healthy4u

The point of Google Print

Posted by Adam Mathes, Associate Product Manager, Google Print Team You may have read about the AAP's lawsuit announced today which objects to Google Print. We'll post our comments about that soon. Meanwhile, we offer this commentary from Eric Schmidt. It ran on the op-ed page of yesterday's Wall Street Journal, and we are reprinting it in full with that paper's permission. Books of Revelation By Eric Schmidt The Wall Street Journal October 18, 2005 Imagine sitting at your computer and, in less than a second, searching the full text of every book ever written. Imagine an historian being able to instantly find every book that mentions the Battle of Algiers. Imagine a high school student in Bangladesh discovering an out-of-print author held only in a library in Ann Arbor. Imagine one giant electronic card catalog that makes all the world's books discoverable with just a few keystrokes by anyone, anywhere, anytime. That's the vision behind Google Print, a program we introduced last fall to help users search through the oceans of information contained in the world's books. Recently, some members of the publishing industry who believe this program violates copyright law have been fighting to stop it. We respectfully disagree with their conclusions, on both the meaning of the law and the spirit of a program which, in fact, will enhance the value of each copyright. Here's why. Google's job is to help people find information. Google Print's job is to make it easier for people to find books. When you do a Google search, your results now include pointers to those books whose contents, stored in the Google Print index, contain your search terms. For many books, these results will, like an ordinary card catalog, contain basic bibliographic information and, at most, a few lines of text where your search terms appear. We show more than this basic information only if a book is in the public domain, or if the copyright owner has explicitly allowed it by adding this title to the Publisher Program (most major U.S. and U.K. publishers have signed up). We refer people who discover books through Google Print to online retailers, but we don't make a penny on referrals. We also don't place ads on Google Print pages for books from our Library Project, and we do so for books in our Publishing Program only with the permission of publishers, who receive the majority of the resulting revenue. Any copyright holder can easily exclude their titles from Google Print -- no lawsuit is required. This policy is entirely in keeping with our main Web search engine. In order to guide users to the information they're looking for, we copy and index all the Web sites we find. If we didn't, a useful search engine would be impossible, and the same dynamic applies to the Google Print Library Project. By most estimates, less than 20% of books are in print, and only around 20% of titles, according to the Online Computer Library Center, are in the public domain. This leaves a startling 60% of all books that publishers are unlikely to be able to add to our program and readers are unlikely to find. Only by physically scanning and indexing every word of the extraordinary collections of our partner libraries at Michigan, Stanford, Oxford, the New York Public Library and Harvard can we make all these lost titles discoverable with the level of comprehensiveness that will make Google Print a world-changing resource. But just as any Web site owner who doesn't want to be included in our main search index is welcome to exclude pages from his site, copyright-holders are free to send us a list of titles that they don't want included in the Google Print index. For some, this isn't enough. The program's critics maintain that any use of their books requires their permission. We have the utmost respect for the intellectual and creative effort that lies behind every grant of copyright. Copyright law, however, is all about which uses require permission and which don't; and we believe (and have structured Google Print to ensure) that the use we make of books we scan through the Library Project is consistent with the Copyright Act, whose "fair use" balancing of the rights of copyright-holders with the public benefits of free expression and innovation allows a wide range of activity, from book quotations in reviews to parodies of pop songs -- all without copyright-holder permission. Even those critics who understand that copyright law is not absolute argue that making a full copy of a given work, even just to index it, can never constitute fair use. If this were so, you wouldn't be able to record a TV show to watch it later or use a search engine that indexes billions of Web pages. The aim of the Copyright Act is to protect and enhance the value of creative works in order to encourage more of them -- in this case, to ensure that authors write and publishers publish. We find it difficult to believe that authors will stop writing books because Google Print makes them easier to find, or that publishers will stop selling books because Google Print might increase their sales. Indeed, some of Google Print's primary beneficiaries will be publishers and authors themselves. Backlist titles comprise the vast majority of books in print and a large portion of many publishers' profits, but just a fraction of their marketing budgets. Google Print will allow those titles to live forever, just one search away from being found and purchased. Some authors are already seeing the benefits. When Cardinal Ratzinger became pope, millions of people who searched his name saw the Google Print listing for his book "In the Beginning" (Wm. B. Eerdmans) in their results. Thousands of them looked at a page or two from the book; clicks on the title's "Buy this Book" links increased tenfold. That's the heart of the Google Print mission. Imagine the cultural impact of putting tens of millions of previously inaccessible volumes into one vast index, every word of which is searchable by anyone, rich and poor, urban and rural, First World and Third, en toute langue -- and all, of course, entirely for free. How many users will find, and then buy, books they never could have discovered any other way? How many out-of-print and backlist titles will find new and renewed sales life? How many future authors will make a living through their words solely because the Internet has made it so much easier for a scattered audience to find them? This egalitarianism of information dispersal is precisely what the Web is best at; precisely what leads to powerful new business models for the creative community; precisely what copyright law is ultimately intended to support; and, together with our partners, precisely what we hope, and expect, to accomplish with Google Print. Mr. Schmidt is CEO of Google.

The point of Google Print

Posted by Adam Mathes, Associate Product Manager, Google Print Team You may have read about the AAP's lawsuit announced today which obje...

Đọc thêm »

We get letters (3)

Posted by Karen Wickre, Google Blog team This just in: Walid Elias Kai, a Ph.D. in search engine marketing, is, it must be said, an avid fan of our company. Dr. Kai, who is Lebanese, and his Swedish wife Carol live in Kalmar, Sweden, where their son was born on September 12. His name? Oliver Google Kai. About this choice, Dr. Kai writes, "When we first knew that my wife Carol is pregnant, I said, 'we will name our child Google.' Everyone laughed and did not take me seriously. My brother said, 'Yeah, name the next one yahoo fuji nikon." And then, says Dr. Kai, the day came to make the baby official in the Swedish Registry. "I was with my friend Magnus Foss and my wife Carol, and I said yes, GOOGLE KAI. Carol knew how serious I am – she knows how much I adore Google services." Clearly not one to shy away from a unique moniker, Dr. Kai also tells us that in the Lebanese tradition both parents have a name related to the child. "All our friends and families are calling us Abou Google (Google's father) and Emm Google (Google's mother)." Of course, there's a <a href="http://www.google-kai.com/">website</a> devoted to young Mr. Kai. We wish him long life and good health, and hope his schoolmates aren't too hard on him. <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/Google_Kai2-786492.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/Google_Kai2-785614.jpg" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" /></a>

We get letters (3)

Posted by Karen Wickre, Google Blog team This just in: Walid Elias Kai, a Ph.D. in search engine marketing, is, it must be said, an avid fan...

Đọc thêm »

Our ongoing privacy efforts

Posted by Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel We updated our <a href="http://www.google.com/privacypolicy.html">privacy policy</a> today. We know privacy is important to our users, and it's important to us, too. That's why we work hard to let people know how we collect and use personal information to provide our services. A clearly written privacy policy is part of this effort. In this update, most of the terms are the same, but there are two important differences: First, we created a short, one-page "<a href="http://www.google.com/privacy.html">highlights</a>" notice summarizing our privacy practices. We hope this is easy to digest and understand at a glance. Second, we provided even more detail about our privacy practices in the <a href="http://www.google.com/privacypolicy.html">full-text privacy policy</a> and lots more detail in the accompanying <a href="http://www.google.com/privacy_faq.html">FAQs</a>. The goal of both is to help you make informed choices about using our services. Designing privacy protection and user choice into Google products is an ongoing effort. Please <a href="http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py?form_type=user&stage=fm&user_type=user&contact_type=remove_info&hl=en">let us know</a> how we're doing.

Our ongoing privacy efforts

Posted by Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel We updated our privacy policy today. We know privacy is important to our users, and it...

Đọc thêm »

More Firefox-Toolbar synchronicity

More Firefox-Toolbar synchronicity

Posted by Ben Lewis, Firefox Toolbar product manager If you’ve been holding off on upgrading to Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 because you’d miss out o...

Đọc thêm »

Financial reporting: the alphabet soup

Posted by Mark Fuchs, Chief Accountant Warning: Financial reporting minutiae below. Proceed with caution. We're going to provide a bit more information with our October 20 <a href="http://investor.google.com/webcast.html">earnings announcement</a>. In this and future announcements, we're going to include a so-called pro-forma, or non-GAAP, diluted <a href="http://www.americancentury.com/servlet/GlossaryManager/acb.americancentury.com/ilEEd.htm#EarningsPerShare">earnings per share (EPS)</a> number as a supplement to our <a href="http://www.aicpa.org/members/glossary/g.htm">GAAP</a> EPS number. In the past, we've only provided GAAP EPS. But because Wall Street analysts typically estimate and describe our results with non-GAAP EPS numbers, that resulted in some confusing apples-to-oranges analyses of our results. (By the way, we review non-GAAP results when we analyze our own performance.) By providing both, we hope it will be easier to understand our results. Now, if you’ve got your green eyeshade handy, read on. What follows is in accountant-speak. Earnings per share is calculated by dividing profit (net income) by the number of outstanding shares. That's GAAP. To compute our non-GAAP EPS, we’ll add back to our net income things such as charges for stock-based compensation. (Before adding back stock-based compensation – or other certain charges – we’ll factor in related taxes. What does that mean? When we add back a charge, we subtract the tax benefit related to it that we would get under GAAP accounting. In other words, in the non-GAAP calculation we don't want to include the GAAP tax benefit.) After tax-affecting the charges and then adding them back to net income, we'll take that sum, divide it by outstanding shares and come up with our non-GAAP EPS number. To illustrate all of this with a fictitious example, let's assume these imaginary data points: <ul> <li>GAAP net income - $300 million</li> <li>Stock-based compensation charge - $100 million (note that other charges in addition to stock-based compensation may be excluded from the computation and presentation of our non-GAAP results as appropriate in the future)</li> <li>Tax affect of stock based compensation charge - $35 million</li> <li>Shares outstanding for Google - 600 million</li> </ul> To get our GAAP EPS, we would simply divide $300 million GAAP net income by the 600 million shares outstanding and arrive at a GAAP EPS of $0.50. <blockquote>$300,000,000 / 600,000,000 = $0.50</blockquote>Now, to get the non-GAAP EPS, we would: <ol> <li>Subtract the $35 million tax affect from the $100 million stock-based compensation charge to arrive at $65 million</li> <li>Add that $65 million to the $300 million GAAP net income for a new, non-GAAP net income of $365 million</li> <li>Divide $365 million by 600 million shares outstanding and get a non-GAAP EPS of $0.61.</li> </ol> <blockquote>($300,000,000 + ($100,000,000 - $35,000,000)) / 600,000,000 = $0.61</blockquote>As if this weren't complicated enough, we should note that most, if not all, analysts have historically computed our non-GAAP earnings by adding stock-based compensation to net income without tax-affecting the charge. As a result, when we provide our non-GAAP EPS number, we may be adding back less to compute our non-GAAP earnings than will most of the analysts. Using the same set of imaginary numbers, analysts might, for example: <ol> <li>Add the full $100 million stock-based compensation charge to the GAAP net income of $300 million and arrive at their non-GAAP net income of $400 million</li> <li>Divide that by outstanding shares and arrive at non-GAAP EPS (for the fictitious example, $0.67 per share)</li> </ol> <blockquote>($300,000,000 + $100,000,000) / 600,000,000 = $0.67</blockquote>Congratulations to those of you who were able to make it this far. We're sorry for the density, but this is dense stuff and we've got to be comprehensive in our explanation of it.

Financial reporting: the alphabet soup

Posted by Mark Fuchs, Chief Accountant Warning: Financial reporting minutiae below. Proceed with caution. We're going to provide a bit m...

Đọc thêm »

About Google.org

Posted by Sheryl Sandberg, VP, Global Online Sales & Operations When we told prospective shareholders about Google and <a href="http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504142742/ds1a.htm">how we wanted to do business</a>, we said that we hoped our philanthropic efforts could some day have a greater impact than Google itself. We committed one percent of our profits and equity toward that vision. We’ve looked closely at how those resources can have the greatest impact and found that there are many creative and effective ways to make a difference. So we’ve taken time to investigate, learn and imagine. And while we are still actively engaged in the learning process, we’ve made enough progress that we thought it was a good time to give an update on our plans. As our founders said in our <a href="http://investor.google.com/pdf/2004_AnnualReport.pdf">2004 annual report</a>, we’re taking a broad approach. We’re calling the umbrella under which we’re putting all of these efforts <a href="http://www.google.org/">Google.org</a>. It will include the work of the Google Foundation, some of Google’s own projects, as well as partnerships and contributions to for-profit and non-profit entities. Here are some things we're already working on: We established the Google Foundation, funded it with $90 million and have made a few initial commitments. We've contributed $5 million to support <a href="http://www.acumenfund.org/">Acumen Fund</a>, a non-profit venture fund that invests in market-based solutions to global poverty. Acumen Fund supports entrepreneurial approaches to delivering affordable goods and services for the 4 billion people in the world who live on less than $4 a day. We’re also working with <a href="http://www.technoserve.org/">TechnoServe</a> to build small businesses that create jobs and promote economic growth in the developing world. With TechnoServe, we are funding an entrepreneurship development program in Ghana that includes a business plan competition and seed capital for the winners to build their businesses. In addition, we are working with Alix Zwane and Edward Miguel of UC Berkeley and Michael Kremer of Harvard University to support research in western Kenya to identify ways to prevent child deaths caused by poor water quality. Google.org also includes projects we manage on our own, using Google talent, technology and other resources. An example is the <a href="http://www.google.com/grants/" title="http://www.google.com/grants/">Google Grants</a> program, which gives free advertising to selected nonprofits. To date, Google Grants has donated $33 million in advertising to more than 850 nonprofit organizations in 10 countries. Current Google Grants participants include: <a href="http://www.wish.org/?gg">Make-a-Wish Foundation</a> - grants the wishes of children with life-threatening medical conditions. More than 25 percent of their online donations are made as a result of their Google ads. <a href="http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/?gg">Doctors Without Borders</a> - delivers emergency medical aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, disasters, and exclusion from health care in nearly 70 countries. Google Grants has assisted them with recruiting experienced doctors and nurses for their field programs, which has helped them increase applications by 30 percent this year. <a href="http://www.gfusa.org/?gg">Grameen Foundation USA</a> - uses microfinance and innovative technology to help the world's poorest people escape poverty. Google Grants has helped them attract donors and broaden their newsletter subscriber base. With Google.org, we’ll also support entities with strong social missions which use market-based solutions for sustainable economic development. One example is our recent donation of $2 million to the <a href="http://laptop.media.mit.edu/">One Laptop Per Child</a> program. While the results we get are more important than the amount of money we give, we want to be clear about how we’re going to keep our “one percent” commitments. There are two parts: equity and profit. For the one percent of equity, we have committed one percent of the outstanding shares that resulted from our initial public offering – 3 million shares. We’re going to donate and invest this amount over a period of as much as 20 years. Because it is based on stock, the dollar value of this commitment will rise and fall with our stock price We’ll follow through on the other commitment – one percent of profit – by taking one percent of each year’s profits and donating and investing that too. Our first step in meeting these commitments includes a $90 million cash donation to the Google Foundation and a commitment of up to $175 million over three years across our other Google.org efforts. We don’t expect to make further donations to the Foundation for the foreseeable future. As Larry and Sergey said in their Founders’ Letter, “We hope someday this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the world's problems." We feel fortunate to have the opportunity to contribute our resources, talent, energy, and passion helping to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. We will provide you with updates as our work progresses.

About Google.org

Posted by Sheryl Sandberg, VP, Global Online Sales & Operations When we told prospective shareholders about Google and how we wanted to ...

Đọc thêm »

Bird flu basics

Posted by Taraneh Razavi, M.D., Staff Doctor As flu season approaches, there's been a lot of talk about bird flu. I thought I'd try to clarify some of the issues and misconceptions around this illness. I keep up with news on this and other emerging diseases in a number of ways, including <a href="http://fas.org/promed/">Pro-MED</a>, which is produced by the Federation of American Scientists, and the <a href="http://www.who.int/csr/disease/avian_influenza/en/">World Health Organization</a> site. You can also read lots more at the CDC site, especially <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/flu/avian/gen-info/avian-flu-humans.htm">here</a>. Bird (avian) flu is an influenza virus type A that normally infects birds, but can also infect pigs and other animals. Wild birds, the natural hosts, normally don't get sick from this virus, but domestic animals such as chickens and turkeys can be severely affected severely. Humans, meanwhile, can be infected with influenza types A, B, and C. Genetic changes and sharing (the closest thing viruses have to sex) can occur under certain circumstances such as in crowded conditions where poultry, pigs, and people live in close quarters. This change can allow a virus to become much more infectious to humans and more easily transmitted from person to person. And this is where a "pandemic" comes in: it's a worldwide outbreak of a new influenza A virus between humans, while epidemics tend to be seasonal, involving viruses that already exist. For you history buffs, previous pandemics include: 1918-19: Spanish flu. Caused more than 500,000 deaths in the U.S., and 50 million worldwide. 1957-58: Asian flu. 70,000 deaths in the U.S. 1968-69. Hong Kong flu. 34,000 deaths in the U.S. Both the 1957-58 and 1968-69 pandemics were caused by viruses containing a combination of genes from a human and an avian influenza virus. It may be reassuring to note that the number of deaths has decreased with each pandemic, possibly due to better supportive medical care. The avian flu's jump to humans was first detected in 1997, although all the human deaths reported so far (about 60 since 2003) have been due to transmission from animals to humans. There has been more concern recently because the virus has been detected in migratory birds which can't be caught and killed - and which may carry the virus to Europe and Africa within the next two migratory seasons. The consensus is that although it's possible an avian flu epidemic may occur, no one can predict if it will take place in weeks or years. It all depends on when that genetic shift (from birds to humans) takes place. There has been no detection of this virus in the U.S. It is possible for travelers to be infected, but most of the cases in humans have been in those with closer contact to birds than a casual traveler has. Since the infection occurs via fecal-oral route, to reduce your risk while traveling, avoid bird markets, zoos, and areas in parks, etc. with high concentrations of bird feces. Countries that are the most vulnerable to this flu are Indonesia, Vietnam, and Cambodia, due to their high concentration of bird markets. Other areas involved are Thailand, China (south and north), Tibet, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia. For an update on outbreaks before you travel, check the <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/travel/seasia.htm">CDC info for southeast Asia</a> and <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/travel/eastasia.htm">east Asia</a>. Symptoms of bird flu in humans have ranged from typical flu-like symptoms (fever, cough, sore throat, muscle aches) to eye infections and pneumonia. If you feel you've been exposed, there are a couple of treatment recommendations available today that you may want to discuss with your doctor. Until these are tested in a pandemic, however, their true efficacy is unknown. There are currently no vaccines available, but many companies are working on them. Bottom line: For now, avian flu is just a "virus of interest" to medical researchers. Of course, you should always consult with your own doctor about any medical conditions or risks that concern you.

Bird flu basics

Posted by Taraneh Razavi, M.D., Staff Doctor As flu season approaches, there's been a lot of talk about bird flu. I thought I'd try ...

Đọc thêm »