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

MLK Day 2011: a day for community service

“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: What are you doing for others?”

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Next Monday, January 17, marks the 25th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. We join Americans in celebrating the life and legacy of Dr. King as a company-recognized holiday. You may not know that Martin Luther King Day is not only a federal holiday, but also a national day of service. In 1994, Congress passed the King Holiday and Service Act, which encourages citizens to volunteer on that day.

This MLK Day, many Google employees are participating in service projects from coast to coast. We’re also joining the Corporation for National & Community Service, a Google Grants recipient, to spread the word about volunteering opportunities around the country. On their MLKDay.gov site you can learn about the King Day of Service and find a project in your area. Projects include delivering meals, refurbishing schools and community centers, collecting food and clothing, signing up mentors, reading to children, promoting nonviolence and more. Many of these projects start on King Day and last throughout the year.

Together, let’s make Martin Luther King Jr. Day “a day on, not a day off.”

Posted by Tolu Thomas on behalf of the MLK Day Volunteer Team

Investing in New York

Google New York started in a Starbucks on 86th Street with one person in 2000—a scrappy, highly-caffeinated sales “team.” After moving to a larger office in Times Square, in 2006 we relocated to our current home in Chelsea, at 111 Eighth Avenue—a former Port Authority building. In June of 2008, we took additional space in the Chelsea Market building at 75 Ninth Avenue. Now we have more than 2,000 Googlers working on a variety of projects in both sales and engineering—and we’re hiring across the board.

Today, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve closed a deal with the partnership of Taconic Investment Partners, Jamestown Properties and the New York State Common Retirement Fund to purchase 111 Eighth Avenue (also known as 76 Ninth Avenue). As part of the deal, we’ve retained Taconic Management Company to continue the leasing oversight services and management of the building on our behalf, providing the same level of customer service the building’s tenants have come to expect. We believe that this is a great real estate investment in a thriving neighborhood and a fantastic city.

Like the city, our New York office is a melting pot of cultures and ideas—it’s home to Googlers from more than 35 countries who speak more than 40 languages. They live in the five boroughs and spread across the tri-state area. We’re excited to continue to build our presence there.

Posted by David Radcliffe, VP Real Estate and Workplace Services

It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood: growing in Pittsburgh

Nearly five years ago, we announced that we would begin building an engineering presence in Pittsburgh, a city with a strong technology ecosystem as well as an entrepreneurial spirit and great quality of life. Since then, we’ve grown from two engineers to more than 150, and we’re continuing our commitment to growth in the region as we've officially opened a new Google Pittsburgh office in an old Nabisco factory in Bakery Square.

The Collaborative Innovation Center at Carnegie Mellon University had been our home since 2006, and our relationship with CMU remains invaluable to us. On top of the strong pipeline of brilliant engineers emerging from local universities, we’re seeing a “boomerang effect” of Pittsburghers who previously believed they had to go elsewhere to succeed with careers in computer science and engineering. We hope that the scrappy start-up culture we’ve maintained from the beginning at Google Pittsburgh as well as the burgeoning tech community throughout the city continues to encourage them to consider coming home.

In addition to teams focused on core initiatives related to Product Search and Ads Quality, we’re proud to be home to 20% time projects including the Sky Map planetarium app for Android phones, which combines astronomy, physics and computer science to put the galaxies in your pocket (and now includes the ability to time travel!) and Sky in Google Earth, which enables you to look upward from your position in Google Earth to view the heavenly objects above. Luis von Ahn and his reCAPTCHA team lead development of a technology that improves the process of converting scanned images into plain text, which powers initiatives like Google Books, and we welcome our first Enterprise sales leads who are working to help businesses and organizations in the region consider the benefits of cloud computing with Google Apps.



Our almost-40,000 square-foot space is Googley in many ways, but my favorite characteristics include a climbable trapeze net that extends from our second floor into thin air and a massive cookie-dough mixer preserved from the former Nabisco factory, which pays homage to Bakery Square’s manufacturing heritage.

If this sounds like the place for you, take a look at our open jobs and apply. We’re growing in Pittsburgh.

Posted by Andrew Moore, Engineering Director, Google Pittsburgh

Honoring Veterans Day 2010 at Google

Today is Veterans Day, the annual U.S. holiday honoring military veterans and the end of World War I, also celebrated as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day in other parts of the world. As we did last year, we want to recognize and thank these courageous men and women who willingly serve to defend the freedoms and rights of others.

For those of us who haven’t served, it’s also a day when we can seek to understand what it means to serve in the armed forces—in any country—and the burdens that military personnel and their families bear on our behalf.

This year, we celebrate the holiday with a special doodle on google.com—and YouTube is featuring content from veterans sharing their personal stories about life in combat and beyond. You’ll hear from Peter, who was awarded a Silver Star, the third-highest military decoration that can be awarded to a member of any branch of the U.S. armed forces for valor; Justin, a disabled veteran who is advocating for wounded warriors; and other brave men and women.

The Google Veterans Network, our employee group dedicated to veterans’ issues led 11 service projects in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia—bringing employees together with those who have served or are still serving. Nearly 200 Googlers volunteered approximately 500 hours in local communities like Ann Arbor, MI. and Seattle, WA. In Mountain View, we taught 510 students at Monta Loma Elementary School about the historic meaning of November 11 and service to one’s country. We also offered Veterans Day and Remembrance Day menus in our company cafes, including military paraphernalia displays and samples of MREs (meals ready to eat).

Through financial and in-kind support, the Google Veterans Network has worked closely with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), the Coming Home Project, Fisher House Foundation (Puget Sound), the Ann Arbor VA Hospital, The Royal British Legion and The Returned and Services League of Australia to make this November 11 a special one.

Posted by Carrie Laureno, Audience Evangelist, Creative Lab and Founder, Google VetNet

Working to stop bullying, National Ally Week and navigating online LGBTQ resources

We’ve all been saddened by the recent suicides of gay youth, especially as tragedy has piled atop tragedy. Each of them is a signal that we need to do more to put an end to these incidents that destroy the lives of both the children being bullied and children who bully.

We believe the Internet can provide a safe space and resources for youth who are struggling with their identity and looking for help. And we’ve been happy to see products like YouTube being used to deliver messages of hope. There are many organizations out there doing an extraordinary job providing resources for LGBTQ youth, and we wanted to highlight a few as part of GLSEN’s National Ally Week: Trevor Project, GroundSpark’s Respect for All Project, the YouTube “It Gets Better” project and the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network. GLSEN’s Safe Space campaign page provides resources and support for educators, policy makers, community leaders and students to take action to make a positive difference. We recently made a $50,000 donation to the Trevor Project, in support of the Levi’s Challenge Grant announced on The Ellen DeGeneres Show—they will be matching up to $50,000 dollars in donations to the Trevor Project. We’ve also donated to GroundSpark and GLSEN. We hope that other companies and individuals will consider doing the same.

We also wanted to share a video some of our own Googlers made for the “It Gets Better” project documenting their own experiences and sending messages of encouragement to LGBTQ youth.



Finally, the Matthew Shepard Foundation has been in the forefront of LGBTQ issues educating the world and sharing the tragic story of Matthew Shepard. We asked Judy Shepard, Matthew’s mother, to share her thoughts with us on the recent tragedies and what we can do to help. Here’s what she said:

It’s been devastating lately to see so many families losing their LGBT kids to suicide and frankly, incredibly frustrating to see so many cases that seem to be linked in some way to bullying. My husband Dennis and I started the Matthew Shepard Foundation in the hope that by helping youth connect with resources, supportive allies and positive messages about their future, that it might prevent tragic outcomes like suicides or hate crimes. We’re just one part of a huge community of allies. And we are allies for all youth, whether they’re being singled out for their sexuality, or their race, or something else that makes them different. But if we can’t get the word out to the young people who really need to hear from us, and can’t make them more comfortable reaching out for help when they’re in crisis, then we’ll continue to struggle to protect them.

I’ve been out speaking at schools for the last 12 years to give these students a little hope and show them there are people they can turn to even if their own families aren’t accepting. I’ve also tried to open the eyes of the kids who are doing the bullying too—to show them the pain a victim’s family suffers. We lost a son, but the young men who killed Matthew are a sad example of how you can basically lose your life by victimizing people, too, almost as much as by being the victim.

-Judy Shepard

We honor the memory of Matthew and of the children who lost their lives this fall, and our hearts go out to their families. We thank Judy for her words and encourage everyone to work to help our youth to find safety and a better way to engage in the world—including using the Internet for the amazing good it brings, and not to bully others.

Posted by Megan Smith, Vice President, New Business Development Google Inc. and General Manager, Google.org and Laszlo Bock, VP of People Operations

Show me the honey

Since we installed four beehives on campus this spring, the area around the hives has been, well, a hive of activity. Many Googlers took the beekeeping plunge, donning bee suits and diving into regular beekeeping activities such as regular checks for diseases and parasites. Today, we have more than 80 employees signed up to care for the bees. We’re happy to report that the bees have prospered at Google (must be all the free food) and the hives have grown from their original one-story “campus,” the Hiveplex, to five stories.

Over the past few weeks, there’s been a ton of anticipation on campus as the hives filled with honey and harvest time drew closer. Each beekeeping team is assigned to one of the four colored hives, and some teams were spotted peeking into other hives to see which was ahead in terms of honey production.

The actual harvest, last week, was a fun-filled event with both traditional and modern methods of honey extraction. Under the helpful guidance of Bill Tomaszewski of Marin Bee Company, Googlers took turns uncapping the honey (removing the protective wax that bees use to cover a cell once it’s filled with honey), hand-cranking the honey extraction machinery to spin the honey out of the honey comb and pouring the honey through filters to remove the bits of wax and other particles that came from the hive.

The end result was beyond any of our expectations—approximately 405lbs of raw, natural honey. (We were so eager to taste the harvest that we neglected to use the scales that had been set up!) We also determined it was more or less a dead heat for which hive was the most productive. Even with such a harvest, we made sure we left enough honey behind to allow the bees to get comfortably through the winter months.

The honey is being put to good use—everyone who participated in the extraction got a jar to take home, while the rest of the honey will be used in the cafes and for cooking classes organized by Marc Rasic, an executive chef at Google and one of the people behind the beekeeping initiative.

We’re also relieved that none of the hives have succumbed to Colony Collapse Disorder, but we’ll be keeping a close eye on them over the winter months to ensure that they stay happy, healthy and ready to start work again in the spring. We're already looking forward to next year!



Posted by Rob Peterson, Manager, Software Engineering

Hood to Coast 2010

At Google we like things fast and fun. That's why we launch enhancements to search like Google Instant and Caffeine, and why 11 speedy Googlers set out from the top of Mount Hood, 6,000 feet above sea level, to run Hood to Coast, nicknamed the "Mother of All Relays."

As our first runner zipped down the mountain with the sun setting over the hills and our cheers spurring him on, it was hard to believe we had 197 miles to cover—not to mention dozens of pop tarts and energy drinks to consume—before reaching the sandy finish line the next afternoon in Seaside, Oregon.

Most members of team Google One, comprised of members of AdSense, AdWords, business analytics, business operations, consumer operations, engineering and legal groups, had run Hood to Coast or similar distance relays before, such as The Relay and Ragnar Relay New York. Most of us knew the drill. Each runner runs three separate legs, one leg typically at some ungodly hour of the morning with a headlamp. When not running, you either wildly cheer on your teammates or try to catch an hour of sleep in one of the two vans—if you're lucky.

As usual, we used a number of Google products during our journey. We posted "essential" status updates (e.g., “Stopped in Portland for pizza around 1 AM”) on a Blogger blog, so co-workers and friends could keep track of our progress. Followers were also able to check the Google Latitude gadget, embedded on our blog, to keep tabs on our current location and to ensure we didn't pull a Rosie Ruiz. We even inputted each of our typical 10K road race times into a Google spreadsheet and used a formula which factored in leg difficulty and distance to help us determine our projected exchange points.

There was one unexpected hurdle—due to unforeseen circumstances, we were short a runner and a few Googlers had to run four legs over the course of the night instead of three, covering nearly a marathon total each.

In the end, this didn't seem to hurt us. In fact, when our last runner crossed the finish line, we had averaged a little over six minute miles, capturing first place corporate team for the first time and seventh overall (PDF). We beat our projected arrival time by 15 minutes, allowing us to join the bustling beach party a little earlier than expected. More importantly, Hood to Coast exceeded its projected fundraising goal, raising over $500,000 for the American Cancer Society.


Posted by Matt Kane, Associate, Consumer Operations

23 walls of Googley

A couple months ago while visiting our London office, I noticed a really cool Google logo on the wall. It was a mosaic of photos of London that had been created by a product manager named Clay Bavor and a team of Googlers (in fact, Clay wrote about it). As a few of us admired the wall, we thought there must be other Googlers who could create something equally cool and fun. So we cooked up a little contest for the product management team: create your own version of a “Googley Art Wall” and the team with the best entry wins a nice dinner out and a donation to the charity of its choice.

When we announced the contest, we weren’t sure if we’d get enough entries to make it interesting. Within minutes of seeing the announcement, however, Lorraine Twohill (head of marketing) and Claire Hughes Johnson (head of online sales) both asked if it was OK for their teams to enter too. Soon Googlers from offices and teams around the world were doing their best to create beautiful, creative and Googley “art walls,” on small budgets and their own time.

Seven weeks later, 23 teams from 12 offices across eight countries submitted videos and photographs of their work. The entries were so universally good that the judges couldn’t limit themselves to picking just one winner. The grand prize went to “Rubik’s Cubes Galore!”, a giant Google doodle meticulously composed of 850 Rubik’s Cubes, created by practically the entire Taipei office. We also named four runners-up: from Mountain View, a “Periodic Table of Google Elements,” a colorful collection of facts and stats about Google and the Internet arranged as a giant periodic table; the “Google Paris Metro Station,” a Metro stop built right inside the Paris office; the “Shanghai Interactive Wall,” a magnetic wall with 63 moveable tiles; and in Dublin, the “Google FoosWall,” a super-sized foosball table with handmade players that spell Google. Watch the video to see the making of these winning walls, along with the finished products.



People sometimes ask me to define “Googley.” Now I can just tell them to walk by any of the newly decorated walls (you should too, if you happen to visit a Google office). This is what happens when you give Googlers a little space—and paint guns, a wood shop, litter scraps from micro-kitchens, stained glass, LEDs, dried beans, colorful plastic balls, antique furniture—or just about anything else they can get their hands on, apparently. They create incredible things.



Posted by Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management

Stargazing in Pittsburgh

Humans have always been fascinated by the night sky. And Googlers are no exception. Over the years, Google engineers have used their 20 percent time to create Google Sky, Moon, Mars and most recently Google Sky Map for Android. This handy app, built by engineers in our Pittsburgh office, turns your Android-powered phone into a live map of the night sky. You just point your phone to the sky and it gives you information about the stars and planets that you’re looking at. Since we introduced the app a year ago, Sky Map has been downloaded more than 5 million times.

On Sunday night we had a wonderful opportunity to share our passion for astronomy with our community in Pittsburgh at the Deep Sky Urban Star Party, held in the abandoned swimming pool at Leslie Park in Lawrenceville. We loaded up a bunch of Android phones with Sky Map and joined the Amateur Astronomers Association of Pittsburgh—who brought along their telescopes—and several hundred local residents for a night of stargazing.

As a Sky Map engineer the biggest thrill I get is when we get emails from people who have used our app to show a planet to their children for the first time. At the Star Party we were delighted to have the chance to show people around the night sky in person. It was great to meet so many people who were both excited by astronomy and interested in Google’s technology. Thanks for all of your ideas for new features, and a big thank you to the Leslie Park Pool Collective and all involved for organizing such a fun event.


Photos by Jason Parker-Burlingham

Posted by John Taylor, Software Engineer

Celebrating Pride 2010

Googlers came out en masse this year to celebrate Pride around the world, in cities ranging from Dublin to Pittsburgh. Pride celebrations are a time for family, friends and members of the LGBT* community to reiterate their commitment to equality and honor the trailblazers whose efforts made it possible for us to stand out and proud today.

Nearly 300 Googlers marched with colorful balloons down Market Street for San Francisco's 40th annual Pride parade. We braved the rain in Boston, enjoyed the sun in New York, rode a trolley in Chicago and marched with the Israel Gay Youth Organization in Tel Aviv and Haifa. Googlers will be participating in EuroPride, held in Poland this year, as well as many other parades, including Tokyo for the first time. And we'll be celebrating Pride season in Singapore too.

This year, we have another reason to celebrate. Google will be grossing-up imputed taxes on health insurance benefits for all same-sex domestic partners in the United States, retroactive to January 1, 2010. Starting July 1, we'll also be providing the equivalent of the Family and Medical Leave Act for all same-sex domestic partners. And we've worked with our carriers to update their definition of infertility—it's now defined as the inability to conceive a child with no stipulations on trying for one year.

Google supports its LGBT employees in many ways: raising its voice in matters of policy, taking a moment to remember the plight of transgender people around the world and going the extra mile to ensure that its employees are treated fairly.

There's a lot be proud of this year but we know the best is yet to come. We look forward to many more years of Pride celebrations. Take a glimpse at the global festivities below.



*LGBT stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered but, without letting the acronym get too unwieldy, is also intended to include people who identify as queer, asexual or intersexed, amongst others.

Posted by Cynthia Yeung, Strategic Partner Development Team

GoogleServe 2010: Celebrating community service worldwide

This month, Googlers around the world participated in GoogleServe—an annual event in which Google employees take a break from their day jobs to re-connect with local communities and give back through service projects. Over 6,000 Googlers from 65 offices in 27 countries spent time in activities ranging from helping the elderly get online and consulting with organizations on their social-media strategies to tidying up public parks and playing with dogs waiting to be rehomed.

GoogleServe began in 2008 as an employee-driven initiative and is organized almost entirely by volunteers. For the 2010 event, we partnered with hundreds of community organizations, schools and governments to help meet local needs around the world. Here’s a taste of some of this year’s projects:

• We tilled soil and planted seedlings at Gaining Ground in Concord, Massachusetts
• We packed food bags for families living under the breadline at Resala in Cairo, Egypt and delivered meals to the needy in San Francisco, California with the Salvation Army
• We trained senior citizens in Dublin, Ireland and Santa Monica, California to engage more effectively in the online world
• We cleaned kitty condos in Milpitas, California at the Humane Society of Silicon Valley and repaired a road leading to the animal shelter at Tier-Asyl Hübeli, in Zurich, Switzerland
• We cleaned rooms, tended gardens and helped out on art projects at Singapore’s Association of the Visually Handicapped
• We repaired playground equipment in Hamburg, Germany, painted classrooms in Johannesburg, South Africa and folded 1,000 origami cranes for sick children in Tokyo, Japan

Check out our album below to see some of our employees and partners in action. And if you'd like to join us in service to your community, websites like All For Good can help you find volunteer opportunities near you.



Posted by Seth Marbin, GoogleServe Global Director

Hello from the Hiveplex

I’ve always thought that beehives are organized similarly to how we do things here at Google. Bees have a flat management structure and they adapt quickly and change roles throughout their career (nurse, guard, foragers, quality control, etc.) depending on demands. And the bees that collect nectar from the forager bees at the entrance to the hive also scrutinize it for quality. If it’s not high enough, they send the foragers back out to get a fresh start... it reminds me a bit of a Google code review!

If Google’s a beehive, then I’m what you might call a forager. I work on the culinary team and we strive to serve food that’s produced locally and grown in a sustainable manner. But we wanted to take the effort to the next level. So, with help from the Marin Bee Company, we’ve installed four hives of bees to help us be as self-sufficient as possible.

The four hives—collectively known as the Hiveplex, of course—are each painted in one of Google’s colors. We’ve placed them close to large areas of wild flowers on our campus, far enough away that anyone who isn’t fond of bees can easily avoid them, but close enough that anyone who wants to can walk over and watch them at work. Many Googlers have signed up to contribute to beekeeping and honey extraction efforts, and, come the harvest in the fall, we’ll round the season off with a series of cooking classes and candle-making sessions for all those who have signed up to help.

With this project, we’re also hoping to raise awareness of impact of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)—a phenomenon in which worker bees abandon the hive for reasons that aren’t fully understood. This has has become a cause of global concern and in some parts of the world more than 50 percent of the hives have been found abandoned. This has grave implications for us all as bees are responsible for pollinating approximately 70 percent of the fruit and vegetables we eat. The loss of bees has serious consequences for plants, wildlife and human survival. (You can read more here.)

To see our newest colleagues at work, check out the album below. Someday we might create a Buzz account for our bees so you can all track their progress and follow our bee keeping activities—but we promise not to drone on.



Posted by Marc Rasic, Executive Chef

Celebrating Bike to Work Day(s)

Most days, I bike to work. No spandex, no special shoes; just me and my cruiser (and a basket on the back for my laptop). It’s about 4.5 miles door to door. Now, I give mad props to the folks who bike from San Francisco to Google every week. But biking to work is for regular folks, too. It feels great: the exercise, the fresh air and doing something “green”, all while giving my brain time to warm up for — or decompress after — a hectic work day.

So how can we get more people who live right around Google offices to get off their good intentions and on to their bikes? Well, we did recently release biking directions on Google Maps (including on mobile phones!) but in case that wasn’t enough motivation, there’s no better time to try than on Bike to Work Day!

We celebrated Bay Area Bike to Work Day this past Thursday at Google’s HQ (as usual, Northern California’s date was ahead of U.S. National Bike to Work Day). The rest of our offices will take up the bike-commuting cause at the end of this week and into next week, from Bangalore to Zurich. Last year, 42 Google offices participated in Bike to Work Day — and we hope to top that this time around.

To prepare for Bay Area Bike to Work day, our employees hosted a How to Bike to Work tech talk and volunteered time at a free bike repair clinic. Those Googlers repaired over 40 bikes in 2.5 hours — not bad for an all-volunteer outfit. And we had a whole pile of volunteer group ride leaders plan to lead 20 different rides in from all over the Bay, to help folks get to work safely and in style.

Last year, we aimed for 1,000 riders globally, and beat that handily (1,322 riders total). So we decided to raise the stakes and shoot for 1,000 in Northern California alone. And we did it: 1,020 riders to our Mountain View, San Bruno, and San Francisco offices. That’s a new record for Google and almost five percent of our global employee population!

The longest ride was 71 miles...from Palo Alto. (Via Pescadero. That’s what we call taking the loooong route.) The Santa Cruz crew came straight in and went 55 miles one way...and some of them were talking about biking home, too! 172 Googlers came in from San Francisco — but thanks to Google’s extensive shuttle system, most of them can get a lift back home.

The largest turnout came from Mountain View, of course — 272 folks came from right around the ‘plex. Considering more riders came from SF than Mountain View last year, our super-locals had some pride to win back!

For me, the highlights included free massages, furry friends, tiny companions, a skeleton, a unicycle and the Warp Speed Conference Bike team who rode a 400+lb contraption all the way in from Redwood City. (Witness also the classiest bike jersey ever.) Oh, and seeing our smiling CFO check in, who biked in even though it was Shareholder Day on campus! Not to mention a certain founder with his solar-panel backpack.

But the real joy was hearing all the people who said, “You know, I never thought I could do it. But it wasn’t so hard after all! I will definitely do it again.” That’s what Bike to Work Day is all about.

Overall, we had tons of fun spreading the bike-commute love here in Mountain View, and we can’t wait to see what our fellow Googlers get up to all around the world. Maybe we’ll even hit our stretch goal: 2010 riders in 2010! In the meantime, check out our photos from Thursday’s party-on-wheels to get psyched for your own ride to work.



Update May 20: Corrected number of riders. We actually had 1020!

Posted by Deb Henigson, Workplace Services Program Manager

A word is worth 884 pictures

(A version of this post first appeared on the author’s personal blog. -Ed.)

I’ve always enjoyed big, ambitious and sometimes slightly bizarre projects. For instance, you might remember a few years back when a bunch of Googlers and I ordered a quarter-ton of Silly Putty for the fun of it. More recently, I had the thought that it would be neat to create a “real” photomosaic — that is, not a poster where you have many tiny, postage-stamp-sized images playing the role of the “tiles” that make up a larger image, but a collection of real, high-resolution 4×6 photographs making up a bigger picture.

Part of the appeal of this project was that it was complicated. First, in order to have enough “tiles” to make the underlying image clear, I knew we’d need a really, really large wall. Second, for you to be able to appreciate both the underlying image and the individual tiles, you’d have to be able to see the mosaic from a large distance (so the tiles blend to create the larger image), and also be able to walk right up to it to look at individual photographs. So the wall would have to be at the end of a long hallway. Third, if you can inspect individual images, then those images would have to be nice, crisp, high-resolution photographs. So I’d have to amass a whole bunch of really high-resolution photos directly from good photographers, and I’d have to figure out exactly where to place all those photos within the image. And finally, I knew I’d need a lot of people to help glue all the photos!

Fortunately, working at Google puts me in a position where these things are possible: we had a giant open wall at the end of a hallway in our London offices; two dozen avid Google photographers uploaded 5,000 photos to use as the tiles (using Picasa, of course); and everyone I talked to about the project said, “That’s neat! How can I help?” So last week, a group of friends, fellow Googlers and I completed our project: a giant Google logo (and yes, it’s the new logo) made out of 884 individually printed 4×6 photographs of people, places and things around the U.K.

We were all really pleased with the result, and it’s best viewed in person. Seeing it from 100 feet away, taking it in clearly as the Google logo, and then walking right up to it to inspect the details of individual images is very cool. But for anyone not in London, here’s an attempt to recreate that experience:

The full mosaic

Zoomed in on the right of the yellow "o" and the left of the lowercase "g".

Zoomed in to an individual photo.

We also took a time-lapse video of the construction process, which started in the evening and went late into the night. (The later it got, the hazier we felt — not because of the hour, but because of all of the fumes from the rubber cement!) The camera took a shot every seven seconds, so about 5.5 hours of work are compressed to a bit over a minute here. The video is best seen in full screen HD so you can see the individual photos as they go up:

Posted by Clay Bavor, Group Product Manager

Eating our way through Earth Day

Today, Earth Day turns 40 and is now celebrated in more than 198 countries. Here at Google, we’ll be focusing on one of the planet’s more enjoyable aspects: its food. (Though, to be fair, we’re always focused on food around here). Our offices are hosting farmers markets, planting herb gardens, hosting talks on sustainable cooking and much more.

At our Mountain View headquarters, we’re enjoying solar cooking demonstrations, classes on composting and local food sourcing, distribution of reusable shopping bags and discussions on healthy cooking and eating. We’re also hosting a speaker from The Nature Conservancy and giving tours of our on-site 1.6MW solar panel installation and the 400kW Bloom Energy fuel cells. Today is also Take Your Child to Work Day, so we have plenty of kid-friendly activities centered around healthy, sustainable habits to complement the bounce house, movies and games.

The focus on food is not limited to Mountain View. Our Dublin office is removing all disposable cups, Stockholm is running a special Earth Day food menu in their cafe, Wroclaw employees are planting seeds and Amsterdam is overhauling its salad bar with organic offerings. And the cafe in our London office is sourcing all of its food from within 50 miles of the office, as well as organizing a bike-to-work effort coordinated with Google Maps.

Beyond food, we’ve been busy with a number of other Earth-related initiatives. Last month, Google Maps biking directions launched in the U.S. and we hope that having these directions on hand will help you find less carbon-intensive ways to commute to work or meet friends. Just the other week we added a new feature in Google Finance that reports companies’ carbon disclosure rating from the Carbon Disclosure Project. Oh, and don’t forget about the new kids on the block.

If you’re looking to make a difference, check for local efforts or make a pledge to have an impact. We’re working to minimize our own carbon footprint, and hope that you’ll take a moment today to consider how you can make a positive impact on our planet.

Posted by Austin Rachlin, Green Business Operations

The art of search results

We’re always honored and often surprised by the many ways people can be inspired by Google. Take for example artist Ken Solomon, who has done a series of watercolors of Google Image Search results, like this one:

Ken's "Google Portrait - Warhol 2"

Just as societies preserve important documents and works of art, archivists and historians are now developing ways to preserve digital ephemera, from tweets to book drafts, as part our cultural and global history. On a small scale, Ken is doing just that, and we’re intrigued by his creative method of preserving moments in time. We may not have majored in art history, but we like the “meta” quality of Ken’s paintings of search results for pop artists. From Brillo pad boxes to Google in under 25 moves...?

You can see more of Ken’s work on his website. And if you live in New York, Ken is exhibiting these pieces in a one-man show at the Josée Bienvenu Gallery until May 15.

Posted by Emily Wood, Google Blog & Twitter team

The goats are baaaahk!

Last year, in our quest to minimize our carbon footprint (and keep people on their toes), we turned to an unlikely solution for mowing an overgrown field: goats. More than 200 goats from California Grazing have once again arrived at our Mountain View headquarters where they’ll stay for over a week chomping away on grassy goodness. The cost of bringing in the goats is comparable to hiring lawn mowers for the same job and the green benefits are clear: the goats eliminate mower emissions, reduce noise pollution, restore plant species and fertilize while grazing.

Don’t worry, we’re not going to be in the business of chèvre anytime soon, but in the meantime we’re having a lot of fun watching our new colleagues.



Posted by Dan Hoffman, Director of Real Estate and Workplace Services for NorCal, and Chief Goat Herder