Investing in innovation at Google

<a href="http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html#eric">Eric</a> said during our <a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/2009Q3_google_earnings.html">third quarter earnings call</a> that "innovation is the technological pre-condition for growth." He was talking about the kind of innovation that's only possible when you can attract and retain the world's finest minds. Some come to Google through acquisition, like the people who created Google Earth (formerly Keyhole), or the folks at Android Inc. — but most innovation coming out of Google is homegrown.<br /><br />A good example is <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/google-chrome-now-live.html">Google Chrome</a>, which in only a year, has more than 30 million active users. Larry and Sergey recently gave the Chrome team a Founders Award, a multimillion-dollar stock bonus shared by the Googlers who worked across functions and regions to create and launch that product. As its name suggests, this award is presented by our founders to celebrate the kind of large-scale, game-changing achievements that Google stands for. The Chrome team joined a long list of teams — including Gmail, AdSense for Content, Google Maps and parts of our sales and marketing units — who have won this award (and could win again!).<br /><br />We want to continue to create products that rethink industry standards, challenge the status quo and make people's lives easier — and we know that there are great minds out there with the same goal. Recently, we announced that we're starting to ramp up hiring for positions across the company, continuing our investment in the future as we imagine it. That future is shaped by small teams of creative people who want to make a difference. We're on the hunt for these kind of people — <a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/index.html">let us know</a> if you think you're one of them.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, Engineering & Research</span>

Investing in innovation at Google

Eric said during our third quarter earnings call that "innovation is the technological pre-condition for growth." He was talking about the kind of innovation that's only possible when you can attract …

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New Technology Roundtable series

We've just posted the first three videos in the <a href="http://research.google.com/roundtable/" id="icld" title="Google Technology RoundTable series">Google Technology Roundtable Series</a>. Each one is a discussion with senior Google researchers and technologists about one of our most significant achievements. We use a talk show format, where I lead a discussion on the technology.<br /><br />While the videos are intended for a reasonably technical audience, I think they may be interesting to many as an overview of the key challenges and ideas underlying Google's systems. And of course they offer a glimpse into the people behind Google.<br /><br />The first one we made is "<a href="http://research.google.com/roundtable/LSS.html" id="gzhc" title="Large-Scale Search System Infrastructure and Search Quality.">Large-Scale Search System Infrastructure and Search Quality</a>." I interview Google Fellows <a href="http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html">Jeff Dean</a> and <a href="http://singhal.info/">Amit Singhal</a> on their insights in how search works at Google.<br /><br />The next title is "<a href="http://research.google.com/roundtable/MR.html" title="Map Reduce">Map Reduce</a>," a discussion of this key technology (first, at Google, and now having a great impact across the field) for harnessing parallelism provided by very large-scale clusters computers, while mitigating the component failures that inevitably occur in such big systems. My discussion is with four of our Map Reduce expert engineers: Sanjay Ghemawat and Jeff Dean again, plus Software Engineers <a href="http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/%7Ezhao/">Jerry Zhao</a> and <a href="http://lafstern.org/matt/">Matt Austern</a> who discuss the origin, evolution and future of Map Reduce. By the way, this type of infrastructure underlies the infrastructure concepts in our recent post on "<a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/intelligent-cloud.html">The Intelligent Cloud</a>."<br /><br />The third video, "<a href="http://research.google.com/roundtable/HLT.html" title="Applications of Human Language Technology">Applications of Human Language Technology</a>," is a discussion of our enormous progress in large-scale automated translation of languages and speech recognition. Both of these technology domains are coming of age with capabilities that will truly impact what we expect of computers on a day-to-day basis. I discuss these technologies with human language technology experts <a href="http://www.fjoch.com/">Franz Josef Och</a>, an expert in the automated translation of languages, and Mike Cohen, an expert in speech processing.<br /><br />We hope to produce more of these, so please leave feedback at YouTube (in the comments field for each video), and we will incorporate your ideas into our future efforts.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">[Cross-posted on the </span><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-technology-roundtable-series.html">Google Research Blog</a><span style="font-style: italic;">.]</span><br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Alfred Spector, VP of Research and Special Initiatives</span>

New Technology Roundtable series

We've just posted the first three videos in the Google Technology Roundtable Series. Each one is a discussion with senior Google researchers and technologists about one of our most significant achieve…

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The next Internet

<span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of. Which got us to thinking, what's going to happen in the next ten years? How will this phenomenal technology evolve, how will we adapt, and (more importantly) how will it adapt to us? We asked ten of our top experts this very question, and during September (our 10th anniversary month) we are presenting <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Google%20at%2010">their responses</a>. As computer scientist Alan Kay has famously observed, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, so we will be doing our best to make good on our experts' words every day. - Karen Wickre and Alan Eagle, series editors</span><br /><br />Historically, the Internet has been all about connectivity between computers and among people. The World Wide Web opened enormous opportunities and motivations for the injection of content into the Internet, and search engines, such as Google's, provided a way for people to find the right content for their interests. Of course, the Internet continues to develop: new devices will find their way onto the net and new ways to access it will evolve.<br /><br />In the next decade, around 70% of the human population will have fixed or mobile access to the Internet at increasingly high speeds, up to gigabits per second. We can reliably expect that mobile devices will become a major component of the Internet, as will appliances and sensors of all kinds. Many of the things on the Internet, whether mobile or fixed, will know where they are, both geographically and logically. As you enter a hotel room, your mobile will be told its precise location including room number. When you turn your laptop on, it will learn this information as well--either from the mobile or from the room itself. It will be normal for devices, when activated, to discover what other devices are in the neighborhood, so your mobile will discover that it has a high resolution display available in what was once called a television set. If you wish, your mobile will remember where you have been and will keep track of RFID-labeled objects such as your briefcase, car keys and glasses. "Where are my glasses?" you will ask. "You were last within RFID reach of them while in the living room," your mobile or laptop will say.<br /><br />The Internet will transform the video medium as well. From its largely programmed, scheduled and streamed delivery today, video will become an interactive medium in which the choice of content and advertising will be under consumer control. Product placement will become an opportunity for viewers to click on items of interest in the field of view to learn more about them including but not limited to commercial information. Hyperlinks will associate the racing scene in <i id="y48e">Star Wars I</i> with the chariot race in <i id="y48e0">Ben Hur</i>. Conventional videoconferencing will be augmented by remotely controlled robots with an ability to move around, focus cameras and microphones, and perhaps even directly interact with the local environment under user control.<br /><br />The Internet will also become more closely integrated with other parts of our daily lives, and it will change them accordingly. Power distribution grids, for example, will become a part of the Internet's information universe. We will be able to track and manage electrical power demand and our automobiles will participate in the generation as well as the consumption of electricity. By sharing information through the Internet about energy-consuming and energy-producing devices and systems, we will be able to make them more efficient.<br /><br />A box of washing machine soap will become part of a service as Internet-enabled washing machines are managed by Web-based services that can configure and activate your washing machine. Scientific measurements and experimental results will be blogged and automatically entered into common data archives to facilitate the distribution, sharing and reproduction of experimental results. One might even imagine that scientific instruments could generate their own data blogs.<br /><br />These are but a few examples of the way in which the Internet will continue to surround and serve us in the future. The flexibility we have seen in the Internet is a consequence of one simple observation: the Internet is essentially a software artifact. As we have learned in the past several decades, software is an endless frontier. There is no limit to what can be programmed. If we can imagine it, there's a good chance it can be programmed. The Internet of the future will be suffused with software, information, data archives, and populated with devices, appliances, and people who are interacting with and through this rich fabric.<br /><br />And Google will be there, helping to make sense of it all, helping to organize and make everything accessible and useful.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist</span>

The next Internet

The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environ…

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Google in one more language

As we've <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/hitting-40-languages.html" id="ew4l" title="written before">written before</a>, one of our goals is to enable everyone using Google to find the information they want easily, no matter what language they speak.<br /><br />It recently came to our attention that Google was not accessible to a large, influential, and notoriously quick-tempered community: Pirates. As of today we are proud and rather relieved to announce that Google Search is available in <a href="http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-pirate">Pirate</a>.<br /><br />As you can see from this <a href="http://www.google.com/trends?q=pirate+talk" id="mefv" title="graph">graph</a> of the popularity of related searches from past years, we have reason to believe that this might be a timely addition:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidqWWceb9EP3xEz_A2ExuCLkQ4wNLHWDOROjwG5Km0CCjpjLDe9tSYm4o-0Bzt__8CU_PLmVdQF7rNpAfDK2_Tij0_tRdScpvF5w5bkRBaZhbrDmMB2FzYjaEwFkge9GJjtN1_eXMCxEQv/s1600-h/pirate_talk.gif"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5247562142125022290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidqWWceb9EP3xEz_A2ExuCLkQ4wNLHWDOROjwG5Km0CCjpjLDe9tSYm4o-0Bzt__8CU_PLmVdQF7rNpAfDK2_Tij0_tRdScpvF5w5bkRBaZhbrDmMB2FzYjaEwFkge9GJjtN1_eXMCxEQv/s320/pirate_talk.gif" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" /></a><br />If ye're a gentleman or lady o' fortune yerself — or just want t' <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=xx-pirate&q=talk+like+a+pirate&btnG=Searrrch" id="hh:l" title="talk like one">talk like one</a> — ye c'n set Pirate as yer preferred lingo usin' th' <a href="http://www.google.com/preferences?hl=xx-pirate" id="wskn" title="Likes an' Dislikes">Likes an' Dislikes</a> page, or cast yer <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=xx-pirate&q=define%3Adeadlights&btnG=Searrrch" id="m7o4" title="deadlights">deadlights</a> on an <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=xx-pirate&q=parrots&btnG=Searrrch" id="g0c7" title="example">example</a>.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Cap'n Pam Greenebearde</span>

Google in one more language

As we've written before, one of our goals is to enable everyone using Google to find the information they want easily, no matter what language they speak.It recently came to our attention that Google …

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The intelligent cloud

<span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of. Which got us to thinking, what's going to happen in the next ten years? How will this phenomenal technology evolve, how will we adapt, and (more importantly) how will it adapt to us? We asked ten of our top experts this very question, and during September (our 10th anniversary month) we are presenting <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Google%20at%2010">their responses</a>. As computer scientist Alan Kay has famously observed, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, so we will be doing our best to make good on our experts' words every day. - Karen Wickre and Alan Eagle, series editors</span><br /><br />In coming years, computer processing, storage, and networking capabilities will continue up the steeply exponential curve they have followed for the past few decades. By 2019, parallel-processing computer clusters will be 50 to 100 times more powerful in most respects. Computer programs, more of them web-based, will evolve to take advantage of this newfound power, and Internet usage will also grow: more people online, doing more things, using more advanced and responsive applications. By any metric, the "cloud" of computational resources and online data and content will grow very rapidly for a long time.<br /><br />As we're already seeing, people will interact with the cloud using a plethora of devices: PCs, mobile phones and PDAs, and games. But we'll also see a rush of new devices customized to particular applications, and more environmental sensors and actuators, all sending and receiving data via the cloud. The increasing number and diversity of interactions will not only direct more information to the cloud, they will also provide valuable information on how people and systems think and react.<br /><br />Thus, computer systems will have greater opportunity to learn from the collective behavior of billions of humans. They will get smarter, gleaning relationships between objects, nuances, intentions, meanings, and other deep conceptual information. Today's Google search uses an early form of this approach, but in the future many more systems will be able to benefit from it.<br /><br />What does this mean to Google? For starters, even better search. We could train our systems to discern not only the characters or place names in a YouTube video or a book, for example, but also to recognize the plot or the symbolism. The potential result would be a kind of conceptual search: "Find me a story with an exciting chase scene and a happy ending." As systems are allowed to learn from interactions at an individual level, they can provide results customized to an individual's situational needs: where they are located, what time of day it is, what they are doing. And translation and multi-modal systems will also be feasible, so people speaking one language can seamlessly interact with people and information in other languages.<br /><br />The impact of such systems will go well beyond Google. Researchers across medical and scientific fields can access massive data sets and run analysis and pattern detection algorithms that aren't possible today. The proposed <a id="jvpk" href="http://www.lsst.org/lsst_home.shtml" title="Large Synoptic Survey Telescope">Large Synoptic Survey Telescope</a> (LSST), for example, may generate over 15 terabytes of new data per day! Virtually any research field will benefit from systems with the ability to gather, manipulate, and learn from datasets at that scale.<br /><br />Traditionally, systems that solve complicated problems and queries have been called "intelligent", but compared to earlier approaches in the field of 'artificial intelligence', the path that we foresee has important new elements. First of all, this system will operate on an enormous scale with an unprecedented computational power of millions of computers. It will be used by billions of people and learn from an aggregate of potentially trillions of meaningful interactions per day. It will be engineered iteratively, based on a feedback loop of quick changes, evaluation, and adjustments. And it will be built based on the needs of solving and improving concrete and useful tasks such as finding information, answering questions, performing spoken dialogue, translating text and speech, understanding images and videos, and other tasks as yet undefined. When combined with the creativity, knowledge, and drive inherent in people, this "intelligent cloud" will generate many surprising and significant benefits to mankind.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Alfred Spector, VP Engineering, and Franz Och, Research Scientist</span>

The intelligent cloud

The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environ…

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The social web: All about the small stuff

<span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" > The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of. Which got us to thinking, what's going to happen in the next ten years? How will this phenomenal technology evolve, how will we adapt, and (more importantly) how will it adapt to us? We asked ten of our top experts this very question, and during September (our 10th anniversary month) we are presenting <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Google%20at%2010">their responses</a>. As computer scientist Alan Kay has famously observed, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, so we will be doing our best to make good on our experts' words every day. - Karen Wickre and Alan Eagle, series editors</span><br /><br />What makes two friends feel "close" to one another? I'd argue that a big part of it is the small details that you know about each other. The funny comment your friend made about a billboard they saw while driving down the road, what they had for dinner, a person they ran into on the street, their comments about the movie they saw two nights before. Closeness often comes from knowing the small things, not just the big things. Distance makes knowing those small things harder. When you live together, either with your family or your friends, knowing the small things is easy. They get conveyed when passing in the hall, sitting down to a meal or just hanging out. It's effortless.<br /><br />When you live apart, things change. Suddenly it takes effort. It used to take a <i>lot </i>more effort when writing a letter was the primary way to communicate over distance as opposed to email or IM or telephone. But, even with our current technology, it still takes work. As a result, we share less with our friends. And when we do share, we tend to share the big stuff (big shifts at work, major family events like birthdays or school milestones) and leave the small stuff behind. We start to feel less connected because we don't know the details.<br /><br />The promise of the social web is about making it easy to share the small stuff -- to make it effortless and rebuild that feeling of connectedness that comes from knowing the details. My wife recently sent out a public Picasa Web Album of baby photos to ten of her friends. Four of them wrote back saying "I didn't know Joe got a new car?!" (her friends browsed through my other public photo albums). While she would never hesitate to share the big event (new baby), she never would have shared the small detail of me getting a new car. This kind of thing is repeated again and again. The small details are left out. A weekend with Grandma and Grandpa? Thinking about selling my house? Are these things all "worth" sharing? Maybe. Sometimes. For some people.<br /><br />Fortunately, as the web becomes more social, I won't have to spend as much energy thinking about what's "interesting enough" to share with a certain group. The people who care about me and that I allow will increasingly be able to tune in to the parts of my life that interest them.<br /><br />It will be great when the instant I think of something to tell my friends, or something I need from my friends, they're available to me in some way. Remember when Google embedded IM into Gmail, and you could suddenly see -- without changing applications -- that the friend you were about to email was online and easily reachable right at that second? That little green bubble of presence right in front of our eyes brought a little extra ping of closeness that email hadn't had until then. That was in 2006, at the start of the AJAX-powered wave of dynamic web apps. Now, many sites and services are adding even more sophisticated plumbing (like profiles and friends and presence and comments) that brings the immediacy of social interaction to more and more places on the web. Reaching your friends can be really active, as IM is today, or it can be passive, like changing your status message.<br /><br />In the coming decade, the web will become as effortlessly social as chatting with your family or roommates at home is today. Social features will be embedded and around and through all variety of spaces and places on the web. Sometimes you'll go to a place because you want to see your friends, and sometimes the place you're in will get better because you can bring your friends there. It will make it easier to strike up new relationships, new communities, new expressions of what your life is about. The web will connect people to the small moments that in many ways matter most.<br /><br />We're just now starting to navigate all the intersections between sociology and engineering on the web. We -- meaning Google and many others in the web community -- are in the midst of a burst of energy around all things social that is teaching us more every day about what people want to do with their friends and where. How does iGoogle or Gmail get more powerful when you've got your friends present in some new way? What is possible on mobile devices when you can put better data about you and your friends in your pocket? What are the big plumbing problems -- like contact portability, or standards for user authentication and authorization -- that need to be solved for the whole web because no one site can do it on its own?<br /><br />Google is chipping in on all of these fronts, listening closely to our users to make our existing products more social in useful ways, and by working with the web community on software projects like <a title="OpenSocial" href="http://www.opensocial.org/" id="jrpp">OpenSocial</a> and <a title="OAuth" href="http://code.google.com/p/oauth/" id="yqhz">OAuth</a> to address some of the big infrastructure challenges that are best solved in the open, with the perspective of many developers and website owners represented. Fast forward ten years, and you'll feel even more at home on the web than you do today - because it will be a pretty good reflection of you.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Joe Kraus, Director of Product Management</span>

The social web: All about the small stuff

The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the en…

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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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Growing our connection to food

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Diane McClamroch, Food Services Team</span><br /><br />Today at our Mountain View headquarters we're celebrating the one-year anniversary of an important project: our organic garden. Not only does it provide a stunning centerpiece for the central campus; it yields produce and herbs that are used daily in the cafes on campus. Although many Googlers would like to think of themselves as <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/googlers%20and%20culture">Renaissance men and women</a>, a green thumb didn't exactly come as easily to some as <a href="http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/topic.py?loc_id=1116&dep_id=1056">C++ development might</a>. Fortunately, the garden wasn't just an ambitious 20% project but rather, an initiative that we took on with the partnership of <a href="http://www.thegrowingconnection.org/">The Growing Connection</a>.<br /><br />The Growing Connection is a grassroots project of the <a href="http://www.fao.org/">UN's Food and Agriculture Organization</a> (FAO). The work of the Growing Connection originates with a humble <a href="http://www.earthbox.com/">earth box</a>, a patented growing system that helps growers to cultivate produce with limited space and water. The project really has two parts: teaching people around the world, especially kids, how to cultivate their own food, and giving them a hands-on lesson in nutrition. The latter entails connecting growers so that kids growing corn on rooftops in Harlem can share their experiences with students planting earth boxes in Ghana.<br /><br />To earmark today's anniversary, we had a little get-together at the Googleplex, complete with cucumber and lemon verbena infused waters, organic snacks and a few words from Robert Patterson, Senior Liaison Officer at FAO. "Like Google, Growing Connections combines growth and information," he observes. "So coming to Google has been a natural fit. We work from kids from all over--Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States. They learn to like each other through food and realize that they're part of an actual solution for hunger and poverty."<br /><br />Check out today's photo album:<br /><br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fdmcclamroch%2Falbumid%2F5198498502072372369%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" height="192" width="288"></embed>

Growing our connection to food

Posted by Diane McClamroch, Food Services TeamToday at our Mountain View headquarters we're celebrating the one-year anniversary of an important project: our organic garden. Not only does it provide a…

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Announcing Project Virgle

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Sir Richard Branson, President and Founder of Virgin Group</span><br /><br />In my life, I've had a lot of exciting adventures and launched a lot of ambitious business ventures. I'm delighted today to announce Virgle, Inc., a joint venture between the Virgin Group and Google which qualifies on both counts.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH6mVp9pMSD6reH1P4hu7TbGeJo6WbO0CYrasHDTZ249fAVrIDrRE2Tu9OGFsiO0Qh_pXWYNrzfr-GIu4aYnDKipOUKpVC4QM_JjQX5iLx7n15qBNhwoiLCTfD9KCMluk6B0Zym8VBc7_d/s1600-h/virgle_logo_final_hi-res.png"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5184067717602307314" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH6mVp9pMSD6reH1P4hu7TbGeJo6WbO0CYrasHDTZ249fAVrIDrRE2Tu9OGFsiO0Qh_pXWYNrzfr-GIu4aYnDKipOUKpVC4QM_JjQX5iLx7n15qBNhwoiLCTfD9KCMluk6B0Zym8VBc7_d/s320/virgle_logo_final_hi-res.png" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 230px; height: 193px;" /></a><br />Virgle's goal is simple: the establishment of a permanent human settlement on Mars. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and I feel strongly that contemporary technology is sufficiently advanced to make such an effort both successful and economical, and that it's high time that humanity moved beyond Earth and began our great, long journey to explore the stars and establish our first lasting foothold on another world.<br /><br />In the years to come, we'll be sending up a series of spaceships carrying (along with the supplies and tools needed to build the new colony) what eventually will be hundreds of Mars colonists, or Virgle Pioneers -- myself among them. If you think you might want join us (or invest in or otherwise assist this vast venture), I hope you'll <a href="http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html">read more here</a> about how Virgle will work, what our brave Pioneers can expect and what the future holds for what just might be the most ambitious adventure in mankind's long and storied history.<br /><br />See you on the north side of Kasei Valles!

Announcing Project Virgle

Posted by Sir Richard Branson, President and Founder of Virgin GroupIn my life, I've had a lot of exciting adventures and launched a lot of ambitious business ventures. I'm delighted today to announce…

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Grand engineering challenges for the 21st century

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist</span><br /><br />Over the course of centuries, engineering of all kinds has transformed our lives -- and the field continues to have the potential to improve the quality of life for every person on the planet.<br /><br />This coming Friday (February 15), the US National Academy of Engineering will post a list of "grand engineering challenges" for the 21st century on <a href="http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/">a special site</a>, which has already garnered many comments from the public. To create the list, the Academy assembled a special committee that includes some of the most innovative names in engineering, including our own Larry Page.<br /><br />I think we will see on the list such things as renewable, sustainable and affordable energy, reduction of dependence on petroleum, desalinization, vastly improved food production, greenhouse gas reduction, and affordable and sustainable housing -- but these are just my guesses. No matter which challenges are selected, we know that attention to detail and daring goals are the twin drivers of innovation.<br /><br />Please visit the site, <a href="http://www.grandchallenges.dnsalias.net/cms/7187.aspx">contribute your ideas</a> and have a look February 15 to see what the experts have decided are the grandest of the grand challenges for engineering in this century.<br /><br />Of course, I hope "Internet for Everyone" makes it onto the list, but if it doesn't, it's still on mine :-).

Grand engineering challenges for the 21st century

Posted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet EvangelistOver the course of centuries, engineering of all kinds has transformed our lives -- and the field continues to have the potential to improve the quality …

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