Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Googland

Googland

[G] Wander the seafloor like never before

Posted: 03 Feb 2010 12:36 AM PST

Google LatLong: Wander the seafloor like never before

If you happen to be a bathymetry buff, we've got an update that you'll be excited about (and if you're not, I hope you will be one by the end of this post). Most of the underwater terrain currently featured in Google Earth comes from the low-resolution US Navy/NOAA/SIO global grid. They're able to predict what the seafloor looks like using an extrapolation of water surface heights to estimate undersea mountains and canyons, based on radar data collected by satellite (if you're curious about this process, you can read Smith and Sandwell's more detailed explanation here). For most of the sea, that's all that's available. But a small part of the ocean has higher-resolution data available, based on echosounding sonar from ships, and it's now available in Google Earth.

Several organizations have provided their ship-collected data for publication in Google Earth to improve our undersea maps. The Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping - Joint Hydrographic Center, has shared large swaths of underwater depth data collected from their expeditions north of Pt. Barrow, Alaska into the Arctic. The Living Oceans Society has shared their surveys off of the west coast of British Columbia, Canada, so you can now zoom around the Oglala seamount:


The California State University at Monterey Bay has collected high-resolution underwater terrain data for the entire California coast out to three nautical miles. We've published their data north and south of San Francisco Bay down to Ano Nuevo, where you can see the underwater ridges that elephant seals must navigate.


You can now also explore large undersea areas newly published from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), including our highest resolution underwater depth data featured to date: 1-meter terrain collected by MBARI's Autonomous Underwater mapping Vehicles in Monterey Bay Canyon (see screenshot below), which is an underwater canyon larger than the Grand Canyon nestled between Santa Cruz and Monterey, California. MBARI has also shared ship echosounding maps that they've collected on the Davidson seamount, the Rodriguez seamount off of Santa Barbara, and terrain along the Juan de Fuca Ridge, as well as data collected off of the Oregon coast, from Beaver basin to the Heceta bank.






Photo caption: The MBARI Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) being launched from the Research Vessel Zephyr and one underwater. The MBARI Mapping AUV is a torpedo-shaped vehicle equipped with four mapping sonars that operate simultaneously during a mission. The sonars are a swath multibeam sonar, two frequencies of sidescan sonars, and a sub-bottom profiler. The multibeam sonar produces high-resolution bathymetry (analogous to topography on land), the sidescan sonars produce imagery based on the intensity of the sound energy's reflections, and the subbottom profiler penetrates sediments on the seafloor, allowing the detection of sediment layers, faults, and depth to the basement rock. All components are rated to 6000 m depth. The vehicle is launched on programmed missions and runs on its own battery power until it returns to the ship, as programmed, for recovery. The mapping AUV was christened the D. Allan B. in honor of MBARI's long-time Board member Dr. D. Allan Bromley of Yale University, who passed away in 2004.

Download this new undersea tour and open it in Google Earth to explore for yourself. Remember that only 5% of the world's oceans have been explored, so much remains to be discovered.
We continue to publish new data in Google Earth, so check back. We thank all of the ocean exploring groups who have shared their data and welcome new contributions.

Posted by Jamie Adams, Geo Data Strategist
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/02/wander-seafloor-like-never-before.html

[G] Take your places and searches to go with Google Maps for mobile

Posted: 02 Feb 2010 02:10 PM PST

Google LatLong: Take your places and searches to go with Google Maps for mobile

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Mobile Blog)

If you often use both a computer and a mobile phone in your daily routine, it can seem like a hassle when they don't stay in sync. You might spend time on your computer looking for a great used bookstore, only to forget the name of the place when you are ready to get directions from your phone. Sure, you could print directions in advance, but we believe smartphones are "smart" because they save you time. That's why today we're making your phone a bit smarter with the introduction of personalized suggestions and synchronized starring in Google Maps for mobile on Android.

Personalized suggestions make it easy to find places you've previously searched for. For example, imagine you're on your computer and you come across the Place Page for Mario's Bohemian Cigar Store Cafe. After reading reviews, you decide to stop in for lunch. When you're ready to go and want to get directions, just open Google Maps on your phone, start typing "mar," and you'll quickly see a suggestion - saving you from re-typing a long query and making it easier and faster to be on your way.





In addition, starring is a great way to save places to access them later. So whether you're standing at Amoeba Music with your phone or making plans to go there on your computer, you can star it so it appears on the map next time you're on either device. When viewing place details, just press the star icon next to the place name; these starred places are automatically synchronized between desktop and mobile, and can be accessed from both the "More" menu on your phone and from the My Maps tab on your computer.





Starring and personalized suggestions both require you to be signed in with your Google account, and your Web History must be enabled in order to use personalized suggestions.With synchronized starring and personalized suggestions, we hope to make your life easier when taking places and searches between your computer and phone. Both features are available in Google Maps 3.4. On Nexus One phones, you'll get this version of Maps after you accept the over-the-air update that started today. For other Android devices, starring and personalized suggestions will soon be available by downloading Google Maps 3.4 from Android Market. Lastly, be sure to check out the newly added "night mode" in Navigation, which will automatically turn on for easier Navigation viewing at night.


Posted by Michael Siliski and Taj Campbell, Google Maps
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/02/take-your-places-and-searches-to-go.html

[G] Take your places and searches to go with Google Maps for mobile

Posted: 02 Feb 2010 02:10 PM PST

Official Google Mobile Blog: Take your places and searches to go with Google Maps for mobile

If you often use both a computer and a mobile phone in your daily routine, it can seem like a hassle when they don't stay in sync. You might spend time on your computer looking for a great used bookstore, only to forget the name of the place when you are ready to get directions from your phone. Sure, you could print directions in advance, but we believe smartphones are "smart" because they save you time. That's why today we're making your phone a bit smarter with the introduction of personalized suggestions and synchronized starring in Google Maps for mobile on Android.

Personalized suggestions make it easy to find places you've previously searched for. For example, imagine you're on your computer and you come across the Place Page for Mario's Bohemian Cigar Store Cafe. After reading reviews, you decide to stop in for lunch. When you're ready to go and want to get directions, just open Google Maps on your phone, start typing "mar," and you'll quickly see a suggestion - saving you from re-typing a long query and making it easier and faster to be on your way.













In addition, starring is a great way to save places to access them later. So whether you're standing at Amoeba Music with your phone or making plans to go there on your computer, you can star it so it appears on the map next time you're on either device. When viewing place details, just press the star icon next to the place name; these starred places are automatically synchronized between desktop and mobile, and can be accessed from both the "More" menu on your phone and from the My Maps tab on your computer.













Starring and personalized suggestions both require you to be signed in with your Google account, and your Web History must be enabled in order to use personalized suggestions.With synchronized starring and personalized suggestions, we hope to make your life easier when taking places and searches between your computer and phone. Both features are available in Google Maps 3.4. On Nexus One phones, you'll get this version of Maps after you accept the over-the-air update that started today. For other Android devices, starring and personalized suggestions will soon be available by downloading Google Maps 3.4 from Android Market. Lastly, be sure to check out the newly added "night mode" in Navigation, which will automatically turn on for easier Navigation viewing at night.


Posted by Michael Siliski and Taj Campbell, Google Maps
URL: http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/02/take-your-places-and-searches-to-go.html

[G] A recent improvement for Arabic searches

Posted: 02 Feb 2010 12:55 PM PST

Official Google Blog: A recent improvement for Arabic searches

We've learned that when performing a search on Google, people sometimes forget to separate words with spaces. Moreover, people often mistakenly repeat a letter within a single word. For instance, when writing the query [amazingly beautiful poem], you might write it as [amazingly beautiifullpoem].

These types of errors are much more common in languages like Arabic, where most of the letters are cursive. That means that the shapes of the letters change, based on the position of the letter in the word (initial, middle, final or isolated). Moreover, some Arabic letters are considered word breaks, meaning that the following letter must be in an "initial" shape. In other words, if the last letter of one word is a word break, the following word may not be separated with a space.

For example, the queries [وزارةالتعليم] and [وزارة التعليم] have an identical meaning (Ministry of Education) and they're both written in a common form for Arabic documents. But they have different, albeit correct, formats — the first query is written as a single word, while the second is written as two. Google needs to understand that while they're written differently, they mean the same thing and should yield the exact same search results. In this example, both queries were written correctly, just in different formats. But sometimes people just make errors — like repeating the same letter twice. For example, you might write [راائعة الجماال], repeating the letter "ا" twice in both query words. In this case the correct spelling should be [رائعة الجمال]. It's important that Google search recognizes your query — despite spelling errors.

To address issues like this, we recently developed a search ranking improvement that targets certain Arabic queries. Our algorithm employs rules of Arabic spelling and grammar along with signals from historical search data to decide when to leave out spaces between words or when to remove unnecessarily repeated letters. Now, when you type a query leaving out spaces or repeating a letter, we'll return better results based not only on what you typed, but also on what our algorithm understands is the "correct" query. For example, here's what happens when you type [قصيدة راائعةالجماال] ([amazingly beautiful poem] in Arabic) with repeated letters and dropped spaces between words.


As you can see, the Google results contain the corrected query, the terms قصيدة رائعة الجمال, in bold.

For most people, this might seem like a small enhancement. But for us, it's a big change. Our tests show we've improved search for 10% of Arabic language queries. Which, when you think about it, is a lot of people.

Posted by Moustafa Hammad and Mohamed Elhawary, Software Engineers, Search Quality Team
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/recent-improvement-for-arabic-searches.html

[G] Stanford expands Google Books agreement

Posted: 02 Feb 2010 11:17 AM PST

Google Public Policy Blog: Stanford expands Google Books agreement

Posted by Tamar Fruchtman, Senior Corporate Counsel

Today, Stanford University announced that it has expanded our original partnership to take advantage of our settlement agreement to make millions of works from its library collection accessible to readers, researchers, and book lovers across the United States. That means that if the settlement agreement is approved by the court, anyone in the US will be able to find, preview and buy online access to books from Stanford's library. Stanford joins the University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and University of Texas, who also expanded their original partnerships with Google.

Google was founded on the principle of making information more accessible to more people, so we're excited that Stanford has joined in our continuing efforts to bring these books to more people around the country. You can read more at the Stanford University website here.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/02/stanford-expands-google-books-agreement.html

[G] Your Questions for President Obama

Posted: 02 Feb 2010 11:17 AM PST

Google Public Policy Blog: Your Questions for President Obama

Posted by Steve Grove, YouTube's Head of News & Politics

(cross-posted from the Official YouTube Blog)

Today, President Obama had his first exclusive interview after his State of the Union speech with you, the YouTube community. The President engaged in a direct conversation about a broad range of issues, from generating jobs to opening up the health care process to investments in nuclear energy.

The best part of the process was that it was driven by you. ​Five days ago, as the President began his State of the Union address, we opened up our Moderator platform on CitizenTube, and over 55,000 of you submitted and voted on both video and text questions. Some of them were hard-hitting, others were emotional, and some were even funny.

You can watch the full interview now:



Only able to ask less than 0.2% of the 11,696 questions submitted, it was hard to choose the final handful. Here's how the selection process worked: we tried to cover a range of issues, minimize duplicate questions, and include both video and text submissions. First, we looked at which topics had the highest participation -- like jobs, foreign policy, health care and government reform -- to determine how many questions to ask in each category. We then took the top 5% of video and text questions and picked questions that reflected what you cared about. None of them were chosen by the White House or seen by the President before the interview.

In some cases, we combined questions, grouping similar ones from different categories like health care and government reform:
"Why are the health care meetings, procedures, etc not on CSPAN as promised?" - Mr. Anderson, Texas
"How do you expect the people of this country to trust you when you have repeatedly broken promises that were made on the campaign trail. Most recently, the promise to have a transparent healthcare debate..." - Warren Hunter, Brooklyn
Sometimes the top overall question in the category was a video question:



To try to get as many question in as possible, we had a section called "Good idea/Bad idea" in which we tried to solicit short responses from the President on ideas you sent in that might not be presented to him in traditional interviews. And in all cases, we tried to select the top questions that would solicit conversation, lead to substantive answers, and hadn't been asked in previous programs we've had with the President.

We had many more questions on hand than we had time to deliver, so we're pleased that the White House has agreed to respond to more of the top-voted questions in their blog soon, at whitehouse.gov.

We hope this interview brings us one step closer to creating better access to your government through YouTube -- and we'd love to hear your feedback and any other ideas you have on YouTube's political programming.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/02/your-questions-for-president-obama.html

[G] 4 8 15 16 23 42

Posted: 02 Feb 2010 09:52 AM PST

Google LatLong: 4 8 15 16 23 42

Here on the Google Maps team we're as excited as everyone else that the final season of the TV series Lost starts today. Our users are excited as well, and they've created maps to track the adventures of the Oceanic 6 around the world:
Please don't share these with Charles Widmore, as we don't really want him to know where to find our heroes! We're still working on that map of the island's movements and will post it when we catch up.

Posted by Lior Ron, Product Manager, Google Maps
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/02/4-8-15-16-23-42.html

[G] Improved Google Search in Labs

Posted: 02 Feb 2010 09:52 AM PST

Official Gmail Blog: Improved Google Search in Labs

Posted by Adam de Boor, Software Engineer

Hello again. I've been taking advantage of my 20% time to make some improvements in the Google Search lab I told you about last April. For starters, I've hooked up a bunch of Google's most popular search features, including:
  • Dictionary definitions: use a keyword like "define" in English and you'll see the first definition of the word, with a link to the dictionary from which it came.


  • Spelling corrections: if you mistype something in your search, Google's spell checking software will automatically ask if you meant a more common spelling of that word (especially helpful when looking up a new word).


  • Calculations: type in an arithmetic expression and you'll get the result. In this case the "Paste result" option from the result's pop-up menu will actually paste the result of the computation.


  • Local results: you can search for a particular place or for things near a particular place (map results will show up in a few weeks — they're a little broken by our recent switch to use https). The "More info" link will take you to the place page.


  • Weather: just type "weather" followed by the city and state, zip code, or city and country.


  • News: if your query matches something in the news, we'll show you one hit and an indication of how many related articles there are, with a link to go see them.


In addition, you can now use this Labs feature in any available Gmail language and you'll get search results that match your preferred language.

Finally, as some folks have already noticed, I added a search button to the toolbar when you're composing a message:


If you've got text selected when you click it, Gmail will search for that text. If you don't have text selected, you'll just get a search box where you can start typing.

That's all for this installment. As always, we welcome your feedback.
URL: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/improved-google-search-in-labs.html

[G] Web Analytics TV #5 with Avinash and Nick

Posted: 02 Feb 2010 08:27 AM PST

Google Analytics Blog: Web Analytics TV #5 with Avinash and Nick

This is the fifth installment in our Web Analytics TV series in which you share your most burning questions via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them.

Here is the list of this week's questions. You all are keeping us on our toes!

In this episode we discuss:
  • Tracking online conversions and success for small, local, businesses
  • Tracking the number of times a visitor converts in one visit
  • How the e-commerce conversion rate can be greater than 100%
  • How you can change the duration of Google Analytics campaigns
  • How you can differentiate between paid and organic search in Google Analytics
  • What is the recommended % balance between branded and category terms
  • Why is time spent 0 for visits with 1 page/visit
  • Why unique visitor numbers are higher than visits
  • How visits and unique pageviews are calculated
  • Would survey and qualitative help measure "engagement" ?
  • How to best track mailto: links on your site
  • What are the best practices for using virtual pageviews, event tracking and custom variables?
  • How to see dimensions and metrics by location
  • Where to find custom variables reports Google Analytics



Here are links to resources we discussed in the video:
Now to a special sidebar with our friend Michael:
Michael, we realized that we didn't actually answer your answer on why unique visitor numbers are higher than visits for a particular page. The real answer is that visits are only incremented for the first hit (pageview, event, transaction, etc..) of a visit whereas unique visitor is increment for each page in the visit. So say a visitor visits pages /foo and /bar in that order. Only /foo would get one visit, and both /foo and /bar would each get one visitor.

Hope that makes sense :)

We hope you found episode helpful, and we'd love to hear your comments and have your questions. Please use the comment form below.

In case you missed them, here are our previous videos:

Episode #1
Episode #2
Episode #3
Episode #4

If you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question or vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site. Avinash and I will answer your latest questions in a couple of weeks with another video. We can't wait!

Please add your thoughts about the Q&A via comments below. Thanks!

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team
URL: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/02/web-analytics-tv-5-with-avinash-and.html

[G] Announcing Google's Focused Research Awards

Posted: 02 Feb 2010 06:55 AM PST

Official Google Research Blog: Announcing Google's Focused Research Awards

Posted by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives

[cross-posted with the Official Google Blog]

It is said that Google is like a university — and not just because everyone eats their lunch off trays in the cafeteria. Like a university, we devote significant energy to research across a wide array of subjects — from semantics to help improve search, to ways we can improve the efficiency of our data centers. Along with our internal efforts, we've long invested in building a strong, mutually beneficial relationship with universities and the research community. We give approximately 150 research grants a year to fund projects across a variety of subjects, we host visiting faculty members here at Google on sabbatical, and last year we started the Google Fellowship Program to fund graduate students doing innovative research in several fields.

Today, we're announcing the first-ever round of Google Focused Research Awards — funding research in areas of study that are of key interest to Google as well as the research community. These awards, totaling $5.7 million, cover four areas: machine learning, the use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring, energy efficiency in computing, and privacy. These are all areas in which Google is already deeply invested, and yet there is a long way to go. We're excited to see what these projects contribute to the body of research in these important areas.

These unrestricted grants are for two to three years, and the recipients will have the advantage of access to Google tools, technologies and expertise. We've given awards to 12 projects led by 31 professors at 10 universities:

Machine Learning: William Cohen, Christos Faloutsos, Garth Gibson and Tom Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon University

Use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring: Gaetano Borriello, University of Washington and Deborah Estrin, UCLA

Energy efficiency in computing:
  • Ricardo Bianchini, Rutgers, Fred Chong, UC Santa Barbara, Thomas F. Wenisch, University of Michigan and Sudhanva Gurumurthi, University of Virginia
  • Christos Kozyrakis, Mark Horowitz, Benjamin Lee, Nick McKeown and Mendel Rosenblum, Stanford
  • David G. Andersen and Mor. Harchol-Balter, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Tajana Simunic Rosing, Steven Swanson and Amin Vahdat, UCSD
  • Thomas F. Wenisch, Trevor Mudge, David Blaauw and Dennis Sylvester, University of Michigan
  • Margaret Martonosi, Jennifer Rexford, Michael Freedman and Mung Chiang, Princeton
Privacy:
  • Ed Felten, Princeton
  • Lorrie Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Ryan Calo, Stanford CIS
  • Andy Hopper, Cambridge University Computing Laboratory
We look forward to working with these researchers over the coming years. And, as we continue to identify key areas of research that are of mutual interest to both university researchers and Google, we will provide awards to support these collaborations. For more information about all of our research programs, check out our University Relations site.
URL: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/02/announcing-googles-focused-research.html

[G] Announcing Google's Focused Research Awards

Posted: 02 Feb 2010 06:55 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Announcing Google's Focused Research Awards

(Cross-posted with the Google Research Blog)

It is said that Google is like a university — and not just because everyone eats their lunch off trays in the cafeteria. Like a university, we devote significant energy to research across a wide array of subjects — from semantics to help improve search, to ways we can improve the efficiency of our data centers. Along with our internal efforts, we've long invested in building a strong, mutually beneficial relationship with universities and the research community. We give approximately 150 research grants a year to fund projects across a variety of subjects, we host visiting faculty members here at Google on sabbatical, and last year we started the Google Fellowship Program to fund graduate students doing innovative research in several fields.

Today, we're announcing the first-ever round of Google Focused Research Awards — funding research in areas of study that are of key interest to Google as well as the research community. These awards, totaling $5.7 million, cover four areas: machine learning, the use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring, energy efficiency in computing, and privacy. These are all areas in which Google is already deeply invested, and yet there is a long way to go. We're excited to see what these projects contribute to the body of research in these important areas.

These unrestricted grants are for two to three years, and the recipients will have the advantage of access to Google tools, technologies and expertise. We've given awards to 12 projects led by 31 professors at 10 universities:

Machine Learning: William Cohen, Christos Faloutsos, Garth Gibson and Tom Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon University

Use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring: Gaetano Borriello, University of Washington and Deborah Estrin, UCLA

Energy efficiency in computing:
  • Ricardo Bianchini, Rutgers, Fred Chong, UC Santa Barbara, Thomas F. Wenisch, University of Michigan and Sudhanva Gurumurthi, University of Virginia
  • Christos Kozyrakis, Mark Horowitz, Benjamin Lee, Nick McKeown and Mendel Rosenblum, Stanford
  • David G. Andersen and Mor. Harchol-Balter, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Tajana Simunic Rosing, Steven Swanson and Amin Vahdat, UCSD
  • Thomas F. Wenisch, Trevor Mudge, David Blaauw and Dennis Sylvester, University of Michigan
  • Margaret Martonosi, Jennifer Rexford, Michael Freedman and Mung Chiang, Princeton
Privacy:
  • Ed Felten, Princeton
  • Lorrie Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Ryan Calo, Stanford CIS
  • Andy Hopper, Cambridge University Computing Laboratory
We look forward to working with these researchers over the coming years. And, as we continue to identify key areas of research that are of mutual interest to both university researchers and Google, we will provide awards to support these collaborations. For more information about all of our research programs, check out our University Relations site.

Posted by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/announcing-googles-focused-research.html
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)