healthy4u

Namaste India!

Namaste India!

Posted by M T Raghunath and Gokul Nath Babu Manoharan, Software Engineers Happy 60th birthday, India! We can't wait to celebrate, but we...

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Posted by Alex Kinnier, Group Product Manager We're always experimenting and testing ways to deliver relevant and new kinds of ads, and as part of that, we recently started running a test of an ad serving technology that will help us understand online ad serving better, and allow us to experiment with some new approaches to privacy for third-party ad servers. The privacy features we'll test in these experiments follow some recently-announced policies, such as a <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/cookies-expiring-sooner-to-improve.html" id="h-8r">shorter expiration date for the cookie</a> set on your computer and <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/how-long-should-google-remember.html">anonymization of the logs data after 18 months</a>. In our ad-serving tests, we're introducing an <a href="http://www.google.com/ads/gcc_privacy.html">opt-out mechanism</a> so people can opt out of the test ad-serving cookie if they wish. In addition, we’re going to experiment with ways the industry could provide improved transparency for consumers and providing users with additional controls over the data gathered by ad servers. Some of the ideas we're exploring include: <ul><li>using "crumbled" cookies, so that the data typically associated with one unique identifying number or "cookie ID" will be broken up among multiple different cookies and diffuse the ad history of individual users; </li></ul><ul><li>providing better forms of notice within ads, to help users understand who is serving the ads they see, and what data is being collected; and</li></ul><ul><li>giving users the ability to provide feedback to us about the ads they like and don't like. </li></ul>Like all experiments, these ideas may or may not work out. And they won't be effective unless the industry adopts them -- we are not likely to implement these ideas alone. But we are excited to start innovating in this area for our advertising customers and for our users. We welcome your <a href="mailto:testadserving@google.com">feedback.</a>

Online ad-serving tests

Posted by Alex Kinnier, Group Product Manager We're always experimenting and testing ways to deliver relevant and new kinds of ads, and ...

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A simple way to get more storage

Posted by Ryan Aquino, Software QA Engineer Lead, Picasa Web Albums As someone who tests Google products daily, I know that the simplest solution is often the one that works best. In the case of online storage, whether it's a picture, a video or an email, you should just, well, be able to store it without having to worry about whether you've got enough space in each particular product. That's why the Picasa team is pleased to tell you that in a few hours we'll be rolling out extra storage that you can purchase to use across several Google products (today, Picasa Web Albums and Gmail; soon, other applications like Google Docs & Spreadsheets). That will help make storage really useful, like letting you upload lots of full resolution images to Picasa Web Albums. When you reach the limit of free storage (i.e., 1GB for Picasa Web Albums, 2.8GB for Gmail), consider this your overflow solution. Plans start at $20/year for 6GB (yes, $5 cheaper than before), with larger plans ranging up to 250GB. If only testing everything were this easy. We'll update this post as soon as we're ready to take your order. Update: And we're live! To buy more storage, <a href="https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageStorage" title="Manage Storage" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">go here.</a>

A simple way to get more storage

Posted by Ryan Aquino, Software QA Engineer Lead, Picasa Web Albums As someone who tests Google products daily, I know that the simplest sol...

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Finding fresh results

Posted by Peeyush Ranjan, Engineering Manager and Hong Zhang, Software Engineer We work hard to keep our search results as fresh as possible so that they reflect the most up to date content on the web. However, given the immense medium the Internet is, it's hard to find all those pages that have just come into existence and make them available when people come looking for the latest information on new topics, whether it's a highly anticipated cell phone launch, news about a popular celebrity or the latest political maneuvers. What makes providing the latest information harder is the small amount of time we have between the page creation and when we'd like to serve those results to you. Despite these challenges, one thing should not be hard: finding the freshest results on the page. To make it easier for you to spot the newer pages among the search results, we are now going to tell you how long ago we've seen a page containing what we think you're looking for. For example, if on August 6th you were searching on Google.com for latest financial information following the Friday financial sector action, here's how that result would have looked in the past: <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAlQEd4xA8EcbQli9-SiCYG3cExJLz8Gs9zRZ_cUuLFkPz5iLHWvrCfSJjukUg6beT4N23KyLuR500Z1IaYDRJRVCPPuH-yRC1ZGrFGBAYEve30BXzK3mrRFERXvSgD66LVgr7hY1hTi2l/s1600-h/Fresh+result-old.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5095987548777549410" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAlQEd4xA8EcbQli9-SiCYG3cExJLz8Gs9zRZ_cUuLFkPz5iLHWvrCfSJjukUg6beT4N23KyLuR500Z1IaYDRJRVCPPuH-yRC1ZGrFGBAYEve30BXzK3mrRFERXvSgD66LVgr7hY1hTi2l/s320/Fresh+result-old.jpg" style="cursor: pointer;" /></a> From this you could only see that we crawled this page at a day level granularity. But now when you do this search you will also be able to tell how long ago we noticed this page, so you can quickly pinpoint which of these is results is likely to contain more recent information. Here's the same example showing the annotation that tells you there's something new in the results we've seen recently. <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuTwOwq2FdZPV-swYdew9E-Wa8rVt0K3PkJ9vG9PY6Itci3A1GRtklv6g0CXL1XNFj2easwZ1PGp0WXieQlm138u48Pn5uE6VMk9lIpWB_YF6kOgb1xhS8S0-DLf-ybkgdrsT0uV-6oj6u/s1600-h/fresh+result-new.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5095988197317611138" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuTwOwq2FdZPV-swYdew9E-Wa8rVt0K3PkJ9vG9PY6Itci3A1GRtklv6g0CXL1XNFj2easwZ1PGp0WXieQlm138u48Pn5uE6VMk9lIpWB_YF6kOgb1xhS8S0-DLf-ybkgdrsT0uV-6oj6u/s320/fresh+result-new.jpg" style="cursor: pointer;" /></a> So if you're looking for the most recent content on the web, this change should make it easier to find. And if you're a webmaster looking to tell us about all the new content on your site we haven't looked at yet, check out our support for <a href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/11/joint-support-for-sitemap-protocol.html">sitemaps</a>.

Finding fresh results

Posted by Peeyush Ranjan, Engineering Manager and Hong Zhang, Software Engineer We work hard to keep our search results as fresh as possible...

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Is black the new green?

Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar Reducing climate change by saving energy is an important effort we should all join, and that's why we're very glad to see the innovative thinking going into a variety of solutions. One idea, suggested by the site called "Blackle" (which is not related to Google, by the way, though the site does use our <a href="http://www.google.com/coop/cse/">custom search engine</a>), is to reduce energy used by monitors by providing search with a black background. We applaud the spirit of the idea, but our own analysis as well as that of <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/does-a-darkened-google-really-save-electricity-104/">others</a> shows that making the Google homepage black will not reduce energy consumption. To the contrary, on flat-panel monitors (already estimated to be 75% of the market), displaying black may actually increase energy usage. <a href="http://techlogg.com/content/view/360/31/">Detailed results</a> from a new study confirm this. As computers become a bigger part of more people's lives, they will consume an increasing amount of energy, which is why we've invested so much in <a title="making our data centers efficient" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/towards-more-efficient-computing.html">making our data centers efficient</a> and we've <a title="joined with others" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/climate-savers-computing-initiative.html">joined with others</a> to launch Climate Savers Computing, which has a goal of reducing total power consumption by more than 50% for all computers by 2010. There are some things you can do now to reduce the energy used by your computer, such as: <ul><li>turn on the power management features. Virtually all computers today have the ability to switch into low-power modes automatically when they're idle; very few computers have this capability enabled! <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/russel_02march25.mspx">Here's how </a>to do it on computers running Windows XP.</li></ul><ul><li>turn off your monitor and computer when you're not using them</li></ul><ul><li>turn down the brightness on your monitor</li></ul><ul><li>make sure your next computer meets the efficiency standards of <a title="Climate Savers Computing" href="http://www.climatesaverscomputing.org/">Climate Savers Computing (</a>an efficient computer uses up to 50% less energy than a conventional one)</li></ul><ul><li>to find the most efficient PCs available today, look for the words "EnergyStar 4.0 compliant."</li></ul>

Is black the new green?

Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar Reducing climate change by saving energy is an important effort we should all join, and that's w...

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Google Checkout back-to-school offers

Google Checkout back-to-school offers

Posted by Susan Taing, Associate Product Marketing Manager Checkout stores are offering up to $20 in savings for the back-to-school season....

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Google search privacy: Plain and simple

Posted by Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel Cookies, IP addresses, logs -- all of these are important things to understand in the context of online privacy. We try to explain them in clear and simple language in our <a title="privacy policy" href="http://www.google.com/privacy.html">privacy policy</a> and <a title="FAQ" href="http://www.google.com/privacy_faq.html">FAQ</a>. But they're not always easy for non-techies to understand. Google is committed to being transparent about our privacy practices. We've been thinking about different ways to help people understand the technical aspects of online privacy, to improve transparency, and to empower you to make informed decisions about how you want to use our services. Today, we're launching our first experiment to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLgJYBRzUXY">explain basic privacy concepts via video</a> on YouTube. Here it is: <object height="350" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/kLgJYBRzUXY"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/kLgJYBRzUXY" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="350" width="425"></embed></object> This video runs about 5 minutes, so we couldn’t cover everything. Over time, we hope to create additional videos where we talk about other privacy issues: what data do we collect when you register for a Google Account? or - when you search on Google while you’re logged in? or - why does Google keep server logs? But before we head down the road of sequels, we’d like to get your feedback on whether you find this video format helpful. So please watch it and <a href="http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py?form_type=user&stage=fm&user_type=user&contact_type=privacy&hl=en">tell us what you think</a>. We look forward to hearing from you.

Google search privacy: Plain and simple

Posted by Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel Cookies, IP addresses, logs -- all of these are important things to understand in the cont...

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