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Saving the galaxy, one traffic jam at a time

Posted by Josh Sacks, Software Engineer Is it wrong to refer to your own handiwork as "the new hotness"? Probably, but we're hoping you'll humor us for a bit. So what is with the new <a href="http://www.google.com/gmm">Google Maps for mobile</a>? Well, to paraphrase Agent J: Old and busted: Being stuck in traffic The new hotness: Checking traffic conditions from your phone* Old and busted: Showing up late The new hotness: Driving directions with real-time traffic estimates Old and busted: Typing in the same addresses over and over The new hotness: 1-touch recall of favorite locations and routes This release won't avert an intergalactic disaster any time soon, but we'd like to think the Men in Black would give it a try. You can too: just point your mobile phone's web browser to www.google.com/gmm. *Update: Currently available across the U.S. with comprehensive data coverage for more than 30 metro areas; partial coverage elsewhere in U.S.

Saving the galaxy, one traffic jam at a time

Posted by Josh Sacks, Software Engineer Is it wrong to refer to your own handiwork as "the new hotness"? Probably, but we're h...

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Findings on invalid clicks

Posted by Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager, Trust and Safety Those of you who follow news about online advertising closely are seeing plenty about the issue of "click fraud" lately. Since there's been a development in a case Google is involved in, you might like to hear about it. As part of the settlement in the click-fraud case <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/update-lanes-gifts-v-google.html">Lane’s Gifts v. Google</a>, we agreed with the plaintiffs to have an independent expert examine our detection methods, policies, practices, and procedures and make a determination of whether or not we had implemented reasonable measures to protect all of our advertisers. The result of that is a <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/pdf/Tuzhilin_Report.pdf">47-page report</a>, written by <a href="http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~atuzhili/">Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin</a>, Professor of Information Systems at NYU. The report was filed with the court in Texarkana, Arkansas, this morning. The bottom-line conclusion of the report is that Google’s efforts against click fraud are in fact reasonable. At several points in his report, he calls out the quality of our inspection systems and notes their constant improvement. It is an independent report, so not surprisingly there are other aspects of it with which we don’t fully agree. But overall it is a validation of what we have said for some time about our work against invalid clicks. Here are excerpts of some of the positive things Dr. Tuzhilin has to say about Google and invalid clicks: <blockquote>“During this project, I visited Google campus three times and interviewed over a dozen of the Click Quality team members from the Spam Operations and the Engineering groups, as well as the Product Manager of the Trust and Safety Group. I found the members of both groups to be well-qualified and highly competent to perform their jobs. Most of them have relevant prior backgrounds and strong credentials.” (p.4) “The current set of Google filters is fairly stable and only requires periodic 'tuning' and ‘maintenance’ rather than a radical re-engineering, even when major fraudulent attacks are launched against the Google Network.” (p.25) “These inspection systems have been developed by Google over an extensive period of time and are constantly improved to extend their functionality and make them better for the investigators to do their inspections more effectively. I have personally observed several such inspections and can attest to how successfully they have been conducted by Google’s investigators. This success can be attributed to (a) the quality of the inspection tools, (b) the extensive experience and high levels of professionalism of the Click Quality inspectors, and (c) the existence of certain investigation processes, guidelines and procedures assisting the investigators in the inspection process.” (p. 40) “Google has built the following four 'lines of defense' for detecting invalid clicks: pre-filtering, online filtering, automated offline detection and manual offline detection, in that order. Google deploys different detection methods in each of these stages: the rule-based and anomaly-based approaches in the pre-filtering and the filtering stages, the combination of all the three approaches in the automated offline detection stage, and the anomaly-based approach in the offline manual inspection stage. This deployment of different methods in different stages gives Google an opportunity to detect invalid clicks using alternative techniques and thus increases their chances of detecting more invalid clicks in one of these stages, preferably proactively in the early stages.” (p. 47) </blockquote> We also filed a document with the court today that may be of interest. You can find it <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/pdf/objections_response.pdf">here</a>. And there's more information on invalid clicks and how we manage them <a href="https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=35">here</a> and <a href="http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/03/about-invalid-clicks.html">here</a>.

Findings on invalid clicks

Posted by Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager, Trust and Safety Those of you who follow news about online advertising closely are...

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Update: Google Desktop Gadget Contest

Update: Google Desktop Gadget Contest

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager Just a quick update to let all you know that, due to popular demand, we've extended t...

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Finding easy-to-read web content

Posted by <a href="http://emacspeak.sf.net/raman">T.V. Raman</a>, Research Scientist Like most of you, when I search the web, I want to find relevant information with a minimal amount of distraction. But because I can't see and I use a device that converts web text to speech, I'm even more in tune with the distractions that can sometimes get in the way of finding the right results. If the information I'm after is on a visually busy page, I have to sort through that page to find the text I want--an extra step that can sometimes be very time-consuming. That's why I've been passionate about a project I'm working on at Google called <a href="http://labs.google.com/accessible/">Google Accessible Search</a>. Accessible Search adds a small twist to the familiar Google search: In addition to finding the most relevant results as measured by Google's search algorithms, it further sorts results based on the simplicity of their page layouts. (Simplicity, of course, is subjective in this context.) When users search from the <a href="http://labs.google.com/accessible/">http://labs.google.com/accessible</a> site, they'll receive results that are prioritized based on their usability. In its current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully--that is, pages with few visual distractions, and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on <a href="http://google.com/coop">Google Co-op</a>'s technology, which improves search results based on specialized interests. This is still an early-stage experiment, and we hope to improve the product's quality over the next few months based on user feedback. Check it out over on our Labs page and <a href="mailto:labs+accessible@google.com?subject=Feedback%20on%20Accessible%20Search">tell us what you think</a>.

Finding easy-to-read web content

Posted by T.V. Raman , Research Scientist Like most of you, when I search the web, I want to find relevant information with a minimal amount...

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Stocking up

Posted by Navneet Loiwal, Software Engineer, Google India A few months ago we launched <a href="http://finance.google.com">Google Finance</a>. Since then, we've listened carefully to your feedback and learned a lot about <a href="http://irwebreport.blogsome.com/2006/07/17/free-earnings-call-transcripts-on-google-finance/">what you like</a> and <a href="http://gigaom.com/2006/03/21/google-finance-needs-some-muscle/">what you don't like</a> about our product. And in response to these requests, we're pleased to announce a few small new features, including a stock-market module on the business section of <a href="http://news.google.com/?ned=us&topic=b">Google News</a> and support for <a href="http://finance.google.com/finance/portfolio?action=view">multiple portfolios</a>. We've also added an auto-suggest feature to the search box to help you find the companies and funds you're searching for more quickly, as well as an auto-refresh feature that keeps the data on your portfolio page current. In addition, rumor has it that a lot of users like to have the choice of reading message boards in reverse chronological order. So we've made sure our discussion groups have that feature, too. Lastly, it's earnings season, and we've been impressed by a small company called <a href="http://seekingalpha.com/">SeekingAlpha</a> that offers free transcripts on many earnings calls, so we've added links to them. These are small steps, and you can expect to see more features and ideas from us in the coming months. We appreciate your feedback and hope you'll continue to push us to <a href="http://www.google.com/support/finance/bin/request.py">make Google Finance better</a>.

Stocking up

Posted by Navneet Loiwal, Software Engineer, Google India A few months ago we launched Google Finance . Since then, we've listened caref...

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"Let click fraud happen"? Uh, no.

Posted by Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety You may have seen some of the media coverage generated by a blogger's <a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=219">quoting</a> Eric Schmidt about click fraud. By using select excerpts and ignoring the context of the remarks, that blog post made for an interesting read, but was unfortunately misleading. Eric spoke at a <a href="http://siepr.stanford.edu/home.html">SIEPR</a> economics event at Stanford in March. At the end of his remarks he took questions. (You can view the whole presentation and Q&A that followed <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5693708890015254551">here</a>.) Here's the relevant question Eric was asked about click fraud: "Recently there’s been some talk about click fraud being a potential threat to the entire advertising business model. I was just wondering what your thoughts on that were and if there’s an economic solution to it more than just technical solutions." Eric made clear from the very beginning that he wasn't describing our approach to click fraud and was answering hypothetically. He introduced his answer by saying: "Let’s imagine for purposes of argument that click fraud were not policed by Google and it were rampant ..." The "let it happen" excerpt followed, in which he discusses the economic forces that can retard click fraud: "Eventually the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for the conversion will decline because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks. In other words, the value of the ad declines. So, over some amount of time, the system is, in fact, self-correcting. In fact, there is a perfect economic solution, which is to let it happen." But he made clear that we don't take that approach, by adding that click fraud is "a bad thing and because we don’t like it, and because it does, at least for the short-term, creates some problems before the advertiser sees it, we go ahead and try to detect it and eliminate it." He also said, "In Google's case, we worry about this a lot and we have a number of technical engineers who think that this is great fun to try to go ahead of this and get ahead of it." The fact is that Google strives to detect every invalid click that passes through its system, and to prevent those clicks from ever reaching an advertiser's account. And Eric and many others at Google have discussed the problem of invalid clicks publicly many times -- on our quarterly <a href="http://investor.google.com/webcast_archive.html">earnings calls</a>, at our <a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressday.html">Press Day</a>, and in other places, such as <a href="http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/03/about-invalid-clicks.html">blogs</a>. Anyone who has followed Google knows that Eric, and others at Google, have stated several times that Google fights invalid clicks, that we've devoted significant resources to manage it, and that we take it very seriously. Update: Added link to the original story.

"Let click fraud happen"? Uh, no.

Posted by Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety You may have seen some of the media coverage generated by a ...

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Code Jamming in Dublin

Posted by Jeanne Williams and Anne Driscoll, Staffing Programs Team On June 29th, Google Dublin hosted the onsite finals for <a href="http://www.google.com/codejameurope/">Code Jam Europe 2006</a>. This is the third of four code competitions slated for this year, with <a href="http://www.topcoder.com/pl/?d1=gccj05&d2=EN_overview">China </a>in January, <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/this-years-india-code-jam.html">India</a> in April and a Global Code Jam this fall. After nearly 10,000 registrants and three intense online rounds, the top 50 finalists persevered and flew to Dublin for the final challenge. ACM members also joined the coding community fun, traveling from countries as far afield as Kazakhstan, Russia, Sweden, Egypt, Spain, France, Poland and Bulgaria to celebrate the success of the finalists. Several of the ACMers had qualified for the Code Jam Finals in their own right, and having them in Dublin added a real buzz to the proceedings. Over 15 countries were represented in the finals, and 31 of the top 50 are from Eastern Europe. We celebrate the success of the top finishers: Tomasz Czajka from Poland took home the €2500 grand prize; second- and third-prize winners were Petr Mitricheve and Roman Elizarov, both from Russia, who won €1000 each. Watch the fun that defined Code Jam Europe in this <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6784270562651759742">short clip</a> from the 3-day event -- and keep on coding to prepare for the next one!

Code Jamming in Dublin

Posted by Jeanne Williams and Anne Driscoll, Staffing Programs Team On June 29th, Google Dublin hosted the onsite finals for Code Jam Europe...

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