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Selasa, 12 Mei 2009

More Search Options and other updates from our Searchology event

Today we are hosting our second Searchology event, to update our users, partners, and customers on the progress we have made in search and tell them about new features. Our first Searchology was two years ago, when we were excited to launch Universal Search, a feature that blended results of different types (web pages, images, videos, books, etc.) on the results page. Since then Universal Search has grown quite a bit, adding new types of results, expanding to new countries, and triggering on ten times as many queries as it did when we launched it.

But as people get more sophisticated at search they are coming to us to solve more complex problems. To stay on top of this, we have spent a lot of time looking at how we can better understand the wide range of information that's on the web and quickly connect people to just the nuggets they need at that moment. We want to help our users find more useful information, and do more useful things with it.

Our first announcement today is a new set of features that we call Search Options, which are a collection of tools that let you slice and dice your results and generate different views to find what you need faster and easier. Search Options helps solve a problem that can be vexing: what query should I ask?

Let's say you are looking for forum discussions about a specific product, but are most interested in ones that have taken place more recently. That's not an easy query to formulate, but with Search Options you can search for the product's name, apply the option to filter out anything but forum sites, and then apply an option to only see results from the past week. Just last week, at our Shareholders' Meeting, I had a woman ask me why she couldn't organize her results by time, with the most recent information appearing first. "Come back Tuesday," I wanted to say!

The Search Options panel also gives you the ability to view your results in new ways. One view gives you more information about each result, including images as well as text, while others let you explore and iterate your search in different ways.

Check out a video tour here:


We think of the Search Options panel as a tool belt that gives you new ways to interact with Google Search, and we plan to fill it with more innovative and useful features in the future.

Another challenging problem we have worked on is better understanding the information you get back from a search. When you see your results from a Google search, how do you decide which one has the best information for you? Or, how can we help you make the best decision about where to click?

We call the set of information we return with each result a "snippet," and today we are announcing that some of our snippets are going to get richer. These "rich snippets" extract and show more useful information from web pages than the preview text that you are used to seeing. For example, if you are thinking of trying out a new restaurant and are searching for reviews, rich snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the restaurant's price range:

In this example, you can quickly see that the Drooling Dog Bar B Q has gotten lots of positive reviews, and if you want to see what other people have said about the restaurant, clicking this result is a good choice.

We can't provide these snippets on our own, so we hope that web publishers will help us by adopting microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface. This will help people better understand the information you have on your page so they can spend more time there and less on Google. We will be rolling this feature out gradually to ensure that the quality of Google's search results stays high. If you are a webmaster and are interested in participating, visit the rich snippets help page to learn more.

We also showed a preview of a new tool that we're calling Google Squared. Unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared doesn't find webpages about your topic — instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet. We'll be opening it up to users later this month on Google Labs.

These features really explore search from a broad and entirely new perspective. Because we realize that when you can't quickly find just the exact information or content you need or want, it's our problem, not yours. And it's a problem with plenty of room left for innovation.  Stay tuned.

Senin, 11 Mei 2009

18th International World Wide Web Conference


The 18th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2009) was recently held in Madrid. This is the forum in which Larry and Sergey introduced the "Google" search engine back in 1998. Conferences like WWW are highly beneficial for all attendees, as they provide a forum for constructive interactions and discussions among the diverse, global community that is contributing so much to the advancement of the web. As one of the major sponsors this year, Google contributed significantly in various scientific and social forums. Here's a short report of those activities:
  • Google and the Prado Museum collaboration: In January 2009, we announced a collaboration between Google Earth and Spain’s Museo del Prado, which lets people zoom in on some of the gallery’s main portraits and view them in a resolution so fine -- up to 14,000 megapixels -- that even individual brush strokes and cracks in the varnish are clearly visible. The Prado Museum has become the first art gallery in the world to provide access to and navigation of its collection in Google Earth. The initiative includes 14 of the Prado’s most famous paintings -- works by Francisco de Goya, Diego Velázquez, Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Paul Rubens, and more. Such ultra-high resolution imaging, enabling users to virtually feel, see and be present with the original masterpieces, is just one way in which the web can make important contributions to the art community. To celebrate this, Google hosted an event at the Prado Museum, where guests received a guided tour of some of the main exhibits, and had the opportunity to network with fellow researchers, academics and engineers, as well as Google's own Vint Cerf.
  • Research Contributions: Google contributed to the WWW conference by authoring or co-authoring several papers and presentations. I gave a keynote speech on The Continuing Metamorphosis of the web (you can read more about that topic on the Google Research blog). Some other papers to highlight are:
-- Sitemaps: Above and Beyond the Crawl of Duty, Uri Schonfeld, N. Shivakumar
-- Estimating the ImpressionRank of Web Pages, Z. Bar-Yossef & M. Gurevich
-- Detecting The Origin Of Text Segments Efficiently, O. Abdel-Hamid, B. Behzadi, S. Christoph & M. Henzinger
-- What's Up CAPTCHA? A CAPTCHA Based On Image Orientation, R. Gossweiler, M. Kamvar & S. Baluja
-- Computer and iPhones and Mobile Phones, oh my! A logs-based comparison of search users on different devices, M. Kamvar, M. Keller, R. Patel, and Y. Xu
-- Collaborative Filterin for Orkut Communities: Discover of User Latent Behaviour, W. Chen, J. Chu, J. Luan, H. Bai, Y. Wang, and E. Chang.
-- Fast Dynamic Reranking in Large Graphs, P. Sarkar, A. Moore
-- WEB 2.0: Blind to an Accessible New World, J. Hailpern, L.Guarino-Reid, R. Boardman, S. Annam
-- How Opinions are Received by Online Communities: A Case Study on Amazon.com Helpfulness Votes, C. Danescu, G. Kossinets, J. Kleinberg, L. Lee
-- Bid Optimization for Broad Match Ad Auctions, E. E. Dar, Y. Mansour, V. Mirrokni, M. Muthukrishnan & U. Nadav
-- General Auction Mechanism for Search Advertising, G. Aggarwal, S. Muthukrishnan, D. Pal & M. Pal

  • Best Paper Award and the Internet Monetization Track: The WWW program committee changed the best paper and poster process this year. They first chose several nominated papers from different tracks, and after seeking feedback from conference attendees, they chose their best paper: Ashish Goel's and Kamesh Munagala's Hybrid Keyword Search Auctions. The authors of this paper propose a unified approach to an auction for cost-per-click and cost-per-impression settings, and show promising properties of their proposed auction. The paper was presented in the Internet Monetization Track at WWW — a new track which, despite its short term at WWW, became very popular this year. Other tracks like web search, data mining, and the social web have been active at WWW for years and already attract many high-quality research papers. The best poster award went to a paper co-authored by Google's Monika Henzinger about Purely URL-based Topic Classification.
Before closing, I want to return to the Prado Museum collaboration with Google Earth: Now that there is really high resolution imaging and the ability to distribute it to a vast audience, the benefits of combining art and technology are greatly increased. In another medium, witness the success of the Metropolitan Opera's high definition broadcasts that are bringing that art form to a much larger audience. Another place where Google recently helped fuse technology and the arts was with the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. In the case of fine art, our collaboration with the Prado museum enables much broader access to the masterpieces while also providing museum attendees with an unparalleled opportunity to study details of the works before and after a visit. For example, the intense detail in Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights is difficult to comprehend in front of the large, heavily visited triptych, but seeing the painting in person after some previous study makes it far more exciting. So, it would seem that we can use technology in the art world to achieve benefits for all.

Energy and the Internet

There's been a lot of debate lately about the growing amount of energy needed to power the Internet, and we wanted to weigh in on the discussion. A few months ago, I first blogged about the about amount of energy used in one Google search. Our engineers crunched the numbers and found that an average query uses about 1 kJ of energy and emits about 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide. But those raw numbers don't really put the environmental impact of searching the Internet into perspective. To add some context, below is data about the C02 impact of some everyday activities and items compared to Google searching:

ActivityGoogle Searches
CO2 emissions of an average daily newspaper (PDF) (100% recycled paper) 850
A glass of orange juice1,050
One load of dishes in an EnergyStar dishwasher (PDF)
5,100
A five mile trip in the average U.S. automobile10,000
A cheeseburger15,000
Electricity consumed by the average U.S. household in one month3,100,000

We work hard to provide our users with the fastest products using the least amount of energy. We have a team of dedicated engineers focused on designing and building the most efficient data centers in the world. In fact, through efficiency innovations, we have managed to cut energy usage in our data centers by over 50 percent, so we're using less than half the energy to run our data centers as the industry average. This efficiency means that in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will likely use more energy than we will use to answer your query.

And the energy used by computers is growing; people are more plugged-in today than ever before in history. There are more than one billion PCs and laptops currently in use, and that number is expected to grow to four billion by 2020. We've got cell phones, PDAs, iPods, and GPS devices — not to mention the data centers that store all of our digital information "in the cloud." The electricity needed to run all of our computers, gadgets, and gizmos is growing and now accounts for half of all ICT emissions. (ICT stands for "information and communications technology.")

Although the amount of energy used to power ICT is growing, it's important to measure all of the ways information technology helps us save energy too. A study by The Climate Group, in fact, shows that ICT emissions pay for themselves (PDF) (and then some) by enabling significant reductions in emissions by other sectors of the economy. After all, it's much more efficient to move electrons than to move atoms. "Virtual" tools like email, video-conferencing, and search engines replace more carbon-intensive activities like snail mail, business travel, and driving.

We can still make progress at improving computing efficiency across the industry, however, and Google is committed to doing so. In 2007 we co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a non-profit organization committed to reducing global CO2 emissions from the operation of computers by 54 million tons a year by 2010. Check out their website for more information on how you can reduce the environmental impact of your own computer use.

Update 7/16/09: Google's Q2 2009 data center efficiency measurements are now available here

Announcing the 2009 Anita Borg Scholars and Finalists

We're pleased to announce our 2009 Anita Borg Scholars and Finalists. We established the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in 2003 to encourage undergraduate and graduate women completing degrees in computer science and related fields to excel in computing and technology and become active role models and leaders in the field. This year, we're awarding 50 scholars and finalists in the U.S., 18 in Canada and 56 in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. We'll also be awarding scholarships to female students in Australia and New Zealand later this year.

In addition to receiving academic scholarships, all of our winners will be invited to participate in all-expenses-paid networking retreats featuring workshops, speakers, panelists, breakout sessions and social activities at Google offices.

For more information on the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship and other Google scholarship opportunities, visit our scholarships page.

Congratulations to all of our winners!

The 2009 U.S. Anita Borg Scholars
  • Dana Forsthoefel - Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Divya Ramachandran - University of California-Berkeley
  • Elaine Short - Yale University
  • Isabel Mattos - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Jennifer Roberts - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Katherine Corner - University of Colorado at Boulder
  • Leshell Hatley - University of Maryland College Park
  • Manjari Narayan - Rice University
  • Mary David - University of Southern California
  • Natalie Freed - Arizona State University Main
  • Norma Savage - University of California-Santa Barbara
  • Ramya Raghavendra - University of California-Santa Barbara
  • Saleema Amershi - University of Washington
  • Sara Sinclair - Dartmouth College
  • Sarah Cooley - Oregon State University
  • Sarah Loos - Indiana University Bloomington
  • Sheena Lewis - Northwestern University
  • Xuexin (Alice) Zhu - Harvey Mudd College
  • Yi-Chieh Wu - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • YoungJoo Jeong - Carnegie Mellon University
The 2009 U.S. Anita Borg Finalists
  • Alyssa Daw - California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo
  • Angela Yen - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Carrie Ruppar - Graduate Program TBD
  • Chaitrali Amrutkar - Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Cindy Rubio Gonzalez - University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Corey Toler-Franklin - Princeton University
  • Ekaterina Gonina - University of California-Berkeley
  • Jacinda Shelly - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Jennifer Harrison - Arizona State University
  • Julia Schwarz - University of Washington
  • Kelli Ireland - University of Pittsburgh
  • Kristi Morton - University of Washington
  • Krystle de Mesa - University of California, San Diego
  • Kyle Rector - Oregon State University
  • Manasi Vartak - Worcester Polytechnic Institute
  • Margaret Leibovic - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Maria Kazandjieva - Stanford University
  • Pinar Muyan-Ozcelik - University of California-Davis
  • Rachel Sealfon - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Rachelle Fuhrer - University of California, San Diego
  • Sarah Shiplett - Wellesley College
  • Shilpa Arora - Carnegie Mellon University
  • Sneha Popley - Texas Christian University
  • Sonal Gupta - University of Texas at Austin
  • Sujatha Nagarajan - University of Illinois at Chicago
  • Supriya Vadlamani - Cornell University
  • Tracy Chou - Stanford University
  • Valerie Yoder - Westminster College
  • Wendy Stevenson - Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
  • Xia Zhou - University of California-Santa Barbara
The 2009 Canada Anita Borg Scholars
  • April Khademi – University Of Toronto
  • Jenna Cameron – University Of Western Ontario
  • Jing Xiang – University Of British Columbia
  • Pooja Viswanathan – University Of British Columbia
The 2009 Canada Anita Borg Finalists
  • Barbara Macdonald – University Of Waterloo
  • Fahimeh Raja – University Of British Columbia
  • Gail Carmichael – Carleton University
  • Kate Tsoukalas (withdrawn) - Simon Fraser University
  • Katherine Gunion – University Of Victoria
  • Marjorie Locke – University Of Western Ontario
  • Melanie Tupper – Dalhousie University
  • Michelle Annett – University Of Alberta
  • Mona Mojdeh – University Of Waterloo
  • Ozge Yeloglu – Dalhousie University
  • Phillipa Gill – University Of Toronto
  • Sarah Carruthers – University Of Victoria
  • Somayeh Moazeni – University Of Waterloo
  • Xiaoyuan XU – Simon Fraser University
  • Zahra Ahmadian – University Of British Columbia
The 2009 Europe, Middle East and North Africa Scholars
  • Anna Magdalena Michalska - University of Warsaw (Poland)
  • Bianca Madalina Milatinovici - RWTH Aachen (Germany)
  • Chia Ching Ooi - University of Freiburg (Gemany)
  • Christiane Lammersen - Technische Universität Dortmund (Germany)
  • Christiane Peters - Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands)
  • Daria Yartseva - Lomonosov Moscow State University (Russia)
  • Ekaterina Volkova - Lomonosov Moscow State University (Russia)
  • Elisa Rondini - University College London (U.K.)
  • Katayon Radkhah - Technische Universität Darmstadt (Germany)
  • Keghani Kristelle Kouzoujian - Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (Qatar)
  • Keren Censor - Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (Israel)
  • Kira Radinsky - Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (Israel)
  • Iulia Ion - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (Switzerland)
  • Ligia Nicoleta Nistor - University of Oxford (U.K.)
  • Maja Temerinac-Ott - University of Freiburg (Germany)
  • Marian George - Alexandria University (Egypt)
  • Moran Yassour - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel)
  • Regina Bohnert - Universität Tübingen (Germany)
  • Selen Basol - Sabanci University (Turkey)
  • Suzan Bayhan - Bogazici University (Turkey)
  • Tali Treibitz - Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (Israel)
The 2009 Europe, Middle East and North Africa Finalists
  • Adrienn Szabo - Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary)
  • Anastasia Shakhshneyder - Novosibirsk State University (Russia)
  • Andreea Voicu - Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands)
  • Anna Astrakova - Novosibirsk State University (Russia)
  • Anna Sperotto - University of Twente (Netherlands)
  • Anna Katarzyna Zych - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (Switzerland)
  • Birgit Vera Schmidt - Graz University of Technology (Austria)
  • Didem Gozupek - Bogazici University (Turkey)
  • Elena Smirnova - INRIA Sophia Antipolis (France)
  • Franziska Huth - Saarland University (Germany)
  • Gaya Nadarajan - The University of Edinburgh (U.K.)
  • Irina Calciu - Jacobs University Bremen (Germany)
  • Kerstin Bauer - Technische Universität Kaiserslautern (Germany)
  • Laia Subirats i Mate - Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain)
  • Limor Leibovich - Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (Israel)
  • Lina AL Kanj - American University of Beirut (Lebanon)
  • Lu Feng - University of Oxford (U.K.)
  • Lucia Fedorova - Czech Technical University (Czech Republic)
  • Maria-Camilla Fiazza - University of Verona (Italy)
  • Maya Kabkab - American University of Beirut (Lebanon)
  • Melinda Toth - Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary)
  • Naama Elefant - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel)
  • Nadezda Osadchieva - Bauman Moscow State Technical University (Russia)
  • Natalia Criado - Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Spain)
  • Nina Kargapolova - Novosibirsk State University (Russia)
  • Noga Zewi - Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (Israel)
  • Noura Yousef Salhi - Birzeit University (Palestine)
  • Oana Tifrea - Vienna University of Technology (Austria)
  • Rehab Khalid Alnemr - Hasso Plattner Institute (Germany)
  • Riina Maigre - University of Technology (Estonia)
  • Talya Meltzer - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel)
  • Tamar Aizikowitz - Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (Israel)
  • Unaizah Hanum Obaidellah - University of Sussex (U.K.)
  • Yana Momchilova Mileva - Saarland University (Germany)
  • Yimeng Yang - University of Twente (Netherlands)

Vote for the national Doodle 4 Google winner

In February we invited U.S. kids to exercise their creativity by participating in our second annual Doodle 4 Google contest. In response, we received more than 28,000 doodles from kids representing all 50 states, a 70 percent increase from last year. Inspired by this year's theme, "What I Wish for the World," kids have expressed a variety of wishes, ranging from a world with a pristine environment to a world where imaginations can run free. We were impressed by the incredible spectrum of artwork we received this year, but even more amazed by the artistic talents of the kids who created them. Thanks to all those who doodled with us!

Today, we're pleased to announce the approximately 400 state finalists and the 40 regional winners. They were chosen by a panel of independent judges, all experts in design, but now it's your turn. We invite you to help us select the four national finalists by voting on your favorite doodle in each grade group. You can place your votes on the Doodle 4 Google website until May 18 at midnight Pacific time. We'll announce the results — along with the winner — on May 20th, and the winning doodle will appear on our homepage the following day. If you happen to be visiting New York City, you can drop in and see the doodles of all 40 finalists in an exhibit at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, which will run May 21 - July 5, 2009.

So please take a look at our regional winners' inspiring doodles, vote on your favorites, and help us decide which of these great doodles will be seen on the Google homepage by millions of people around the world.

Update @ 10:00 AM PST: This post was revised to more accurately reflect the number of state finalists.

Update on May 20, 2009 @ 10:45 AM: We've posted all of the state finalists — several hundred doodles in all —on the Doodle 4 Google website and we encourage you to take a look at the beautiful artwork created by these very talented young artists.

Jumat, 08 Mei 2009

A Mom's Day menu

When I was about three years old, my mom and I had a game. Mom would show me things around the house. "Look, Scotto, this is a picture," she said. "Can you eat it?" I asked. "No, honey," she said. "Look, Scotto, this is a flower." "Can you eat it?" I said.

And so the story went: With everything she pointed out, I asked if you could eat it. Now, I'm a chef here at Google. I feel lucky that I fell in love with food and cooking — if not, who knows what I would be having for lunch!

This Mother's Day, you could get your mom a bouquet of flowers, or new earrings, but, well, you can't eat those things. Plus, making a gift at home is a nice personal gesture that doesn't break the bank. With that in mind, some of the other Google chefs and I put together a brunch menu full of recipes designed to pamper moms on their special day. You can download all of them in this PDF, and I've also copied the most mouthwatering recipe below (sure, it's decadent, but isn't that the point?).

Molten Chocolate Cakes

Ingredients
5 oz chocolate, semisweet
5 oz butter
3 eggs
3 egg yolks
1 ½ cups powdered sugar, sifted
½ cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp vanilla extract

Procedure
Preheat oven to 325° F. Place chocolate and butter over a double boiler; stir until melted. Let cool slightly. In the meantime, whisk eggs, egg yolks, and vanilla in a large mixer. Slowly add the sugar, then the chocolate mixture and flour. Coat ¾ cup ramekins with butter, then pour the batter into the ramekins up to the rim. Place in oven for 8-10 minutes. Remove from oven; run knife along edges of ramekin; invert onto a plate. Serve with vanilla whipped cream or vanilla bean ice cream. Makes about 6 cakes.

We hope your mom — and you — enjoy brunch this Sunday!

Google Chrome ads on TV

A couple of months ago, the Google Japan team produced a fun video to demonstrate how clean and simple our Google Chrome user interface is. After releasing this video on the web, we got lots of positive feedback and thoughtful comments. In order to keep that conversation going, we invited some of our creative friends to make a collection of short films celebrating our browser. We released Chrome Shorts last week on our YouTube channel.

At the same time, we talked to our Google TV Ads team to see how we could show the video that our Japan team developed to a wider audience in a measurable way. Using some of the results from our placement-targeted ads on the Google Content Network, we designed a Google TV Ads campaign which we hope will raise awareness of our browser, and also help us better understand how television can supplement our other online media campaigns.

So today, we’re pleased to announce that we're using Google TV Ads to run our Chrome ad on various television networks starting this weekend. We're excited to see how this test goes and what impact television might have on creating more awareness of Google Chrome.

Check out the video below if you haven’t already seen it, or wait and you might see it on TV while you’re channel surfing!