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How Google keeps your information secure

Posted by Douglas Merrill, VP of Engineering As many of you know, we spend a lot of time around here thinking about new products to help you run your life more efficiently, whether that’s organizing email in a better way, sharing pictures with friends, or collaborating in real time on documents. What you may not know is that we also spend a lot of time thinking about the security that goes into those products, and more specifically the ways we can protect you and your private information. While the chances are that you'll never have a security problem, we take security very seriously, and that's why we have some of the best engineers in the world working here to secure information. Much of their work is confidential, but we do want to share some of the ways we're protecting your data. There are a few things you should know about how we handle confidential information: <ul><li>Philosophy: First is our <a href="http://www.google.com/corporate/security.html" id="j192" title="philosophy">philosophy</a>. At Google, security is a continuous process. We don't just "check" a product for security before we launch it -- we are thinking about security before the product is even created, and we are building it in throughout the product's development. Also critical is our belief in layered protection. It's much like securing your house. You put your most private information in a safe. You secure the safe in your house, which is protected with locks and possibly an alarm system. And then you have the neighborhood watch program or the local police monitoring your neighborhood. It's very similar at Google. Our most sensitive information is difficult to find or access (the safe). Our network and facilities (the house) are protected in both high- and low-tech ways: encryption, alarms, and other technology for our systems, and strong physical security at our facilities. And finally, we've learned that when security is done right, it's done best as a community (the neighborhood); we encourage everyone to help us identify potential problems and solutions. Researchers who work at security and technology companies all over the world are constantly looking for security problems on the Internet, and we work closely with that community to find and fix potential problems.</li></ul><ul><li>Technology: These layers of protection are built on the best security technology in the world. While we employ products developed by others in the security community, we build a lot of our security technology ourselves. Some of the most innovative components of our security architecture focus on automation and scale. These are important to us because we're handling searches, emails, and other activities for millions of users every day. To keep our security processes a step ahead, we automate the way we test our software for possible security vulnerabilities and the way we monitor for possible security attacks. We're also constantly seeking more ways to use <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encryption" id="o7ve" title="encryption">encryption</a> and other technical measures to protect your data, while still maintaining a great user experience.</li></ul> <ul><li>Process: In addition to technology, we have a set of processes that dictate how we secure confidential information at Google and who can access it. We carefully manage access to confidential information of any sort, and very few Googlers have access to what we consider very sensitive data. This is in no small part because there's very little reason for us to provide that access -- most of our processes are automated, and don't require much human intervention. Of course, the limited number of people who are granted access to sensitive data must have special approval. And while we hold ourselves to a very high standard, we also work to ensure that our processes meet (and in many cases exceed) industry standards. These include audits for <a href="http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=107_cong_public_laws&docid=f:publ204.107" id="uask" title="Sarbanes-Oxley">Sarbanes-Oxley</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_70" id="uc6_" title="SAS 70">SAS 70</a>, <a href="https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/" id="czo3" title="PCI (payment card industry) compliance">PCI (payment card industry) compliance</a>, and more. By working with independent auditors, who evaluate compliance with standards that hold hundreds of different companies to very rigorous requirements, we add another layer of checks and balances to our security processes.</li></ul> <ul><li>People: The most important part of our approach to security is our people. Google employs <a href="http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/The-15-Most-Influential-People-in-Security-Today/1/" id="d4xl" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" title="some of the best and brightest">some of the best and brightest</a> security engineers in the world. Many of our engineers came from very high-profile security environments, such as banks, credit card companies, and high-volume retail organizations, and a large number of them hold PhDs and patents in security and software engineering. As you can imagine, our engineers are smart and curious and are on the lookout for security anomalies and best practices in the industry. Our engineers have published hundreds of academic papers on technically detailed topics such as <a href="http://research.google.com/archive/provos-2008a.pdf" id="x:h7" title="drive-by downloads installing malware">drive-by downloads that install malware</a> (PDF file) or <a href="http://taviso.decsystem.org/virtsec.pdf" id="plvy" title="hostile virtualized environments">hostile virtualized environments</a>. (You can find some of these papers <a href="http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html#category14" id="to:9" title="here">here</a>.) What's more, we cultivate a collaborative approach to security among all of our engineers, requiring everyone to pass a coding style review (which enables us to control the type of code used here and how it's used in order to prevent software problems) and ensuring that all code at Google is reviewed by multiple engineers so that it meets our software and security standards. </li></ul>And throughout the company, we use our own products. That means we protect your information with the same security that we use to protect our own company emails and documents. And while we continue to innovate with our products, we'll also continue to innovate in the world of security. For more on our approach to security, visit our <a href="http://www.google.com/corporate/security.html" id="b:bc" title="security and product safety site">Security and Product Safety page</a>.

How Google keeps your information secure

Posted by Douglas Merrill, VP of Engineering As many of you know, we spend a lot of time around here thinking about new products to help you...

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Google Calendar Sync

Posted by Shirin Oskooi, Product Manager, Google Calendar I've suffered major headaches trying to sync all my calendars. I used the Microsoft Outlook calendar on my desktop computer at home, but since I wanted to be able to access my schedule from anywhere, I also kept a copy of it on Google Calendar. When I traveled, I'd import my Google Calendar data into my laptop's Outlook calendar so I could access it offline. This was not only annoying to maintain, but also quite error-prone. If I made updates on any of the copies of my calendar, I had to make sure to make those same exact changes to the other copies, too. This was my life for a whole year before we started working on <a href="http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=89955" id="nhfn" title="Google Calendar Sync">Google Calendar Sync</a>, a 2-way synching application between Google Calendar and the calendar in Microsoft Outlook. I was probably the most excited person on the team when we started developing it, because now I can access my calendar at home or on my laptop, on Google Calendar or in Outlook. When I add an event to the Outlook calendar on my laptop, Google Calendar Sync syncs it to my Google Calendar -- and since I also have Google Calendar Sync running on my desktop, the event then syncs from Google Calendar to Outlook calendar on my desktop. All of my calendar views are always up to date, and I can choose whichever one I want to use. <div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDXPe9iS_UgzNg9DTZZ0GWvux2q6m955AIezoVCJQshYh2YvgwGTouc7krLC5_DCZTxsQi2SpDt-EoHCPfMYbANJC4n2-svKCjOl6o70WSCnJjwgMqe1KUISt7-M6tkcokjgFeHJ8qi28B/s1600-h/Cal+Sync.gif" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5174318993302282354" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDXPe9iS_UgzNg9DTZZ0GWvux2q6m955AIezoVCJQshYh2YvgwGTouc7krLC5_DCZTxsQi2SpDt-EoHCPfMYbANJC4n2-svKCjOl6o70WSCnJjwgMqe1KUISt7-M6tkcokjgFeHJ8qi28B/s320/Cal+Sync.gif" style="cursor: pointer;" /></a> </div>

Google Calendar Sync

Posted by Shirin Oskooi, Product Manager, Google Calendar I've suffered major headaches trying to sync all my calendars. I used the Micr...

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Search within a site: A tale of teleportation

Posted by Ben Lee, Software Engineer, and Jack Menzel, Product Manager Have you ever forgotten the exact address of a site that you wanted to visit? Not a problem - just type the name of the site into the Google search box and hopefully it appears at the top of the search results page. We call this "teleporting", and we're pleased that we have been able to minimize the need to remember an alphabet soup of .coms, .nets, and .orgs out of everyone's lives. However, one of the trends we noticed while studying teleporting was that there were lots of searchers who would type the name of a specific website as if they wanted to teleport, but would then immediately issue another more a refined search within this site. For example, if someone is looking for official information about the <a href="http://hubblesite.org/" id="ftnz" title="Hubble Space Telescope">Hubble Space Telescope</a> on the NASA website, one might first search for [NASA] and then [NASA Hubble Telescope], like this: <div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZE85n4BIuJvO7i1Xqj6l13lsuUIrAiOJ5y5RpKCpovMX84yopsguQMZa-C1DQYhOT8xbzgvNfX_6N0YEGIbf7uR58FT6X3hG-BqmrEoKswOkpJPM27Y49MOQj4BagHEhdzUDn5-IpwxUT/s1600-h/search_subset.gif" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5174415140440170626" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZE85n4BIuJvO7i1Xqj6l13lsuUIrAiOJ5y5RpKCpovMX84yopsguQMZa-C1DQYhOT8xbzgvNfX_6N0YEGIbf7uR58FT6X3hG-BqmrEoKswOkpJPM27Y49MOQj4BagHEhdzUDn5-IpwxUT/s320/search_subset.gif" style="cursor: pointer;" /></a> </div> Through <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/this-is-test-this-is-only-test.html" id="g-73" title="experimentation">experimentation</a>, we found that presenting users with a search box as part of the result increases their likelihood of finding the exact page they are looking for. So over the past few days we have been testing, and today we have fully rolled out, a search box that appears within some of the search results themselves. This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site. Like the rest of our snippets, the sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users. We hope that you will make use of the site search box in order to get the information you're looking for as quickly and easily as possible.

Search within a site: A tale of teleportation

Posted by Ben Lee, Software Engineer, and Jack Menzel, Product Manager Have you ever forgotten the exact address of a site that you wanted t...

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Desktop: More gadgets, more languages

Posted by Ryan Tabone, Product Manager Desktop's last beta release made the beautiful gadgets in our <a href="http://desktop.google.com/plugins/" id="robi" title="Check out the great gadgets for Google Desktop!">Desktop gallery</a> available for use in <a href="http://www.google.com/ig" id="q3af" title="iGoogle">iGoogle</a>. Today <a href="http://desktop.google.com/" id="nnwr" title="Google Desktop 5.5">Google Desktop 5.5</a> goes out of beta and makes that same functionality available to 31 more languages, now including <a href="http://desktop.google.com/th/" id="odpl" title="Thai">Thai</a> and <a href="http://desktop.google.com/id/" id="yor_" title="Indonesian">Indonesian</a>. If you want to see how Desktop can help you stay connected internationally, read more about this latest release on the <a href="http://googledesktop.blogspot.com/" id="gcfk" title="Google Desktop Blog">Google Desktop Blog</a>. And remember, Google Desktop is not only about gadgets for your desktop and browser; it's a great way of <a href="http://desktop.google.com/features.html#search" id="oka-" title="searching files and launching applications">searching files and launching applications</a> too.

Desktop: More gadgets, more languages

Posted by Ryan Tabone, Product Manager Desktop's last beta release made the beautiful gadgets in our Desktop gallery available for use ...

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Why data matters

Posted by Hal Varian, Chief Economist We often use this space to discuss how we <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/privacy" id="irrh" title="protect privacy">treat user data and protect privacy</a>. With the post below, we're beginning an occasional series that discusses how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users. We think it's appropriate to start with a post describing how data has been critical to the advancement of search technology. - Ed. Better data makes for better science. The history of information retrieval illustrates this principle well. Work in this area began in the early days of computing, with simple document retrieval based on matching queries with words and phrases in text files. Driven by the availability of new data sources, algorithms evolved and became more sophisticated. The arrival of the web presented new challenges for search, and now it is common to use information from web links and many other indicators as signals of relevance. Today's web search algorithms are trained to a large degree by the "wisdom of the crowds" drawn from the logs of billions of previous search queries. This brief overview of the history of search illustrates why using data is integral to making Google web search valuable to our users. A brief history of search Nowadays search is a hot topic, especially with the widespread use of the web, but the history of document search dates back to the 1950s. Search engines existed in those ancient times, but their primary use was to search a static collection of documents. In the early 60s, the research community gathered new data by digitizing abstracts of articles, enabling rapid progress in the field in the 60s and 70s. But by the late 80s, progress in this area had slowed down considerably. In order to stimulate research in information retrieval, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched the <a href="http://trec.nist.gov/" id="r_82" title="Text Retrieval Conference">Text Retrieval Conference</a> (TREC) in 1992. TREC introduced new data in the form of full-text documents and used human judges to classify whether or not particular documents were relevant to a set of queries. They released a sample of this data to researchers, who used it to train and improve their systems to find the documents relevant to a new set of queries and compare their results to TREC's human judgments and other researchers' algorithms. The TREC data revitalized research on information retrieval. Having a standard, widely available, and carefully constructed set of data laid the groundwork for further innovation in this field. The yearly TREC conference fostered collaboration, innovation, and a measured dose of competition (and bragging rights) that led to better information retrieval. New ideas spread rapidly, and the algorithms improved. But with each new improvement, it became harder and harder to improve on last year's techniques, and progress eventually slowed down again. And then came the web. In its beginning stages, researchers used industry-standard algorithms based on the TREC research to find documents on the web. But the need for better search was apparent--now not just for researchers, but also for everyday users---and the web gave us lots of new data in the form of links that offered the possibility of new advances. There were developments on two fronts. On the commercial side, a few companies started offering web search engines, but no one was quite sure what business models would work. On the academic side, the National Science Foundation started a "Digital Library Project" which made grants to several universities. Two Stanford grad students in computer science named Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked on this project. Their insight was to recognize that existing search algorithms could be dramatically improved by using the special linking structure of web documents. Thus <a href="http://www.google.com/technology/" id="lv1x" title="PageRank">PageRank</a> was born. How Google uses data PageRank offered a significant improvement on existing algorithms by ranking the relevance of a web page not by keywords alone but also by the quality and quantity of the sites that linked to it. If I have six links pointing to me from sites such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and the House of Representatives, that carries more weight than 20 links from my old college buddies who happen to have web pages. Larry and Sergey initially tried to license their algorithm to some of the newly formed web search engines, but none were interested. Since they couldn't sell their algorithm, they decided to start a search engine themselves. The rest of the story is well-known. Over the years, Google has continued to invest in making search better. Our information retrieval experts have added more than 200 additional signals to the algorithms that determine the relevance of websites to a user's query. So where did those other 200 signals come from? What's the next stage of search, and what do we need to do to find even more relevant information online? We're <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/this-is-test-this-is-only-test.html" id="a9t." title="constantly experimenting">constantly experimenting</a> with our algorithm, tuning and tweaking on a weekly basis to come up with more relevant and useful results for our users. But in order to come up with new ranking techniques and evaluate if users find them useful, we have to store and analyze search logs. (Watch our <a href="http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=ECB20E29232BCBBA" id="d36_" title="privacy videos">videos</a> to see exactly what data we store in our logs.) What results do people click on? How does their behavior change when we change aspects of our algorithm? Using data in the logs, we can compare how well we're doing now at finding useful information for you to how we did a year ago. If we don't keep a history, we have no good way to evaluate our progress and make improvements. To choose a simple example: the Google spell checker is based on our analysis of user searches compiled from our logs -- not a dictionary. Similarly, we've had a lot of success in using query data to improve our information about geographic locations, enabling us to provide better local search. Storing and analyzing logs of user searches is how Google's algorithm learns to give you more useful results. Just as data availability has driven progress of search in the past, the data in our search logs will certainly be a critical component of future breakthroughs.

Why data matters

Posted by Hal Varian, Chief Economist We often use this space to discuss how we treat user data and protect privacy . With the post below, w...

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Summer of Code is back!

Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Program Manager, Open Source <a href="http://code.google.com/soc/2008/" id="bt92" title="Google Summer of CodeTM">Google Summer of Code</a>, our program to introduce students to open source software development is coming back. In the past <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/three-summers-of-open-source.html" id="uv9q" title="three years">three years</a>, we've seen more than 1500 students 'graduate' from this program, working with 2000+ mentors across 90 countries to produce millions of lines of code. We're pleased to have funded more than $10M in open source development through Summer of Code, and we've increased our funding for it this year by another $1M. Last year alone, more than 800 students successfully completed their projects. Each received $4500 as a stipend and an awesome <a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2327/2043654975_2ca729fc9d.jpg" id="gr3." title="program t-shirt">T-shirt</a>. We're looking forward to welcoming even more student participants and open source projects into the Google Summer of Code community this year. We're accepting applications from open source projects who'd like to act as mentoring organizations through March 13th, and will begin taking student applications on March 24th. If you're interested in learning more, just subscribe to the <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/google-summer-of-code-discuss" id="r:gc" title="program discussion list">program discussion list</a>. We hope to see you there!

Summer of Code is back!

Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Program Manager, Open Source Google Summer of Code , our program to introduce students to open source software de...

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Hello, Pittsburgh

Posted by Andrew Moore, Engineering Director On Tuesday, March 4, the <a href="http://maps.google.com/?q=40.444542,-79.945659+%28Google%20Pittsburgh%29&hl=en">Google Pittsburgh office</a> will open its doors to the technical community for a special evening. We'll kick things off with some mingling over beer, wine and snacks, and then transition into a tech talk with one of our local engineers, Pat Stephenson. Pat will discuss the implementation of Dapper, a low-overhead system for monitoring the performance of large, distributed applications at Google, and the tools his team has built to analyze the data in a talk titled "Dapper: It's 11 p.m. and do you know where your RPC is?" We hope to create a collegial atmosphere where members of the technical community can learn from and get to know one another. If you're in the Pittsburgh area, please <a href="http://services.google.com/events/pittsburgh_techtalk_dapper">join us</a>. Space is limited, however, so hurry and register.

Hello, Pittsburgh

Posted by Andrew Moore, Engineering Director On Tuesday, March 4, the Google Pittsburgh office will open its doors to the technical communi...

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