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This was posted from Microsoft Word

This was posted from Microsoft Word

Posted by Jason Shellen, Product Manager Last July, a few of us visited the Democratic National Convention to see political bloggers in acti...

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We get letters …

Posted by Karen Wickre, Google Blog team The Google mailbag is filled with stories like this one, demonstrating the reach of Google across countries and between people. Occasionally we'll feature such a story here and hope you enjoy reading them. If you have a noteworthy tale about how you've used Google, write to testimonial@google.com. Laura Escobosa is the executive director of <a href="http://www.operationrainbow.org/">Operation Rainbow</a>, an all-volunteer organization which organizes medical missions to poor countries for American doctors and nurses specializing in orthopedic and plastic surgery. The people on these missions are affiliated with Stanford University's <a href="http://www.lpch.org/">Lucile Packard Children's Hospital</a>, and one regular stop for them has been <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=esteli+nicaragua&spn=0.109600,0.114318&t=k&hl=en">Esteli, Nicaragua</a>. Among those mentioning his Operation Rainbow experience is Dr. Elliot Krane, who cites it <a href="http://med.stanford.edu/profiles/frdActionServlet?choiceId=showComm&commId=344&fid=4216">on his CV</a>. Just two weeks ago, this year's team was preparing for its annual trip to Esteli. At the same time, a quite unrelated journey was underway. A young American woman, Alice Orman, was visiting Esteli en route to her new year-long role as an English teacher in Honduras. While in Esteli, she had an accident that led to a leg break in two places. Though local doctors wanted to help, they lacked good facilities or equipment for setting a complicated break properly. Someone at the hospital remembered the Stanford doctors. The staff knew they were coming soon, but who, and when? Alice called her parents in Nashville for help. They went to Google and typed in [Esteli Stanford] and up came Dr. Krane's reference. They emailed him late that night, and by morning he had replied from his office in Palo Alto. He told them about <a href="http://www.corronline.com/pt/re/corr/abstract.00003086-200203000-00015.htm;jsessionid=C8t2R6Ojpn5HIGBkik6rleSi63lIEpMjHZL0yITxzDjAMYwCrKUt%21250931426%21-949856145%219001%21-1">Dr. Larry Rinsky</a>, an orthopedic surgeon who was packing his bags right then for Esteli. With a copy of Dr. Krane's email reply in hand, Dr. Rinsky called Alice's parents and assured them he would see Alice, and that the team would do what it could for her. So Alice rested and waited another day, hoping that the arriving team would treat her in addition to their Nicaraguan patients. Ms Escobosa says the team of Stanford doctors and nurses treated her right away, gave her crutches and some TLC too. Within a short time she was able to continue on to Honduras for her year of teaching. And she's there now. Back in Nashville, Scott and Mindy Orman were very relieved: "When we received the call from Alice," writes Mindy, "we were very worried and didn't know how we could help, being so far away. But the miraculous timing of the Stanford doctors' annual mission trip to Esteli, and the Google search that led us to them, assured us that Alice would be in good hands. We are so thankful for all the prayers and encouragement of so many folks and the excellent care she received from the Stanford team." Ms. Escobosa wrote us to marvel at the coincidences that led to this happy ending. We're glad we could be part of it.

We get letters …

Posted by Karen Wickre, Google Blog team The Google mailbag is filled with stories like this one, demonstrating the reach of Google across c...

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Making books easier to find

Posted by Adam M. Smith, Google Print Product Manager (Updated 8/12/05, 1:31 p.m. PDT*) In October 2004 we announced a program called <a href="http://print.google.com/">Google Print</a>, a way for publishers to make their books discoverable by the millions of people who search on Google every day. Shortly thereafter, we added a complementary program to help find all books more easily by partnering with libraries to index their collections too. The goal of Google Print is ambitious: to make the full text of all the world's books searchable by anyone. These books are hard to find now, and for most of them, no full-text search exists. We think that making books easier to find will have a positive impact on the world, and we welcome the challenge. As with many ambitious ideas, Google Print has sparked a healthy amount of discussion. And we've been listening. Over the last few months, we’ve been talking with numerous publishers, publishing industry organizations and authors about our <a href="http://print.google.com/googleprint/publisher.html">Google Print Publisher Program</a> and <a href="http://print.google.com/googleprint/library.html">Google Print Library Project</a>. Today I’d like to mention <a href="http://print.google.com/googleprint/publisher_library.html">two new features</a> that reflect these discussions and which we feel will considerably improve both programs. If you’re in the Publisher Program (or you <a href="http://print.google.com/googleprint/publisher.html">decide to join it</a>), you can now give us a list of the books that, if we scan them at a library, you’d like to have added immediately to your account. This way you can have your books in Google Print, which will put them into Google.com search results, direct potential buyers to your website, provide ongoing reports about user interest in your books, and your books will also earn revenue from contextual advertising – even if they are out of print. We think most publishers and authors will choose to participate in the publisher program in order to introduce their work to countless readers around the world. But we know that not everyone agrees, and we want to do our best to respect their views too. So now, any and all copyright holders – both Google Print partners and non-partners – can tell us which books they’d prefer that we not scan if we find them in a library. To allow plenty of time to review these new options, we won’t scan any in-copyright books from now until this November. We're going to continue talking about Google Print with our partners and the publishing industry. These discussions have been crucial in helping to build a program that benefits the industry and, most important, the millions of users who'll be able to discover new books. Stay tuned. *Update: People have been asking us how we came to this new policy for the Google Print Library Project. We consulted with a variety of constituencies and ultimately decided that this new approach would best balance the rights and needs of users and publishers while remaining consistent with our web search policy. Google automatically indexes content across the web. Most web publishers find this service convenient and useful, but we gladly offer those who prefer that we not index their site a way of telling us not to do so via a robots.txt file. Similarly, the Library Project aims to make it convenient and useful for publishers to get their books into Google Print, but those publishers who don't want to take advantage of this service can now simply tell us which books they'd like us to exclude.

Making books easier to find

Posted by Adam M. Smith, Google Print Product Manager (Updated 8/12/05, 1:31 p.m. PDT*) In October 2004 we announced a program called Google...

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It's a Mini world

It's a Mini world

Posted by Kevin Gough, Google Mini Marketing Manager Everyone else is having fun with Google Maps; why not your friendly neighborhood Google...

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Fill in the blanks

Posted by Hiyan Alshawi, Research Scientist Sometimes one wants to use a search engine to find a very specific piece of information rather than to learn about a topic. If search engines were truly intelligent, you could just pose a question the same way you would ask a person. An alternative is to get the search engine to 'fill in the blank.' So instead of asking [who invented the parachute?], you can enter the query [<a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=the+parachute+was+invented+by+*&btnG=Google+Search">the parachute was invented by *</a>]. (The <a href="http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=3178">blank, or </a><a href="http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=3178">wildcard,</a><a href="http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=3178"> search</a> is marked by * - an asterisk.) There is so much text on the web that this method often works well, but to make it more effective, we've improved the way results are found in response to queries containing such blanks. This includes allowing softer pattern matching, if necessary, and promoting results in which the blank filler is relatively more frequent in the context of the query. One nice thing about this approach to answering questions is that the same mechanism can be used in all languages, so the improved blank filling will work on google.com in your favorite language. It can also be used for exploratory queries rather than questions as such: try something like [<a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=glasgow+is+the+*+capital+of+europe&btnG=Google+Search">Glasgow is the * capital of Europe</a>].

Fill in the blanks

Posted by Hiyan Alshawi, Research Scientist Sometimes one wants to use a search engine to find a very specific piece of information rather t...

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Breaking story: Google News Feeds

Breaking story: Google News Feeds

Posted by Vijay Boyapati, Software Engineer For some time now, the Google News team has noticed a steady uptick in feature requests for feed...

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Guest Bloggers: those Freakonomics Guys

Posted by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner We didn't know quite what to expect at Google during our visit last week. A few months ago we'd been asked to give some kind of presentation to an undetermined number of Google employees. Were we interested? Sure, we said. This was still many weeks ago. When something is that far away, you'll generally agree to it without much thought. Because we arrived at Google late -- we were coming from a meeting with some people who may want to turn Freakonomics into a board game (!) — our tour was cut a little short. Still, we did manage to see: <ul><li>Your Google-logo-colored pylons at the extremely low-key "security" post.</li><li>Your very user-friendly name-tag-generating/sign-in computer</li> <li>Your very, very fancy toilets.</li> <li>Your rack of primordial servers with the thin layers of cork that used to make the fire department so nervous.</li> <li>Your roaming dogs, one friendlier than the next.</li> <li>Your scrolling query screens: Hillary Duff … pits puppies … Yenifer Lopez … Spanish Dictionary (we were a bit disappointed not to see a Freakonomics, but maybe it got caught in your filter; people sometimes give it some pretty deviant spellings.)</li> <li>Your quartz rug, robust cacti, fancy yurts, and ecologically sound staircase in the Africa building.</li> </ul> Then it was time for our "presentation." We left Africa and our host, Google product manager Hunter Walk, walked us over to the room where we were speaking... Whomp! It wasn’t some little room, with a conference table and a couple dozen people, as we'd imagined. It was a big, big room, rows and rows of chairs, all of them filled with Googlers, and many, many more Googlers sitting on the floor and standing in the back and – well, not exactly hanging from the rafters but it felt like it. The walls were black, the stage lights white-hot, the room alive with chatter. This wasn’t a presentation; this was a presentation. It was a Sally Field moment: They like us! They really like us! (We realize, of course, that the average Googler is far too young to catch <a href="http://www.littlereview.com/goddesslouise/articles/oscrpost.htm">this reference</a>. Don't worry; it's not very funny anyway.) As we picked our way through the floor-sitting Googlers, it felt like we should have been carrying a couple of Telecasters; it was likely the closest that either of us will ever get to having a rock-star moment (in truth, Dubner was a minor-league rock star, but that was in the late 80s, so it doesn't really count). Google had passed around a few hundred copies of <a href="http://www.freakonomics.com/">Freakonomics</a> (we immediately wondered if the order would be counted as a bulk sale, and therefore underweighted on the N.Y. Times best-seller list), so now, looking across the long rows of chairs, you could see one Googler after the next with the open book in his/her lap, as if preparing to hear a speech from Chairman Mao. It was, well, freaky. A bit like happening upon your own funeral. There was one podium and one microphone, so we decided to do a tag-team talk, discussing the book (e.g., why crack dealers still live with their moms) and telling a few stories based on research that’s happened since the book (e.g., monkey prostitution at Yale). We seemed to do okay, based on the fact that everyone laughed a lot. The biggest laugh came when Levitt mentioned that we spoke at Yahoo! a day earlier and got a much smaller crowd. That was true; Google’s turnout was about double Yahoo!'s. On the other hand, that means Google may have lost twice the productivity (unless you think that our talk may have somehow increased productivity). The best question of the day was, "What would you do with our data if we could give it to you?" We've thought about that quite a bit ever since; we'll keep you posted. After our talk, we spent a few minutes hanging around with miscellaneous Googlers. This was the most impressive slice of the day; not only were they all smart and inquisitive and friendly, but they were so damn happy. For instance, there's surely no company in the world where so many employees wear t-shirts with their company logo, which we took to be a sign of deep pride (or perhaps simply a deep discount). One person we talked with after our presentation was actually an old friend of Dubner's, a writer named Anya Kamenetz who is the fiancee of a Google employee. Dubner hadn't seen her in a couple of years and had no idea she was even in California. Even stranger, Levitt had seen her on PBS not long ago, just as the two of us were starting to do TV appearances, and called up Dubner to say, I just saw this young woman named Anya on TV, and she was so good and natural at it that it made me realize that that’s how we should try to be on TV. The reason Levitt remembered her name is that Dubner's daughter is also named Anya, a name he (Dubner) chose in some part because Anya Kamenetz was such a good name model. So here, a few thousand miles and a few months away, all these strange random elements got tied up in a neat bow, on the Google campus. Somehow it doesn’t seem as if it could have happened anywhere else.

Guest Bloggers: those Freakonomics Guys

Posted by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner We didn't know quite what to expect at Google during our visit last week. A few months ...

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