This week in search 3/11/11

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.

When searching, sometimes you have a pretty good idea of what you want to see and what you don’t. With features like Google Instant and Instant Previews, you’re able to quickly scan results to find exactly what you’re looking for. This week’s changes continue to make Google more interactive so you can get to your desired search result even faster—whether you’re on the go, looking for videos or weeding out unhelpful search results.

Instant Previews for Videos
When it comes to videos, people want to spend less time searching and more time watching. That’s why we added an enhancement to Instant Previews—the ability to preview videos. Click once on the magnifying glass next to the title of any video search result in universal or video mode. For some videos, you'll now be able to play through a set of four short segments from the video to see if it’s what you’re looking for (video providers have to opt to make the previews available, so you won't find it for every video yet).

Example searches: [roy halladay], [bi-winning], [heat vs. lakers]

Instant Previews for Mobile
When you’re searching on your mobile device you want to find what you’re looking for fast. Similar to the desktop version, Instant Previews for mobile displays search results in the form of webpage snapshots, so you can visually compare results without having to go back and forth between websites and search results. To use Instant Previews, go to www.google.com on your Android (2.2+) or iOS (4.0+) device and tap on the magnifying glass next to any search result. You can quickly scroll across previews by swiping with your finger and when you find one you like, tap on the preview to go straight to the page. Try searching for [honeycomb] or [how to poach an egg] on your phone and preview the results to find what’s most interesting and useful to you.

Scroll across Instant Previews of search results on your mobile phone

Hide sites to further personalize your search results
Have you ever clicked on a result and come right back to Google to look for another one? Sometimes, this happens when the first result just isn’t quite right, but other times, it could be because the entire site seemed offensive or of generally low quality. Yesterday, we announced a new option for times like these, so you can further personalize your search results and block sites that you don’t find useful. When you click a result and then return to Google, you’ll find a new link to “Block all example.com results.” If you click the link and confirm it, the domain won’t appear in your future search results.

The next time you do a search that would normally return results from a site you’ve blocked, you’ll see a message telling you that results have been hidden from view. You can also manage your list of blocked sites from a separate page, which is accessible via your Search Settings, when you block a site, and when you see a blocked results reminder.

This week’s changes are designed to give you more control over the information you find on Google, so you can quickly decide what’s most useful to you and get to the result you need. Information has been exploding on the web for years now, whether it's real-time, video or blog posts, but one thing has stayed the same—your time. That's our inspiration for coming to work every day: to look for new ways to help you pinpoint exactly the information you need in seconds.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

Three years of Google + DoubleClick by the numbers, and video arrives on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange

In 2008, we acquired DoubleClick, and our efforts to make the display advertising landscape a better, simpler place for users, publishers and marketers began in earnest. Today marks exactly three exciting years together. The time has flown by, and we’ve made huge strides towards our goal, largely powered by DoubleClick’s technological and industry expertise.

Here are a few of the things we’ve achieved in the past three years: we’ve offered people control over what ads they see on the web, created a new way for advertisers and publishers to buy and sell ads, given publishers a powerful tool to maximize the value of their content, introduced a way to bring a campaign to life across the web with instantly customized creative, added a platform to buy across ad exchanges in real time, enabled small advertisers to launch display campaigns in minutes, introduced a highly effective way of delivering ads to interested consumers on the Google Display Network and rolled out video ads that allow consumers to watch only the ads they want to see (while letting advertisers pay for only the ads that consumers watch).

We realize that the display industry is still complex (we actually turned to the laws of physics to help marketers navigate their way through it). But we’re getting there.

A few numbers help tell the story of the past three years:

• 5,400,000: A rough estimate of the hours our engineers have spent working on our display business since 2008 (that’s equivalent to 616 years without sleep or rest)
• 33 billion: Our estimate of the number of potential customers that our clients’ display ads have driven immediately to marketers’ websites (to say nothing of the exposure, engagement and brand-building that these ads enable)
• 5: On sites in the Google Display Network, the number of times larger that spending on display ads is today, compared to three years ago (that’s like a toddler growing to the size of a one-story house)

We’re kicking off year four with another step towards our overall vision: the addition of video ad formats to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. We’re about to start a beta test, allowing Ad Exchange buyers to run in-stream video ads on YouTube using real-time bidding technology. (We’ll eventually extend this capability to include additional video formats and will serve ads on more videos across the web.)

We think that video ads are going to quickly become an even bigger piece of the display landscape. And in our own survey with Digiday, about 20% of marketers indicated that they wanted to use real-time bidding to buy video ads this year. Combining the power of exchange buying with the potential of video will to help grow the advertising pie (or in honor of today’s anniversary, cake) for everyone.

We can’t wait to see what else the next year has in store.

Update 10:53 AM: Fixed one of our estimates.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, Senior Vice President, Product Management and Neal Mohan, Vice President, Product Management

A fairytale marriage: Google Earth and London in 3D

(Cross-posted on the Lat Long Blog)

On April 29, the eyes of the world will focus on London for the royal wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton, and the U.K. will deliver a royal celebration that will capture the imagination of a global audience. We’re doing our part too: following last week's announcement of new aerial imagery for London, we’re expanding our 3D imagery of central London’s buildings and trees in Google Earth—including the entire royal procession route.



With this new 3D data covering the royal procession route, you can indulge yourself in a “royals’-eye” view to see the same sights that William and Catherine will see. Upon departing Westminster Abbey, you’ll pass the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, the famous ministries on Whitehall and the Prime Minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street. Traverse Horse Guards Parade, and from there, you can travel down The Mall—with 3D trees lining the route—and see Buckingham Palace standing proudly at the finish.

This new 3D imagery isn’t limited to the royal parade route. Thousands of buildings are available, so people from around the globe can digitally experience the beauty of London. You can view buildings such as the British Museum, a treasure trove of historical artifacts, Goodge Street tube station, where General Eisenhower commanded allied forces in WWII, and Shaftesbury Avenue, the historical theatre district of London.

What’s more, we’ve also turned St James' Park, Green Park and Hyde Park into a 3D lush green carpet, thanks to the help of our friends at the Royal Parks. We’ve modeled five different species of trees, and virtually planted more than 12,000 individual trees (available in Google Earth 6).

To see all the landmarks and greenery in Google Earth, check the 3D buildings box in the left-hand panel under “Layers,” type “London” in the search bar on the top left and use the navigation controls in the upper right to zoom in, spin around and tilt the view. Or you can go to Earth View on Google Maps in your browser.

Since moving to London from Leek, in Staffordshire, I’ve grown to appreciate all the royal and historic landmarks in the capital. So whether you’re standing near me and millions of my fellow Britons on the Mall on April 29 to catch a glimpse of the happy couple, or enjoying the spectacle from home, I hope this new 3D data for London brings you closer to this wonderful city.

A preview of the sunrise on April 29

Posted by Phil Verney, Program Manager, Google Earth & Maps

We want YOU-Tube: now hiring

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

Nearly six years ago, YouTube was created to enable people to create, share and discover the world through video. Today, 35 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute and we see well over 2 billion views a day. It’s been amazing to watch an idea become a platform that turned into a stage for hundreds of millions of people to express themselves. We now have aspiring filmmakers and musicians building their careers on YouTube, activists opening our eyes to global issues and individuals telling their stories in ways that only video can capture. And because we believe that technology and platforms like YouTube are giving rise to the most diverse set of faces and voices ever seen or heard in human history, us YouTubers really enjoy and feel proud to work here.



2010 was a bang-up year. And in 2011, we plan to grow the number of people working at YouTube by more than 30% (!), making it the largest hiring year in YouTube’s history. We’re looking for top talent from around the world. Why don’t you join us?

Posted by Jeff Ferguson, YouTube HR

Hide sites to find more of what you want

Over the years we’ve experimented with a number of ways to help you personalize the results you find on Google, from SearchWiki to stars in search to location settings. Now there’s yet another way to find more of what you want on Google by blocking the sites you don’t want to see.

You’ve probably had the experience where you’ve clicked a result and it wasn’t quite what you were looking for. Many times you’ll head right back to Google. Perhaps the result just wasn’t quite right, but sometimes you may dislike the site in general, whether it’s offensive, pornographic or of generally low quality. For times like these, you’ll start seeing a new option to block particular domains from your future search results. Now when you click a result and then return to Google, you’ll find a new link next to “Cached” that reads “Block all example.com results.”

As always, Matt’s been gracious enough to let us use him as an example. His site is awesome, though, and we doubt many people will want to block it!

Once you click the link to “Block all example.com results” you’ll get a confirmation message, as well as the option to undo your choice. You’ll see the link whether or not you’re signed in, but the domains you block are connected with your Google Account, so you’ll need to sign in before you can confirm a block.

Once you’ve blocked a domain, you won’t see it in your future search results. (Side note: Sometimes you may have to search on a new term, rather than simply refreshing your browser, before you'll notice the domain has been successfully removed.) The next time you’re searching and a blocked page would have appeared, you’ll see a message telling you results have been blocked, making it easy to manage your personal list of blocked sites. This message will appear at the top or bottom of the results page depending on the relevance of the blocked pages.

You can see a list of your blocked sites in a new settings page, which you can access by visiting your Search Settings or clicking on the “Manage blocked sites” link that appears when you block a domain. On the settings page you can find details about the sites you’ve blocked, block new sites, or unblock sites if you’ve changed your mind.

We’re adding this feature because we believe giving you control over the results you find will provide an even more personalized and enjoyable experience on Google. In addition, while we’re not currently using the domains people block as a signal in ranking, we’ll look at the data and see whether it would be useful as we continue to evaluate and improve our search results in the future. The new feature is rolling out today and tomorrow on google.com in English for people using Chrome 9+, IE8+ and Firefox 3.5+, and we’ll be expanding to new regions, languages and browsers soon. We hope you find it useful, and we’ll be listening closely to your suggestions.

Posted by Amay Champaneria and Beverly Yang, Search Quality Engineers

Google at SXSW 2011: Austin here we come

SXSW begins Friday, March 11 and pretty soon Googlers will be touching down in Austin for the Interactive, Music and Film Festivals. We have a lot planned for the week, and we hope you’ll join us for some of the fun.

More than a dozen Googlers are speaking on a wide variety of panels, kicking off with a talk on Friday, March 11 by Marissa Mayer, our VP of Consumer Products. Google and YouTube panelists will cover topics as varied as Google doodles, electronic privacy, hybrid marketing, recommendation engines and beyond.

All developers are invited to join us at the League of Extraordinary H4ckers on Sunday, March 13. At this 1-6 PM event, attend 15-minute API briefings on Android, Chrome, HTML5, Blogger, Google TV, Google Maps, App Engine, YouTube, Web Fonts, Cellbots and Fusion Tables, mingle with our developer team or hang out in the YouTube Leanback lounge. If you stick around, that same evening we’re co-sponsoring SuperHappyDevHouse—complete with hacking and a LEGO® MINDSTORMS® sumobot competition. Be sure to RSVP for both events!

If you’re also attending the Film and Music portions of the festival, keep an eye out for screenings of Life in a Day, and check out the YouTube-sponsored NPR Music showcase on March 17 and the Other Music & Dig for Fire Lawn Party on March 17-18. We’ll be holding a meetup for Texas-area partners, too.

Of course, no SXSW is complete without a slew of parties, and this year is no exception. Here are a few of the places you’ll find Googlers unwinding:

• Sunday, March 13 - don your legwarmers along with the ACLU and party like it’s 1986—the last time the U.S. electronic privacy law was updated
• Monday, March 14 - Blogger is hosting its annual bash—this time with co-conspirators from the SketchUp team
• Tuesday, March 15 - YouTube-sponsored Official Film Closing/Music Opening party

Plus, from March 14-17, you can visit us at our booth for demos and presentations of Google products and features.

There’s a full list of Google/YouTube activities on our event site, and throughout the festival, we’ll post updates about all our events via @googlesxsw, so be sure to follow us and spread the word. We’re looking forward to seeing you in Austin!

Posted by Emily Wood, Google Blog editor

Happy 1st birthday to the Google Apps Marketplace

A year ago today, the Google Apps Marketplace launched with 50 web apps integrated into Google Apps, making it easier for organizations to customize web-based solutions for their specific needs.

We’ve come a long way since then, and now offer 300 apps across 11 categories, including a new set of education apps. Each web app in the Marketplace provides meaningful integrations that range from single sign-on convenience to contextual gadgets inside of a user’s Gmail inbox.

Read our post on the Enterprise blog or visit the Apps Marketplace to learn more—and join us in celebrating a year of expanded Apps functionality.



Posted by Harrison Shih, Product Marketing, Google Enterprise

Instant Previews now available on mobile

(Cross-posted from the Mobile Blog)

Instant Previews provides a fast and interactive way to evaluate search results. Starting today, Google Instant Previews is available on mobile for Android (2.2+) and iOS (4.0+) devices across 38 languages. Similar to the desktop version of Instant Previews, you can visually compare search results from webpage snapshots, making it easier to choose the right result faster, especially when you have an idea of the content you’d like to see.

For example, if you’re looking for a webpage that has both photos and descriptions, you can use Instant Previews to quickly identify these pages by navigating across the visual search results with a few swipes of your finger. Or perhaps you’re looking for an article, a step-by-step instructions list, or a product comparison chart—with Instant Previews, you can see easily spot pages with the right content without having to navigate back and forth between websites and search results. And when the mobile version of a website is available, we’ll show you a preview of the mobile page.

To use Instant Previews on your mobile device, do a search on www.google.com and tap on the magnifying glass next to any search result. A side-by-side comparison view of the webpage previews for the first page of search results will appear. When you find a result you like, tap on the preview to go straight to the website. It’s as easy as finding a recipe for poaching an egg:

You can learn more about Instant Previews for mobile in our Help Center. We hope you enjoy finding the right result faster with Instant Previews!

Posted by Brian Ngo, Software Engineer, Mobile Search team

Speedier, simpler and safer: Chrome’s basics get even better

(Cross-posted on the Google Chrome Blog)

Just three weeks ago, we kicked off the Year of the Rabbit with a speedy Chrome beta. Today, we’re excited to bring these speed improvements and more to everyone using Chrome. With today’s stable release, even your most complex web apps will run more quickly and responsively in the browser. (For the curious, this boost corresponds to a 66% improvement in JavaScript performance on the V8 benchmark suite.)

We realize that speed isn’t just about pure brawn in the browser—it’s also about saving time with simple interfaces. Chrome’s new settings interface will help you get to the right settings quickly so you don’t have to dig endlessly to find a way to import your bookmarks or change your browser’s homepage. We’ve added a search box that shows you the settings you’re looking for, as you type. On top of that, you can also copy and paste a direct link into Chrome’s address bar to jump to a specific settings page. (No more long, frustrating phone conversations with your dad on where to find that specific setting in the browser!) Here’s the new settings interface in action:



For those of you who save your passwords in the browser, you can now quickly log on to the websites you frequent even when you switch computers, by simply synchronizing those passwords across your computers. You can also encrypt those passwords with your own secret passphrase for extra security. To enable sync on each of your computers, visit the “Personal Stuff” section in Chrome’s settings (or just type “sync” in the settings search box). You can also choose to sync bookmarks, extensions, preferences, themes and more.

Finally, you’ll be even safer as you speed around the web, as we’ve extended Chrome’s sandboxing technology to the integrated Flash Player in Chrome. So if you’re using Windows Vista or newer versions, you’ll benefit from the additional layer of protection against malicious webpages. To learn more about sandboxing, check out this animated video:



We hope that Chrome’s speed, simplicity and security will continue to make your daily life on the web more enjoyable. You can download the browser at google.com/chrome, or if you’re already using Chrome, you’ll be automatically updated to this new version soon!

Posted by Tim Steele, Software Engineer

100 years of celebrating women

(Cross-posted on the LatLong Blog)

As today’s doodle shows, we’re very excited to celebrate the centenary of International Women’s Day. Late last month we teamed up with Women for Women International to announce the Join me on the Bridge campaign, a celebration of the achievements of women taking place on bridges around the world. Since then almost 300 bridge events in more than 50 countries have been added to the map. I’ve found it inspiring to watch all of those little red pins pop up, knowing that each of them represents a group of women and their supporters coming together to let the world know how far we’ve come.

In addition to the flagship events happening throughout the day on the Brooklyn Bridge (New York), the Millennium Bridge (London) and the Golden Gate Bridge (San Francisco), women and men are gathering in places as far-flung as Kabul, Afghanistan, La Paz, Bolivia and Sydney, Australia.

It’s not too late to join the celebrations and show your support—simply find an event on the map. Remember to “check in” to the event on the map before the end of the day, and if you have photos or videos of an event, it’s easy to share them with the world: just click on the pin for the event you attended (or want to support virtually) and start uploading.

We hope you’ll also consider donating to one of the more than 40 incredible women’s organizations participating in our celebration. You can learn more and make a donation at google.com/iwd2011.

Plus, when you use Google Maps on March 8, you’ll notice that Pegman, Street View’s trusted guide, has a new friend. He invited his colleague Pegwoman to join him on the map today to celebrate International Women’s Day!

Posted by Claire Hughes Johnson, VP, Global Online Sales, and Chair, Google Women’s Professional Community

You’ve got better things to do than wait in traffic

(Cross-posted on the LatLong Blog and Mobile Blog)

Ever been stuck in traffic, only to find out you’d have been better off going a bit out of your way to take a less congested route? If you’re like me, you probably hear the traffic report telling you what you already know: traffic is bad on the road you’re currently on, and you should have taken another. It doesn’t need to be this way, and we want to help. So we’re happy to announce that Google Maps Navigation (Beta) will now automatically route you around traffic. With more than 35 million miles driven by Navigation users every day, this should add up to quite a bit of time saved!

On a recent trip to New York, I was running late to meet some friends at the Queens Museum of Art. I had no idea that there was a traffic jam along the route I would normally have taken. Thankfully, Navigation routed me around traffic. I didn’t even have to know that there was a traffic jam on I-495, and I got to enjoy a much faster trip on I-278 instead.

Navigation now uses real-time traffic conditions to automatically route you around traffic.

You don’t have to do anything to be routed around traffic; just start Navigation like you normally would, either from the Navigation app or from within Google Maps. Before today, Navigation would choose whichever route was fastest, without taking current traffic conditions into account. It would also generate additional alternate directions, such as the shortest route or one that uses highways instead of side roads. Starting today, our routing algorithms will also apply our knowledge of current and historical traffic to select the fastest route from those alternates. That means that Navigation will automatically guide you along the best route given the current traffic conditions.

Not only can you save time and fuel, you’re making traffic better for everyone else by avoiding traffic jams. Keep in mind that we can’t guarantee that Navigation will be able to find a faster way, but it will always try to get you where you’re going as fast as possible.

You can begin routing around traffic with Google Maps Navigation for Android in North America and Europe where both Navigation and real-time traffic data are available.

Enjoy your newly found free time!

Posted by Roy Williams, Software Engineer, Google Maps Team

Happy birthday Will Eisner

From time to time we invite guests to post about topics of interest and we’re pleased to have Scott McCloud join us here. Scott is a comics artist with special ties to Google—he illustrated the Chrome comic book and is a 2011 U.S. Doodle 4 Google judge. He also helped in the design of today’s doodle in honor of Will Eisner, which is running in many countries including the U.S. In this post, Scott shares his thoughts on Will Eisner’s legacy. -Ed.

Will Eisner, American comics pioneer and creator of The Spirit, was born on March 6, 1917. He would have been 94 today.

Many of us who knew him still find it hard to believe he’s gone. He died in 2005, but for six decades, Eisner was a participant in, and inspiration for, much of the best in American comics, as well as a friend and mentor to multiple generations of comics artists.

Eisner influenced comics in dozens of ways. In the ‘40s, Eisner’s The Spirit—a seven-page newspaper feature—introduced an arsenal of visual storytelling techniques still used generations later, and provided an early testing ground for future comics stars including Jack Kirby and Jules Feiffer. (The Spirit also began a tradition of pictorially-integrated logos—inspiring today's snazzy rooftop doodle!)

Eisner was one of the first cartoonists to understand the power of visual education, and wrote eloquently about the process of making comics in Comics and Sequential Art (1985) and Graphic Storytelling (1996). As early as 1941, he publicly advocated treating comics as a distinct literary and artistic form, and—nearly four decades later—was instrumental in the rise of the graphic novel in America, beginning with A Contract with God in 1978.

For most of his career, Eisner was years, even decades, ahead of the curve. I saw him debating artists and editors half his age, and there was rarely any question who the youngest man in the room was. It helped that he never stood on ceremony. Everyone was his peer, regardless of age or status. None of us called him “Mr. Eisner.” He was just “Will.”

Eisner lived well into his eighties; long enough to see an industry award named after him. Inevitably, the prospect loomed that Will Eisner himself might win an “Eisner Award” leading to some awkward choices; Hall of Fame, maybe? Lifetime Achievement?

His only suggestion was “Most Promising Young Cartoonist.”

And so he was.

Posted by Scott McCloud

YouTube Highlights 3/3/2011

This is the latest in our series of YouTube highlights. Every couple of weeks, we bring you regular updates on new product features, interesting programs to watch, and tips you can use to grow your audience on YouTube. Just look for the label “YouTube Highlights” and subscribe to the series. – Ed.

In past weeks, we’ve featured two more YouTube interviews with leaders through the World View program and seen more footage come in from across the Middle East as unrest there continues.

David Cameron and John Boehner on YouTube
In YouTube World View’s second interview, YouTube and Al Jazeera English sat down with British Prime Minister David Cameron. Ten thousand people submitted questions, and in the interview, the Prime Minister shared his thoughts on what should be done in Libya, and talked about increased taxes for banks in the U.K. and Britain’s role in Afghanistan.

And as the budget debate rages on the U.S. Capitol Hill, we asked viewers from across the U.S. and around the world to submit questions to Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH). The final interview will be posted to YouTube on Friday, March 4.

We’ll have another interview in the coming weeks—check YouTube World View for more details soon.



Join us on YouTube for Carnaval in Brazil
An estimated 100 million people travel to Brazil each year to experience Carnaval, the iconic celebration on the streets of Salvador, Bahia. This year, you can join the festivities on the Carnaval YouTube channel via computer or mobile phone. Watch live feeds of Salvador’s multi-day street fest from Thursday, March 3 through Tuesday, March 8. If you’re lucky enough to be there in person, find out how to buy a pass to Google’s street-side camarote (cabin) at the celebration at www.youtube.com/carnaval.

February’s “On The Rise” winner
After tens of thousands of votes, D-trix from theDOMINICshow has been named February’s “On The Rise” contest winner. He beat out tornado chasers, graphic artists and pop stars for the honor. When D-trix isn’t spoofing Justin Bieber, he’s dancing or teaching people how to rap. Congratulations!

Making YouTube seven times faster
To help you better enjoy all the great content that’s uploaded to YouTube every minute, we recently increased speed for uploads and playback. Google’s cloud computing capabilities help us process videos in chunks on different machines—making our video-processing seven times faster than in 2008.

Ad Blitz winner
Super Bowl ads are always a big draw of the game. This year, we added Super Bowl spots to the Ad Blitz gallery so you could vote for your favorites. More than 2.7 million votes were cast, and 3.5 million views took place on mobile devices. This year’s winner, Chrysler, was featured on the YouTube masthead for the Saturday following the game.



This week’s trends on YouTube
Here are a few recent highlights from YouTube Trends:

• Britney Spears built up anticipation for her latest music video.

• Dramatic footage poured in from across the Middle East: Libya, Iran, Algeria and Yemen.

• A funny moment from "Family Feud" got "passed around."


We’ll have another update for you in a couple of weeks. Until then, visit us at the YouTube Blog.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Marketing Manager, The YouTube Team

Finding more high-quality sites in search

Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.

It’s worth noting that this update does not rely on the feedback we’ve received from the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension, which we launched last week. However, we did compare the Blocklist data we gathered with the sites identified by our algorithm, and we were very pleased that the preferences our users expressed by using the extension are well represented. If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84% of them, which is strong independent confirmation of the user benefits.

So, we’re very excited about this new ranking improvement because we believe it’s a big step in the right direction of helping people find ever higher quality in our results. We’ve been tackling these issues for more than a year, and working on this specific change for the past few months. And we’re working on many more updates that we believe will substantially improve the quality of the pages in our results.

To start with, we’re launching this change in the U.S. only; we plan to roll it out elsewhere over time. We’ll keep you posted as we roll this and other changes out, and as always please keep giving us feedback about the quality of our results because it really helps us to improve Google Search.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer

Join us on the bridge for International Women’s Day 2011

(Cross-posted on the LatLong Blog)

I lead a global team at Google and travel extensively. When I speak about my work, the questions I get are often about the efforts we make to bring more women into engineering and how I maintain my work/life balance with two young children. These are very important questions, but I’m acutely aware that they reflect a certain amount of privilege when it comes to issues of women’s equality. Despite the incredible advances women have made in the last century, many around the world are still struggling to provide for their families and keep them safe amidst violence and instability.

For the past several years I’ve been part of a sponsorship program administered by Women for Women International, an organization dedicated to helping women survivors of war rebuild their lives. Every time I receive a letter from a woman I sponsor, each of whom is determined to improve her life despite the terrible odds she faces, I’m reminded of why it’s so important that we all—women and men alike—recognize the challenges women continue to face around the world.

That’s why I’m so excited to celebrate the centenary of International Women’s Day on March 8, 2011. This year Google is collaborating with Women for Women International on their “Join me on the Bridge” campaign. Originally conceived of by women from Rwanda and Congo as a sign of solidarity between women in two conflict-ridden countries, last year’s campaign brought together thousands of women and men at more than 100 bridge events on four continents.



This year we’re making it simple for you, your friends, your classmates and your colleagues to participate in bridge events on International Women’s Day by offering new online resources.

To attend a bridge event, check our map to see all the events that have already been planned. Or you can use our event toolkit to plan your own event on the bridge of your choice. You’ll see that there are two kinds of events—physical and online; if you’re not able to attend a bridge event in person on March 8, you can lend your support online by virtually attending an event via Street View in Google Maps.

Finally, on our International Women’s Day 2011 site, you can to donate to Women for Women International and more than 40 other incredible organizations working in the fields of women’s economic security, education, empowerment, equality, health and safety.

See you on the bridge on March 8!

Update 4:33PM: Added YouTube video.

Posted by Claire Hughes Johnson, VP, Global Online Sales and Chair, Google Women’s Professional Community

Slice and dice your recipe search results

As a second-generation Indian who has grown up in the United States, I’ve developed a taste for great home-cooked Indian food, but not a knack for how to make it. Somehow my cooking efforts result in foods that taste over-spiced yet bland at the same time. My parents follow the art of cooking by intuition, where the right amount of each spice is measured out by gut feel, but that’s never worked very well for me. As a math geek and computer engineer, I prefer to work with concrete numbers and instructions, including when cooking, so today I’m very happy about a new feature that helps me find recipes online: Recipe View.

Recipe View lets you narrow your search results to show only recipes, and helps you choose the right recipe amongst the search results by showing clearly marked ratings, ingredients and pictures. To get to Recipe View, click on the “Recipes” link in the left-hand panel when searching for a recipe. You can search for specific recipes like [chocolate chip cookies], or more open-ended topics—like [strawberry] to find recipes that feature strawberries, or even a holiday or event, like [cinco de mayo]. In fact, you can try searching for all kinds of things and still find interesting results: a favorite chef like [ina garten], something very specific like [spicy vegetarian curry with coconut and tofu] or even something obscure like [strange salad].

In the past, you only had one way to specify your recipe searches—with the text you type into the Google search box. Now you can also filter search results based on your ideal ingredients, cooking time and calorie count using the recipe tools on the left hand side of the page. For example, I can now find vegetable biryani recipes (an Indian rice dish) that include cauliflower and take less than an hour to make:

We like to “eat our own dogfood” at Google—meaning we like to test our own products and features ourselves before releasing them for public consumption. With Recipe View, we’ve taken this more literally than usual. Here’s Google Chef Scott Giambastiani to demonstrate how he uses Recipe View to find great recipes for Googlers:



Recipe View is based on data from rich snippets markup, which we first introduced at Searchology in 2009. If you’re a recipe publisher, you can add markup to your webpages so that your content can appear with this improved presentation in regular Google results as well as in Recipe View. Recipe View is part of our ongoing efforts to enrich the search experience using structured data, and this release is an exciting technical milestone for our team since it’s first time we’ve built a brand new set of search tools based off of rich snippets data.

Recipe View is rolling out now in the U.S. and Japan, and we’ll be adding more countries in the future. We look forward to making further improvements and building more views so you can “slice and dice” your results for other types of searches as well. Bon appetit!

Posted by Kavi Goel, Product Manager

New ways to experience better collaboration with Google Apps

The Google Apps collaboration tools have steadily and swiftly improved over the last couple years, and many companies have found that Google Docs and Google Sites are faster, simpler and more powerful than traditional software for the majority of common tasks, especially tasks where people need to work efficiently together. Today, we’re launching two new initiatives to help more people experience the productivity benefits of web-powered collaboration.

First, Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office is now available worldwide. This plugin for Microsoft Office is available to anyone with a Google Account, and brings multi-person collaboration to the Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications that you may still need from time to time. The plugin syncs your work through Google’s cloud, so everyone can contribute to the same version of a file at the same time. Learning the benefits of web-powered collaboration will help more people make a faster transition to 100% web collaboration tools.



We’re also introducing the 90-Day Appsperience program, a way for companies that currently use cumbersome legacy systems to see how web-powered tools help their teams work together more effectively. A nominal fee covers 90-day access to Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Cloud Connect and more, as well as assistance from Google experts to help coworkers quickly become more productive together. And companies trying Google Apps can use the new collaboration dashboard in the Google Apps control panel to assess the value of our tools. The dashboard provides data on how people are using Apps to collaborate more efficiently without the hassles of document versions, check-in/check-out or attachments.

If you’re curious how your company could become more agile, efficient and innovative with better tools for teams to work together, read more about these updates on the Google Enterprise Blog.

Posted by Shan Sinha, Google Apps Product Manager

The three laws of display advertising physics

It’s not just the Android team that is exploring the outer reaches of our galaxy. In recent years, advertising technology has had its own “Big Bang": a rapid onset of incredible growth and expansion in the display advertising universe.

Display advertising is one of our big focus areas. Better display advertising helps to fund the websites and content we all use and read, provides useful and engaging commercial information, and helps large and small advertisers to reach new customers, increase sales and grow their businesses.

Just as the laws of physics have helped us make sense of our own expanding universe, we think that there are three “laws of display advertising physics” to help advertisers and agencies thrive. We’ve laid out these laws and what they mean for advertisers and agencies on our Agency Ad Solutions Blog:

1. The Theory of Relativity: The distinction between different advertising technologies (like ad networks and demand side platforms) is blurring. Each of these technologies provides similar ways to achieve your marketing goals, depending on how you want to manage your campaign.
   
   
2. Fusion Theory: There’s a few different ways to deliver ads to people. Each on their own is powerful, but combining these different ways unlocks the best results.
   
   
3. The Law of Perpetual Motion: New technology is driving rapid change in display advertising—which is constantly improving marketers’ creative palettes and the way that ads are bought and sold. Embracing new media and technology provides a key way for marketers to differentiate and grow their businesses in a new universe.

The expansion in the advertising industry is leading towards a future with a better advertising universe for everyone—where people see more relevant, useful ads, publishers get better returns to fund their content and marketers can run more effective campaigns.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

Investing in news innovation in Europe

(Cross-posted from the European Public Policy Blog)

Journalism is changing fast. And as news businesses experiment with new ways of creating and delivering journalism in the digital age, Google is keen to play its part on the technology side. Over the last year, we’ve been partnering with publishers around the world to develop technological solutions—including, most recently, One Pass—to find new and engaging ways of presenting stories online and to generate greater revenues.

As well as our focus on technological experimentation, we’re also investing at the grassroots level. Last October we announced that we would be giving $5 million in grants to non-profit organisations working on developing new approaches to journalism. At that time, we allocated around 40% of the total fund to the Knight Foundation in the U.S.

Today, we awarded a $2.7 million grant to the International Press Institute, based in Vienna, which will be used to sponsor the IPI News Innovation Contest. The contest seeks to find and fund breakthrough ideas that will have a lasting impact on the future of digital news in communities across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Grants will be awarded to both non-profit and for-profit organisations working on digital journalism initiatives, including open-source and mobile technology projects created by or for journalists and distributed in the public interest. From today until June 1, the IPI will invite proposals from around the region for projects devoted to online innovation in journalism, new economic models for news and training in digital reporting.

The IPI has a long tradition of working on innovation in journalism, freedom of expression and other important issues. We’re sure they’ll be able to find and advance some great digital journalism projects over the next couple of years—and we encourage anyone with innovative ideas, large or small, to apply for a grant from the IPI. In the meantime, we’ll continue to work with the news industry to help develop new projects, products and experiments that make it possible for journalism to thrive online.

Posted by Peter Barron, Director of External Relations, Google EMEA

Speech technology at Google: teaching machines to talk and listen

This is the latest post in our series profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. Here, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at how one Googler built an entire R&D team around voice technology that has gone on to power products like YouTube transcriptions and Voice Search. - Ed.

When I first interviewed at Google during the summer of 2004, mobile was just making its way onto the company’s radar. My passion was speech technology, the field in which I’d already worked for 20 years. After 10 years of speech research at SRI, followed by 10 years helping build Nuance Communications, the company I co-founded in 1994, I was ready for a new challenge. I felt that mobile was an area ripe for innovation, with a need for speech technology, and destined to be a key platform for delivery of services.

During my interview, I shared my desire to pursue the mobile space and mentioned that if Google didn’t have any big plans for mobile, then I probably wouldn’t be a good fit for the company. Well, I got the job, and I started soon after, without a team or even a defined role. In classic Google fashion, I was encouraged to explore the company, learn about what various teams were working on and figure out what was needed.

After a few months, I presented an idea to senior management to build a telephone-based spoken interface to local search. Although there was a diversity of opinion at the meeting about what applications made the most sense for Google, all agreed that I should start to build a team focused on speech technology. With help from a couple of Google colleagues who also had speech backgrounds, I began recruiting, and within a few months people were busily building our own speech recognition system.

Six years later, I’m excited by how far we’ve come and, in turn, how our long-term goals have expanded. When I started, I had to sell other teams on the value of speech technology to Google's mission. Now, I’m constantly approached by other teams with ideas and needs for speech. The biggest challenge is scaling our effort to meet the opportunities. We've advanced from GOOG-411, our first speech-driven service, to Voice Search, Voice Input, Voice Actions, a Voice API for Android developers, automatic captioning of YouTube videos, automatic transcription of voicemail for Google Voice and speech-to-speech translation, amongst others. In the past year alone, we’ve ported our technology to more than 20 languages.



Speech technology requires an enormous amount of data to feed our statistical models and lots of computing power to train our systems—and Google is the ideal place to pursue such technical approaches. With large amounts of data, computing power and an infrastructure focused on supporting large-scale services, we’re encouraged to launch quickly and iterate based on real-time feedback.

I’ve been exploring speech technology for nearly three decades, yet I see huge potential for further innovation. We envision a comprehensive interface for voice and text communication that defies all barriers of modality and language and makes information truly universally accessible. And it’s here at Google that I think we have the best chance to make this future a reality.

Update 9:39 PM: Changed title of post to clarify that speech technology is not only used on mobile phones but also for transcription tasks like YouTube captioning and voicemail transcription. -Ed.

Posted by Mike Cohen, Manager, Speech Technology