Celebrating free expression 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall

<span style="font-style: italic;">(Cross-posted from the </span><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/10/celebrating-free-expression-20-years.html">YouTube Blog</a><span style="font-style: italic;">)</span><br /><br />In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall became a striking symbol for free expression far beyond the borders of Germany. Just 20 years later, Iranian citizens used online tools like YouTube and Twitter to share <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUMVwkf2tEY">firsthand accounts</a> of the brutal government crackdown waged against protesters disputing the country's election results. <a href="http://www.citizentube.com/2009/06/violence-breaks-out-in-streets-of.html">Many Iranians risked their lives</a> to document the violence, despite the government's attempts to expel journalists and stifle any voices of dissent.<br /><br />The democratizing power of the Internet has enabled individuals to share their stories with a global audience in ways never before possible, and given a voice to those who wouldn't otherwise be heard.<br /><br />To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we're launching a YouTube channel — <a href="http://youtube.com/googlefreeexpression">youtube.com/GoogleFreeExpression</a> — to highlight and celebrate free expression around the world, and we want to hear from you.<br /><br />This channel is designed to feature your stories and reflections on free expression. Tell us about how you or someone you know has taken a stand for free expression. Perhaps you've <a href="http://www.youtube.com/googlefreeexpression#p/c/31A28F774BE309E2/11/SDAPbRZmT6g">protested against</a> something you didn't agree with, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/googlefreeexpression#p/c/31A28F774BE309E2/8/BNf8a0fjnn8">taken action</a> when someone else's free speech was being suppressed or <a href="http://www.youtube.com/googlefreeexpression#p/c/31A28F774BE309E2/14/KVqj5lcEkBk">been inspired</a> by someone who has stood up for the right to speak out. Make a short video sharing your experience, upload it to YouTube, and add it as a reply to this one:<br /><br /><object height="340" width="560"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/NBirQbsWXw0&hl=en&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/NBirQbsWXw0&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object><br /><br />We'll be featuring the best submissions on the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleFreeExpression">Google Free Expression channel</a>, so be sure to check back in the weeks to come. We look forward to hearing from you.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Annette Kroeber-Riel, Senior European Policy Counsel</span>

Celebrating free expression 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall became a striking symbol for free expression far beyond the borders of Germany. Just 20 years later, Iranian citizens used onli…

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Happy 10th birthday, Blogger

Much has changed since Blogger was released in August of 1999. Writing about Blogger's founding in his book <a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.sayeverything.com/">Say Everything</a>, Scott Rosenberg describes the effect of Blogger simply: "It cleared the obstacles from the path between brain and Web page." As the phenomenon of blogging has grown and evolved over the past ten years, so too has Blogger, adapting to a world of fast-paced communication and allowing millions to tell their stories. When Google acquired Blogger in February of 2003, about 250,000 people visited Blogger per month. Today, that number is more than 300 million.<br /><br />In our <a href="http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/News/News-Item/Google-Buys-Pyra-Labs-and-Blogger.com--4069.htm">announcement</a> about the Blogger acquisition, we said (somewhat ironically, not in a blog post — the Official Google Blog was still more than <a href="http://www.google.com/tenthbirthday/#2004-official-google-blog">a year away</a>): "Blogs are a global self-publishing phenomenon that connect Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation." We're proud that Blogger <a href="http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/08/giving-voice-to-digital-refugees.html">continues to be a force for free expression worldwide</a> and that it is growing quickly despite its maturity. In the past two years alone, the number of people contributing to a blog has more than doubled, and every second of every day, a new blog is created on Blogger.<br /><br />To commemorate Blogger's 10th birthday, we've been releasing <a href="http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/08/blogger-is-turning-10.html">birthday presents</a> as our way of saying thanks to the millions of users who have made Blogger what it is today. So far, we have released 5 presents and today we're announcing 2 more, courtesy of two Blogger partners:<br /><ul><li><a href="http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/09/earn-charity-donations-on-blogger-with.html">Socialvibe</a>: When Socialvibe approached us about finding a way to empower the Blogger community to help raise funds for charities, we couldn't pass up the opportunity to leverage Blogger's reach to do some good. Starting this week, Blogger users can show their support for charities and raise funds by adding a gadget to their blog. The Socialvibe team has challenged us to raise $50,000 for charity by the end of the year, and we're pretty confident we can beat that.</li><li><a href="http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/09/theres-app-for-that.html">InfoThinker</a>: If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch and a Blogger blog, you're in luck. The team at <a href="http://www.infothinker.com/">InfoThinker</a> (makers of the iPhone app BlogPress) was eager to help celebrate Blogger's birthday. Earlier this week they submitted a free version of BlogPress that works only on Blogger to the iPhone App Store. Blogging on the go has never been so easy! Keep an eye out for the app. </li></ul>Here is the <a href="http://buzz.blogger.com/search/label/10th%20Birthday">full list of presents</a>. We have more in store over the next couple weeks, and we're just as excited about a number of developments planned for later in the year. With thanks to Blogger founders <a href="http://www.megnut.com/">Meg</a>, <a href="http://www.onfocus.com/">Paul</a> and <a href="http://www.evhead.com/">Ev</a> without whom we wouldn't have a 10th birthday to celebrate, and to the millions of people around the world who rely on Blogger to tell their story every day, here's to our next decade.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Rick Klau, Product Manager</span>

Happy 10th birthday, Blogger

Much has changed since Blogger was released in August of 1999. Writing about Blogger's founding in his book Say Everything, Scott Rosenberg describes the effect of Blogger simply: "It cleared the obst…

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Extending Google services in Africa

At Google we seek to serve a broad base of people — not only those who can afford to access the Internet from the convenience of their workplace or with a computer at home. It's important to reach users wherever they are, with the information they need, in areas with the greatest information poverty. In many places around the world, people look to their phones, rather than their computers, to find information they need in their daily lives. This is especially true in Africa, which has <a href="http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/publications/idi/2009/index.html">the world’s highest mobile growth rate</a> and where mobile phone penetration is six times Internet penetration. One-third of the population owns a mobile phone and many more have access to one.<br /><br />Most mobile devices in Africa only have voice and SMS capabilities, and so we are focusing our technological efforts in that continent on SMS. Today, we are announcing <a href="http://www.google.co.ug/sms">Google SMS</a>, a suite of mobile applications which will allow people to access information, via SMS, on a diverse number of topics including health and agriculture tips, news, local weather, sports, and more. The suite also includes <a href="http://www.google.co.ug/mobile/sms/#6007">Google Trader</a>, a SMS-based “marketplace” application that helps buyers and sellers find each other. People can find, "sell" or "buy" any type of product or service, from used cars and mobile phones to crops, livestock and jobs.<br /><br />We are particularly excited about <a href="http://www.google.co.ug/mobile/sms/#6001">Google SMS Tips</a>, an SMS-based query-and-answer service that enables a mobile phone user to have a web search-like experience. You enter a free form text query, and Google's algorithms restructure the query to identify keywords, search a database to identify relevant answers, and return the most relevant answer. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisXAtDTNauvYKD2NPQw2zsRqRa7ylO2hiW6FXpJ8mDAsvBmoCyQdIXOk4Df2cMpLh5AuK_jF4Yfl9NgzYA9B7sqcA-nVf67jBc9G1B7MnL6jUxRC_e3lP4hgzeg3QQsTkZEiflp2hyLMMp/s1600-h/Africa_AgScreenShot.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisXAtDTNauvYKD2NPQw2zsRqRa7ylO2hiW6FXpJ8mDAsvBmoCyQdIXOk4Df2cMpLh5AuK_jF4Yfl9NgzYA9B7sqcA-nVf67jBc9G1B7MnL6jUxRC_e3lP4hgzeg3QQsTkZEiflp2hyLMMp/s200/Africa_AgScreenShot.gif" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL1xolUBtez6ezLk64SsD4FDmbGZHagbXmdULQZF4Tp2MLaseFLjJR768B9OnHHFMYhJta9eBEdG7Uzh14Dm07ir_HwyDyZFC6NjfTZWpaLEzgbOiy0f-UNifMQsnwnggANcG1akWrbazk/s1600-h/Africa_HealthScreenShot2+(2).gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL1xolUBtez6ezLk64SsD4FDmbGZHagbXmdULQZF4Tp2MLaseFLjJR768B9OnHHFMYhJta9eBEdG7Uzh14Dm07ir_HwyDyZFC6NjfTZWpaLEzgbOiy0f-UNifMQsnwnggANcG1akWrbazk/s200/Africa_HealthScreenShot2+(2).gif" /></a></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Both Google SMS Tips and Google Trader represent the fruits of unique partnerships among Google, the <a href="http://www.grameenfoundation.org/">Grameen Foundation</a>, <a href="http://www.mtn.co.ug/" title="MTN Uganda">MTN Uganda</a> and local organizations*. We worked closely together as part of Grameen Foundation's <a href="http://www.applab.org/" title="Applications Laboratory">Application Laboratory</a> to understand information needs and gaps, develop locally relevant and actionable content, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP7T-o9bGl8">rapidly test prototypes</a>, and conduct multi-month pilots with the people who will eventually use the applications have truly been a global effort, and created with Ugandans, for Ugandans.<br /><br />We're just beginning. We can do a lot more to improve search quality and the breadth — and depth — of content on Google SMS, especially on Tips and Trader. Google SMS is by no means a finished product, but that's what's both exciting and challenging about this endeavor.<br /><br />Meanwhile, if you're curious about what Google is doing in Africa, learn more at the <a href="http://google-africa.blogspot.com/">Google Africa Blog</a>.<br /><br /><b><i>Update:</i></b> Corrected link to YouTube video for "rapidly test prototypes".<br />____<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">*</span><a href="http://brosdi.or.ug/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1" title="BROSDI"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">BROSDI</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">, (Busoga Rural Open Source and Development Initiative), </span><a href="http://www.straight-talk.or.ug/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Straight Talk Foundation</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">, </span><a href="http://www.mariestopes.org.uk/ShowContent.aspx?id=40" title="Marie Stopes Uganda"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Marie Stopes Uganda</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">.</span><br /><br />Posted by Joe Mucheru, Head of Google Sub-Saharan Africa, & Fiona Lee, Africa Project Manager

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Extending Google services in Africa

At Google we seek to serve a broad base of people — not only those who can afford to access the Internet from the convenience of their workplace or with a computer at home. It's important to reach use…

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Google translates Persian

Today, we added Persian (Farsi) to <a href="http://translate.google.com/?sl=fa&tl=en#">Google Translate</a>. This means you can now translate any text from Persian into English and from English into Persian — whether it's a news story, a website, a blog, an email, a tweet or a Facebook message. The service is available free at http://translate.google.com.<br /><br />We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran. Like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/blog?entry=2soHkPYkGJw">YouTube</a> and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa — increasing everyone's access to information.<br /><br />As with all machine translation, it's not perfect yet. And we're launching this service quickly, so it may perform slowly at times. We'll keep a close watch and if it breaks, we'll restore service as quickly as we can.<br /><br />We've optimized this service for translation between Persian and English. But we're working hard to improve Persian translation for the additional 40 languages available via Google Translate. If you see something you think is incorrectly translated, we invite you to click on the "contribute a better translation" link and we'll learn from your correction.<br /><br />The web provides many new channels of communication that enable us to see events unfold in real-time around the world. We hope that Google Translate helps make all that information accessible to you — no matter what language you speak. So please visit <a href="http://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=fa#">Google Translate</a> and try it out.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Franz Och, Principal Scientist</span>

Google translates Persian

Today, we added Persian (Farsi) to Google Translate. This means you can now translate any text from Persian into English and from English into Persian — whether it's a news story, a website, a blog, a…

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Citizentube: Watching video change our world

As you might have noticed, there's a lot of fascinating stuff that happens on YouTube every day. For example, did you know that a nine-year-old recently used YouTube to successfully <a href="http://www.citizentube.com/2009/05/9-year-old-uses-youtube-to-save.html">campaign</a> to save his local kickball lot? Have you seen the video of a Guatemalan lawyer who predicted his own <a href="http://www.citizentube.com/2009/05/dead-lawyers-video-accusation-causes.html">assassination</a> on YouTube moments before it happened? Or did you know that YouTube and Google have launched a <a href="http://www.citizentube.com/2009/06/new-model-for-political-interviews-and.html">new technology platform</a> for political debates, which allows you to submit and vote on the most important issues you want to discuss with political candidates?<br /><br />These are the sorts of things you can stay on top of with <a href="http://www.citizentube.com/">Citizentube</a>, a special YouTube blog devoted to chronicling the way that people are using video to change the world. If you've followed news and politics on YouTube, you might have <a href="http://www.youtube.com/blog?entry=zADtM47GcO0">noticed</a> that we started Citizentube as a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/citizentube">video channel</a> on the site a few years back, but we soon realized that keeping track of all the phenomenal uses of YouTube by posting our own videos just wasn't fast enough — so now we're blogging, too. We generally focus on two types of posts: the compelling political and social uses of YouTube that we see the community bubble up every day, and our own programming initiatives and partnerships in the political, news, and nonprofit arenas.<br /><br />Our team creates opportunities for you to engage with content that goes beyond the humorous or even the educational — content that changes the way you interact with your communities, institutions, and leaders. The first initiative we launched in this space was the You Choose '08 platform and the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/republicandebate">CNN/YouTube Debates</a> in 2007. Since then we've expanded our programming to the fields of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/senatehub">government</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/inmyname">activism</a>, and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/projectreport">news & information</a>. On the blog, we'll post an occasional series that gives a bigger picture perspective of what's happening in the worlds of news reporting, government, and social change on YouTube.<br /><br />So be sure to check out www.citizentube.com and subscribe to our <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/PrYR">RSS feed</a> (we're on Twitter, too: @citizentube). With more than 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, our blog helps provide you with a filter that you can use to see the way that video is changing our world.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Steve Grove, YouTube News and Politics</span>

Citizentube: Watching video change our world

As you might have noticed, there's a lot of fascinating stuff that happens on YouTube every day. For example, did you know that a nine-year-old recently used YouTube to successfully campaign to save h…

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The 2008 Founders' Letter

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Sergey Brin, Co-founder & President, Technology</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Every year our founders take turns writing a letter that is included in our annual report. We originally published the <a href="http://investor.google.com/2008_founders_letter.html">2008 Founders' Letter</a> on our Investor Relations site. Since today is the annual Stockholders' Meeting at our Mountain View headquarters, we wanted to make it more widely available. </span><span style="font-style: italic;">We welcome you to have a read, and you can also check out the <a href="http://investor.google.com/webcast">webcast</a> of the Stockholders' Meeting, beginning at 2 p.m. PT today. – Ed.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Introduction</span><br /><br />Since 2004, when Google began to have annual reports, Larry and I have taken turns writing an annual letter. I never imagined I would be writing one in the midst of an economic crisis unlike any we have seen in decades. As I write this, search queries are reflecting economic hardship, the major market indexes are one half of what they were less than 18 months ago, and unemployment is at record levels.<br /><br />Nonetheless, I am optimistic about the future, because I believe scarcity breeds clarity: it focuses minds, forcing people to think creatively and rise to the challenge. While much smaller in scale than today's global collapse, the dot-com bust of 2000-2002 pushed Google and others in the industry to take some tough decisions — and we all emerged stronger as a result.<br /><br />This new crisis punctuates the end of our first decade as a company, a decade that has brought great change to Google, the web and the Internet as a whole. As I reflect on this short time period, our accomplishments and our shortcomings, I am very excited about what the next ten years may bring.<br /><br />But let me start a little farther back — in 1990, the very first web page was created at <a href="http://info.cern.ch/">http://info.cern.ch/</a>. By late 1992, there were only 26 websites in the world so there was not much need for a search engine. When NCSA Mosaic (the first widely used web browser) came out in 1993, every new website that was created would get posted to its "What's New" page at a rate of about one a day: <a href="http://www.dejavu.org/prep_whatsnew.htm">http://www.dejavu.org/prep_whatsnew.htm</a>. Just five years later, in 1998, web pages numbered in the tens of millions, and search became crucial. At this point, Google was a small research project at Stanford; later that year it became a tiny startup. The search index sat on a small number of disk drives enclosed within Lego-like blocks. Perhaps a few thousand people, mostly academics, used the service.<br /><br />Fast-forward to today, the changes in scale are striking. The web itself has grown by about a factor of 10,000, as has our search index. The number of people who use Google's services every day is now in the hundreds of millions. More importantly, billions of people now have access to the Internet via computers and mobile phones. Like many other web companies, the vast majority of our services are available worldwide and free to users because they are supported by ads. So a child in an Internet cafe in a developing nation can use the same online tools as the wealthiest person in the world. I am proud of the small role Google has played in the democratization of information, but there is much more left to do.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Search</span><br /><br />Search remains at the very core of what we do at Google, just as it has been from our earliest days. As the scale has changed dramatically over the years, the presentation and quality of our search results have also undergone many changes since 1998. In the past year alone we have made 359 changes to our web search — nearly one per day. Some are not easy to spot, such as changes in ranking based on personalization (launched broadly in 2005) but they are important in getting the most relevant search results. Others are very easy to see and improve search efficiency in a very clear way, such as spelling correction, annotations, and suggestions.<br /><br />While I am proud of what has been accomplished in search over the past decade, there are important areas in which I wish we had made more progress. Perfect search requires human-level artificial intelligence, which many of us believe is still quite distant. However, I think it will soon be possible to have a search engine that "understands" more of the queries and documents than we do today. Others claim to have accomplished this, and Google's systems have more smarts behind the curtains than may be apparent from the outside, but the field as a whole is still shy of where I would have expected it to be. Part of the reason is the dramatic growth of the web — for any particular query, it is likely there are many documents on the topic using the exact same vocabulary. And as the web grows, so does the breadth and depth of the curiosity of those searching. I expect our search engine to become much "smarter" in the coming decade.<br /><br />So too will the interfaces by which users look for and receive information. While many things have changed, the basic structure of Google search results today is fairly similar to how it was ten years ago. This is partly because of the benefits of simplicity; in fact, the Google homepage has become increasingly simple over the years: <a href="http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-04-21-n63.html">http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-04-21-n63.html</a>. But we are starting to see more significant changes in search interfaces. Today you can search from your cell phone by just speaking into it and Google Reader can suggest interesting blogs without any query at all. It is my expectation that in the next decade our searches and results will look very different than they do today.<br /><br />One of the most striking changes that has happened in the past few years is that search results are no longer just web pages. They include images, videos, books, maps, and more. From the outset, we realized that to have comprehensive search we would have to venture beyond web pages. In 2001, we launched Google Image Search and via Google Groups we made available and searchable the most comprehensive archive of Usenet postings ever assembled (800 million messages dating back to 1981).<br /><br />Just this past fall we expanded Image Search to include the LIFE Magazine photo archive. This is a collection of 10 million photos, more than 95 percent of which have never been seen before, and includes historical pictures such as the Skylab space station orbiting above Earth and Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. Integrating images into search remains a challenge, primarily because we are so reliant on the surrounding text to gauge a picture's relevance. In the future, using enhanced computer vision technology, we hope to be able to understand what's depicted in the image itself.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">YouTube</span><br /><br />Video is often thought of as an entertainment medium, but it is also a very important source of high-quality information. Some queries seem like natural choices to show video results, such as for sports and travel destinations. Yet videos are also great resources for topics such as computer hardware and software (I bought my last RAID based on a video review), scientific experiments, and education such as courses on quantum mechanics.<br /><br />Google Video was first launched in 2005 as a search service for television content because TV close-captioning made search possible and user-generated video had yet to take off. But it subsequently evolved to a site where individuals and corporations alike could post their own videos. Today Google Video searches many different video hosting sites, the largest of which is YouTube, which we acquired in 2006.<br /><br />Every minute, 15 hours worth of video are uploaded to YouTube — the equivalent of 86,000 new full length movies every week. YouTube channels now include world leaders (the President of the United States and prime ministers of Japan, the UK and Australia), royalty (the Queen of England and Queen Rania of Jordan), religious leaders (the Pope), and those seeking free expression (when Venezuelan broadcaster El Observador was shut down by the government, it started broadcasting on YouTube).<br /><br />When it began, online video was associated with small fuzzy images. Today, many of our uploads are in HD quality (720 rows and greater) and can be streamed to computers, televisions, and mobile phones with increasing fidelity (thanks to improvements in video compression). In the future, vast libraries of movie-theater-quality video (4000+ columns) will be available instantly on any device.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Books</span><br /><br />Books are one of the greatest sources of information in the world and from the earliest days of Google we hoped to eventually incorporate them into our search corpus. Within a couple of years, Larry was experimenting with digitizing books using a jury-rigged contraption in our office. By 2003, we launched Google Print, now called Google Book Search. Today, we are able to search the full text of almost 10 million books. Moreover, in October we reached a landmark agreement with a broad class of authors and publishers, including the Authors' Guild and the Association of American Publishers. If approved by the Court, this deal will make millions of in-copyright, out-of-print books available for U.S. readers to search, preview, and buy online — something that has been simply unavailable to date. Many of these books are difficult, if not impossible, to find because they are not sold through bookstores or held on most library shelves; yet they make up the vast majority of books in existence. The agreement also provides other important public benefits, including increased access to users with disabilities, the creation of a non-profit registry to help others license these books, the creation of a corpus to promote basic research, and free access to full texts at a kiosk in every public library in the United States.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Geo</span><br /><br />While digitizing all the world's books is an ambitious project, digitizing the world is even more challenging. Beginning with our acquisition of Keyhole (the basis of Google Earth) in October 2004, it has been our goal to provide high-quality information for geographic needs. By offering both Google Earth and Google Maps, we aim to provide a comprehensive world model encompassing all geographic information including imagery, topography, road, buildings, and annotations. Today we stitch together images from satellites, airplanes, cars, and user uploads, as well as collect important data, such as roads, from numerous different sources including governments, companies, and directly from users. After the launch of Google Map Maker in Pakistan, users mapped 25,000 kilometers of uncharted road in just two months.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Ads</span><br /><br />We always believed that we could have an advertising system that would add value not only to our bottom line but also to the quality of our search result pages. Rather than relying on distracting flashy ads, we developed relevant, clearly marked text-based ads above and to the right of our search results. After a number of early experiments, the first self-service system known as AdWords launched in 2000 starting with 350 advertisers. While these ads yielded small amounts of money compared to banner ads at the time, as the dot-com bubble burst, this system became our life preserver. As we syndicated it to EarthLink and then AOL, it became an important source of revenue for other companies as well.<br /><br />Today, AdWords has grown beyond just being a feature of Google. It is a vast ecosystem that provides valuable traffic and leads to hundreds of thousands of businesses: indeed in many ways it has helped democratize access to advertising, by creating an open marketplace where small business and start-ups can compete with well-established, well-funded companies. AdWords is also an important source of revenue for websites that create the content that we all search. Last year, AdSense (our publisher-facing program) generated more than $5 billion dollars of revenue for our many publishing partners.<br /><br />Also in the last year we ventured further into other advertising formats with the acquisition of DoubleClick. This may seem at odds with the value we place on relevant text-based ads. However, we have found that richer ad formats have their place such as video ads within YouTube and dynamic ads on game websites. In fact, we also now serve video ads on television with our AdSense for TV product. Our goal is to match advertisers and publishers using the formats and mediums most appropriate to their goals and audience.<br /><br />Despite the progress in our advertising systems and the growth of our base of advertisers, I believe there are significant improvements still to be made. While our ad system has powerful features, it is also complex, and can confuse many small and local advertisers whose products and services could be very useful to our users. Furthermore, the presentation formats of our advertisements are not the optimal way to peruse through large numbers of products. In the next decade, I hope we can more effectively incorporate commercial offerings from the tens of millions of businesses worldwide and present them to consumers when and where they are most useful.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Apps</span><br /><br />Within a couple of years of our founding, a number of colleagues and I were starting to hit the limitations of our traditional email clients. Our mailboxes were too big for them to handle speedily and reliably. It was challenging or impossible to have email available and synchronized when switching between different computers and platforms. Furthermore, email access required VPN (virtual private networks) so everyone was always VPN'ing, thereby creating extra security risks. Searching mail was slow, awkward, and cumbersome.<br /><br />By the end of 2001 we had a prototype of Gmail that was used internally. Like several existing services at the time, it was web-based. But unlike those services it was designed for power users with high volumes of email. While our initial focus was on internal usage, it soon became clear we had something of value for the whole world. When Gmail was launched externally, in 2004, other top webmail sites offered 2MB and 4MB mailboxes, less than the size of a single attachment I might find in a message today. Gmail offered 1 Gigabyte at launch, included full-text search, and a host of other features not previously found in webmail. Since then Gmail has continued to push the envelope of email systems, including functionality such as instant messaging, video-conferencing, and offline access (launched in Gmail Labs this past January). Today some Googlers have more than 25 gigabytes of email going back nearly 10 years that they can search through in seconds. By the time you read this, you should be able to receive emails written in French and read them in English.<br /><br />The benefits of web-based services, also known as cloud computing, are clear. There is no installation. All data is stored safely in a data center (no worries if your hard drive crashes). It can be accessed anytime, anywhere there is a working web browser and Internet connection (and sometimes even if there is not one — see below).<br /><br />Perhaps even more importantly, new forms of communication and collaboration become possible. I am writing this letter using Google Docs. There are several other people helping me edit it simultaneously. Moments ago I stepped away and worked on it on a laptop. Without having to hit save or manage any synchronization all the changes appeared in seconds on the desktop that I am back to using now. In fact, today I have worked on this document using three different operating systems and two different web browsers, all without any special software or complex logistics.<br /><br />In addition to Gmail and Google Docs, the Google Apps suite of products now includes Spreadsheets, Calendar, Sites, and more. It is also now available to companies, universities, and other organizations. In fact, more than 1 million organizations use Google Apps today, including Genentech, the Washington D.C. city government, the University of Arizona, and Gothenburg University in Sweden.<br /><br />Because tens of millions of consumers already use our products, it is easy for organizations — from businesses to non-profits — to adopt them. Very little training is required and the passionate Google users already in these organizations are usually excited to help those who need a hand. In many ways, Google Apps are even more powerful in a business or group than they are for individuals because Apps can change the way businesses operate and the speed at which they move. For example, with Google Apps Web Forms we innovated by addressing the key problem of distributed data collection, making it incredibly simple to collect survey data from within the enterprise — a critical feature for collecting internal feedback we use extensively when "dogfooding" all of our products.<br /><br />There are a number of things we could improve about these web services. For example, since they have arisen from different groups and acquisitions, there is less uniformity across them than there should be. For example, they can have different sharing models and chat capabilities. We are working to shift all of our applications to a common infrastructure. I believe we will achieve this soon, creating greater uniformity and capability across all of them.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Chrome</span><br /><br />We have found the web-based service model to have significant advantages. But it also comes with its own set of challenges, primarily related to web browsers, which can be slow, unreliable, and unable to function offline. Rather than accept these shortcomings, we have sought to remedy them in a number of ways. We have contributed code and generated revenue for several existing web browsers like Mozilla Firefox, enabling them to invest more in their software. We have also developed extensions such as Google Gears, which allows a browser to function offline.<br /><br />In the past couple of years, however, we decided that we wanted to make some substantial architectural changes to how web browsers work. For example, we felt that different tabs should be segregated into separate sandboxes so that one poorly functioning website does not take down the whole browser. We also felt that for us to continue to build great web services we needed much faster Javascript performance than current browsers offered.<br /><br />To address these issues we have created a new browser, called Google Chrome. It has a multiprocess model and a very fast JavaScript engine we call V8. There are many other notable features, so I invite you to try it out for yourself. Chrome is not yet available on Mac and Linux so many of us, myself included, are not able to use it on a regular basis. If all goes well, this should be addressed later this year. Of course, this is just the start, and Chrome will continue to evolve. Furthermore, other web browsers have been spurred on by Chrome in areas such as JavaScript performance, making everyone better off.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Android</span><br /><br />We first created mobile search for Google back in 2000 and then we started to create progressively more tailored and complex mobile offerings. Today, the phone I carry in my pocket is more powerful than the desktop computer I used in 1998. It is possible that this year, more Internet-capable smartphones will ship than desktop PCs. In fact, your most "personal" computer, the one that you carry with you in your pocket, is the smartphone. Today, almost a third of all Google searches in Japan are coming from mobile devices — a leading indicator of where the rest of the world will soon be.<br /><br />However, mobile software development has been challenging. There are different mobile platforms, customized differently to each device and carrier combination. Furthermore, deploying mobile applications can require separate business arrangements with individual carriers and manufacturers. While the rise of app stores from Apple, Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, and others as well as the adoption of HTML 5 on mobile platforms have helped, it is still very difficult to provide a service to the largest group of network-connected people in the world.<br /><br />We acquired the startup Android in 2005 and set about the ambitious goal of creating a new mobile operating system that would allow open interoperation across carriers and manufacturers. Last year, after a lot of hard work, we released Android to the world. As it is open source, anyone is free to use it and modify it. We look forward to seeing how this open platform will spur greater innovation. Furthermore, Android allows for easy creation of applications which can be deployed on any Android device. To date, more than 1000 apps have been uploaded to the Android Market including Shop Savvy (which reads bar codes and then compares prices), our own Latitude, and Guitar Hero World Tour.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">AI</span><br /><br />The past decade has seen tremendous changes in computing power amplified by the continued growth of Google's data centers. It has enabled the growth and processing of increasingly large data sets such as the web, the world's books, and video. This in turn has allowed problems once considered to be in the fantasy realm of artificial intelligence to come closer to reality.<br /><br />Google Translate supports automatic machine translation between 1640 language pairs. This is made possible by large computer clusters and vast repositories of monolingual and multilingual texts: <a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/faq_translation.html">http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/faq_translation.html</a>. This technology also allows us to support translated search where the query gets translated to another language and the results get translated back.<br /><br />While the earliest Google Voice Search ran as a crude demo in 2001, today our own speech recognition technology powers GOOG411, the voice search feature of the Google Mobile App, and Google Voice. It, too, takes advantage of large training sets and significant computing capability. Last year, PicasaWeb, our photo hosting site, released face recognition, bringing a technology that is on the cutting edge of computer science to a consumer web service.<br /><br />Just a few months ago we released Google Flu Trends, a service that uses our logs data (without revealing personally identifiable information) to predict flu incidence weeks ahead of estimates by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). It is amazing how an existing data set typically used for improving search quality can be brought to bear on a seemingly unrelated issue and can help to save lives. I believe this sort of approach can do even more — going beyond monitoring to inferring potential causes and cures of disease. This is just one example of how large data sets such as search logs coupled with powerful data mining can improve the world while safe guarding privacy.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Conclusion</span><br /><br />Given the tremendous pace of technology, it is impossible to predict far into the future. However, I think the past decade tells us some things to expect in the next. Computers will be 100 times faster still and storage will be 100 times cheaper. Many of the problems that we call artificial intelligence today will become accepted as standard computational capabilities, including image processing, speech recognition, and natural language processing. New and amazing computational capabilities will be born that we cannot even imagine today.<br /><br />While about half the people in the world are online today via computers and mobile phones, the Internet will reach billions more in the coming decade. I expect that by using simple yet powerful models of computing such as web services, everyone will be more productive. These tools enable individuals, small groups, and small businesses to accomplish tasks that only large corporations could achieve before, whether it is making and releasing a movie, marketing a product, or reporting on a war.<br /><br />When I was a child, researching anything involved a long trip to the local library and good deal of luck that one of the books there would be about the subject of interest. I could not have imagined that today anyone would be able to research any topic in seconds. The dark clouds currently looming over the world economy are a hardship for us all, but by the time today's children grow up, this recession will be a footnote in history. Yet the technologies that we create between now and then will define their way of life.

The 2008 Founders' Letter

Posted by Sergey Brin, Co-founder & President, TechnologyEvery year our founders take turns writing a letter that is included in our annual report. We originally published the 2008 Founders' Letter on…

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India's 15th general election: tools for citizen empowerment

<span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">(Cross-posted from the </span><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://googleindia.blogspot.com/2009/04/indias-15th-general-election-tools-for.html">Google India Blog</a><span style="font-style: italic;">)</span></span><br /><br />At Google, we believe information is fundamentally empowering. While all of our technologies demonstrate a commitment to this guiding principle, information is especially important when a society comes together to participate in democratic elections. Beginning ten days from today, more than 700 million eligible voters in India will over the course of four weeks have the opportunity to participate in the <a href="http://eci.nic.in/press/current/pn020309.pdf">largest democratic event</a> in human history — India's 15th general election.<br /><br />Today, along with a <a href="http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/landing/loksabha2009/partners.html">wide range of partners</a>, we are happy to announce the launch of the <a href="http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/landing/loksabha2009/">Google India Elections Centre</a> — available in <a href="http://www.google.co.in/loksabha2009">English</a> and in <a href="http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/landing/loksabha2009/index-hindi.html">Hindi</a>.<br /><br />People from across India can use the centre to do the following:<br /><ul><li> Confirm their voter registration status</li><li> Discover their polling location</li><li> View their constituency on a map</li><li> Consume relevant election-related news, blogs, videos, and quotations</li><li> Evaluate the status of development in their constituency across a range of indicators</li><li> Learn about the background of their Member of Parliament and this year's candidates</li></ul>With still more features to be added during the election, we hope the site will be an ongoing resource for analysis, governance, and democracy in India after the election.<br /><br />This project would not have been possible without the shared vision of a broad coalition of partners: the <a href="http://www.adrindia.org/home/index.asp">Association for Democratic Reforms</a>, <a href="http://www.htmedia.in/">HT Media Limited</a>,<a href="http://www.indicus.net/"> Indicus Analytics</a>, the <a href="http://www.janaagraha.org/">Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy</a>, the <a href="http://www.empoweringindia.org/new/home.aspx">Liberty Institute</a>, and <a href="http://www.prsindia.org/">PRS Legislative Services</a>. These groups are the true champions of promoting a more transparent democracy, and we're privileged to be able to shine a light on their work on the occasion of India's 15th Lok Sabha polls.<br /><br />We're hopeful not only that the elections centre will further a culture that seeks access to information, but that it will also yield positive changes in voting patterns during the upcoming polls.<br /><br />Please visit the <a href="http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/landing/loksabha2009/">site</a>, select your constituency, and get started! Spread the word about what you learn and, of course, don't forget to visit the polls.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Rishi Jaitly, Senior Policy Analyst, and Sanjay Jain, Product Manager</span>

India's 15th general election: tools for citizen empowerment

(Cross-posted from the Google India Blog)At Google, we believe information is fundamentally empowering. While all of our technologies demonstrate a commitment to this guiding principle, information is…

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New steps to protect free expression and privacy around the world

In a world where governments all too often censor what their citizens can see and do on the Internet, Google has from the start promoted global free expression and taken the lead in being transparent with our users. We've pressed governments around the world to stop limiting free speech and made it possible for dissidents, bloggers and others to have their voices heard.<br /><br />As part of those ongoing efforts to promote free expression and protect our users' privacy, today we're announcing Google's participation as a founding company member of a new program called the <a href="http://www.globalnetworkinitiative.org/">Global Network Initiative</a>.<br /><br />This initiative is the result of two years of discussions with other leading technology companies, human rights organizations, socially responsible investors and academic institutions. Thanks to hard work and cooperation from all parties, the Initiative sets the kinds of standards and practices that all companies and groups should use when governments threaten internationally recognized rights to free expression and privacy.<br /><br />The Global Network Initiative also offers an important commitment from all parties to take action together to promote free expression and protect privacy in the use of all information and communication technologies. We know that common action by these diverse groups is more likely to bring about change in government policies than the efforts of any one company or group acting alone.<br /><br />Companies that join the Initiative commit to putting into effect procedures that will protect their users by:<div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;"><br /></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;"><ul style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;"><li style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;">Evaluating against international standards government requests to censor content or access user information</li><li style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;">Providing greater transparency</li><li style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;">Assessing human rights risks when entering new markets or introducing new products</li><li style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;">Instituting employee training and oversight programs</li></ul><br />These are things that Google does now, but joining the Initiative will help us refine our methods and maintain our leadership position. Down the road companies will be assessed on how they're doing in implementing the principles and the Initiative will report those results.<br /><br />This Initiative is by no means a silver bullet or the last word, but it does represent a concrete step toward promoting freedom of expression and protecting users' privacy in the 60th anniversary year of the <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/60UDHR.aspx">Universal Declaration of Human Rights</a>. Now we're actively recruiting more companies and groups to join the Initiative and advance these critical human rights around the world.<br /> <br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Andrew McLaughlin, Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs</span></div>

New steps to protect free expression and privacy around the world

In a world where governments all too often censor what their citizens can see and do on the Internet, Google has from the start promoted global free expression and taken the lead in being transparent …

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High-powered search for Arabic-speaking engineers

When I first started working at Google in 2006 I was amazed to see that the fabled <a title="20% time" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/googles-20-percent-time-in-action.html" id="yrod">20% time</a> really existed, and that it was up to me to decide how to use it. Being of Egyptian descent and having lived in Canada and the U.S., I became increasingly interested in Google's international work. Based on my interests and background, I helped assemble a team of Arabic-speaking engineers and we began to spend 20% of our time on developing Arabic-language products. Over time this has become a more formal effort, so I'm really happy to tell you that today we're stepping up our commitment to users in the Middle East by hiring full-time engineers familiar with the Arabic language and its engineering challenges.<br /><br />The reality is that in many countries across Middle East and North Africa (MENA) there is only single-digit Internet penetration rate. On the other hand, there are over 330 million Arabic speakers worldwide, many of them hungry for the information, interactivity, and opportunities that the Internet can provide. As more Arabic speaking people come online -- the vast majority via mobile phones -- our team wants to help provide effective and useful products in their native language. For example, despite the fact that there are millions of Arabic speakers worldwide, only approximately 1% of all of the content online is in Arabic. We want to build tools to make content creation even easier for our Arabic-speaking users, encouraging them to connect, share and interact with each other, and with other users around the world.<br /><br />This isn't easy. Creating an Arabic-language product is actually significantly harder than for most other languages. As mentioned in a previous post about our <a id="eycd" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/hitting-40-languages.html" title="40 language initiative">40 language initiative</a>, Arabic is written from right to left. An Arabic speaker searching for [Ramadan TV series schedule 2008] (a very popular query during Ramadan) would type [مواعيد مسلسلات رمضان 2008]. Part of the query will be <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/searching-rght-to-left.html" id="qr.221" target="_blank" title="written in one direction">written from right to left in Arabic</a> while the numbers will be written left to right. Sometimes the right-to-left difference can mean having to change the entire layout of a page, as with Gmail.<br /><br />As you can see, just delivering products in Arabic is challenging, but we also believe the differences mean that the capabilities of the products can be different. There are a large number of new, innovative features and products that need to be created to properly serve the Arabic markets, many of which have fundamental computer science challenges.<br /><br />Intrigued? Google is looking for the best Arabic engineer minds to join the first dedicated team focused on tackling these engineering challenges. Our goal is to put together a top-notch Arabic engineering team. I am passionate about building an exceptional global team of engineers whose job it will be to design and develop innovative products and features that meet the needs of our Arabic speaking users. I was initially attracted to this challenge because I knew that my work at Google could easily have an impact on tens of millions of people around the world. It especially excites me that for a language that has been underserved to date, we'll be making product innovations that can have a material effect on the future of the region.<br /><br />Google has been formally recognized in <a href="http://www.greatplacetowork.co.uk/best/list-uk.htm">the UK</a> and in <a href="http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0801/gallery.bestcos_top50.fortune/index.html">the U.S.</a> and publicized worldwide for our unique work environment. The first question I always get from people after they find out I work here is, "Is what we've heard about Google really true?" The short answer: Yes. Two of our offices have slides, and one actually has a firepole between floors. We have numerous gourmet cafes that are free. We have massage therapists available in many locations. And the list goes on. It is truly a fun and rewarding place to work. But what I think what is most exceptional about Google is that we bring our own unique culture to every country we open an office in, and blend it with the uniqueness of the local culture.<br /><br />Interested in joining our effort? Well if you've heard anything about our interview process, you probably know that simply put, it's tough, but for good reason. When I interviewed two years ago I went through many intense interviews. You're expected to be well versed in areas such as coding, data structures, algorithms, designing large scale systems and, depending on the role, you might be asked leadership questions. Having a Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science definitely helped, but it was still grueling. The interview process was less about what I had memorized from the past (fact-based questions) but instead included questions that showed my ability to apply what I had learned to problem sets that I had never encountered before. I came out of the interview with a deep respect for this style because Google hires the best of the best, and it shows in the rigor of the hiring process.<br /><br />Are you a great engineer familiar with Arabic speaking skills? We're looking for engineers with the regional knowledge and Arabic language expertise to make Google products more relevant to this important population and to build new products for the global market. If you're interested, please visit <a href="http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/static.py?page=intl.html&jobslc=addlocationsemea" id="yo_d" title="http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/static.py?page=intl.html&jobslc=addlocationsemea">our job center</a> and apply for one of the open positions. You could be a part of a team that will positively affect the lives of millions of Arabic users around the world.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3NqKwQsrkNrQznPXEOOZC-6qxsYl1EfsxrSeGDJ5OSmktp0cXto2TSe5YuWFeO77Jhn9W416mdB2akvVN60JjvwufDJHgwQlk8Qc_v3h9bL1L28_BTp2lwfOrcsGvULYkygmTV2neckdC/s1600-h/Arab-engineers.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5257186178036495970" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3NqKwQsrkNrQznPXEOOZC-6qxsYl1EfsxrSeGDJ5OSmktp0cXto2TSe5YuWFeO77Jhn9W416mdB2akvVN60JjvwufDJHgwQlk8Qc_v3h9bL1L28_BTp2lwfOrcsGvULYkygmTV2neckdC/s320/Arab-engineers.JPG" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Some of our engineers working on Arabic products (L to R): </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Mohamed Elfeky, </span></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Adel Youssef, </span></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Amgad Zeitoun, </span></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Ahmad Hamzawi.</span></span><br /></div><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Ahmad Hamzawi, Engineering Manager, MENA</span>

High-powered search for Arabic-speaking engineers

When I first started working at Google in 2006 I was amazed to see that the fabled 20% time really existed, and that it was up to me to decide how to use it. Being of Egyptian descent and having lived…

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Information poverty

Today is <a href="http://blogactionday.org/">Blog Action Day</a>, an annual event that rallies blogs around the world to post about a common cause. This year's issue up for discussion is poverty, so we wanted to take a look at the relationship between access to information and social and economic development. The right information at the right time in the hands of people has enormous power. As someone who works for Google, I see evidence of this everyday as people search and find information they need to create knowledge, grow their business, or access essential services. But that applies primarily to the rich world, where economies are built on knowledge and presume access to information. What about the poor and developing countries where people are offline more than online? How do they benefit from the power of information?<br /><br />In much of Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, rates of economic growth over the last decade have exceeded 5% every year. Despite this trend, poverty in many countries has remained constant. In Kenya, for example, the official poverty rate was 48% in 1981 (World Bank, June 2008). According to the <a href="http://www.hackenya.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_details&Itemid=254&gid=519">Kenya Poverty and Inequality Assessment</a> released by the World Bank this year, 17 million Kenyans or 47% of the population were unable to meet the costs of food sufficient to fulfill basic daily caloric requirements. The vast majority of these people live in rural areas and have even less access to the information that impacts their daily life. Data on water quality, education and health budgets, and agricultural prices are nearly impossible to access.<br /><br />Despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent each year on providing basic public services like primary education, health, water, and sanitation to poor communities, poverty in much of Sub-Saharan Africa persists. Where does this money go, who gets it, and what are the results of the resources invested? That’s where we find a big black hole of information and a lack of basic accountability. How do inputs (dollars spent) turn into outputs (schools, clinics, and wells), and, more importantly, how do outputs translate into results (literate and healthy children, clean water, etc.)?<br /><br />We simply don’t know the answers to most of these basic questions. But what if we could? What if a mother could find out how much money was budgeted for her daughter's school each year and how much of it was received? What if she and other parents could report how often teachers are absent from school or whether health clinics have the medicines they are supposed to carry? What if citizens could access and report on basic information to determine value for money as tax payers?<br /><br />The work of The Social Development Network (SODNET) in Kenya is illustrative. They are developing a simple budget-tracking tool that allows citizens to track the allocation, use, and ultimate result of government funds earmarked for infrastructure projects in their districts. The tool is intended to create transparency in the use of tax revenues and answer the simple question: Are resources reaching their intended beneficiaries? Using tools like maps, they are able to overlay information that begins to tell a compelling story.<br /><br />Google.org’s role, through <a href="http://www.google.org/projects.html">our partners</a> in East Africa and India, is to support, catalyze, and widely disseminate this kind of information to public, private, and civil society stakeholders that can use it to see more clearly what’s working, what’s broken and what are potential solutions. Leveraging platforms like Google Earth and Google Maps can help organizations disseminate their content widely and let people see and understand what was once invisible. Once information is visible, widely known, and easy to understand, we are betting that governments and citizens will pay more attention to leakages in the service delivery pipeline and feel empowered to propose solutions.<br /><br />You can’t change what you can’t see. The power to know plus the power to act on what you know is the surest way to achieve positive social change from the bottom up. And when we consider the magnitude of resources invested in delivering public services each year, a 10% improvement globally would exceed the value of all foreign aid. We believe that is a bet worth making.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">(Cross-posted from the </span><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://blog.google.org/2008/10/information-poverty.html">Google.org blog</a><span style="font-style: italic;">)</span><br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Aleem Walji, Head of Global Development Initiatives, Google.org</span>

Information poverty

Today is Blog Action Day, an annual event that rallies blogs around the world to post about a common cause. This year's issue up for discussion is poverty, so we wanted to take a look at the relations…

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The ONE News YouTube Election Debate in New Zealand

Over the course of the long U.S. Presidential election campaign, millions of people have checked out the candidates' YouTube Channels on our <a href="http://www.youtube.com/youchoose">You Choose '08</a> platform, and communicated directly with all those running for President. Thousands more submitted questions for candidates in the CNN/YouTube debates, participated in our <a href="http://www.youtube.com/youchoose08">You Choose '08 Spotlight</a>, or made videos for the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/2008conventions">Democratic and Republican conventions</a>. Outside the U.S., YouTube has also become an important part of leveling the political playing field. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, the 2008 New Zealand general elections were called, with Kiwis going to the polls in early November.<br /><br />Now, we're thrilled to announce the <a href="http://nz.youtube.com/">ONE News YouTube Election Debate</a> between Helen Clark and John Key, a history-making initiative with New Zealand's public broadcaster, TVNZ. This marks the first time the head of a national government and a challenger will face YouTube video questions in an official live TV debate. The debate will be broadcast live on TV ONE on October 14.<br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/-g1i7q-xdiY&hl=de&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/-g1i7q-xdiY&hl=de&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />If you're a Kiwi, head on over to the <a href="http://nz.youtube.com/blog?entry=sj1JOSfiJic">YouTube New Zealand blog</a> for details on how to submit your own questions.<br /><br />Posted by Steve Grove, YouTube News & Politics

The ONE News YouTube Election Debate in New Zealand

Over the course of the long U.S. Presidential election campaign, millions of people have checked out the candidates' YouTube Channels on our You Choose '08 platform, and communicated directly with all…

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Google in Tamil

The global nature of <a title="our mission" href="http://www.google.com/corporate/" id="yu3:">our mission</a> is reflected in the phrases the "world's information" and "universally accessible." To this end, you may have recently read about our <a title="40-language initiative" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/hitting-40-languages.html" id="v_23">40-language initiative</a> and <a title="the story" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/google-in-your-language.html" id="x.2b">the story</a> of a community coming together to develop Google search in the <a title="Maori language" href="http://www.google.co.nz/" id="wlp2">Maori language</a>.<br /><br />Following on this theme, we'd like to highlight a few new products that enable a better online experience for Tamil speakers around the world.<br /><br />First, we just <a title="announced" href="http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/google-news-now-in-tamil.html" id="hiur">released</a> <span id="qxqj" style="font-size:100%;"><a id="de0f14" href="http://news.google.co.in/news?ned=ta_in" title="http://news.google.co.in/news?ned=ta_in" target="_blank">Google News in Tamil</a>. Like other Google News editions, we gather stories from the various Tamil news sources on the web and present an automatically- generated summary with links to the most important stories in each section.<br /><br />We recognize that it can sometimes be hard to enter Tamil text with existing keyboards. Our transliteration technology enables the conversion from English text to phonetically equivalent text in Indian languages. For example, using transliteration, you could type "vanakkam" and we would convert it to Tamil script as வணக்கம். We have embedded this technology in several Google products to make it easier to enter text in Tamil.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.google.co.in/intl/ta/">Google search in Tamil</a> enables users to start typing in English and automatically get query suggestions in Tamil. If you wanted to enter the query "ponniyin selvan" in Tamil, just start typing it in English - e.g. "ponni" and we will show the Tamil suggestions:<br /><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNeMyLPTsyWGgkEwcZRtoMYcp9Y1pdEzD8WtOAIEfBmNvyJZI6K-B0QuOyBNG9viMJHmp1Bz_IiU-xGNxImvR15PAWv8YT53F0M07SICxqThua6vur83VF_uROuD0Ldty8rNs-lJyIZCu9/s1600-h/Tamil_ponni.GIF"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234078225168628818" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNeMyLPTsyWGgkEwcZRtoMYcp9Y1pdEzD8WtOAIEfBmNvyJZI6K-B0QuOyBNG9viMJHmp1Bz_IiU-xGNxImvR15PAWv8YT53F0M07SICxqThua6vur83VF_uROuD0Ldty8rNs-lJyIZCu9/s320/Tamil_ponni.GIF" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" /></a><span id="de0f25"><br /><a href="http://blogger.com/indic/ta" id="now1">Tamil transliteration in Blogger</a> is designed for bloggers publishing content in Tamil when using the English keyboard for text entry. It's our hope that this will make Tamil content more popular and more easily available online.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.orkut.com/Scrapbook.aspx" title="http://www.orkut.com/Scrapbook.aspx" target="_blank">Tamil transliteration in orkut</a> makes it easier to communicate with friends and family by exchanging scraps in Tamil.<br /><br />We hope that each of these products will help to bring the benefits of the Internet to the millions of Tamil speakers in India and elsewhere.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Vinodh Kumar R and Naren Manappa, Software Engineers</span></span>

Google in Tamil

The global nature of our mission is reflected in the phrases the "world's information" and "universally accessible." To this end, you may have recently read about our 40-language initiative and the st…

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Hitting 40 languages

One of our goals is to give everyone using Google the information they want, wherever they are, in whatever language they speak, and through whatever device they're using. A huge part of that goal is making our services available in as many languages as possible. And as I’m sure you can imagine, that isn't as easy as simply as translating a few lines of text.<br /><br />Take Hebrew or Arabic, which are written from right to left. An Arabic speaker may search for [world cup football 2008] [<a id="qr.220" href="http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUK241&q=%D9%83%D8%A3%D8%B3+%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85+2008+%D9%84%D9%83%D8%B1%D8%A9+%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%AF%D9%85&btnG=Google+Search" target="_blank" title="كأس العالم 2008 لكرة القدم">كأس العالم 2008 لكرة القدم</a>]. Part of the query will be <a id="qr.221" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/searching-rght-to-left.html" target="_blank" title="written in one direction">written from right to left in Arabic</a>, while the numbers will be written left to right. Sometimes the right-to-left difference can mean having to change the entire layout of a page, as with Gmail.<br /><br />Or take Russian, where words change depending on their placement and role in a sentence. In Russian, for example [pizza in Moscow] is [<a href="http://www.google.ru/search?hl=ru&q=%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%86%D1%86%D0%B0+%D0%B2+%D0%9C%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B2%D0%B5&btnG=%D0%9F%D0%BE%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BA+%D0%B2+Google&lr=&aq=f">пицца в Москв<b id="qr.226">е</b></a>] but [pizza near Moscow] is [<a href="http://www.google.ru/search?hl=ru&q=%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%86%D1%86%D0%B0+%D1%80%D1%8F%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BC+%D1%81+%D0%9C%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B9&btnG=%D0%9F%D0%BE%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BA+%D0%B2+Google&lr=&aq=f">пицца рядом с Москв<b id="qr.229">ой</b></a>].<br /><br />Then there's the whole challenge of ensuring that results are locally relevant. While many Australians searching for [freedom] are looking for the Australian furniture chain, UK and US users are often looking for the definition of the word itself. Our search results, then, have to take into account these local differences.<br /><br />Our efforts to make Google products available in as many languages as possible dates to 2001, when we started <a title="Google in Your Language" href="https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=transconsole&passive=true&nui=1&continue=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Ftransconsole&followup=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Ftransconsole" id="b9s9">Google in Your Language</a>, which lets volunteers translate and edit translations of Google products in their native languages.<br /><br />As more and more users, advertisers, and partners interact with Google across the world, the need for local products has become even more obvious. In 2007, we undertook a company-wide initiative to increase the availability of our products in multiple languages. We picked the 40 languages read by over 98% of Internet users and got going, relying heavily on open source libraries such as <a href="http://icu-project.org/">ICU</a> and other internationalization technologies to design products. Do you need <a href="http://www.google.cn/">web search in Chinese</a> or <a href="https://adwords.google.es/support/">AdWords online support in Spanish</a>? Perhaps <a href="http://news.google.com/news?ned=hi_in">Google News in Hindi</a> or <a href="http://scholar.google.co.kr">Google Scholar in Korean</a>? Not a problem.<br /><br />Here's a taste of how far we've come.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5nY5fZebF9lHdT6FGpG1Z2_vvoMAtKGf5od_8AcvlfbND03LoPuAOb2VEyMhWRVVv-AntRwYRHno4HszVvYQvnv3-0E6ttX8eiTccQSXO37q76d7n_QbWJ7HQxTmjsvuCbF2IaZjWKvyb/s1600-h/40+lang+graph-3.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5224353121513643106" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5nY5fZebF9lHdT6FGpG1Z2_vvoMAtKGf5od_8AcvlfbND03LoPuAOb2VEyMhWRVVv-AntRwYRHno4HszVvYQvnv3-0E6ttX8eiTccQSXO37q76d7n_QbWJ7HQxTmjsvuCbF2IaZjWKvyb/s320/40+lang+graph-3.JPG" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" /></a> <span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" > Growth in local language versions. </span><br /></div><ul><li>30 in 30: Today we have more than 30 products in more than 30 languages, up from 5 products in 30 languages just a year ago.</li><li>In 2004, we had 150 local-language versions of various products (e.g. a product local to the UK, not just the English-speaking world); today we're at more than 1500.</li><li>From January to March of 2008, we launched 256 local-language versions of various products, compared to 55 in the same period of 2007. </li><li>We've upgraded to <a id="y.4217" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/moving-to-unicode-51.html" target="_blank" title="Unicode">Unicode 5.1</a> to make sure that we can handle any characters people read or write in.</li></ul>The web is only useful - or utile, 便利, pożyteczny, or nyttig, depending on what language you speak - to the degree it can be accessible in your language. That's why we're so excited about how far we've come - and why we know there's still a lot of work to be done.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Mario Queiroz, Vice President, Product Management, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Latin America</span>

Hitting 40 languages

One of our goals is to give everyone using Google the information they want, wherever they are, in whatever language they speak, and through whatever device they're using. A huge part of that goal is …

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"In their own words": political videos meet Google speech-to-text technology

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet and Ari Bezman, Product Managers</span><br /><br />In this U.S. election year, what information could be more important than the candidates' own words to describe their views, actions and platforms?<br /><br />Our teams have been working to develop tools to make it easier for people to track election-related information. A few months back, YouTube encouraged everyone to participate in the discussion process through the CNN/YouTube debates, Google Checkout offered an easy and fast way for individuals to make contributions to political candidates, and the Geo team created maps and layers to inform voters during elections.<br /><br />Today, the Google speech team (part of <a href="http://research.google.com/">Google Research</a>) is launching the <a href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?root=/ig&dpos=top&url=www.google.com/ig/modules/elections_video_search.xml">Google Elections Video Search gadget</a>, our modest contribution to the electoral process. With the help of our speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTube's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/members?s=mv&t=a&g=8">Politicians channels</a> are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed. Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly <span style="font-style: italic;">when </span>words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find. Here's a look:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnEE0yW91NxtSGkaUvdK89P9dKh9B_67eZWoJY8NPqQKsrqe1fvuVGyH6J1i42zNGyZt5_AmfjDPQtiEKen9tRCjnQ23OzuGsoWKF0pRH9422-0r3QncreGEtLQM4jty8SSIoL4p7agaFY/s1600-h/screen-shot-final-final.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5223001365359592226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnEE0yW91NxtSGkaUvdK89P9dKh9B_67eZWoJY8NPqQKsrqe1fvuVGyH6J1i42zNGyZt5_AmfjDPQtiEKen9tRCjnQ23OzuGsoWKF0pRH9422-0r3QncreGEtLQM4jty8SSIoL4p7agaFY/s400/screen-shot-final-final.jpg" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" /></a><br />In addition to providing voters with election information, we also hope to find out more about how people use speech technology to search and consume videos, and to learn what works and what doesn't, to help us improve our products.<br /><br />The gadget only searches videos uploaded to YouTube's Politicians channels, which include videos from Senator Obama's and Senator McCain's campaigns, as well as those from dozens of other candidates and politicians. It usually takes less than a few hours for a video to appear in the index after it has been published on YouTube. Candidates can control the videos that appear in the gadget by managing the content they upload to YouTube. While some of the transcript snippets you see may not be 100% accurate, we hope that you'll find the product useful for most purposes. Speech recognition is a difficult problem that hasn't yet been completely solved, but we're constantly working to refine our algorithms and improve the accuracy and relevance of these transcribed results.<br /><br />To try it out, just visit our <a href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?root=/ig&dpos=top&url=www.google.com/ig/modules/elections_video_search.xml">iGoogle gadget page</a>. We welcome your feedback, so please feel free to leave a comment while you're there.

"In their own words": political videos meet Google speech-to-text technology

Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet and Ari Bezman, Product ManagersIn this U.S. election year, what information could be more important than the candidates' own words to describe their views, actions and platf…

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Google Translate adds 10 new languages...

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager</span><br /><br />...and that's great news any way you say it. Language is one of the biggest challenges we have in making information universally accessible. As part of the machine translation team within <a id="kzlh" href="http://research.google.com/" title="Google Research">Google Research</a>, I'm happy to report we've been hard at work to overcome this challenge. We've recently added translation capabilities for 10 new languages to <a title="Google Translate" href="http://translate.google.com/" id="jrwu">Google Translate</a>, bringing the total to 23 languages. The newly featured languages include Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish.<br /><br />In addition, you can now translate text and web pages as well as perform <a style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" id="ikf7" href="http://translate.google.com/translate_s" title="cross-language searches">cross-language searches</a> between <span style="font-style: italic;">any</span> two languages that we offer. For example, we now support Chinese translation to/from any of our languages (e.g., Chinese to French). So for those of you who will be following or attending the Olympics in Beijing this fall, you'll be able to more easily find and access content from local sources.<br /><br />We've also added a "<a title="Detect Language" href="http://translate.google.com/translate_t?sl=auto&tl=en" id="hvn:">Detect Language</a>" option to help you automatically identify the language of the text you're trying to translate. Keep in mind that the longer the text, the more accurate it will be. And for those of you who have embedded the <a id="qvf8" href="http://translate.google.com/translate_tools" title="Google Translate My Page gadget">Google Translate My Page gadget</a> in your website to give it global reach, these new languages will automatically appear. Developers can also take advantage of these new languages in our <a title="AJAX language API" href="http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/documentation/#SupportedPairs" id="tvp8">AJAX language API</a>.<br /><br />While our system is quite good, we know it's not perfect. Machine translation is a hard problem, but it plays an important role in helping people access content they might otherwise be unable to read. We’re constantly working to improve the quality, so if you find a translation that’s not quite right, let us know by using our <a id="hdqw" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/suggest-better-translation.html" title="“Suggest a better translation”">"Suggest a better translation”</a> feature.

Google Translate adds 10 new languages...

Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager...and that's great news any way you say it. Language is one of the biggest challenges we have in making information universally accessible. As part of the machine …

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International development & technology: What's working and what's new

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Sonal Shah, Head of Global Development Initiatives, Google.org and Bob Boorstin, Washington Director of Policy Communications</span><br /><br />Last month, Google and Google.org hosted more than 80 technology decisionmakers from international development non-profits for an interactive discussion at our Washington D.C. office. Over lunch, case study presentations and hands-on sessions, participants discussed the ways technology is changing the landscape of international development -- and how to take advantage of new tools for fundraising, communication, data visualization, and online collaboration.<br /><br />Speakers highlighted the benefits of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing" id="h9x4">cloud computing</a> and demonstrated how to display data on maps and interactive graphs with products like <a title="Google Earth" href="http://www.google.com/earth/outreach/" id="um5h">Google Earth</a> and <a title="Trendalyzer" href="http://www.gapminder.org/world/" id="zj2i">Trendalyzer</a>. A representative from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum discussed how the Museum created a <a href="http://www.ushmm.org/maps/projects/darfur/" id="k5to" title="Darfur Layer">Darfur layer</a> on Google Earth that gives "publicly accessible evidence of destruction to help visually refute claims of minimal collateral damage from war." The YouTube breakout session explored how cheap video cameras paired with an on-the-ground presence can help document and spread awareness of ongoing crises abroad. Participants even made their own videos to talk about how the Internet is changing the development world:<br /><br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/5v02QS69F1w"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/5v02QS69F1w" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br />Special thanks to our friends at the <a href="http://www.theirc.org/" id="ycg4" title="International Rescue Committee">International Rescue Committee</a>, <a href="http://www.mercycorps.org/" id="m-do" title="MercyCorps">MercyCorps</a>, and the <a href="http://www.ushmm.org/" id="homs" title="US Holocaust Memorial Museum">U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum</a> for sharing stories of their experiences in taking advantage of new technologies. For those who are interested, we're posting the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=0C7A75D936163C8C" id="pafl">presentations on YouTube</a>.<br /><br />We hope that this event will be the first of many discussions, workshops, and other public events we hold with non-profits in our new D.C. space.

International development & technology: What's working and what's new

Posted by Sonal Shah, Head of Global Development Initiatives, Google.org and Bob Boorstin, Washington Director of Policy CommunicationsLast month, Google and Google.org hosted more than 80 technology …

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Three more languages for Blogger

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Tyrone Nicholas, Software Engineer</span><br /><br />Millions of people around the world already use <a title="Blogger" href="http://www.blogger.com/" id="gza.">Blogger</a> to participate in the wider Internet community. Blogging is a powerful way for people to publish online, reach a large and varied audience, and communicate with others who share their interests. And today, Blogger is available in Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew. This brings the number of languages we offer to 40. We've been really excited about adding these languages and widening the world of bloggers.<br /><br />We're especially pleased that Blogger now supports composing text and displaying blogs right to left. This has long been an challenge for bloggers in Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic. We've added <a title="Blogger Buzz" href="http://buzz.blogger.com/2008/01/three-new-languages-and-whole-new.html" id="a6:0">new features</a> specifically for these users, and also made sure every page of the Blogger application displays right-to-left in these languages. This project has been very technically challenging, but among the most thrilling I've ever worked on. I hope that everyone enjoys using it as much as I've enjoyed developing it.

Three more languages for Blogger

Posted by Tyrone Nicholas, Software EngineerMillions of people around the world already use Blogger to participate in the wider Internet community. Blogging is a powerful way for people to publish onl…

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The year in YouTube politics

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Steve Grove, Head of YouTube News and Politics</span><br /><br /><a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=bfZ_gXCHaMw">Candidates caught singing on camera</a>. <a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=nQi7PaYKqTU">Dorm-room presidential interviews</a>. A martial arts master<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=EjYv2YW6azE"> endorsing</a> a presidential candidate. Citizen-created campaign <a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=6h3G-lMZxjo">commercials</a>. And <a href="http://youtube.com/republicandebate">two presidential primary debates</a>. 2007 was quite a year for YouTube Politics.<br /><br />At this time last year, YouTube had developed a reputation as a place where <a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=r90z0PMnKwI">"gotcha!" videos</a> posted by citizens were changing the political landscape. Some even called the 2006 U.S. midterm elections "the YouTube election" after several candidates were caught on camera saying things they probably shouldn't have. But in 2007, that changed. Seizing the YouTube opportunity, presidential candidates came rushing to the platform themselves, setting up official campaign channels on our <a href="http://youtube.com/youchoose">You Choose '08</a> platform. Seven of the 16 presidential candidates even announced their candidacies on YouTube.<br /><br />Candidates and voters now speak to each other through video. At their best, campaigns use YouTube not as a shrunken TV screen through which to distribute their soundbites, but as a window through which to have a dialogue with the American people. YouTube's leveling effect is this: anyone can upload a video with their political message, and the best content rises to the top through community view counts, rankings, linkages, and embeds. Any voter with a video camera and access to the Internet has the opportunity to be seen and heard.<br /><br />Our two presidential debates with CNN highlighted this phenomenon. Eight thousand video questions were submitted for the two record-setting debates, which opened up a traditionally closed event to the rest of the world via YouTube. Time was, you had to be in New Hampshire, Iowa, or Florida to get access to candidates at a debate. With questions coming directly from voters via video, our YouTube debates helped to break down some of the geographical barriers that have so sharply defined American politics in the past.<br /><br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/JEmulj-6tgQ&rel=1"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/JEmulj-6tgQ&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br />So what's ahead in 2008? Things are only going to get more exciting. As Congressional and Senate races heat up, you'll see more and more candidates coming to YouTube. And as the presidential races narrows down to two candidates, YouTube will be a critical battlefront in the general election. With voters, candidates, issue groups, media companies, trade associations, lobbyists and activists all interacting on the same level platform, 2008 promises to be a true "YouTube Election."

The year in YouTube politics

Posted by Steve Grove, Head of YouTube News and PoliticsCandidates caught singing on camera. Dorm-room presidential interviews. A martial arts master endorsing a presidential candidate. Citizen-cre…

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The Davos Question

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Ed Sanders, Product Marketing Manager, YouTube Europe</span><br /><br />Every year, many of the world's top leaders from politics, business and the global community -- including some of our own -- attend the <a href="http://www.worldeconomicforum.org/">World Economic Forum</a> in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss how to make the world a better place. This year, we wanted to give people around the world the chance to join them, and help them, by submitting their own answers to "the Davos Question," which is: "What one thing do you think that countries, companies or individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?"<br /><br />So that's the question, but we all agree that it's finding the answer which will be tough.<br /><br />You may be familiar with the <a title="http://www.youtube.com/debates" href="http://www.youtube.com/debates">CNN-YouTube U.S. presidential debates</a>, which have made an enormous impact on interactive politics as we know it. The interactive component here is similar, but this is a global initiative where we are using the magic of <a title="http://www.youtube.com" href="http://www.youtube.com/">YouTube</a> to create an ongoing conversation between people in positions of authority, and those whose lives their decisions affect every day. Before the success of the CNN-YouTube initiative, such a conversation would never have been thought possible. And now we're trying to take it to an even more ambitious level.<br /><br />We see the Davos Question as a means to let people everywhere get close to, and influence, leaders whom they would never otherwise have a chance to reach. Equally, however, we want to show the actual participants at Davos the muscle with which YouTube is able to make a difference. It's kind of a two-way street: we can let everyday people into Davos, and at the same time we can show Davos the views of everyday people. And this is where it gets interesting. The YouTube community gets to vote and rank the submitted videos, and the highest-ranked ones will be featured at Davos. They will be used by the World Economic Forum to introduce topics in the plenary sessions, and we will be showing them directly to world leaders in the YouTube booth we are running onsite at Davos. The ongoing video blogs from some of the most influential people in the world which stem from the Davos Question will, we hope, kickstart a mechanism to really make a difference.<br /><br />Can you help? You bet. Spend some time over the holiday season thinking about your own answer to the Davos Question, and <a title="http://www.youtube.com/davos" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.youtube.com/davos" target="_blank">post a response</a> through the cool gadget we've developed. Then vote, rank, and encourage your friends and colleagues to get involved.<br /><br />Around here, we often talk about doing things which genuinely help the world. We think this is one way we can truly make the world sit up and take notice of what its people think about the most pressing issues of our time. But this time, instead of having it lost in the ether, we want to take it, wrap it up, and present it to some of the most important leaders we have, when the whole world is watching on YouTube.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ2AMGrnG0hm-_iUwhHnV2m6XCicSvIlsZnms2nZ_z_tGm_bMUDihACzuvEesKIGWdtCUnk1TQdukaWaCxPA_S_AHz9OpIgFdZfxUebW9v2BtMBU3atqLi88soryyCsPOCA7tPkt1F4K26/s1600-h/DavosQ.gif"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5145098405911778754" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ2AMGrnG0hm-_iUwhHnV2m6XCicSvIlsZnms2nZ_z_tGm_bMUDihACzuvEesKIGWdtCUnk1TQdukaWaCxPA_S_AHz9OpIgFdZfxUebW9v2BtMBU3atqLi88soryyCsPOCA7tPkt1F4K26/s320/DavosQ.gif" style="cursor: pointer;" /></a>

The Davos Question

Posted by Ed Sanders, Product Marketing Manager, YouTube EuropeEvery year, many of the world's top leaders from politics, business and the global community -- including some of our own -- attend the W…

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Free expression and controversial content on the web

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Rachel Whetstone, Director of Global Communications and Public Affairs, EMEA</span><br /> <br />Our world would be a very boring place if we all agreed all the time. So while people may strongly disagree with what someone says, or think that a particular newspaper article is total nonsense, we recognize that each of us have the right to an opinion.<br /><br />We also know that letting people express their views freely has real practical benefits. Allowing individuals to voice unpopular, inconvenient or controversial opinions is important. Not only might they be right (think Galileo) but debating difficult issues in the open often helps people come to better decisions.<br /><br />While most people agree in principle with the right to free expression, the challenge comes in putting theory into practice. And that's certainly the case on the web, where blogs, social networks and video sharing sites allow people to express themselves - to speak and be heard - as never before.<br /><br />At Google we have a bias in favor of people's right to free expression in everything we do. We are driven by a belief that more information generally means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual. But we also recognize that freedom of expression can't be -- and shouldn't be -- without some limits. The difficulty is in deciding where those boundaries are drawn. For a company like Google with services in more than 100 countries - all with different national laws and cultural norms - it's a challenge we face many times every day.<br /><br />In a few cases it's straightforward. For example, we have a global all-product ban against child pornography, which is illegal in virtually every country. But when it comes to political extremism it's not as simple. Different countries have come to different conclusions about how to deal with this issue. In Germany there's a ban on the promotion of Nazism -- so we remove Nazi content on products on <a title="http://www.google.de/" href="http://www.google.de/">Google.de</a> (our domain for German users) products. Other countries' histories make commentary or criticism on certain topics especially sensitive. And still other countries believe that the best way to discredit extremists is to allow their arguments to be publicly exposed.<br /><br />All this raises important questions for Internet companies like Google. Our products are, after all, specifically designed to help people create and communicate, to find and share information and opinions across the world. So how do we approach these challenges?<br /><br />It should come as no surprise to learn people have different views about what should appear on our sites. How and where to draw the boundaries is the subject of lively debate even within Google. We think that's healthy. And partly because of this, we realize that creating a flawless set of policies on which everyone can agree is an impossible task.<br /><br />Google is not, and should not become, the arbiter of what does and does not appear on the web. That's for the courts and those elected to government to decide. Faced with day-to-day choices, however, we look at our products in three broad categories: search, advertising and services that host other people's content.<br /><br />Search is the least restricted category. We remove results from our index only when required by law (for example, when linked to content infringing copyright) and in a small number of other instances, such as spam results or results including unauthorized credit card and social security numbers. Where feasible, we tell our users when we remove results. <br /><br />At the other, most restrictive, end of the spectrum, we have what might be called commerce products –- the text of the advertisements we carry, which are subject to clear <a href="http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=guidelines.cs&topic=9271&subtopic=9279">ad content policies</a>. <br /><br />The most challenging areas are where we host other people’s content -- offerings like Blogger, Groups, orkut and video. On the one hand, we're not generating the content and we aim to offer a platform for free expression. On the other hand, we host the content on our servers and want to be socially responsible. So we have terms that we ask our users to follow. (See <a href="http://www.blogger.com/content.g">Blogger</a> and <a href="http://help.orkut.com/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=57444">orkut</a> for examples.)<br /><br />So the question becomes: how do we enforce those terms? In general, Google does not want to be a gatekeeper. We don't, and can't, check content before it goes live, any more than your phone company would screen the content of your phone calls or your ISP would edit your emails. Technology can sometimes help here, but it's rarely a full answer. We also have millions of active users who are vocal when it comes to alerting us to content they find unacceptable or believe may breach our policies. When they do, we review it and remove it where appropriate. These are always subjective judgments and some people will inevitably disagree. But that’s because what’s acceptable to one person may be offensive to another.<br /><br />We also face the added complication that laws governing content apply differently in the different parts of the world in which we operate. As we all know, some governments are more liberal about freedom of expression than others. These legal differences create real technical challenges, for example, about how you restrict one type of content in one country but not another. And, in extreme cases, we face questions about whether a country's laws and lack of democratic processes are so antithetical to our principles that we simply can't comply or can't operate there in a way that benefits users.<br /><br />But it's not only legal considerations that drive our policies. One type of content, while legal everywhere, may be almost universally unacceptable in one region yet viewed as perfectly fine in another. We are passionate about our users so we try to take into account local cultures and needs -- which vary dramatically around the world -- when developing and implementing our global product policies.<br /><br />Dealing with controversial content is one of the biggest challenges we face as a company. We don’t pretend to have all the right answers or necessarily to get every judgment right. But we do try hard to think things through from first principles, to be as transparent as possible about how we make decisions, and to keep reviewing and debating our policies. After all, the right to disagree is a sign of a healthy society.

Free expression and controversial content on the web

Posted by Rachel Whetstone, Director of Global Communications and Public Affairs, EMEA Our world would be a very boring place if we all agreed all the time. So while people may strongly dis…

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