googleblogs

Improved search in Gmail

Gmail Blog 21 May 2012, 8:03 pm CEST

Posted by Isaac Elias, Software Engineer When we built Gmail, we wanted to bring that same great search experience Google is known for to email. And today, we are making that experience even better by improving the autocomplete predictions you see when you search in Gmail. Now when you type something into the Gmail search box, the autocomplete predictions will be tailored to the content in your email, so you can save time and get the information you want faster than ever before. For example, you might now get lax reservation or lax united as predictions after typing "lax" if you have received an email with a flight confirmation for your trip to Los Angeles in your inbox recently.

We will be rolling out improved autocomplete in English over the next few days and will follow with more languages over the next few months. While initially improved autocomplete will not be available for Google Apps customers, we plan to bring this feature to Apps domains in the future.

Mobile Mondays: QLife receives 560% increase in mobile app revenue with Custom Search Ads

Inside AdSense 21 May 2012, 7:05 pm CEST

QLife is a leading hospital finder, drug database and health-care information website. QLife’s mobile application, “Medicine Search” is one of the biggest health-care applications in Japan. The app enables users to search for information on a range of medicines. QLife reached 2.5 million downloads of their app after the 3/11 Japan Earthquake, when Japanese consumers sought to pay greater care and attention to their family’s health-care. Recently, QLife’s Executive Producer, Yoshimasa Mine spoke to us to describe why they choose to use Custom Search Ads for Mobile Applications and AdMob mobile advertising, and shared some optimization best practices.

Why and when did QLife choose to start building a mobile application?

In 2008, when the iPhone was introduced to the Japanese market, there was a mobile industry event, Mobitec, where I felt the potential of high-end mobile. Mobile phones are a device that's always with a consumer, regardless of whether they're at home, at work, or at play. This was a good match with our business of providing a medicine search service - a search that is done instantly at a time of need. Next, we took a look at our own company's data. We began to see large increases in traffic from mobile, even more than PCs. We wanted to build and encourage mobile activity to complement desktop traffic, particularly during holidays and weekends where we saw mobile traffic surging.
Why did you decide to monetize your mobile app using AdSense and AdMob?

We originally started using AdSense on our desktop site. As a health-care review site, we need to protect our objectivity and integrity to our users. As a result, advertising is the best solution for monetization, over paid reviews from other health-care services and companies. We chose AdSense because of the quality of the ads, the content matching technology, and the limited number of sales resources we had internally. Serving relevant ads is important to our business; we view ads as useful content for our business, and irrelevant ads have not been successful in bringing revenue to us. We used to use only AdMob to monetize our application. But last year, when Custom Search Ads for Mobile Apps was released, we decided to implement it for two reasons. First, we already used Custom Search Ads for our desktop site. Secondly, we’ve heard that using both Custom Search Ads and AdMob will increase CTR because Custom Search Ads will show more related ads in search results.
What did you see as a result of implementing Custom Search Ads for Mobile Apps? We’ve seen revenue from mobile increase by 560% after implementing Custom Search Ads for Mobile Applications. We’re seeing CTRs, CPCs, and RPMs maintain healthy levels in line with our internal benchmarks. Ad engagement tends to be higher with users who own our free app. When we compare how these perform to our desktop site, we find that the mobile app generates lower CPCs but higher CTRs for us.To increase more app downloads, we are working hard to create high quality content to meet our user's needs. How long did it take to implement Custom Search Ads on mobile apps? We took some time to implement Custom Search Ads on our app, since changes won’t go live until our users update their version of our app. It took us three to four days including the test period to implement this. Could you share any publisher best practices you’ve found across using Custom Search Ads and AdMob?

Show Custom Search Ads on search result pages. Use AdMob on other content pages.
We also use the AdMob House priority level to serve direct ads to users.
With Custom Search Ads, you'll see a variation in the number of ads that show, depending on the amount of organic search results you're delivering. We'll always place one ad above search results. We'll also choose to show another ad below when there are more than five search results. In doing so, we can maximize revenue while complying with the program policy, which permits only one ad per view.

What’s next for QLife?

We've found a lot of success with the medicine/health-care search and service business. We'd like to expand our business in a couple of new directions. First, we're interested in growing our business as an app developer for the health-care and medical service sector. We saw good success with the consumer application, and so our reputation as a medical app developer has increased in the industry overall. We're looking to take our app to new global markets. There is a need for a quality medical and health-care search service anywhere in the world. With a publisher solution like AdSense, we are excited to expand and monetize our business beyond our home market in Japan. Finally, I’m excited to announce that we just launched a new iOS app, Find Clinic that seeks to help people easily find and access hospitals at home and abroad. We’ve implemented Custom Search Ads for mobile apps on Find Clinic as well, and look forward to seeing similar successes! Posted by Tatsuo Sakamoto, Account Strategist

Introducing the SketchUp Showcase – A labor of love

SketchUpdate 21 May 2012, 6:30 pm CEST

It’s our sincere pleasure to unveil The SketchUp Showcase, a home for the most impressive, interesting, and inspiring project stories that have been shared with us.

Why a new showcase? Often, when you find an amazing model in the 3D Warehouse, it doesn't tell the full story behind a project. You can download it and see how it was built. But you probably wouldn’t get a sense of why it was built. Where did the inspiration come from? What were the design challenges the modeler faced? What happened after the model was finished? The story just isn’t complete.

The Showcase is a space where the stories, images, renders, animations, and 3D models of passionate SketchUppers can shine a bit brighter.

What was the inspiration behind this 3D model? | Image courtesy of Roberto Bergamo

But that's not all – the Showcase is also a first look at a new element of SketchUp technology: an online 3D model viewer. This 3D viewer lets you orbit, zoom, and pan 3D models right in your browser! To see it in action, find a project marked with a red flag or simply click here. Please note: you’ll need to use the latest version of Google Chrome to take advantage of the WebGL goodness that makes this viewer possible.

Go ahead and start exploring now; content is organized by category filters, so you can easily find projects based on your interests.

A project page featuring the new online 3D viewer | The Catalyst Playground in Vietnam

Finally, our team would like to dedicate the SketchUp Showcase to all the passionate SketchUppers who’ve supported us for over a decade. As we enter a new chapter with Trimble, we hope the Showcase and the online viewer are proof that SketchUp is only getting better. It’s clichéd to say we wouldn’t be much of anywhere without you, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Thank you for all of the love (sometimes tough) you’ve sent our way. Your passion for SketchUp is still what gets us out of bed in the morning.

Want to include your project in the SketchUp Showcase? Submit it here.

Posted by the SketchUp team

Announcing the 90 regional finalists of the Google Science Fair 2012

The Official Google Blog 21 May 2012, 3:27 pm CEST

Congratulations to the regional finalists of the second Google Science Fair! These top 90 entries from around the world represent some incredibly innovative and groundbreaking science.

This year’s competition was even more international and diverse than last year. We had thousands of entries from more than 100 countries, and topics ranging from improving recycling using LEGO robots to treating cancer with a substance created by bees to tackling meth abuse. Our judges were impressed by the quality of the projects, and it was no easy task to evaluate the creativity, scientific merit and global relevance of each submission to narrow down the entries to just 90 finalists.

Thirteen of our 90 finalists have also been nominated for the Scientific American Science in Action award, the winner of which will be announced on June 6 along with our 15 finalists. These top 15 and the Science in Action winner will be flown out to Google’s headquarters in California in July for our celebratory finalist event and for the last round of judging, which will be conducted by our panel of renowned scientists and innovators.

Thanks to all of the students around the world who submitted projects to the Google Science Fair and congratulations to all the young scientists who were selected as regional finalists.

Posted by Sam Peter, Google Science Fair Team

It's YouTube's 7th birthday... and you’ve outdone yourselves, again

YouTube Blog 21 May 2012, 6:00 am CEST

In May 2005 we first shared YouTube with the world. Seven years later, you’re the ones doing the sharing! We’re so honored that you’ve used YouTube to share how-to tips, political moments, home videos, comedy, music, and so much more. Last year to celebrate our birthday, we wrote you, the YouTube Community, a thank you note for making our first 6 years so special. And on that birthday you gave us a great present by reaching a record rate of 48 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute. Well Community, this year, on our 7th birthday, you’ve outdone yourselves once again. Today 72 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute. Like many 7 year olds around the world, we’re growing up so fast! In other words, every single minute you now upload three whole days worth of video instead of two. That's 61 Royal Wedding Ceremonies, 841 Bad Romances, and 1,194 Nyan Cats. We’ve come along way in the past 7 years. What started as a handful of videos shared among friends has transformed into a global platform delivering the next generation of channels to anyone, anywhere, and on any device. This last year was especially big for us. We helped bring more great channels to YouTube and we redesigned the site, making it easier for you to discover, watch and subscribe to the videos you love. And all 800 million of you all over the world have shown us we’re on the right track by increasing subscriptions 50% and watching over 3 billion hours a month. Behind the tens of millions of channels on YouTube featuring talented filmmakers, home videos, skateboarding tricks, music, and car enthusiasts there has always been one consistent voice: you. Throughout our seven years you’ve made the YouTube community what it is. Thank you! The YouTube Team, recently watched “"How to" throw the PERFECT *Princess Birthday Party*”

Happy Birthday DoubleClick Search V3

Inside AdWords 18 May 2012, 10:42 pm CEST

DoubleClick Search V3 is one year old! Over the last year we've focused on:

Campaign Management
Deeper Insights
Bid Optimization
Better Results

To learn more about a year of DoubleClick innovation, visit the DoubleClick Search blog. Posted by Allison Sommer, Inside AdWords crew

Fridaygram: email journey, humans and robots, special space launch

Google Developers Blog 18 May 2012, 8:53 pm CEST

By Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog Editor This week we launched Story of Send, a new site that shows you what happens to your email after you click (or tap) Send. The site is meant for everyone, so you can share it with your [insert favorite non-nerdy reference person here].

Even though Story of Send is designed for all viewers, there are great features inside for us nerds. These appear not just in the text and animation, but also in the form of photos and videos. In particular, take a look at the video At the data center, which you’ll find on the Safe and Secure page, for a rare look inside a Google data center. We’re used to great technology in our computers and mobile devices. More rarely, we get to see amazing tech that truly transforms lives. Thanks to research in robotics and neuroscience, two paralyzed people have controlled a robotic arm with their thoughts via a tiny injected sensor. One participant used the robot arm to grab a bottle and bring it to her so she could drink from it. This woman has been paralyzed for 15 years. After the successful experiment, one of the researchers was quoted as saying "She had a smile on her face that I and the research team will never forget". Finally, space fans might want to make time this weekend to watch the May 19 launch of the private SpaceX Dragon spacecraft from Cape Canaveral on its way to the International Space Station. Depending on where you are on the planet, the launch is scheduled for morning, afternoon, or evening on Saturday. Those of us here on the west coast of North America and in Hawaii can just plan to drink a lot of coffee and stay up late tonight. Each week we publish Fridaygram, featuring stuff from Google and beyond that you might have missed during the week. Fridaygram items aren't necessarily related to developer topics; they’re just interesting to us nerds. This week we’re wondering if Zefram Cochrane would be interested in the SpaceX launch.

A look inside our 2011 diversity report

The Official Google Blog 18 May 2012, 8:13 pm CEST

We work hard to ensure that our commitment to diversity is built into everything we do—from hiring our employees and building our company culture to running our business and developing our products, tools and services. To recap our diversity efforts in 2011, a year in which we partnered with and donated $19 million to more than 150 organizations working on advancing diversity, we created the 2011 Global Diversity & Talent Inclusion Report. Below are some highlights. In the U.S., fewer and fewer students are graduating with computer science degrees each year, and enrollment rates are even lower for women and underrepresented groups. It’s important to grow a diverse talent pool and help develop the technologists of tomorrow who will be integral to the success of the technology industry. Here are a few of the things we did last year aimed at this goal in the U.S. and around the world:

We held our third annual HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) Faculty Summit at Google New York, hosting 50 professors and administrators from 16 HBCUs, who came together to collaborate, share insights and engage with Googlers.
We helped 100,000 students and faculty at 22 HBCUs in the U.S. “go Google;” they now use Google Apps for Education.
To date, 3,000 students in 77 countries have received Google scholarships and we also expanded our scholarship programs for women in technology.
We piloted the Top Black Talent U.K. program to help the U.K.’s top black engineering and business students transition into the tech industry. We also partnered with the African Caribbean Society to offer 100 students workshops and mentoring with Googlers from engineering, sales and marketing.

We not only promoted diversity and inclusion outside of Google, but within Google as well.

We had more than 10,000 members participate in one of our 18 Global Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). Membership and reach expanded as Women@Google held the first ever Women’s Summit in both Mountain View, Calif. and Japan; the Black Googler Network (BGN) made their fourth visit to New Orleans, La., contributing 360 volunteer hours in just two days; and the Google Veterans Network partnered with GoogleServe, resulting in 250 Googlers working on nine Veteran-related projects from San Francisco to London.
Googlers in more than 50 offices participated in the Sum of Google, a celebration about diversity and inclusion, in their respective offices around the globe.
We sponsored 464 events in 70 countries to celebrate the anniversary of International Women's Day. Google.org collaborated with Women for Women International to launch the “Join me on the Bridge” campaign. Represented in 20 languages, the campaign invited people to celebrate by joining each other on bridges around the world—either physically or virtually—to show their support.

Since our early days, it’s been important to make our tools and services accessible and useful to a global array of businesses and user communities. Last year:

We introduced ChromeVox, a screen reader for Google Chrome, which helps people with vision impairment navigate websites. It's easy to learn and free to install as a Chrome Extension.
We grew Accelerate with Google to make Google’s tools, information and services more accessible and useful to underrepresented communities and diverse business partners.
On Veterans Day in the U.S., we launched a new platform for military veterans and their families. The Google for Veterans and Families website helps veterans and their families stay connected through products like Google+, YouTube and Google Earth.

We invite you to take a look back with us at our 2011 diversity and inclusion highlights. We’re proud of the work we’ve done so far, but also recognize that there’s much more to do to. These advances may not happen at Internet speed, but through our collective commitment and involvement, we can be a catalyst for change. Posted by Yolanda Mangolini, Director, Global Diversity & Inclusion/Talent & Outreach Programs

Khan Sheikhoun attack, Wildfires rage across Arizona, NATO Protests

YouTube Blog 18 May 2012, 7:12 pm CEST

Everyday on the CitizenTube channel (and @CitizenTube on Twitter), along with our curation partners @storyful, we look at how the top news stories are covered on YouTube. Each week we post a weekly recap of the top news stories of the week, as seen through the lens of both citizen-reported footage and professional news coverage.

We witnessed Syrian activists claim the government was responsible for the deaths of at least 21 people in the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun after attacks on a funeral procession and on UN vehicles.
We viewed wildfires raging across parts of Arizona, increasing in size due to strong winds and continuing dry weather.
We watched protests against the upcoming NATO summit lead to arrests outside buildings in the downtown Chicago area.
We saw newly-elected French president François Hollande's inauguration take place in Paris.
We followed the presidential candidates on the US campaign trail, as Mitt Romney stuck to his guns over marriage equality.
We saw two Russians and an American board the International Space Station from a Soyuz spacecraft.
We heard boos and mocking remarks towards Mexican presidential race front-runner, Enrique Pena Nieto, during campaign events in Mexico City.
We monitored the deepening crisis in Greece where there were repeated attempts to form a coalition government in an effort to avoid a new election and a possible exit from the euro.
We bade a sad farewell to 'Queen of Disco' Donna Summer, who passed away this week in Florida after a battle with cancer.

Come back next week to watch the news unfold on YouTube.

Olivia Ma, YouTube News & Politics, recently watched "Drinking Coffee for Longer Life".

From Words to Concepts and Back: Dictionaries for Linking Text, Entities and Ideas

Google Research Blog 18 May 2012, 6:30 pm CEST

Posted by Valentin Spitkovsky and Peter Norvig, Research Team

Yet in each word some concept there must be...

— from Goethe's Faust (Part I, Scene III)

Human language is both rich and ambiguous. When we hear or read words, we resolve meanings to mental representations, for example recognizing and linking names to the intended persons, locations or organizations. Bridging words and meaning — from turning search queries into relevant results to suggesting targeted keywords for advertisers — is also Google's core competency, and important for many other tasks in information retrieval and natural language processing. We are happy to release a resource, spanning 7,560,141 concepts and 175,100,788 unique text strings, that we hope will help everyone working in these areas. How do we represent concepts? Our approach piggybacks on the unique titles of entries from an encyclopedia, which are mostly proper and common noun phrases. We consider each individual Wikipedia article as representing a concept (an entity or an idea), identified by its URL. Text strings that refer to concepts were collected using the publicly available hypertext of anchors (the text you click on in a web link) that point to each Wikipedia page, thus drawing on the vast link structure of the web. For every English article we harvested the strings associated with its incoming hyperlinks from the rest of Wikipedia, the greater web, and also anchors of parallel, non-English Wikipedia pages. Our dictionaries are cross-lingual, and any concept deemed too fine can be broadened to a desired level of generality using Wikipedia's groupings of articles into hierarchical categories. The data set contains triples, each consisting of (i) text, a short, raw natural language string; (ii) url, a related concept, represented by an English Wikipedia article's canonical location; and (iii) count, an integer indicating the number of times text has been observed connected with the concept's url. Our database thus includes weights that measure degrees of association. For example, the top two entries for football indicate that it is an ambiguous term, which is almost twice as likely to refer to what we in the US call soccer:

text=football	url	count
1.	Association football	44,984
2.	American football	23,373
⋮

An inverted index can be used to perform reverse look-ups, identifying salient terms for each concept. Some of the highest-scoring strings — including synonyms and translations — for both sports, are listed below:

concept:

“soccer”

football and Football

Soccer and soccer

Association football

fútbol and Fútbol

footballer

Futbol and futbol

Fußball

futebol

futbolista

サッカー

축구

footballeur

Fußballspieler

sepak bola

足球

فوتبال

футболист

כדורגל

piłkarz

voetbalclub

ฟุตบอล

bóng đá

voetbal

Foutbaal

futebolista

لعبة كرة القدم

fotbal

concept:

“football”

American football

football and Football

fútbol americano

football américain

アメリカンフットボール

American football rules

futebol americano

فوتبال آمریکایی

美式足球

football americano

Amerikan futbolu

Le Football Américain

football field

อเมริกันฟุตบอล

פוטבול

كرة القدم الأمريكية

Futbol amerykański

미식축구

futbolu amerykańskiego

football team

американского футбола

Amerikai futball

sepak bola Amerika

football player

američki fudbal

反則

كرة القدم الأميركية

Associated counts can easily be turned into percentages. The following table illustrates the concept-to-words dictionary direction — which may be useful for paraphrasing, summarization and topic modeling — for the idea of soft drink, restricted to English (and normalized for punctuation, pluralization and capitalization differences):

url=Soft_drink	text		%
1.	soft drink	(and soft-drinks)	28.6
2.	soda	(and sodas)	5.5
3.	soda pop		0.9
4.	fizzy drinks		0.6
5.	carbonated beverages	(and beverage)	0.3
6.	non-alcoholic		0.2
7.	soft		0.1
8.	pop		0.1
9.	carbonated soft drink	(and drinks)	0.1
10.	aerated water		0.1
11.	non-alcoholic drinks	(and drink)	0.1
12.	soft drink controversy		0.0
13.	citrus-flavored soda		0.0
14.	carbonated		0.0
15.	soft drink topics		0.0
⋮

The words-to-concepts dictionary direction can disambiguate senses and link entities, which are often highly ambiguous, since people, places and organizations can (nearly) all be named after each other. The next table shows the top concepts meant by the string Stanford, which refers to all three (and other) types:

text=Stanford	url	%	type
1.	Stanford University	50.3	ORGANIZATION
2.	Stanford (disambiguation)	7.7	a disambiguation page
3.	Stanford, California	7.5	LOCATION
4.	Stanford Cardinal football	5.7	ORGANIZATION
5.	Stanford Cardinal	4.1	multiple athletic programs
6.	Stanford Cardinal men's basketball	2.0	ORGANIZATION
7.	Stanford prison experiment	2.0	a famous psychology experiment
8.	Stanford, Kentucky	1.7	LOCATION
9.	Stanford, Norfolk	1.0	LOCATION
10.	Bank of the West Classic	1.0	a recurring sporting event
11.	Stanford, Illinois	0.9	LOCATION
12.	Leland Stanford	0.9	PERSON
13.	Charles Villiers Stanford	0.8	PERSON
14.	Stanford, New York	0.8	LOCATION
15.	Stanford, Bedfordshire	0.8	LOCATION
⋮

The database that we are providing was designed for recall. It is large and noisy, incorporating 297,073,139 distinct string-concept pairs, aggregated over 3,152,091,432 individual links, many of them referencing non-existent articles. For technical details, see our paper (to be presented at LREC 2012) and the README file accompanying the data. We hope that this release will fuel numerous creative applications that haven't been previously thought of!

Google Summer of Code 2012 Stats - Part 2

Google Open Source Blog 18 May 2012, 5:00 pm CEST

And now the news that some of you have been waiting for: the annual list of schools with the largest number of accepted students for Google Summer of Code 2012!

Rank	School	Country	# of Accepted Students	# in 2011
1	University of Moratuwa	Sri Lanka	29	27
2	Polytechnic University Of Bucharest	Romania	21	23
2	National University of Singapore	Singapore	21	11
3	Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology	India	17	8
4	International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad	India	16	9
5	Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Goa campus / BITS-Pilani - K.K.Birla Goa Campus	India	14	1
6	Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University (IT-BHU)	India	13	6
7	Technical University Of Gdansk	Poland	12	9
7	Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani)	India	12	10
8	Technische Universität Wien, (TU Wien)	Austria	10	13
8	Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur	India	10	14
8	University of Ljubljana	Slovenia	10	7
9	Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi	India	9	6
9	Chernihiv State Technological University	Ukraine	9	6
10	UNICAMP - Universidade Estadual de Campinas	Brazil	8	14

As you can see, some schools have a big jump in participants over 2011 - yes, I’m talking about you, BITS-Pilani - while a few schools show a drop off in students. To compare, let’s look at the overall “Top 10” schools for the past 8 years.

Rank	School	Country	# of Accepted Students: 2005-2012
1	University of Moratuwa	Sri Lanka	164
2	Polytechnic University Of Bucharest	Romania	75
3	National University of Singapore	Singapore	58
3	Technische Universität Wien, (TU Wien)	Austria	58
3	Universidade Estadual de Campinas - UNICAMP	Brazil	58
4	University of Toronto	Canada	57
5	Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur	India	51
6	Technical University Of Gdansk	Poland	49
7	Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences	China	48
8	International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad	India	42
8	Politechnika Wroclawska	Poland	42
9	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	United States	41
10	Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University (IT-BHU)	India	38

Charts like these highlight how international Google Summer of Code truly is.

It’s important to remember that the number of students from each school is not the point of the program. Over 13% of accepted students are from schools whose students are participating for the first time this year. What matters is participation - getting more students involved with creating free and open source software.

By Cat Allman, Google Open Source Programs

Making more pages load instantly

Google Webmaster Central Blog 18 May 2012, 12:00 am CEST

Webmaster level: All At Google we're obsessed with speed. We've long known that even seemingly minor speed increases can have surprisingly large impacts on user engagement and happiness. About a year ago we rolled out Instant Pages in pursuit of that goal. Instant Pages makes use of prerendering technology in Chrome to make your site appear to load instantly in some cases, with no need for any extra work on your part. Here's a video of it in action:

We've been closely watching performance and listening to webmaster feedback. Since Instant Pages rolled out we've saved more than a thousand years of ours users' time. We're very happy with the results so far, and we'll be gradually increasing how often we trigger the feature. In the vast majority of cases, webmasters don't have to do anything for their sites to work correctly with prerendering. As we mentioned in our initial announcement of Instant Pages, search traffic will be measured in Webmaster Tools just like before this feature: only results the user visits will be counted. If your site keeps track of pageviews on its own, you might be interested in the Page Visibility API, which allows you to detect when prerendering is occurring and factor those out of your statistics. If you use an ads or analytics package, check with them to see if their solution is already prerender-aware; if it is, in many cases you won't need to make any changes at all. If you're interested in triggering Chrome's prerendering within your own site, see the Prerendering in Chrome article. Instant Pages means that users arrive at your site happier and more engaged, which is great for everyone. Posted by Ziga Mahkovec - Software Engineer, Instant Pages

Carbon stocks and cultural mapping in the Amazon Rainforest

Google LatLong 17 May 2012, 11:55 pm CEST

In 2008, the Google Earth Outreach team visited the Surui tribe in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest for the first time, upon request of Chief Almir Naramagoya Surui. Their goal was to learn how to share and preserve their culture using Google Maps, Google Earth, and other online tools including Picasa, YouTube, and Blogger. We were honored to play a role in empowering the indigenous people of a region that had been ravaged by illegal logging to tell their stories to millions of people around the world. Filmmaker Denise Zmekhol documented this experience in a video called Trading Bows and Arrows for Laptops. Then, in 2009, Rebecca Moore, head of the Google Earth Outreach team, returned to the Amazon to teach the Surui about Open Data Kit (ODK), a new suite of open-source tools that streamlines the process of data collection in the field with Android phones. Using ODK, the tribe takes pictures of what’s happening on the ground for proof of the illegal logging that is taking place on their territory. The Surui also began using ODK and Google Earth to visualize the carbon reserves of the forest they live in. This process is part of their 50-year sustainability plan, and serves as a model for how indigenous tribes who have lost much of their ancestral land to logging and deforestation can thrive with the help of a new emerging market based on carbon credits. Chief Almir, in his joint presentation with Rebecca Moore, celebrated the validation of the Surui Forest Carbon Project on Saturday, May 12th at TEDxBeloHorizonte in Brazil. This is a groundbreaking outcome for the Surui people for two reasons. First, this is the first indigenous-led project in the world to be validated. Equally important, it’s also the first REDD+ project in Brazil to get certified by both the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) to sell stocks in the carbon market, and the Climate, Community and Biodiversity (CCB) Gold Standard to get extra gains from other ‘co-benefits’ of forest preservation, such as increasing biodiversity for a region, or preserving the livelihood of local communities who depend on the forest. The project was validated by Rainforest Alliance and the Brazilian NGO IMAFLORA.

The Surui and their partner IDESAM have already measured a baseline of carbon stored in the indigenous reserve and will avoid the emission of 6 million tons of carbon over the 30 years of the life of the project by avoiding the deforestation of 40 thousand hectares of forests and protecting an additional 200,000 hectares. Coordinated by Forest Trends, the Surui will work with the Brazilian government and those who want to neutralize their emissions to develop financial mechanisms to ensure the forest is protected and well managed, while also assuring the quality of life for the Surui community. The primary financial vehicle has been designed by FUNBIO, a Brazilian NGO specializing in creating financial mechanisms for conservation. The TEDx talk was made on the heels of another Google Earth Outreach workshop held in Cacoal, Rondonia in May -- this one intended to teach the Surui people how to create a cultural map using Google Earth. Creating a new platform for storytelling online and an interactive repository for shared memories, the Surui students have interviewed their elders to map their ancestral sites, such as the site of first contact with western civilization in 1969, places where the tribes battled with colonists in the 1970s, as well as places of interest, like sightings of jaguars, capybaras and toucans. Once the Surui students have completed the first version of the map, it will be available for all to explore both as a Google Earth KML, powered by Spreadsheet Mapper 3.0, and as a narrated tour in Google Earth.

We are very excited for Chief Almir, the Surui people, and their partners, including ECAM, Amazon Conservation Team, Forest Trends, IDESAM, Kaninde, FUNBIO, among others, who are entering into a new phase of global significance with the validation of the Surui Forest Carbon Project and the Surui Cultural Map. Posted by Tanya Birch, Program Manager, Google Earth Outreach

Internet at Liberty 2012 Conference: Join the discussion

Google Public Policy Blog 17 May 2012, 10:00 pm CEST

Posted by Bob Boorstin, Director of Public Policy Next week, 300+ Internet activists, policy makers, academics and NGO leaders from more than 30 countries will gather in Washington, D.C. to discuss the future of free speech online. The event is called Internet at Liberty 2012, and we want you to join the discussion. The future of free expression is uncertain. According to the Open Net Initiative, more than 620 million Internet users—31% of the world’s total Internet users—live in countries where there is substantial or pervasive filtering of online content. And when free expression is in jeopardy, so are reporters; as the Committee to Protect Journalists found, nearly half of all the writers, editors, and photojournalists imprisoned around the world are online journalists. Dictatorships and authoritarian regimes are the worst offenders, but democracies around the world are also questioning whether the Internet requires monitoring and supervision. 2012 is a crucial year. As governments are trying to draw the right lines, we are bringing the most challenging and important debates to you via Internet at Liberty 2012. Join us on May 23 and May 24 by watching our livesteam at YouTube.com/citizentube, and feel free to Tweet your questions and comments (@InternetLiberty). If you are in the DC area, consider joining us at the event live. You can register here. Space is limited, but this is a crucial issue and we want you to participate. For more information, check out our detailed schedule of events.

Helping students fish for a better future in the land of 10,000 lakes

The Official Google Blog 17 May 2012, 9:50 pm CEST

Minnesota has long been a state that’s prided itself on its commitment to education. Now the state has taken on the mission of becoming a technology hub as well, setting the goal to become one of the country’s top five technology states by 2020. Last week, we travelled to Minnesota to pilot two new programs designed to help students with an interest in technology get a jump on the job market, and learn directly from Google engineers over Google+ Hangout. First, we partnered with Teach for America on a classroom mentorship project that pairs Google engineers with middle school science and math classes via Google+ Hangouts. A dozen Googlers paired up with classrooms in Minneapolis/St. Paul last week to introduce a curriculum modelled after Solve for X, Google’s initiative that celebrates technology-based moonshot thinking to solve real-world problems. In the coming weeks, each classroom will chose a big problem to tackle (world hunger, homelessness, climate change, etc.) and develop an innovative technology solution to address it—with help from the Google mentor who will join the classroom via Google+ Hangout for coaching sessions. We think hangouts are a great way to connect Googlers with classrooms far away, and are looking to expand this pilot to other states in the fall.

Google Engineer Selim Onal talks with students at the Minneapolis KIPP Academy about Solve for X

We also kicked off our first-ever youth entrepreneurship training as part of our Google for Entrepreneurs programs. The summit brought together 60 high school students from the Minneapolis STEP-UP program, an effort designed to place students from lower-income communities as interns at Minnesota businesses over the summer. Our goal was to give these students some basic training in Google tools like Docs, Apps, YouTube and Google+ so that they can enter their internships with a better understanding of how technology and the Internet can be of help to them, as well as spark these students with an entrepreneurial drive that will serve them well in these opportunities. After a morning of learning about Google tools, the students broke out into teams to pitch their own business ideas to solve challenges in education, government, transportation and the music industry. A number of mentors from the Minneapolis tech community joined us to help coach the students, and Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak was onhand himself to help get the students started.

Minneapolis STEP-UP students pitch their start-up ideas to address a series of real-world challenges

Science and technology disciplines are projected to add 70,000 jobs to the Minnesota job market by 2019. We hope by partnering with local organizations, we can help give students the inspiration and skills to enter that job market ready to excel. Posted by Steve Grove, Head of Community Partnerships, Google+

Hangouts Hackathon: 1 API, 5 developers, 2 weeks

Google Developers Blog 17 May 2012, 8:14 pm CEST

By Jonathan Beri, Google+ Developer Advocate Cross-posted from the Google+ Developers Blog Last week we released an update to the Google+ Hangouts API, which includes several new features and possibilities to build on, like the ability to respond to facial movements in real-time inside an app. As with any new API, we’re especially interested in what sorts of things our developer friends will dream up, so we've commissioned a handful of them to play with it over the next couple of weeks, and to share their thoughts and discoveries along the way. The participants represent a wide range of developers -- from agencies like The Barbarian Group to independent developers like Eyebeam alum Aaron Meyers teamed up with OKFocus. Follow the Hangouts Hackathon with us on the Google+ Developers page, and, if you’re working on an interesting Hangouts API project we’d love to hear about that too. Use hashtag #hangoutshackathon to chat about our work, or your own, with the new API.

Announcement: Custom alerts will sunset on June 30, 2012

Inside AdWords 17 May 2012, 8:06 pm CEST

When we first created custom alerts, we wanted to provide advertisers with a way to be notified when certain behaviors or changes occurred in their AdWords account. Over time, we observed that most advertisers wanted to take action when such triggers occurred within their accounts. Many of these actions can now be done by creating automated rules - a tool within AdWords that enables you to schedule automatic changes to specific parts of your account based on the criteria that you specify. Based on automated rules adoption, we have decided to sunset custom alerts. Starting June 15, we will disable creation of new alerts and by the end of June, we will stop triggering existing alerts. This means that on June 30, you will not see custom alerts in your AdWords account. If you selected email as your notification method, this means you will no longer receive alert emails. We are actively working to bring you an email-only option in automated rules so you can be notified when a rule requirements are met without taking any action. In the meantime, check out some of the common ways you can use automated rules to save you time in managing your account. Posted by Prashant Baheti, AdWords Product Manager

Hangouts Hackathon: 1 API, 5 developers, 2 weeks

Google+ Developers Blog 17 May 2012, 7:25 pm CEST

Last week we released an update to the Google+ Hangouts API, which includes several new features and possibilities to build on, like the ability to respond to facial movements in real-time inside an app. As with any new API, we’re especially interested in what sorts of things our developer friends will dream up, so we've commissioned a handful of them to play with it over the next couple of weeks, and to share their thoughts and discoveries along the way. The participants represent a wide range of developers -- from agencies like The Barbarian Group to independent developers like Eyebeam alum Aaron Meyers teamed up with OKFocus. Follow the Hangouts Hackathon with us on the Google+ Developers page, and, if you’re working on an interesting Hangouts API project we’d love to hear about that too. Use hashtag #hangoutshackathon to chat about our work, or your own, with the new API. Posted by Jonathan Beri, Google+ Developer Advocate

Shiver me timbers, the 2012 D4G Winner is....

The Official Google Blog 17 May 2012, 7:04 pm CEST

After 114,000 submissions and millions of your votes, second grader Dylan Hoffman of Caledonia, Wisc. is this year’s U.S. Doodle 4 Google National Winner. His doodle “Pirate Times” will be featured on the U.S. Google homepage tomorrow, May 18. Hoffman, who attends the Prairie School in Racine, Wisc., responded to this year’s theme “If I could travel in time I’d visit...” with a colorful depiction of his dream visit to an era filled with swashbucklers. There, he’d “sail a pirate ship looking for treasure, have a colorful pet parrot and enjoy beautiful sunsets from deserted islands.” With his win, Dylan has come into some treasure of his own: a $30,000 college scholarship, a Chromebook computer and a $50,000 technology grant for his school. As an added bonus, Dylan’s doodle will grace the front of a special edition of the Crayola 64-crayon box, available this fall.

After this year's record-breaking submissions, choosing the National Winner and the four National Finalists wasn’t an easy decision. In addition to selecting Dylan, millions of public votes also helped us determine the four National Finalists, each of which will receive a $5,000 college scholarship:

Grades 4-5: Talia Mastalski, Grade 5, East Pike Elementary School, Indiana, Penn., for her doodle “Traveling to me.” Talia says, “When I think of Google, I think of a wormhole leading me to knowledge. If I could travel in time, I would visit a similar wormhole into the future to find out about ME.”
Grades 6-7: Herman Wang, Grade 6, Suzanne Middle School, West Covina, Calif., for his doodle “Retro City.” Herman says, “If I could travel in time, I'd visit Retro City. A future city made of robots and humans.”
Grades 8-9: Susan Olvera, Grade 8, SOAR Alternative School, Lafayette, In., for her doodle “Traveling Back to the Future.” Susan says, “If I could travel in time, I'd travel back to the future. If there is life on other planets, I believe we'd visit the natives as well as invent different ships and rockets for quicker transportation. With what we have accomplished currently, I believe the ‘future’ isn’t so far away.”
Grades 10-12: Cynthia Cheng, Grade 11, Edison High School, Edison, NJ, for her doodle “A World of Adventure.” Cynthia says, “If I could travel in time, I'd visit the age of the Vikings. Though their tales of monsters may not have been entirely true, they were some of the greatest explorers in history. It would be a remarkable experience to share adventures and discover new lands with them.”

After the awards ceremony in New York City today, all 50 of our State Winners will unveil an exhibition of their artwork at the New York Public Library, where their doodles will be displayed from May 18-July 19. In addition, the artwork of all our State Finalists and Winners will be displayed at exhibitions in their home states across the country over the summer. Be sure to check out the local exhibition near you. Thanks to all of you who voted and helped us select this year's winner. Even more important, thank you to all of the students who submitted entries. Keep on doodling and we’ll see you next year! Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Product Management

Join Google Analytics on Google+

Google Analytics Blog 17 May 2012, 5:40 pm CEST

Google Analytics users are part of a passionate community. Many of you go beyond using the product and actively seek a connection with Google team members and other GA users to stay at the edge of what’s next. For example, more than 80,000 readers subscribe to the Google Analytics blog through our RSS feed, our videos on YouTube have been viewed more than 3.5 million times and well over 100,000 people follow us on Twitter.

So it isn’t surprising we’ve received requests from many of you to participate on Google+. We’re excited to fulfill that expectation with a brand new Google+ page for Google Analytics.

Join us on Google+ today

Check out our Google+ page and add us to your analytics, marketing or related circle. We’ll be sharing the latest and greatest about Google Analytics and digital marketing overall to help you become a better practitioner and achieve more with your efforts.

Expect everything from how-to’s/tips, technical advice, interesting stats, plus some fun mixed in for good measure. In addition to useful updates, we’re planning to give you the opportunity to hang out live with some of the team members behind Google Analytics. If there’s anything else you’d like to see, please add a comment to this thread on Google+ and we’ll be happy to consider it.

Posted by Adam Singer, Google Analytics Team