Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Googland

Googland

[G] New imagery of Port-au-Prince

Posted: 20 Jan 2010 03:48 AM PST

Google LatLong: New imagery of Port-au-Prince


In the wake of the devastating Haiti earthquake, aid organizations have been hard at work on the ground and citizens around the world have pitched in to help in whatever way they can. On the Geo team, we've been looking for ways we can help relief efforts using our mapping tools. Last week, thanks to our partner GeoEye, we published updated satellite imagery of Haiti in Google Earth and Google Maps which illustrated the devastation and current conditions on the ground. This data was made available for public consumption and also to assist relief efforts including those by UNOSAT and the Center for Interdisciplinary Geospatial Information Technologies.

With the hope of furthering awareness and relief efforts, we arranged for a collection of the Port-au-Prince area at even higher resolution (approximately 15cm) to complement the existing imagery. Here are some examples of the kind of detail this new dataset can convey:



click to see full-size

These images were gathered on Sunday (January 17). You can currently view the imagery in Google Maps in Satellite mode. It will also be available via the Google Maps API and in Google Map Maker. We're working to make this available as the base imagery in Google Earth by tomorrow morning (and all previous imagery of Haiti will be included in the Historical Imagery feature). We're also making this imagery directly available to relief organizations.

Earlier today we updated the Haiti Earthquake KML layer (download for Google Earth) with additional information, including more imagery from GeoEye, Digital Globe, and NOAA, as well as earthquake epicenters and other maps. Aid groups can also download Map Maker data as well.

Posted by Matt Manolides, Senior GIS Strategist
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-imagery-of-port-au-prince.html

[G] Making the grade by mapping Candide's journey

Posted: 20 Jan 2010 12:47 AM PST

Google LatLong: Making the grade by mapping Candide's journey


Before their winter break, a group of students from Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn visited the New York Public Library to see the Library's exhibition Candide at 250: Scandal and Success, an exhibit that traces the history of Voltaire's classic tale of travel and misadventure. While they were there they also got a lesson from the Library's mapper extraordinaire, Matt Knutzen, on how to map out their own version of Candide's journey in Google Earth and Maps. Their work is now available on the Library's new website, and visitors are invited to add their own journeys to the map.

We're always on the lookout for innovative ways that students and educators are working with Google's geo tools, so we were happy to find out that the Library has also made the lesson plan available to the public. Teachers looking for a new way to teach the classics should take a look and get some fresh ideas.

Take it from sophomore Anna Sherman, age 15. She had to re-read the book carefully while creating her map, so that she could plot every city right. "To make it accurate, I had to really learn about the geography," she said. "This is the direction education is heading, definitely, 100 percent. It's a new way to learn. Me personally, at my age, I wouldn't really want to read a paper with just words on it. If you have images and video, that's so much better. It helps you see the book in a whole new light."


Posted by Kate Hurowitz, Lat Long Blog Team
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/01/making-grade-by-mapping-candides.html

[G] Change the way you see your site with Browser Size

Posted: 19 Jan 2010 06:46 PM PST

Official Google Website Optimizer Blog: Change the way you see your site with Browser Size

This is a guest post from Jesse Nichols. Jesse is part of the Google Analytics team and is one of our Analytics gurus. Here, he shares a new tool in Google Labs that can help you see how visitors see your site.

​The easiest websites to optimize are the horrible ones. In fact, the hardest part about optimizing a site that has a million and one problems is deciding which ones to go after first. However, where do you begin if you have a beautiful, clean, profitable website? If there are no clear issues - if the calls to action are visible and the page uncluttered and the buttons big and shiny - then what can be done short of remaking the entire site (an idea as scary as it is unnecessary)?

Sometimes, all you need is a change in perspective. We, the web savvy, see the Internet through big, clear monitors and 11 point font. We look at our site and we can't understand why anyone wouldn't be able to perform whatever task the site is designed to do. Well, to that end, Google Labs has created Browser Size. This nifty little tool allows you to see how much of your webpage is immediately visible to your visitor depending on the size of their monitor and resolution settings.

The concept of "the fold" of a webpage (as in "above the fold", i.e., what can be seen upon landing on a webpage without any scrolling) is not a solid line that snips the bottom off every page, but rather a subjective experience. The notion of having important links, buttons and messages above the fold is taken for granted as a good policy, so what if you found out that 20% of your visitors couldn't immediately see what you thought they could?

Plug your site into Browser Size and you'll get that perspective. Each band of color represents approximately how many visitors will see that section immediately upon landing (the seemingly shaky lines are actually a true representation of the visible area excluding the title bar, toolbars, etc). If you have important information or buttons in the 70% range, that means 30% of your visitors are forced to scroll to see that information and convert.

Take a look at this example from the Website Optimizer homepage:


Click to see full-size

As you can see, most people can see our primary call to action, the "Start testing now" button. However, some of our educational content like Benefits and Testing 101 sections is below the fold for 50% of viewers.

Think the numbers are different for your site? Browser Size bases its data on a sample of visitors to Google.com, but you can check out your screen resolutions report in your web analytics tool to see the most common visitor screen resolutions for your own site. For most sites the list of dimensions is quite long, and the ones we in the industry tend to use – 1024x768, 1280x800, 1280x1024 - typically only represent about 50% of the visitors at best.

So get back to the optimization grindstone, squeeze another percentage point or two into your conversion rate, and give all of your visitors the experience they deserve. You can start using Browser Size at http://browsersize.googlelabs.com

Thanks again to Jesse for sharing this post with us.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Website Optimizer team
URL: http://websiteoptimizer.blogspot.com/2010/01/change-way-you-see-your-site-with.html

[G] Helping computers understand language

Posted: 19 Jan 2010 12:46 PM PST

Official Google Blog: Helping computers understand language

An irony of computer science is that tasks humans struggle with can be performed easily by computer programs, but tasks humans can perform effortlessly remain difficult for computers. We can write a computer program to beat the very best human chess players, but we can't write a program to identify objects in a photo or understand a sentence with anywhere near the precision of even a child.

Enabling computers to understand language remains one of the hardest problems in artificial intelligence. The goal of a search engine is to return the best results for your search, and understanding language is crucial to returning the best results. A key part of this is our system for understanding synonyms.

What is a synonym? An obvious example is that "pictures" and "photos" mean the same thing in most circumstances. If you search for [pictures developed with coffee] to see how to develop photographs using coffee grinds as a developing agent, Google must understand that even if a page says "photos" and not "pictures," it's still relevant to the search. While even a small child can identify synonyms like pictures/photos, getting a computer program to understand synonyms is enormously difficult, and we're very proud of the system we've developed at Google.

Our synonyms system is the result of more than five years of research within our web search ranking team. We constantly monitor the quality of the system, but recently we made a special effort to analyze synonyms impact and quality. Most of the time, you probably don't notice when your search involves synonyms, because it happens behind the scenes. However, our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports. We took a set of these queries and analyzed how precise the synonyms were, and were happy with the results: For every 50 queries where synonyms significantly improved the search results, we had only one truly bad synonym.

An example of a bad synonym from this analysis is in the search [dell system speaker driver precision 360], where Google thinks "pc" is a synonym for precision. Note that you can still see that on Google today, because while we know it's a bad synonym, we don't typically fix bad synonyms by hand. Instead, we try to discover general improvements to our algorithms to fix the problems. We hope it will be fixed automatically in some future changes.

We also recently made a change to how our synonyms are displayed. In our search result snippets, we bold the terms of your search. Historically, we have bolded synonyms such as stemming variants — like the word "picture" for a search with the word "pictures." Now, we've extended this to words that our algorithms very confidently think mean the same thing, even if they are spelled nothing like the original term. This helps you to understand why that result is shown, especially if it doesn't contain your original search term. In our [pictures developed with coffee] example, you can see that the first result has the word "photos" bolded in the title:


(Note that because our synonyms depend on the other words in your search and use many signals, you won't necessarily always see the word "photos" bolded for "pictures", only when our algorithms think it is useful and important to bold.)

We use many techniques to extract synonyms, that we've blogged about before. Our systems analyze petabytes of web documents and historical search data to build an intricate understanding of what words can mean in different contexts. In the above example "photos" was an obvious synonym for "pictures," but it's not always a good synonym. For example, it's important for us to recognize that in a search like [history of motion pictures], "motion pictures" means something special (movies), and "motion photos" doesn't make any sense. Another example is the term "GM." Most people know the most prominent meaning: "General Motors." For the search [gm cars], you can see that Google bolds the phrase "General Motors" in the search results. This is an indication that for that search we thought "General Motors" meant the same thing as "GM." Are there any other meanings? Many people can think of the second meaning, "genetically modified," which is bolded when GM is used in queries about crops and food, like in the search results for [gm wheat]. It turns out that there are more than 20 other possible meanings of the term "GM" that our synonyms system knows something about. GM can mean George Mason in [gm university], gamemaster in [gm screen star wars], Gangadhar Meher in [gm college], general manager in [nba gm] and even gunners mate in [navy gm].

Here are screenshots of those disambiguations of GM in action:


As a nomenclatural note, even obvious term variants like "pictures" (plural) and "picture" (singular) would be treated as different search terms by a dumb computer, so we also include these types of relationships within our umbrella of synonyms. Pictures/picture are typically called stemming variants, which refers to the fact that they share the same word stem, or root. The same systems that need to understand that "pictures" and "photos" mean the same thing also need to understand that "pictures" and "picture" mean the same thing. This is something that is even more obvious to a human but is also still a difficult task for a computer. An example of how this is difficult are the words "animal" and "animation," which share the same stem and etymology, but don't mean the same thing in standard use. Another tricky case that is very dependent on the other words in the query is "arm" vs. "arms." Arms might seem like the plural of arm, but consider how it might be used in a search: [arm reduction] vs. [arms reduction]. Google search is smart enough to know that the former is about removing fat from one's arm, and the latter is about reducing stockpiles of weaponry, and that arm/arms are dangerous synonyms in that case because they would change the meaning. These subtle differences between words that seem related is what makes synonymy very hard to get right.

Here are some other examples of synonyms we thought were interesting:

[song words], "lyrics" is bolded for "words".
[what state has the highest murder rate], "homicide" is bolded for "murder".
[himalayan kitten breeder], Google knows that "cat breeder" is the same as "kitten breeder".
[dura ace track bb axle njs], Google knows that "bb" here means "bottom bracket".
[software update on bb color id], "blackberry is bolded for "bb".
[bb cream dark], Google knows here that bb means "blemish balm".
[southeastern usa bb fitness & figure], "bodybuilding" is bolded for "bb."

Lastly, language is used with as much variety and subtlety as is present in human culture, and our algorithms still make mistakes. We flinch when we find such mistakes; we're always working to fix them. One of the best ways for us to discover these problems is to get feedback from real users, which we then use to inspire improvements to our computer programs. If you have specific complaints about our synonyms system, you can post a question at the web search help center forum or you can tweet them with the hash tag #googlesyns. You can also turn off a synonym for a specific term by adding a "+" before it or by putting the words in quotation marks.

Posted by Steven Baker, Software Engineer
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/helping-computers-understand-language.html

[G] Take a virtual tour of the Olympics in 3D

Posted: 19 Jan 2010 12:46 PM PST

Google LatLong: Take a virtual tour of the Olympics in 3D

[Cross-posted from the SketchUp Blog]

The countdown to the 2010 Winter Olympics has begun, and the Google Boulder office has been busy modeling the Olympic venues in Vancouver, BC using Google SketchUp.

Last month, we introduced photo-realistic 3D models for eight of the nine venues hosting the games.

Today, we released updates to many of the models using higher-resolution imagery, and, the last venue for the Olympics: the Bobsled Course!


With today's release, all nine venues (54 buildings in total) are completely modeled in 3D and available for viewing in Google Earth's "3D Buildings" layer (or view the collection in the Google 3D Warehouse). The collection includes 3D models that range from downtown event centers to ski lifts and spectator bleachers.

In addition, the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games incorporated the models into the Official website using the Google Earth plugin. To see the models, simply click on "Spectator Guide," then "Venues." You'll find a "3D View" tab that loads the 3D model.

So wax your virtual skis and take a tour!

Posted by Bruce Polderman, Product Manager
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/01/take-virtual-tour-of-olympics-in-3d.html

[G] An update from AdSense about the response to Haiti Earthquake

Posted: 19 Jan 2010 12:46 PM PST

Inside AdSense: An update from AdSense about the response to Haiti Earthquake

We've heard from many of our AdSense publishers about your concern for the victims of the recent earthquake in Haiti. We wanted to take this opportunity to let you know about some of the efforts Google is making to help the people of Haiti respond to this catastrophe.

Google is donating $1 million to organizations on the ground that are rescuing those still trapped and providing clean water, food, medical care, shelter and support to those affected. For more information on Google's efforts and opportunities to get involved, please visit the Google Blog.

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Team
URL: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/01/update-from-adsense-about-response-to.html

[G] Staying connected in post-earthquake Haiti

Posted: 19 Jan 2010 09:46 AM PST

Google Public Policy Blog: Staying connected in post-earthquake Haiti

Posted by Jacquelline Fuller and Prem Ramaswami for the Google Crisis Response Team

(cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

With relief efforts underway, many displaced Haitians and their friends and families around the world are deeply concerned about the safety and whereabouts of loved ones. In response to the Haitian earthquake, a team of Googlers worked with the U.S. Department of State to create an online People Finder gadget so that people can submit information about missing persons and to search the database.



You'll find this gadget on our Haiti earthquake response website as well as on the State Department website. In order to prevent the proliferation of multiple missing persons databases (a big problem during Hurricane Katrina), we've made the People Finder gadget standards-based and easily embeddable on any website (see here for instructions). The gadget is currently available in English, French and Creole.

We're also helping families in the U.S. stay connected with their loved ones in Haiti by offering free calls to Haiti for the next two weeks via Google Voice. If you don't have a Google Voice account already, request an invitation at www.google.com/voice.

For anyone interested in viewing updated imagery in Google Earth, we've now included GeoEye's shots from Wednesday in the Historical Imagery feature. Now you can view the imagery without downloading the KML file and can use the time slider to easily compare the stark before-and-after images, such as those below. To help relief organizations, GeoEye has made professional-quality files of their recent satellite imagery of Haiti downloadable via our earthquake response website. We hope the imagery in this format will be valuable to GIS organizations and aid workers.


(click image to see full-size)

We have also made Haiti Map Maker data publicly available for download for non-commercial use and attribution. Data can be used by relief workers to do things such as create offline maps, combine data sets and run analysis, all of which we hope will help with their efforts on the ground. Please help improve Haiti maps with Google Map Maker.

News and user footage continues to roll into YouTube. Oxfam and the American Red Cross are even responding to donations by uploading videos that show viewers exactly where their contributions are making a difference.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/01/staying-connected-in-post-earthquake.html
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