Google Apps now south of the Sahara

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Francoise Brougher, Business Operations Team</span><br /><br />Tens of thousands of university students in Rwanda and Kenya are now on their way to using <a href="http://www.google.com/a/edu/">Google Apps</a>. As a result of two separate partnerships that <a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/apps_rwanda.html">we've signed today</a> with the Rwandan Ministry of Infrastructure and the Kenya Education Network, nearly 20,000 students from the <a title="http://www.nur.ac.rw/" href="http://www.nur.ac.rw/">National University of Rwanda</a>, the <a title="http://www.kie.ac.rw/" href="http://www.kie.ac.rw/">Kigali Institute for Education</a> and the <a title="http://www.kist.ac.rw/index_2.html" href="http://www.kist.ac.rw/index_2.html">Kigali Institute for Science and Technology</a>, plus 50,000 more from Kenya's <a title="http://www.uonbi.ac.ke/" href="http://www.uonbi.ac.ke/">University of Nairobi</a>, are joining their colleagues at <a href="http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2007/02/google.html">Northwestern</a>, <a href="http://www.asu.edu/news/stories/200610/20061010_asugmail.htm">ASU</a> and <a href="http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/customers.html">around the world</a> with access to Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets under their university's domain for free.<br /><br />Offering Google Apps in Africa means more to us than connecting students and teachers to conduct that special exchange of ideas, innovation and creativity so unique to universities (<a href="http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html">we should know</a>). In Africa and in the developing world, it also means doing our part to make sure that everyone has access to the same services wherever they live, whatever their language, and regardless of income.<br /><br />We can't be more delighted about our Google Apps partnerships with Rwanda and Kenya, and there are more to come.

Google Apps now south of the Sahara

Posted by Francoise Brougher, Business Operations Team Tens of thousands of university students in Rwanda and Kenya are now on their way to...

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Let the passion continue! We're acquiring Adscape

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Bernie Stolar, Dean of Games</span><br /><br />Asteroids, Space Invaders, Centipede and Tetris—remember when you could only play these games at an arcade? I would line up behind at least 6 people for my chance at Asteroids.<br /><br />Time warp—now it's 2007. Games can be played anywhere and at anytime. In this mobile world, games have evolved to become a part of our lives. Unlike television, gamers can make games their own—customizing their experience in new ways—and we are helping them do that big time.<br /><br />But of course developing these sophisticated games can be very expensive. Back in the 80s the cost of producing a single game was about $100K. Today it can cost $25M to produce a game. The good news is there are some very passionate gamers out there that have come up with some interesting new ways to introduce non-intrusive and targeted advertising in order to make gaming accessible and affordable for all.<br /><br />Our charge at Adscape has always been to honor the game that was developed and find new ways to enable that game to continue so others can enjoy it. That's why we are so stoked <a href="http://www.google.com/press/annc/annc_adscape.html">to join Google</a>—because these guys get it, and are committed to helping us continue our mission.

Let the passion continue! We're acquiring Adscape

Posted by Bernie Stolar, Dean of Games Asteroids, Space Invaders, Centipede and Tetris—remember when you could only play these games at an a...

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A world in motion

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience</span><br /><br />Mark Twain said, "Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable." We're pretty sure Twain's definition of pliable is different from ours. Building flexibility into search, email, and other Google products is critically important as we seek to organize the world's information, and it's only natural that we should continue to look for ways to make the use of such statistics more "pliable" as well.<br /><br /><div style="direction: ltr;"><span>In this regard, we are excited to announce that we have acquired</span> Gapminder's Trendalyzer software, and we welcome the Trendalyzer team to Google. Trendalyzer generates moving graphics and other novel<span> effects in the display of facts, figures, and statistics in presentations.</span> In its nimble hands, Trendalyzer views development data—such as regional income distribution or trends in global health—as <a href="http://tools.google.com/gapminder/">literally a world of opportunity</a>. Like Google, Gapminder strives to make information more useful, and Trendalyzer will improve any function or application in which data might be better visualized.<br /></div><br />Gathering data and creating useful statistics is an arduous job that often goes unrecognized. We hope to provide the resources necessary to bring such work to its deserved wider audience by improving and expanding Trendalyzer and making it freely available to any and all users capable of thinking outside the X and Y axes.<br /><br />That's our definition of "pliable." Please stay tuned, and we'll tell you more as soon as we can.

A world in motion

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience Mark Twain said, "Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable...

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Webmasters, Google Sprechen Deutsch

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Vanessa Fox</span><br /><br />We love our webmaster community, and with <a href="http://www.google.com/webmasters">Webmaster Central</a>, we provide as much information and interaction about how Google crawls and indexes websites<span> as we can, in 18 languages. We also regularly provide information and tips in our <a href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/03/brand-new-german-webmaster-central.html">webmaster blog</a>. The blog has been available only in English. Until now. We're very happy to launch our first non-English webmaster blog: the <a href="http://googlewebmastercentral-de.blogspot.com/">German Webmaster-Zentrale Blog</a>. If you speak German, head there to read German versions of the English blog posts, as well as news and tips specifically for the German market. Willkommen!

Webmasters, Google Sprechen Deutsch

Posted by Vanessa Fox We love our webmaster community, and with Webmaster Central , we provide as much information and interaction about how...

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Three summers of open source

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Chris DiBona, Open Source Program Manager</span><br /><br />Everything is ready. All systems are go. We're now accepting applications for the third <a href="http://code.google.com/soc/">Google Summer of Code</a>, Google's program for introducing college students to open source software development.<br /><br />Not everyone knows it, but open source plays an enormous role at Google. Each time you use the Google search engine, you're using open source software. Google relies on the Linux kernel, GCC, python and Samba and commits code into each of those projects.<br /><br />We also work closely with the open source developer community. Googlers have released hundreds of thousands of lines of code, both as patches to existing projects and as new and wholly open source projects, such as the <a href="http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/">Google Web Toolkit</a>. We've funded <a href="http://osuosl.org/info/sponsors">great work at universities</a> and we host many thousands of active open source projects on <a href="http://code.google.com/">code.google.com</a>'s project hosting facility. Just shy of a year old, this hosting system has become one of the largest online development communities ever developed, second only to our friends at <a href="http://sourceforge.net/">SourceForge.Net</a>.<br /><br />But back to the Google Summer of Code. Last year we paid 630 students from 450 schools in 90 countries $4,500 each to work on open source software projects. These projects, selected by some 100 open source mentoring organizations from over 6,000 applications, provided students with invaluable real-world programming experience.<br /><br />Many of our former students are still actively involved with their mentoring organizations. <a href="http://www.webchick.net/">Angela Byron</a>, for example, started working with the Drupal project during Google <a href="http://code.google.com/summerofcode05.html">Summer of Code 2005</a>; she went on to become an organization administrator for the project for Google Summer of Code 2006 and now sits on the board of the newly created <a href="http://www.drupal.org/">Drupal Association</a>. Other students, such as <a href="http://steffenpingel.de/">Steffen Pingel</a>, have been voted in as committers to their projects. Steffen began working with the <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/mylar/">Eclipse Mylar</a> project for Google <a href="http://code.google.com/soc/2006/">Summer of Code 2006</a> and was voted in as a committer just as he was completing his project work. Still others have gone on to internships or full-time jobs with us or other companies, including IBM and NetApp, or have even started their own consulting businesses.<br /><br />This year we're happy to say that we're expanding the program to accommodate an additional 200 students and some additional open source organizations. If you're a college student who'd like to program over the summer for the good of open source, <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/google-summer-of-code-announce/web/guide-to-the-gsoc-web-app-for-student-applicants">we're taking applications until March 24</a>. We look forward to seeing yours!

Three summers of open source

Posted by Chris DiBona, Open Source Program Manager Everything is ready. All systems are go. We're now accepting applications for the th...

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Google News in Hindi

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Vinodh Kumar R, Software Engineer</span><br /><br />Millions of Hindi speakers across India and the rest of the world have a reason to cheer: Google News is now available in <a href="http://news.google.com/news?ned=hi_in">Hindi</a>.<br /><br /><a href="http://news.google.com/">Google News</a> gathers news stories from the various Hindi news sources on the web and presents a ranked one-page summary with all the links to your favourite news sources in the various sections. One of the interesting challenges we faced in this edition was the fact that not all our Hindi news sources are in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8">UTF-8 format</a>. Though we strongly back and urge the adoption of the <a href="http://www.unicode.org/">Unicode</a>-based UTF-8 standard by all Indian language websites, we didn't want to deprive our readers from reaching content on some of their favourite news sources which are not yet there. So we internally translate this information to the UTF-8 standard and do all the processing necessary to provide links to these sites. We hope that this edition will enable the huge Hindi-speaking Internet population to easily reach all of your favourite news content across the web, and also help news publishers to connect to their audience better.<br /><br />We at the <a href="http://www.google.co.in/jobs/sw-bangalore.html">Google Bangalore</a> office are pleased to launch our first Indian language edition of Google News -- and we will certainly be following up with more Indian languages in the future. On a personal note, this launch also marks the completion of a fun-filled and exciting first year for me at Google.<br /><br />And now I'm off to tell my beloved family members and friends all the great news --or should I say Google News?

Google News in Hindi

Posted by Vinodh Kumar R, Software Engineer Millions of Hindi speakers across India and the rest of the world have a reason to cheer: Google...

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Taking steps to further improve our privacy practices

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Peter Fleischer, Privacy Counsel-Europe, and Nicole Wong, Deputy General Counsel</span><br /><br />When you search on Google, we collect information about your search, such as the query itself, IP addresses and cookie details. Previously, we kept this data for as long as it was useful. Today we're pleased to report a change in our privacy policy: Unless we're legally required to retain log data for longer, we will anonymize our server logs after a limited period of time. When we implement this policy change in the coming months, we will continue to keep server log data (so that we can improve Google's services and protect them from security and other abuses)—but will make this data much more anonymous, so that it can no longer be identified with individual users, after 18-24 months.<br /><br />Just as we continuously work to improve our products, we also work toward having the best privacy practices for our users. This includes designing privacy protections into our products (like Google Talk's “<a href="http://www.google.com/talk/chathistory.html#offrecord">off the record</a>” feature or Google Desktop’s <a href="http://desktop.google.com/gettingstarted.html#stop" title="“pause” and “lock search”">“pause” and “lock search”</a> controls). This also means providing clear, easy to understand <a href="http://www.google.com/privacy.html">privacy policies</a> that help you make informed decisions about using our services.<br /><br />After talking with leading privacy stakeholders in Europe and the U.S., we're pleased to be taking this important step toward protecting your privacy. By anonymizing our server logs after 18-24 months, we think we’re striking the right balance between two goals: continuing to improve Google’s services for you, while providing more transparency and certainty about our retention practices. In the future, it's possible that data retention laws will obligate us to retain logs for longer periods. Of course, you can always choose to have us retain this data for more personalized services like <a href="http://www.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=1593">Search History</a>. But that's up to you.<br /><br />Our engineers are already busy working out the technical details, and we hope to implement this new data policy over the coming months (and within a year's time). We’ll communicate more as we work out these details, but for now, we wanted you to know that we’re working on this additional step to strengthen your privacy.<br /><br />If you want to know more, read the <a href="http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/services.google.com/en/us/blog_resources/google_log_retention_policy_faq.pdf">log retention FAQ</a> (PDF).<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Update</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> (April 2008:)</span> After the explanation above concerning our decision to anonymize our server logs after 18-24 months, we subsequently decided on 18 months, which we explain <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/how-long-should-google-remember.html">here</a>.<br /><a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/how-long-should-google-remember.html" target="_blank"></a>

Taking steps to further improve our privacy practices

Posted by Peter Fleischer, Privacy Counsel-Europe, and Nicole Wong, Deputy General Counsel When you search on Google, we collect information...

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