New, improved, and out of beta

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Annie Sullivan, Software Engineer</span><br /><br />After two months in beta we are officially releasing our <a href="http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/index.html">Firefox Toolbar</a> with a couple of nifty Firefox-only features. One of these is the addition of <a href="http://labs.google.com//suggestfaq.html">Google Suggest</a>, which shows useful query suggestions as you type in the Toolbar search box.<br /><br />We also heard from plenty of savvy Firefox users who wanted to be able to reorganize their Toolbar with Firefox’s Customize feature. So in the latest version of the Toolbar, you can go to the View > Toolbars > Customize menu to rearrange icons to your heart's content. You can even move the search box around!<br /><br />With my setup I've rearranged the buttons and saved quite a few pixels. Here's a screenshot:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/firetools-screenshot-764517.png"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/firetools-screenshot-763422.png" style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" /></a><br /><br />Don't have Firefox yet? <a href="http://www.getfirefox.com/">Get it here</a>.

New, improved, and out of beta

Posted by Annie Sullivan, Software Engineer After two months in beta we are officially releasing our Firefox Toolbar with a couple of nifty...

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We can't do it all ...

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Kevin Smith, Partner Program Manager </span><br /><br />If you can get <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=weather+belfair+WA&btnG=Google+Search">weather forecasts for Belfair, WA</a> from Google.com, why shouldn’t you be able to access mainframe data from your own <a href="http://www.google.com/appliance">Google Search Appliance</a>? Our 2,000 enterprise customers know that you can. (In fact our enterprise business has grown more than 100 percent in the first half of this year over the first half of last year.) The <a href="http://www.google.com/enterprise/gep/">Google Enterprise Professional program</a> will help Google customers extend their use of enterprise products to previously hard-to-search areas of their infrastructure, such as legacy data locked in mainframes, information on a highly secure government network, or real-time customer data in an enterprise application.<br /><br />As it turns out, there are plenty of businesses with expertise in this stuff -- systems integrators and independent software vendors that know more about specialized enterprise environments than we ever could. So today we're announcing this program to help customers get more value out of their Google enterprise search deployments.<br /><br />We provide training, a development version of the Google Search Appliance, and the necessary support so Google Enterprise Professionals can become experts on our enterprise technology. And they give us expertise in their categories built on years of experience.

We can't do it all ...

Posted by Kevin Smith, Partner Program Manager If you can get weather forecasts for Belfair, WA from Google.com, why shouldn’t you be able ...

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Putting crowd wisdom to work

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Bo Cowgill, Project Manager</span><br /><br />At Google, we're constantly trying to find new ways to organize the world's information, including information relevant to our business. Building on the ideas of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek">Friedrich Hayek</a> and the <a href="http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/">Iowa Electronic Markets</a>, a few Googlers (Doug Banks, Patri Friedman, Ilya Kirnos, Piaw Na and me, with some help from <a href="http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/%7Ehal/">Hal Varian</a>), set up a predictive market system inside the company.<br /><br /><a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/PLogo%20%282%29-720832.GIF"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/PLogo%20%282%29-719936.GIF" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" /></a>The markets were designed to forecast product launch dates, new office openings, and many other things of strategic importance to Google. So far, more than a thousand Googlers have bid on 146 events in 43 different subject areas (no payment is required to play).<br /><br />We designed the market so that the price of an event should, in theory, reflect a consensus probability that the event will occur. To determine accuracy of the market, we looked at the connection between prices of events and the frequency with which they actually occurred. If prices are correct, events priced at 10 cents should occur about 10 percent of the time.<br /><br />In the graph below, the X-axis indicates the price ranges for the group. The orange line represents the average price, which is how often outcomes in that group should actually happen according to market prices. The purple line is how often they did happen. Ideally these would be equal, and as you can see they're pretty close. So our prices really do represent probabilities - very exciting!<br /><br /><a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/media/happened_by_predicted_all_weeks-707724.GIF"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/media/happened_by_predicted_all_weeks-706902.GIF" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" /></a>We also found that the market prices gave decisive, informative predictions in the sense that their predictive power increased as time passed and uncertainty was resolved. When a market first opens there may be considerable uncertainty about what will eventually happen; but as time goes on, some outcomes became more likely than others. The market prices should reflect this phenomenon, with the implied probability distributions becoming more concentrated over time.<br /><br />Being geeks, we naturally used information theory to measure the entropy of our probability distributions:<br /><br /><a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/media/entropy_by_week_settled_markets-799301.GIF"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/media/entropy_by_week_settled_markets-798100.GIF" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" /></a>In this graph, we have weeks before market expiration on the X-axis, and entropy (in bits) on the Y-axis. We've included some reference entropies to help your intuition, and you can see that in addition to accurate predictions, the distributions become steadily more informative and decisive (lower entropy) over time.<br /><br />Our search engine works well because it aggregates information dispersed across the web, and our internal predictive markets are based on the same principle: Googlers from across the company contribute knowledge and opinions which are aggregated into a forecast by the market. Sometimes, just feeling lucky isn't enough, and these tools can help.

Putting crowd wisdom to work

Posted by Bo Cowgill, Project Manager At Google, we're constantly trying to find new ways to organize the world's information, inclu...

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Google Print and the Authors Guild

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Susan Wojcicki, Vice President, Product Management</span><br /><br />Today we learned that the Authors Guild filed a lawsuit to try to stop <a href="http://print.google.com/">Google Print</a>. We regret that this group chose to sue us over a program that will make millions of books more discoverable to the world -- especially since any copyright holder can <a href="http://print.google.com/googleprint/publisher_library.html#options3">exclude</a> their books from the program. What’s more, many of Google Print’s chief beneficiaries will be authors whose backlist, out of print and lightly marketed new titles will be suggested to countless readers who wouldn’t have found them otherwise.<br /><br />Let's be clear: Google doesn’t show even a single page to users who find copyrighted books through this program (unless the copyright holder gives us permission to show more). At most we show only a brief snippet of text where their search term appears, along with basic bibliographic information and several links to online booksellers and libraries. Here’s what an in-copyright book scanned from a library looks like on Google Print:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/LibraryProject_screenshot-745613.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/LibraryProject_screenshot-743475.JPG" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" /></a>Google respects copyright. The use we make of all the books we scan through the Library Project is fully consistent with both the <a href="http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_00000107----000-.html">fair use doctrine</a> under U.S. copyright law and the <a href="http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/articles.html#1.8">principles underlying copyright law itself</a>, which allow everything from <a href="http://straylight.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/92-1292.ZS.html">parodies</a> to <a href="http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_00000107----000-.html">excerpts in book reviews</a>. (Here's <a href="http://www.policybandwidth.com/doc/googleprint.pdf">an article</a> by one of the many legal scholars who have weighed in on Google Print.)<br /><br />Just as Google helps you find sites you might not have found any other way by indexing the full text of web pages, Google Print, like an electronic card catalog, indexes book content to help users find, and perhaps buy, books. This ability to introduce millions of users to millions of titles can only expand the market for authors’ books, which is precisely what copyright law is intended to foster.

Google Print and the Authors Guild

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, Vice President, Product Management Today we learned that the Authors Guild filed a lawsuit to try to stop Google P...

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Polyglot pictures

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Adrian Graham, Picasa Product Manager</span><br /><br />People all around the world are photo-mad, snapping digital photos everywhere they go. Today people in <a href="http://picasa.google.com.au/">Australia</a>, <a href="http://picasa.google.at/">Austria</a>, <a href="http://picasa.google.be/">Belgium</a>, <a href="http://picasa.google.com.br/">Brazil</a>, <a href="http://picasa.google.ca/">Canada</a>, <a href="http://picasa.google.com/intl/zh-CN/">China</a>, <a href="http://picasa.google.fr/">France</a>, <a href="http://picasa.google.de/">Germany</a>, <a href="http://picasa.google.com.hk/">Hong Kong</a>, <a href="http://picasa.google.co.in/">India</a>, <a href="http://picasa.google.it/">Italy</a>, <a href="http://picasa.google.co.jp/">Japan</a>, <a href="http://picasa.google.nl/">Netherlands</a>, <a href="http://picasa.google.ru/">Russia</a>, <a href="http://picasa.google.co.kr/">South Korea</a>, <a href="http://picasa.google.es/">Spain</a>, <a href="http://picasa.google.ch/">Switzerland</a>, <a href="http://picasa.google.com.tw/">Taiwan</a> and the <a href="http://picasa.google.co.uk/">UK</a> have a new tool: Google's <a href="http://www.google.com/picasa">Picasa</a> photo organizer in their own (local) language.

Polyglot pictures

Posted by Adrian Graham, Picasa Product Manager People all around the world are photo-mad, snapping digital photos everywhere they go. Today...

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The illuminated continent

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Michael Jones, Google Earth CTO</span><br /><br />Have you ever dreamed of Africa while reading <span style="font-style: italic;">National Geographic</span>? The exotic photographs and thoughtful articles take you there with a magical sense of place. Today we embraced that magic by releasing Google Earth data layers that index <span style="font-style: italic;">National Geographic</span> stories, images, journals, and even a live webcam in Africa. <br /><br />Just start <a href="http://earth.google.com/">Google Earth</a>, enable the National Geographic layers, and begin exploring.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/ge-balloon-727757.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/ge-balloon-726752.JPG" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" /></a><br />Across Africa, you will see the familiar yellow National Geographic logo. Zoom in to see the title of each feature article or photograph. Click the icon and a pop-up balloon shows a photo and description along with links to the content. Follow those links to read the entire story right where it happened. Not only will you learn about Jane Goodall's Fifi, you'll see her home. Joining the stories and images are layers for National Geographic Sights & Sounds multimedia resources, a live WildCam in Botswana, and a collection of Mike Fay's Megaflyover images.<br /><br />The Megaflyover images are stunning. Mike spent more than a year taking 92,000 high resolution photographs of the continent. That project is described in <span style="font-style: italic;">Tracing the Human Footprint</span>, an article in the September 2005 <span style="font-style: italic;">National Geographic</span>. He selected 500 of his favorite scenes of people, animals, geological formations, and signs of human presence and annotated them in Google Earth. Look for the red airplane icons as you fly over Africa. Each of these marks a spot where a high resolution image awaits your own personal voyage.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/ge-herd-779023.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/ge-herd-778065.JPG" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" /></a>

The illuminated continent

Posted by Michael Jones, Google Earth CTO Have you ever dreamed of Africa while reading National Geographic ? The exotic photographs and tho...

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Googlebombing 'failure'

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products</span><br /><br />If you do a Google search on the word [<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=failure">failure</a>] or the phrase [<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=miserable+failure">miserable failure</a>], the top result is currently the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush. We've received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part. I'd like to explain how these results come up in order to allay these concerns.<br /><br />Google's search results are generated by computer programs that rank web pages in large part by examining the number and relative popularity of the sites that link to them. By using a practice called <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;c2coff=1&q=googlebombing&btnG=Search">googlebombing</a>, however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush's website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases. We don't condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don't affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.

Googlebombing 'failure'

Posted by Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products If you do a Google search on the word [ failure ] or the phrase [ miserable failu...

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