What's hot today?

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Corey Vickrey, Software Engineer</span><br /><br />For more than six years, we have compiled a regular list of popular searches called the <a href="http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html">Google Zeitgeist</a>. This has been our way to highlight the sorts of queries people type into the Google search box every day. More recently, we unveiled <a href="http://www.google.com/trends">Google Trends</a> to show the popularity of search terms in relation to each other overtime, and how different cities or regions may care (or not) about the trends.<br /><br />And today we're introducing a new toy we are calling <a href="http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends">Hot Trends</a>. It's a new feature of Google Trends for sharing the the hottest current searches with you in very close to real time. What's on our collective mind as we search for information? What's interesting to people right now? Hot Trends will tell you. At a glance, you'll see the huge variety of topics capturing our attention, from current events to daily crossword puzzle clues to the latest celebrity gossip. Hot Trends is updated throughout the day, so check back often.<br /><br />For each Hot Trend, you will see results from Google News, Google Blog Search and web search, which help explain why the search is hot. For example, the <a href="http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?q=creed+thoughts&date=2007-5-17">#7 item on Thursday, May 17th</a> was the cryptic phrase [creed thoughts]. The associated news stories and blog results show that this odd term is the name of a fake website mentioned on the season finale of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Office</span>. Mystery solved. Of course, some searches are not as easily explained. Visit the <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/google-trends-hot-trends">Hot Trends group</a> to read the explanations of others and offer your own.<br /><br />If you want to look further back, you can also see what queries were hot on a particular day. On Wednesday, May 16th, [<a href="http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?q=melinda+doolittle&date=2007-5-16&sa=X">melinda doolittle</a>], [<a href="http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?q=halo+3+beta&date=2007-5-16&sa=X">halo 3 beta</a>], and [<a href="http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?q=ge+dishwasher+recall&date=2007-5-16&sa=X">ge dishwasher recall</a>] were on the Hot Trends list. If you don't know why, maybe you'll learn something.<br /><br />Hot Trends aren't the search terms people look for most often -- those are pretty predictable, like [weather] or [games] or perhaps [myspace]. Yes, [sex] too. Instead, the Hot Trends algorithm analyzes millions of searches to find those that are deviating the most relative to their past traffic. And the outcome is the Hot Trends list.<br /><br />In addition to Hot Trends, we've updated Google Trends so that it's easier to use and, we hope, more useful to you. In addition to viewing the top search terms by country and city, you can view the top "subregions" (e.g. states within the U.S.) across more than 70 countries. You can now compare the leading <a href="http://www.google.com/trends?q=hillary+clinton%2C+rudy+giuliani%2C+barack+obama%2C+john+mccain">presidential candidates</a> around the country, for instance, or find out which states have the worst <a href="http://www.google.com/trends?q=mosquitoes&ctab=0&geo=US">mosquito problems</a>.<br /><br />With the release of Hot Trends, we're retiring the weekly Zeitgest list, but we will still compile monthly lists for each country, and will continue our annual year-end roll-ups too.<br /><br />Hot Trends is currently available only in English, but we hope to release international versions in the future.

What's hot today?

Posted by Corey Vickrey, Software Engineer For more than six years, we have compiled a regular list of popular searches called the Google Ze...

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Registration open for our scalability conference

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Amanda Camp, Software Engineer<br /><br />As we <a href="http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2007/02/seattle-conference-on-scalability.html">noted earlier</a>, our Conference on Scalability is taking place in Seattle on June 23. And now <a href="http://www.google.com/events/scalability_seattle/index.html">registration is open</a> until June 15. We have nine great talks from industry and academia including keynotes by Jeff Dean and Marissa Mayer from Google and Werner Vogels from Amazon. Space is limited, so do sign up now.<br /><br />We're excited to bring together so many talented people from the Seattle area. Looking forward to seeing you there!</span>

Registration open for our scalability conference

Posted by Amanda Camp, Software Engineer As we noted earlier , our Conference on Scalability is taking place in Seattle on June 23. And now ...

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Massage interviews?

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Reza Behforooz, Massage expert and Software Engineer</span><br /><br />Life at the Googleplex is often full of fun surprises. One day, I was asked if I could do a massage interview. I was already a big fan of our massage program, and I was familiar with doing interviews at Google, but I didn't know about massage interviews. Regardless, it sounded Googley, and I decided to help.<br /><br />Getting a massage at work is a favorite <a href="http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/static.py?page=benefits.html&benefits=us#bbb">perk</a> among Googlers. As with anyone we hire, our massage therapists have to go through an interview process...but the actual interviews are a little unique. We ask the therapists to do what they do best -- give massages. And as Googlers, it is our duty to help with the hard task of receiving table or chair massages as part of the interviews. Though we do have to write detailed feedback about the massage, just like any other interview, in this interview, all I had to do was close my eyes and relax. Who knew interviewing could be so easy!

Massage interviews?

Posted by Reza Behforooz, Massage expert and Software Engineer Life at the Googleplex is often full of fun surprises. One day, I was asked i...

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Google Apps Partner Edition

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Hunter Middleton, Product Manager</span><br /><br />From the beginning, we envisioned making <a href="http://google.com/a">Google Apps</a> available to any organization that might want to offer this innovative set of services to its employees, customers, students, members, or any other associates of the organization. Today, we're excited to take another step in that direction by releasing a version of Google Apps specifically designed for ISPs, portals, and other service providers, whether you have a few thousand subscribers or over a million. This new version, which we're calling the <a href="http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/partner_edition.html">Partner Edition</a>, makes it easy for large and small service providers to offer your subscribers the latest versions of powerful tools, like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets, without having to worry about hosting, updating, or maintaining any of the services yourself. All you have to do is point and click in the easy admin control panel and figure out what branding you'd like to layer on top of the products in order to create a customized look and feel. You can quit spending your resources and time on applications like webmail -- and leave the work to our busy bees at the Googleplex.

Google Apps Partner Edition

Posted by Hunter Middleton, Product Manager From the beginning, we envisioned making Google Apps available to any organization that might w...

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Google Book Search becomes more comprehensive

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Adam Mathes, Product Manager, Book Search</span><br /><a href="http://books.google.com/"><br />Google Book Search</a> allows you to instantly search the full text of over a million digitized books, but we thought that wasn't quite enough. Now when you search you'll get both digitized book results as well as records for millions of other books that still just exist in the analog world.<br /><br />When you view these new added book records, you can often read reviews, a summary, or see what other people had to say about the book around the web. Since these books haven't been digitally indexed yet, you can't preview the text online, but if you've discovered something great, we offer links to buy the book or <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/finding-wealth-in-your-library-and.html">find it in a library near you</a>.<br /><br />We're doing this because we want to offer users the most comprehensive book search in the world - whether it's a book you can <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=cyokAAAAMAAJ&pg=PPA7">read online now</a>, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=dO-sDl1ySHoC&printsec=frontcover">preview samples</a>, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=HbwYAAAAMAAJ&dq=paul+otlet&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;q=documentation&pgis=1">see a few snippets</a>, or just read what <a href="http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0783556756">others have written</a> about the book. We're still very busy digitizing millions more books, but want to make as much discoverable as possible today.<br /><br />To find out more, check out our post on <a href="http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2007/05/found-more-books.html">Inside Google Book Search</a>.

Google Book Search becomes more comprehensive

Posted by Adam Mathes, Product Manager, Book Search Google Book Search allows you to instantly search the full text of over a million digit...

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Oh, the places you'll go....

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Tammy McLeod, Software Engineer, Picasa Web Albums</span><br /><br />If all you ever wanted to do is direct, now's your chance. You can use our free photo sharing service, <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com">Picasa Web Albums</a>, to create nifty portable Flash slideshows that you can easily embed in any blog or web page. Check out this slideshow of our new Hollywood-themed office in Santa Monica.<br /><br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" flashvars="host= picasaweb.google.com&captions=1&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Ftester%2Falbumid%2F5061951474333359457%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss%26authkey%3D3V8IljiqEO0" pluginspage=" http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" height="192" width="288"></embed><br /><br />The playback controls are built right in -- just roll over the slideshow to reveal them -- and it just takes a quick click for friends to get started on creating their own masterpiece.

Oh, the places you'll go....

Posted by Tammy McLeod, Software Engineer, Picasa Web Albums If all you ever wanted to do is direct, now's your chance. You can use our ...

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Behind the scenes with universal search

<span class="byline-author">Posted by David Bailey, Tech Lead, and Johanna Wright, Product Manager, universal search</span><br /><br />So when we were asked to make the vision <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/05/universal-search-best-answer-is-still.html">Marissa describes</a> about universal search into a reality, we admit we were a little daunted. Googlers had tried before to do this without success -- several times. Finding the best answer across multiple content types is a well-known hard problem in the search field. Besides that, we wondered if we had become too big a company to pull off a project this complex.<br /><br />Here's the challenge in a nutshell: Until now, we've only been able to show news, books, local and other such results at the top of the page, like this example for [<a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=trends+in+education+&btnG=Google+Search">trends in education</a>]. But it's a tall order to earn placement at the top of our search results, so plenty often we end up not showing these kinds of results even when they might be useful. If only we could smartly place such results elsewhere on the page when they don't quite deserve the top, we could share the benefits of these great Google features with people much more often.<br /><br />One challenge was being able to regularly search through all of the additional content types to find relevant results. After all, you don't know if there might be a minor news story or an obscure book relevant to your query unless you go and check. But Google's massive compute cluster -- and much effort by our infrastructure experts -- gave us a leg up on that one, and we can now search these disparate types of information about as efficiently as we search our massive index of web pages. We may have melted down a data center or two along the way, but then bugs are part of life in this business!<br /><br />The next challenge was deciding when and where such results should blend in. Fortunately we have some of the world's experts on ranking, and have been able to apply the lessons learned on web search to ensure that we show news only for newsworthy queries, scanned books only when there aren't better web results, etc. It can be tricky. As we learned the hard way, just because everyone under the sun is writing about Anna Nicole Smith doesn't mean news about her should show up for the search [baby names].<br /><br />Lastly, we faced the challenge of the user interface you see on the screen -- the UI. The new UI for these results is subtle, but this is one reason why the project is fun for our designers and usability experts: they get to focus on creating a simple experience for you. For example, with news results they designed a compact look for the result that includes helpful items like an image and a date, but is limited to just the most salient information. Or take our book search results, which call out the author and number of pages in the book. (Of course, we learned that sometimes you don't even need to design a user interface. In one early usability study, shortly after Barry Bonds broke Babe Ruth's home run record, we asked people "how many home runs has Barry Bonds hit?" hoping they would type [barry bonds] into the search box. Instead, each and every one simply blurted out "715".)<br /><br />We also called on experts from each of our feature areas such as News and Local, and were delighted to find our startup mindset is alive and well. Folks from all over found spare time and pitched in to get us to the finish line. There were many nights when we went to bed knowing that plenty of the team's IM status still reported they were online.<br /><br />And after all this elbow grease, finally we have something that works. What does it mean for you?<br /><br />Although it's just a beginning, this first pass of universal search focuses on video, news, local and books. Now you'll be able to get more information Google knows about directly from within the search results. You won't have to know about specialized areas of content. If you're looking for the [<a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=atkins+southwestern+pork+fajitas&btnG=Search">atkins southwestern pork fajitas</a>] recipe, we can now link you right to that page in the book. Or if, like me, you've been busy these past few days and have not caught up with your Tivo, don't type [<a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=sopranos&btnG=Search">sopranos</a>] into Google, because our news result will be a giant spoiler. The search for [<a href="http://www.google.com/search?aq=t&oq=rachmaninoff+concerto+&hl=en&q=rachmaninoff+concerto+3">rachmaninoff concerto 3</a>] includes a video of Vladimir Horowitz performing this piece (scroll down to see it), and [<a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Animator+vs.+Animation+2&btnG=Search">Animator vs. Animation 2</a>] is pretty cool as well. (And as Johanna notes: I was delighted to see that when querying for my son's name a video showed up too.)<br /><br />This is just the tip of the iceberg in making Google results more comprehensive and useful. It has involved launching a number of new systems that will make it much easier for us to continue making improvements so you get the most relevant information from our varied content areas. We hope you like it. And finally, we're especially happy to know that Google is still very much a place where we can get big things done!

Behind the scenes with universal search

Posted by David Bailey, Tech Lead, and Johanna Wright, Product Manager, universal search So when we were asked to make the vision Marissa de...

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