More organizing tools

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Darren Delaye, User Experience Designer</span><br /><br />We collaborate using <a href="http://docs.google.com/">Google Docs & Spreadsheets</a> so often at work that I now have more than 300 online documents. My project teams create shared documents and spreadsheets for everything: taking notes in meetings, planning product launches, analyzing usability studies, and much more. I also share docs with friends at work to plan baseball outings, and my fiancée and I are using a shared spreadsheet to help manage the guest list for our upcoming wedding. In other words, I'm one of many with a desperate need to organize all my online documents. Thankfully, I got the chance to design a new interface for Google Docs & Spreadsheets that includes folders and some convenient ways to quickly manage and access all my documents (and if you're like me, your own collection of online docs and spreadsheets is growing daily).<br /><br />Now when you sign in, you'll see a new interface that lets you create personal folders for each of your projects, and drag your online documents and spreadsheets into them. On the lefthand side, you'll see a list of all the people you are collaborating with; click on any name to see all the files you're working on with them. To read more about this new interface, head over to the <a href="http://google-d-s.blogspot.com/2007/06/entirely-new-way-to-stay-organized.html">Docs & Spreadsheets blog</a>.<br /><br />The wedding planning continues -- but at least all the docs I need are now easier to find in a folder. Hope your own organizing is easier now too.

More organizing tools

Posted by Darren Delaye, User Experience Designer We collaborate using Google Docs & Spreadsheets so often at work that I now have more...

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Introducing Google Earth Outreach

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Rebecca Moore, Manager, Google Earth Outreach</span><br /><br />When <a href="http://earth.google.com/">Google Earth</a> launched two years ago, it was fun to see that many people around the world used it to fly to their homes, navigate around their neighborhoods, and explore the planet. But when, in September 2005, it was used to rescue stranded victims in the aftermath of Katrina, we realized that Google Earth had the potential to be a significant tool beyond personal exploration. We began to see public-benefit KMLs created for things like environmental protection and global public health. A large number of non-profit groups started contacting us, asking good questions: can Google Earth help us illustrate our projects in a new and more compelling manner than text and slideshows? Are there methods or tools for importing our existing data into Google Earth? Can you tell us about any other non-profits who’ve been successful at using GE to reach a new audience, raise awareness, gain volunteers, inspire people into action, and create a tangible impact?<br /><br />We listened carefully and worked on this for more than a year, and now, the answer is “Yes!” Today we're formally launching <a href="http://earth.google.com/outreach/index.html">Google Earth Outreach</a>, a program designed to empower non-profit groups with the resources, tools, and inspiration that they need to leverage the power of Google Earth for their cause. This is where public service groups can find online guides and video tutorials, inspiring case studies and a gallery of high-quality, public-benefit KML. We are offering free Google Earth Pro licenses to qualified non-profit 501(c)(3) organizations. And the Earth Outreach team is also moderating <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/google-earth-outreach/topics">a forum</a> to foster discussion, exchange ideas, and give technical support.<br /><br />We're excited to see the birth of Google Earth Outreach, and it's truly an honor for us to be able to support the critically important work of these groups. As Dr. Jane Goodall said, "Only if we understand can we care. Only if we care will we help. With Google Earth Outreach, more people have the chance to see, to care, and then to act."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Update</span>: Here's some video from our Google Earth Outreach event on Tuesday. Enjoy!<br /><br /><object height="350" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/qYJwxnD9JmY"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/qYJwxnD9JmY" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>

Introducing Google Earth Outreach

Posted by Rebecca Moore, Manager, Google Earth Outreach When Google Earth launched two years ago, it was fun to see that many people around...

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Why we're buying DoubleClick

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Alex Kinnier, Group Product Manager</span><br /><br />In April we <a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/doubleclick.html" title="announced">announced</a> that we're buying DoubleClick, a leading company in the ad serving business. When we made this announcement, we gave some of our reasons. But because online advertising is complicated, I thought I'd step back a bit and offer some more context. If you're an expert, please bear with me, as some of what follows will seem elementary to those already familiar with the online advertising world. If you're not, I hope this gives you a better understanding of how advertisers, publishers, ad serving companies, agencies and other companies such as Google all fit into this exciting new mix.<br /><br /><b>A little history</b><br />In the earliest years, online ads were simple banner ads on websites. Advertisers would purchase these banner ads for those sites their customers would likely visit. A tire company, for example, would place banner ads on sites for automobile enthusiasts.<br /><br />An innovation followed: Text-based ads targeted at search. Type “drip irrigation” into a search engine and up pop ads, or “sponsored links,” to gardening service and supply companies. This development made online advertising accessible to small advertisers for the first time. According to a May 2007 IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) study called the "<a href="http://www.iab.net/resources/adrevenue/pdf/IAB_PwC_2006_Final.pdf" title=""Internet Advertising Revenue Report,"">Internet Advertising Revenue Report</a>," text-based search ads now account for 40 percent of online ads. Google, Yahoo! and MSN are the leaders in managing this category of text-based ads.<p></p>The same IAB study notes that display ads account for roughly another 40 percent of online ad sales. Unlike text ads, these may incorporate 3-D graphics, full-motion video, sound and user interactivity. And the remaining 20 percent consists of other categories such as email, classified and lead-generation ads.<br /><br />Three portals – AOL, Yahoo! and MSN – lead the industry in display ads. Each has more than $1 billion in annual display ad revenue. Content sites such as CNET and ESPN.com are also in the game. Google, however, has been a minor player in display advertising.<br /><br />Meanwhile, ad serving companies such as DoubleClick, Atlas, and MediaPlex have been helping advertisers get their ads onto these sites and measure how effective the ads are. Since Google has never played in this space, acquiring DoubleClick will enable us to complement our search and content-based advertising capabilities. Its products and technologies will help to improve online advertising for consumers, advertisers and publishers.<br /><br />By enabling our AdSense network to work with DoubleClick’s delivery mechanisms, for example, advertisers can obtain more precise metrics in order to judge the effectiveness of their campaigns. The combination of the technologies and expertise of Google and DoubleClick will help publishers better monetize their unsold inventory, thus helping to fuel the creation of even more rich and diverse content on the Internet.<br /><br /><b>What ad serving is</b><br />As you might expect, ad serving is the act of serving, or delivering, ads to websites. Google and DoubleClick play different but complementary roles in online advertising. Google primarily sells ads, and DoubleClick delivers (serves) ads. The relationship between Google and DoubleClick is analogous to the relationship between Amazon.com and Federal Express. Amazon.com makes money by selling a book to the consumer. Federal Express makes money by delivering it to the consumer.<br /><br />For some perspective on the relative size of the ad serving business versus the online ad sales business, some industry estimates put the latter, globally, at about $20-30 billion. According to various <a href="http://www.emarketer.com/" title="eMarketer">eMarketer</a> studies (available by subscription), estimates of ad serving, on the other hand, are many times smaller -- probably 20 times smaller, or even less.<br /><br /><b>How ad serving works</b><br />There are two types of ad-serving products: publisher and advertiser-agency. Publishers use ad-serving products to manage how and when the ads they have sold appear in their websites. For example, will the ad appear on the front page of the site, or on a subsequent page? The process of placing the ad on the appropriate page and in the appropriate size is managed by the publisher’s ad server.<br /><br />In addition to placing ads in the right location at the right time, ad servers report on the performance of the ads. This is an absolutely vital function. Real-time performance reporting enables advertisers and agencies to change the content, and timing of ads almost on the fly. The value to the advertiser-agency of an ad-serving company such as DoubleClick is having a single place to measure and report on all online campaigns for ads that run on different sites across the web.<br /><br /><b>How Google and DoubleClick differ</b><br />Google makes money primarily by selling text-based ads to advertisers and their agencies. These are displayed on Google.com and partner sites through our <a href="http://adsense.google.com/" title="AdSense program">AdSense program</a>. We get paid when consumers click on the ads.<br /><br />DoubleClick is in the ad-serving business and has two primary products. DART for Advertisers is an ad server that gives advertisers/agencies the tools to plan, deliver and report on their online ads. DART for Publishers gives publishers the tools to place ads on their site, optimize them, and assess placement to make the best use of their ad inventory. For the most part, DoubleClick is paid by advertisers and publishers to serve and report on ads. These are two vital and interrelated functions. Allowing agencies and advertisers to deliver ads in the right context and monitor their effectiveness maximizes the return on investment for a given ad or campaign. Ultimately, this leads to better and more relevant ads for the consumer.<br /><br /><b>Why we're buying DoubleClick</b><br />In summary, we're buying DoubleClick because: <ol><li>DoubleClick's products and technology are complementary to our search and and content-based text advertising business, and give us new opportunities to improve online advertising for consumers, advertisers and publishers.</li><li>Historically, we've not allowed third parties to serve into Google's AdSense network, which has made it hard for advertisers to get performance metrics. Together, Google and DoubleClick can deliver a more open platform for advertisers, and provide the metrics they need to manage marketing campaigns.</li><li>By combining Google's infrastructure with DoubleClick's knowledge of agencies and publishers, we can create the next generation of more innovative ad serving technology, one that significantly improves the efficiency and effectiveness of online advertising.</li><li>To manage ad inventory, some of the largest publishers use DoubleClick DART for Publishers – but a good portion of it goes unsold. It's our view that the combination of DoubleClick and Google will help these publishers succeed by monetizing their unsold inventory. </li></ol>We believe DoubleClick can help Google deliver better, more relevant display ads, which improves the online experience of consumers. From a technical perspective, Google will also be able to get web pages to load faster by reducing latency from ad servers. Publishers will benefit by making more money from remnant inventory and – as has been the case with other technologies we've acquired – we hope to make ad serving more accessible. Smaller publishers would get access to DoubleClick's ad serving technology, enabling them to better compete in the global marketplace.<br /><br />Advertisers and agencies will benefit, too. AdSense will support certain ad tags so advertisers will be able to use a broader selection of formats in our ad network, improving ad relevance. And the experience for advertisers will be more efficient, because there will be an ad server that provides consolidated reporting and management of display ads on all properties and networks. More generally, we'll be able to use our technology and record of innovation to improve the quality of existing products in the marketplace. We intend to invest heavily in R&D and product development to respond to the demand from publishers, advertisers and agencies for better tools.<br /><br />In short, Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick will benefit all parties in the online advertising business, including advertisers, publishers, agencies and, most importantly, consumers.

Why we're buying DoubleClick

Posted by Alex Kinnier, Group Product Manager In April we announced that we're buying DoubleClick, a leading company in the ad serving ...

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New dictionary translations

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Miguel García, Software Engineer, Zürich Engineering Office</span><br /><br />Google's <a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/faq_translation.html#whatis">automatic translation</a> is handy for getting translations of complete sentences, paragraphs, and documents. But when you need to translate a single word, a bilingual dictionary can be very useful because it gives you translations for the many possible meanings a word might have. With that in mind, we've added <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate_dict?hl=en">dictionary translations</a> to <a href="http://translate.google.com/">Google Translate</a>. Now, for example, if you want to know how to say "play" in Spanish, you can <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate_dict?q=play&sa=N&hl=en&langpair=en%7Ces">use our dictionary translation</a> and learn that depending on the context it can be "jugar", "tocar", or "obra", among others.

New dictionary translations

Posted by Miguel García, Software Engineer, Zürich Engineering Office Google's automatic translation is handy for getting translations ...

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A smooth Apps move

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Vikaram Gupta, Software Engineer, Google Apps</span><br /><br />Today, it becomes a lot easier for organizations and schools to start using Google Apps email services without leaving any of their valuable email data behind. Our new self-service mail migration tools enables administrators using the Premier and Education Editions to easily copy existing mail from an IMAP server over to Google Apps. Now businesses and schools can spend less time worrying about "maintaining infrastructure" and focus more on the things that matter most to them -- like <a href="http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/customers.html#biz">healthcare </a> or <a href="http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/customers.html#edu">educating students</a>. <br /><br />One of the first organizations to test this out, Central Piedmont Community College, replaced its old email system for 30,000 users in just 3 weeks. And that process came down to 3 million emails flying from their server over to ours in just 24 hours -- more than 2,000 emails per minute, all without missing a beat.<br /><br />Once you're part of the Google Apps family, you can be sure there are more exciting things to come. In the past month alone, we added <a href="http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/new.html">five new improvements</a> to make it even easier for organizations to share information and work together.

A smooth Apps move

Posted by Vikaram Gupta, Software Engineer, Google Apps Today, it becomes a lot easier for organizations and schools to start using Google A...

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Google and open source OCR

<span class="byline-author">Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">From time to time, our own <a href="http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/raman/">T.V. Raman</a> shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.</span><br /><br />As someone who cannot see, I prefer to live in a mostly paperless world. This means ruthlessly turning every piece of paper that enters my life into a set of bits that I can process digitally. I scan in everything. Until now, I have relied on commercial OCR packages to convert these images into readable text. OCR is perhaps one of the areas where the benefits of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law">Moore's Law</a> are most evident; today, OCR can do remarkably well when handed a page image. Until now, my only dissatisfaction with the status quo in this area has been that commercial OCR engines afford me little flexibility with respect to training them to do better on documents that are specific to me.<br /><br />The advent of our own open source OCR initiative, <a href="http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/">OCRopus</a> (source code: <a href="http://ocropus.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/">Ocropus Sources</a>) is a welcome change in this regard. I introduced support for <a href="http://code.google.com/p/emacspeak">OCRopus in Emacspeak</a> recently, and the HTML output this produces compares favorably with output from commercial OCR engines, provided you place the page at the right orientation on the scanner. OCRopus' extensibility, and the ability to express the OCR as a structured HTML document makes it an ideal starting point for producing rich spoken output. The possibilities are enormous for people being able to collectively train, customize and improve an OCR engine.

Google and open source OCR

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as...

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Asia-Pacific Open House June 28th

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Christine Hong, Head of Engineering Operations, Asia Pacific</span><br /><br />We're hosting an Asia Pacific open house for engineers on Thursday, June 28 from 6-9pm on the <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=1600+Amphitheatre+Pky,+Mountain+View,+CA+94043&sll=37.0625,-95.677071&sspn=82.939223,105.996094&ie=UTF8&ll=37.423412,-122.086515&spn=0.042466,0.051756&amp;amp;amp;z=14&iwloc=addr&om=1">Google campus</a> in Mountain View. Ping Li from Accel Partners will moderate a panel discussion by the four directors of our engineering centers in India, Korea, Taiwan, and China. They'll talk about top tech trends in their respective markets, and we'll demo products developed in each location. Of course, there will be plenty of food & drink, and a raffle. This should be an informative networking event for Bay Area engineers and entrepreneurs with a technical background.<br /><br />Agenda: <ul><li>6-6:30 pm - Registration, food, drinks</li><li>6:30-8 pm - Panel discussion and Q&A</li><li>8-9 pm - Product demo, networking, and a raffle drawing</li></ul>If you're an engineer or an entrepreneur with a technical background who'd like to come, please email me at <span style="font-style: italic;">chong at google dot com</span> for your invitation. Make the subject line "APAC Open House 2007" and include:<br />- name<br />- title<br />- affiliation/company<br />- contact info<br /><br />We're looking forward to seeing you on the 28th.

Asia-Pacific Open House June 28th

Posted by Christine Hong, Head of Engineering Operations, Asia Pacific We're hosting an Asia Pacific open house for engineers on Thursda...

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