Saturday, April 23, 2011

Googland

Googland

[G] Two heads are better than one: introducing enhanced collaboration in Google Site Search

Posted: 23 Apr 2011 12:32 AM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Two heads are better than one: introducing enhanced collaboration in Google Site Search

Success most frequently arrives to those who collaborate. It's been proven through time: the telephone - Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson, the Cubism art movement - Picasso and Braque, and the list goes on. So in the spirit of teamwork (and our hope that it'll provide you tremendous success), we're introducing a better way collaborate on your Google Site Search search engine.

With Google Site Search, we provide website owners with an easy way to add a search engine to scan the content on their website and other desired domains. To date, collaborating on a search engine has existed to the extent that we allow multiple users to add websites to their search engine index. Today we're expanding the scope of our team-based tools by giving you the ability to add administrators with full collaborative control. With administrators, you'll be able to collaborate on granular elements of your search engine such as refinements, promotions, and much more.

Check out our new collaboration tools by creating a site search engine (tip: enter "collaborate" in the coupon field for a special offer), or logging into your existing Google Site Search control panel. Select "Admin accounts" from the left hand navigation and add collaborators to your search engine. Please reference our post on the custom search blog for more details.

Posted by Rui Jiang, Software Engineer
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/04/two-heads-are-better-than-one.html

[G] Security First: Security and data protection in Google data centers

Posted: 23 Apr 2011 12:32 AM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Security First: Security and data protection in Google data centers

At Google, we run a network of data centers that are built for scale and reliability. They're also designed for security and data protection. For the 3 million businesses that have gone Google and the thousands more that join them every day, these features help ensure that their data is kept safe.

Many of you have been interested in visiting our data centers to see how we work to protect your data, but access to them is tightly restricted. Since we can't give everyone a tour, we look for other ways to provide some visibility into these buildings. Last year we published the Google Apps security white paper, earlier this year we hosted a security & privacy webcast and today we're sharing a video that highlights some of the capabilities in our data centers, including:
  1. Physical security
  2. Data protection
  3. Reliability of operations

Of course, we're also committed to bringing you product features that help ensure the security and protection of your data. To that end, we're the first major cloud provider to offer 2-step verification, default https encryption, attachment viewing and mobile device management in the browser, and many other security and administrative capabilities at no additional charge.

Our data centers aren't just designed with data protection in mind, they're also some of the greenest in the world. We've reduced our energy consumption by over 50% by building highly energy efficient facilities, and just yesterday we announced a power purchase agreement for clean wind energy - our second in less than a year - with the goal of supplying our Mayes County, Oklahoma data center with renewable energy. Read more about our efficiency efforts and our approach to purchasing renewable energy.

For additional information about the security and privacy of Google Apps, please visit our Google Apps Trust site.

Posted by Adam Swidler, Sr. Manager, Google Enterprise
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/04/security-first-security-and-data.html

[G] An update on Google Video - Finding an easier way to migrate Google Video content to YouTube

Posted: 22 Apr 2011 03:51 PM PDT

YouTube Blog: An update on Google Video - Finding an easier way to migrate Google Video content to YouTube

[Cross-posted on the Google Webmaster Blog]

Last week we sent an email to Google Video users letting them know we would be ending playbacks of Google Videos on April 29 and providing instructions on how to download videos currently hosted on the platform. Since then we've received feedback from you about making the migration off of Google Video easier. We work every day to make sure you have a great user experience and should have done better. Based on your feedback, here's what we're doing to fix things.

Google Video users can rest assured that they won't be losing any of their content and we are eliminating the April 29 deadline. We will be working to automatically migrate your Google Videos to YouTube. In the meantime, your videos hosted on Google Video will remain accessible on the web and existing links to Google Videos will remain accessible. If you want to migrate to YouTube now, here's how you do it:
  • We've created an "Upload Videos to YouTube" option on the Google Video status page. To do this, you'll need to have a YouTube account associated with your Google Video account (you can create one here). Before doing this you should read YouTube's Terms of Use and Copyright Policies. If you choose this option, we'll do our best to ensure your existing Google Video links continue to function.


If you'd prefer to download your videos from Google Video, that option is still available.

As we said nearly two years ago, the team is now focused on tackling the tough challenge of video search. We want to thank the millions of people around the world who have taken the time to create and share videos on Google Video. We hope today's improvements will help ease your transition to another video hosting service.

Posted by Mark Dochtermann, Engineering Manager, just watched SJRI: Stanford Juggling Research Institute, which he recently migrated from Google Video to YouTube


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/3LW9ZMdYr8I/update-on-google-video-finding-easier.html

[G] Browsing through time and space with GigaPan and Chrome

Posted: 22 Apr 2011 03:17 PM PDT

Official Google Blog: Browsing through time and space with GigaPan and Chrome

From the presidential inauguration to the World Series to gorgeous cityscapes, for the past few years the GigaPan team at Carnegie Mellon University has been making it possible to explore breathtaking panoramic photos from around the world. GigaPan pioneered the hardware design that captures these photos and used innovative rendering techniques—similar to those of Google Maps—to create seamless transitions between photos, so people can pan and zoom through the image for an interactive and incredibly detailed photo experience.

Yesterday, the GigaPan team took their creative and technical skills to the next level with the GigaPan Time Machine, which brings this same kind of visual interactivity to video using the power of HTML5 and modern browser technology. Time Machine works particularly well on Google Chrome, thanks to its support for the latest HTML5 features and its stability architecture, which ensures it can smoothly run complex web applications without crashing. Time Machine is featured on the gallery of Chrome Experiments, a showcase of creative web applications submitted by developers around the world, and built using the latest web technologies.

The sophisticated cameras the GigaPan team uses for their photographs capture hundreds or even thousands of digital pictures and stitch them together to form an interactive panorama. With Time Machine, the cameras capture these image mosaics at regular intervals to create a video with hundreds of millions or even billions of pixels in each frame. The result is a video that viewers have the ability to zoom in on while it's playing and see incredible detail.

With Time Machine, watching paint dry or grass grow is actually pretty cool. Take a look at a table full of potted plants grow and bloom into flowers. Zoom in to examine a specific plant or even a single leaf, or watch a caterpillar bite off a leafy green for lunch.



One of the critical elements of making Time Machine work was developing algorithms that allow the site to shift seamlessly from one portion of a video to another, to give people the experience of zooming and panning across a video of almost limitless resolution. This is particularly challenging because a seamless transition between videos requires starting a new video before the old one is finished, and then queueing it to align perfectly in time before the swap. The GigaPan researchers were able to accomplish this successfully using HTML5's video tag feature, as well as by taking advantage of Chrome's speed and stability to render the content smoothly as videos start and stop dynamically.

While you can't fast-forward to the weekend (yet), head over to GigaPan's Time Machine to zoom around in space and time with some of the samples, or create your own Time Warp by building your own animated tour through any of the sample videos.

Posted by Rachel Durfee, Google Blog team
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/browsing-through-time-and-space-with.html

[G] This week in search 4/22/11

Posted: 22 Apr 2011 03:17 PM PDT

Official Google Blog: This week in search 4/22/11

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

This week, we sped up search by bringing more predictions to autocomplete and enabling Google Instant in the new Google Toolbar 7 for Internet Explorer. You'll also find more personalization for the tools you use most in this new version of Toolbar, as well as in Google News, which we updated with new features to help you find more articles on topics you're interested in.

More predictions in autocomplete
One of the main ways autocomplete predicts searches while you type is by looking at the most popular searches on Google. This week we improved autocomplete for less common, longer and more complicated queries so that now we make predictions based on the last word or words of your search, getting you results even faster.

For example, previously you wouldn't have gotten a prediction for [online store with underwater gadgets] since few people have searched for that exact query. But many more have searched for [underwater gadgets], so by looking at just the last part of what you've typed into the box, we can now generate a prediction for "gadgets." You'll see a dropdown box below the end of your search with predictions for just that word. This change is currently available for all google.com users in English.


Google Toolbar 7 with Toolbar Instant
We continued to bring the speed of Google Instant to more places with this week's launch of Google Toolbar 7 for Internet Explorer 8 and 9. Once you enable Instant under "Toolbar Options," you'll see search predictions and results appear as you type in the Toolbar search box. The new Toolbar also sports a cleaner look, and is more personalized—showing you only the tools you use the most. It's currently available in English, but we'll be bringing it to other supported languages over the next week. Visit www.google.com/toolbar to download the new Google Toolbar 7.



Automatic personalization and Recommended Sections in Google News
Yesterday, the U.S. English edition of Google News got two new features: automatic personalization and a recommendations gadget. When logged into your Google account, you'll now see stories based on your news-related web history. For instance, if you click on a lot of articles about baseball, we'll make sure you get a chance to see breaking baseball news. In the new Recommended Sections in the right-hand column, you'll see suggested topics to follow based on stories you've clicked before. Learn more about personalization features in the Help Center.


Finally, before you head off for the weekend, don't forget to test your search skills and try solving today's A Google a Day question at www.agoogleaday.com:


Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/this-week-in-search-42211.html

[G] Celebrating Earth Day

Posted: 22 Apr 2011 03:17 PM PDT

Official Google Blog: Celebrating Earth Day

Today, we're celebrating Earth Day with an animated, interactive doodle on our homepage and events at Google offices around the world. At our headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., we're holding an environmental fair for Googlers, complete with speakers and contests to strengthen Googlers' green acumen, and a cookout using—what else—parabolic solar cookers (don't worry, we'll compost the leftovers).

Our campus garden in Mountain View

We've been carbon neutral since 2007 and—Earth Day or not—we're always asking ourselves what we can do to make the world greener today than it was yesterday. This week, we launched a new website with many of the questions we've been asking over the years that have inspired our environmental initiatives. What can we do to make renewable energy cheaper than coal? How can we run a data center using 50 percent less energy? And what does it take to green our energy supply?

It's questions like these that led us to install solar panels on our Mountain View campus in 2007—at the time, the largest corporate solar installation in the U.S. They're also what made us decide to donate to Googlers' favorite charities based on how often they self-power their commute, whether by bike or by pogo stick. We hope the new website helps you start asking bold questions that lead to innovative solutions to make the world a greener place.

In addition to our new site, we've had a busy few weeks continuing our green streak. We doubled down on greening our energy supply with our second power purchase agreement (PPA) in less than a year and made several new investments: at a solar photovoltaic plant in Germany (our first in Europe), and others in the largest wind farm and solar project in the world, bringing our total invested in clean energy to more than $350 million. While the investments won't supply our operations with energy, we believe they make business sense and will spur development and deployment of compelling clean energy technologies.

This Earth Day, we'll continue to ask ourselves what else we can do to bring us closer to true sustainability. We hope that you, and companies across the world, will be doing the same.

Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Enegy Czar
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/celebrating-earth-day.html

[G] This week's Trends: mobs, ads, and Passover

Posted: 22 Apr 2011 01:17 PM PDT

YouTube Blog: This week's Trends: mobs, ads, and Passover

Each weekday, we at YouTube Trends take a look at the most interesting videos and cultural phenomena on YouTube as they develop. We want take a moment to highlight some of what we've come across this week:







Check back every day for the latest about what's trending on YouTube at: www.YouTube.com/Trends



Kevin Allocca, YouTube Trends Manager, recently watched "Super Mario Proposal."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/hzelEHZldkQ/this-weeks-trends-mobs-ads-and-passover.html
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