giving you enough information to let you decide if you want to click to investigate further. When hovering over a cluster of multiple results, a list of everything underneath the mouse pointer is shown, including the number of stars for a business listing. This makes exploring large sets of search results quicker and easier.

Here's some information about an option in Russian Hill:

And here are two options next to each other near Lombard Street:
This also works for many other things on the map, including transit stations, photos, and more. Next time you're searching, just hover and discover!

Posted by Michael Bürge, Software Engineer
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/12/more-information-fewer-clicks.html

[G] The holiday season and Google News Archive Search

Posted: 15 Dec 2009 11:25 AM PST

Google News Blog: The holiday season and Google News Archive Search

Posted by David Smydra, Google News Online Team

Crowded shopping malls, radio stations pumping songs about sleigh bells and chestnuts, inclement weather from coast to coast -- all signs point to one explanation. We're smack in the middle of the holiday season.

Whichever holidays you observe, you might be surprised to learn of another one to add to the roster. Two hundred eighteen years ago today, the founders ratified the Bill of Rights, which the United States officially celebrates every December 15 as U.S. Bill of Rights Day. We have President Franklin D. Roosevelt to thank for officially creating the holiday, which he inaugurated in 1941, on the 150th anniversary of the document's ratification.

I took a spin through Google News Archive Search to learn more. Searching for "Bill of Rights Day 1941," I was able to drill down to autumn of that year, where I hoped to find articles explaining how the holiday took shape. Sure enough, the St. Petersburg Times ran an Associated Press story on November 29, 1941, quoting a proclamation from President Roosevelt. In what appears to be a clear reference to the events of World War II, Roosevelt mentions the "privileges lost in other continents and countries," and how Americans "can now appreciate their meaning to those people who enjoyed them once and now no longer can." And so December 15 would become "a day of mobilization for freedom and for human rights, a day of remembrance of the democratic and peaceful action by which these rights were gained, a day of reassessment of their present meaning and their living worth."

Little more than a week later, of course, arrived "a date which will live in infamy," the attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into the war.

So when Bill of Rights Day arrived eight days later, the holiday had renewed meaning. Once again, in the St. Petersburg Times, you could find a full page featuring another proclamation from Roosevelt, the full Bill of Rights reprinted for readers, and a picture of Roosevelt with New York Mayor Fiorello Henry La Guardia. And the day after the holiday, this write-up summarized various ways that the country marked the occasion, including Chicago school girls reading the Bill of Rights "publicly at State and Madison streets."

It's interesting to see how the meaning and observance of different holidays continue to change, sometimes even just days after they have been created.

URL: http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/holiday-season-and-google-news-archive.html

[G] A simple way to curb climate change

Posted: 15 Dec 2009 11:25 AM PST

Google Public Policy Blog: A simple way to curb climate change

Posted by Michael Terrell, Energy Policy Counsel

People often get up in settings like the international climate change conference in Copenhagen and make complicated pronouncements that leave heads spinning. Today was different. Google, GE, the Climate Group, and NRDC, supported by other leading businesses and NGOs, had a simple message: governments across the world should ensure people have real-time access to their home energy information.

Most of us know little about how we use energy in our homes, other than what our monthy power bill tells us. Yet studies show that when people can see in real-time how much energy they are using, they save up to 15% on their electricity use with simple behavioral changes, and even more with investments in energy efficiency. The savings are huge when added up: if all US households reduced 15% of their energy use by 2020 it would be equivalent to taking 35 million cars off the road and would save consumers $46 billion on their energy bills.

As 40,000 people gather in Copenhagen to fight global warming, we think that's a solution that governments should be paying attention to. This group, which will take other actions after the meeting has ended, has begun a push to give ordinary citizens the tools to save money and save the planet. A lot of the decisions on the table in Copenhagen are hard, we believe this one is simple.

Copenhagen statement signers: Google, GE, The Climate Group, NRDC, Alliance to Save Energy, Center for American Progress, Demand Response and Smart Grid Coalition, Digital Energy Solutions Campaign, Dow, Energy Future Coalition, Intel, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, US Green Building Council, Whirlpool
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/12/simple-way-to-curb-climate-change.html

[G] New legal templates by RocketLawyer.com™

Posted: 15 Dec 2009 11:25 AM PST

Official Google Docs Blog: New legal templates by RocketLawyer.com™

Guest post: Rob Elhardt is the Senior VP of Product Management at RocketLawyer.com. Bringing easy legal documents to more people is Rob's passion, and here's what he told us about the new RocketLawyer.com legal templates in Google Docs. RocketLawyer.com legal templates, and the information contained in them: (a) are meant to serve as suggestions only; and (b) are not a substitute for professional advice or specific, authoritative knowledge or direction.

Did you know that you can choose from 76 new RocketLawyer.com™ legal form templates to help you get started with your next legal task in Google Docs? In addition to personal legal forms like Living Wills for all 50 states, there are many legal templates covering business contracts, real estate, and more.

Here are a few of the new RocketLawyer.com legal templates that I'd like to highlight. Please remember that these legal document templates are provided for reference and covers a common scenario that may not be right for you.

Template: California Living Will
Area of Law: Estate Planning
You can use this Living Will template to specify your health care preferences and to choose someone to make health care decisions for you if you are unable to do so. This template combines the best features of a living will and a health care power of attorney. Living Wills are available for all 50 states.


Template: Simple Promissory Note
Area of Law: Personal and Business
You can use this Promissory Note template to loan or borrow money. It states the terms, rights and obligations that apply to a loan. It specifies the amount of the loan, the interest rate, the repayment terms and includes other specific provisions.


Template: Non Disclosure Agreement (Unilateral)
Area of Law: Business
You can use a Non Disclosure Agreement template to help protect your proprietary and confidential information. In this agreement, a party agrees not to disclose certain information received from another party.

You can browse the complete list of RocketLawyer.com legal templates in Google Docs.

Posted by: Rob Elhardt, Senior VP of Product Management, RocketLawyer.com
URL: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2009/12/new-legal-templates-by-rocketlawyercom.html

[G] Teaching a Computer to Understand Japanese

Posted: 15 Dec 2009 11:25 AM PST

Official Google Research Blog: Teaching a Computer to Understand Japanese

Posted by Mike Schuster, Google Research and Kaisuke Nakajima, Google Japan

On December 7th, we launched our new Japanese voice search system (音声検索), which has been available for various flavors of English since last year and for Mandarin Chinese for the past two months. The initial Japanese system works on the Android platform and also through the Google Mobile App on the iPhone as announced in a Japanese blog and a general explanation on how to get started. For developers who want to make use of the speech recognition backend for their own Android applications there is a public API (recognizer intent API) described here.

Although speech recognition has had a long history in Japan, creating a system that can handle a problem as difficult as voice search is still a considerable challenge. Today, most speech recognition systems are large statistical systems that must learn two models from sets of examples, an acoustic model and a language model. The acoustic model represents (statistically) the fundamental sounds of the language, and the language model statistically represents the words, phrases, and sentences of the language. The acoustic model for Japanese voice search was trained using a large amount of recorded Japanese speech, with the associated transcriptions of the words spoken. The language model for Japanese voice search was trained on Japanese search queries.

While speech recognition systems are surprisingly similar across different languages, there are some problems that are more specific to Japanese. Some of the challenges we faced while developing Japanese voice search included:

  • Spaces in Japanese text
    As we looked at some popular search queries in Japan we saw that Japanese often doesn't have spaces but sometimes it does. For example, if a user searches for Ramen noodles near Tokyo station they will often type: "東京駅 ラーメン" with a space in between Tokyo station and Ramen -- therefore, we would like to display it in this way as well. Getting the spaces right is difficult and we continue working to improve it.
  • Japanese word boundaries
    Word boundaries in Japanese are often not clear and subject to interpretation as most of the time there are not spaces between words. This also makes the definition of the vocabulary (the words that can be recognized theoretically) extremely large. We deal with this problem by finding likely word boundaries using a statistical system which also helps us limit the vocabulary.
  • Japanese text is written in 4 different writing systems
    Japanese text as written today uses Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana & Romaji, often mixed in the same sentence and sometimes in the same word, depending on the definition of a word. Try these example queries to see some interesting cases: "価格.com", "マーボー豆腐", "東京都渋谷区桜丘町26-1". We try to display the output in a way that is most user-friendly, which often means to display it as you would write it down.
  • Japanese has lots of basic characters and many have several pronunciations depending on context
    To be able to recognize a word you need to know its pronunciation. Western languages in general use only ASCII or a slightly extended set of characters which is relatively small (<100>
  • Encoding issues
    Japanese characters can be written in many encoding systems including UTF-8, Shift_JIS, EUC-JP and others. While at Google we try to use exclusively UTF-8 there are still interesting edge cases to deal with. For example some characters exist in different forms in the same encoding system. Compare for example "カナ"　and "ｶﾅ" -- they both say "kana" and mean the exact same thing, the first in full-width and the second in half-width. There are numerous similar cases like this in Japanese that make normalization of the text data more difficult.
  • Every speaker sounds different
    People speak in different styles, slow or fast, with an accent or without, have lower or higher pitched voices, etc. To make it work for all these different conditions we trained our system on data from many different sources to capture as many conditions as possible.
The challenges listed above are just a small portion of what we dealt with while building the Japanese voice search system. Over time, we are committed to improve the system as much as and as quickly as possible to make speech, in addition to the keyboard, a user-friendly input modality on mobile devices. We will push a first set of improved models this week.
URL: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/12/teaching-computer-to-understand.html

[G] Shop smarter with the new Chrome Extension for Checkout promotions

Posted: 15 Dec 2009 10:19 AM PST

Official Google Checkout Blog: Shop smarter with the new Chrome Extension for Checkout promotions

Want to make the most out of your dollar? The new Google Checkout promotion notifier alerts you when sites you are browsing are offering discounts for purchases made through Google Checkout. With hundreds of stores offering savings of $5, $10, or $20 through December 17, you don't want to miss another Google Checkout deal.



















To install this Chrome Extension, visit the gallery page using your Google Chrome browser. And to find more places to shop, you can also browse participating stores on the Checkout deals page or search for products to buy on Google.com and look for the Google Checkout promotion badge.

Posted by Nicolas Garnier and Peng Ying, Developer Programs Engineers
URL: http://googlecheckout.blogspot.com/2009/12/shop-smarter-with-new-chrome-extension.html

[G] More Russian Gmail videos

Posted: 15 Dec 2009 10:19 AM PST

Official Gmail Blog: More Russian Gmail videos

Posted by Maya Moufarek, Regional Marketing Manager

Recently, I reunited with some colleagues in our Moscow office (the same team that brought you this Gmail art video last year) on a set of animated videos showcasing some of Gmail's features: messages grouped into conversations, great spam protection, built-in video chat, offline access, and themes. Some of the humor in these videos may be uniquely Russian — they revolve around a character who imagines what the world would be like if everyday objects worked like Gmail, like this video that compares unthreaded conversations to a mess of laundry:



In case the Russian version is too confusing, we've translated all the videos into English here.
URL: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/more-russian-gmail-videos.html
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