Google Treasure Hunt update

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Phillip Grasso, Manager, Engineering/Operations</span><br /><br />Avast, matey! As announced on the <a href="http://google-au.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-treasure-hunt.html" id="v30r" title="Google Australia blog">Google Australia blog</a>, we've launched Treasure Hunt — a puzzle contest designed to test yer problem-solving skills in computer science, networking, and low-level UNIX trivia. You'll find the first of four brainteasers at <a href="http://treasurehunt.appspot.com/" id="jf4l5" target="_blank">http://treasurehunt.appspot<wbr id="jf4l6">.com/</a>. A new puzzle will be posted every week for the next three weeks, and a few lucky gobs to submit correct answers to every question will receive a prize.<br /><br />The second puzzle will be appearing soon — to be exact, 936266827 seconds before Y2K38, so keep yer eyes open. We'll also be highlighting our Mountain View mother ship, so step smartly, lads and lasses, and good luck!<br /><br />In case ye missed out on the first week's puzzle, it's still available, so 'tis not too late! ARR! (Can you tell we can hardly wait to <a title="Talk Like a Pirate" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Talk_Like_A_Pirate_Day" id="mpmh">Talk Like a Pirate</a>?)

Google Treasure Hunt update

Posted by Phillip Grasso, Manager, Engineering/Operations Avast, matey! As announced on the Google Australia blog , we've launched Treas...

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Google Translate adds 10 new languages...

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager</span><br /><br />...and that's great news any way you say it. Language is one of the biggest challenges we have in making information universally accessible. As part of the machine translation team within <a id="kzlh" href="http://research.google.com/" title="Google Research">Google Research</a>, I'm happy to report we've been hard at work to overcome this challenge. We've recently added translation capabilities for 10 new languages to <a title="Google Translate" href="http://translate.google.com/" id="jrwu">Google Translate</a>, bringing the total to 23 languages. The newly featured languages include Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish.<br /><br />In addition, you can now translate text and web pages as well as perform <a style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" id="ikf7" href="http://translate.google.com/translate_s" title="cross-language searches">cross-language searches</a> between <span style="font-style: italic;">any</span> two languages that we offer. For example, we now support Chinese translation to/from any of our languages (e.g., Chinese to French). So for those of you who will be following or attending the Olympics in Beijing this fall, you'll be able to more easily find and access content from local sources.<br /><br />We've also added a "<a title="Detect Language" href="http://translate.google.com/translate_t?sl=auto&tl=en" id="hvn:">Detect Language</a>" option to help you automatically identify the language of the text you're trying to translate. Keep in mind that the longer the text, the more accurate it will be. And for those of you who have embedded the <a id="qvf8" href="http://translate.google.com/translate_tools" title="Google Translate My Page gadget">Google Translate My Page gadget</a> in your website to give it global reach, these new languages will automatically appear. Developers can also take advantage of these new languages in our <a title="AJAX language API" href="http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/documentation/#SupportedPairs" id="tvp8">AJAX language API</a>.<br /><br />While our system is quite good, we know it's not perfect. Machine translation is a hard problem, but it plays an important role in helping people access content they might otherwise be unable to read. We’re constantly working to improve the quality, so if you find a translation that’s not quite right, let us know by using our <a id="hdqw" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/suggest-better-translation.html" title="“Suggest a better translation”">"Suggest a better translation”</a> feature.

Google Translate adds 10 new languages...

Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager ...and that's great news any way you say it. Language is one of the biggest challenges we have in m...

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Demographics now available in YouTube Insight

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Nick Jakobi, Product Manager, YouTube</span><br /><br />When we first <a id="q2x33" title="announced" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/insight-into-youtube-videos.html" target="_blank">announced</a> YouTube Insight, our free video analytics tool for YouTube, we were excited to see just how users, partners, and advertisers might creatively use information about the viewing trends of their videos. We've since learned that some users and partners are <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/16/AR2008041603478_pf.html">modifying their upload schedules</a> based on when they know their audience is tuning in, and advertisers are <a href="http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3628920">studying geographic traffic patterns</a> to assess the effectiveness of regional ad campaigns.<br /><br />Today we've added some new features to Insight. One is a new demographics tab that displays view count information broken down by age group (such as ages 18-24), gender, or a combination of the two, to help you get a better understanding of the makeup of your YouTube audience. We show you general information about your viewers in anonymous and aggregate form, based on the birth date and gender information that users share with us when they create YouTube accounts. This means that individual users can't be personally identified.<br /><br />Insight now also displays statistics based on the combined total views of all the videos you've uploaded. Just as you can explore the view counts and popularity of individual videos, with this feature you can see your account's total number of views, and your relative popularity on YouTube compared to other users, based on geographic location.<br /><br />As with Insight's other features, we hope this new information helps you learn how to create more compelling content that best engages the audiences you want to reach. You can find these new metrics under the "Demographics" tab within the Insight dashboard. Click on the "Insight" button under "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/signup?next=/my_account">Account</a> > <a href="http://www.youtube.com/signup?next=/my_videos">My Videos</a>."

Demographics now available in YouTube Insight

Posted by Nick Jakobi, Product Manager, YouTube When we first announced YouTube Insight, our free video analytics tool for YouTube, we were...

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Registration open for 2008 scalability conference

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Andrew Schwerin, Software Engineer</span><br /><br />As we <span id="rvj18"><a id="rvj110" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/seattle-conference-on-scalability-2008.html" target="_blank">noted earlier</a></span>, our Conference on Scalability is taking place in Seattle on Saturday, June 14. And now <span id="rvj18"><a id="rvj111" href="http://services.google.com/events/seattle_scalability2008" target="_blank">registration is open</a> </span> until June 6.<br /><br />We have some great talks lined up from industry and academia, covering everything from scalability of storage, communication and transactions to scaling applications into the mobile space or, in one case, under water. 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!

Registration open for 2008 scalability conference

Posted by Andrew Schwerin, Software Engineer As we noted earlier , our Conference on Scalability is taking place in Seattle on Saturday, Jun...

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Google.org announces investment in BrightSource Energy

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Chris Busselle, Investments Manager and Kevin Chen, Green Energy Strategy<br /><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHSq9h3pDJp4X6PPRED9_fprPWAfHyIphHCmI-tYmfKZ6Y0xs37ZHDC_chVCinBjOLP3SXJUsU7DFQLy3YrOAG6RUfFNVGEh1dJJEm2aXVWrYVctLa3oNdnIZVkqg53lleK1NR9LTWmHeq/s1600-h/Pilot+Plant+Relection+cropped+3.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5200282150790709986" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHSq9h3pDJp4X6PPRED9_fprPWAfHyIphHCmI-tYmfKZ6Y0xs37ZHDC_chVCinBjOLP3SXJUsU7DFQLy3YrOAG6RUfFNVGEh1dJJEm2aXVWrYVctLa3oNdnIZVkqg53lleK1NR9LTWmHeq/s400/Pilot+Plant+Relection+cropped+3.jpg" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" /></a><br />Today we are pleased to announce our participation in BrightSource Energy's $115 million venture <a href="http://www.brightsourceenergy.com/Release5-14-08.pdf">financing</a> with a $10 million equity investment as part of <a href="http://www.google.com/corporate/green/energy/">Google's RE<C initiative</a>.<br /><br />Solar thermal energy generation is one of the key emerging industries addressing the changing global climate and we are excited about both of our current investments in solar thermal technology -- <a href="http://www.brightsourceenergy.com/">BrightSource Energy</a> and <a href="http://www.esolar.com/">eSolar</a>.<br /><br />In addition to making investments in renewable energy startups, we plan to make grants to support the research and development of enabling technologies to help the solar thermal industry achieve larger scale and lower costs. We believe that by supporting researchers and entrepreneurs taking different, ambitious approaches and risks to generate clean energy, we can help to accelerate progress and increase the collective economic value of these new clean energy industries.<br /><br />We are also looking for a <a href="http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?answer=81799&query=energy&topic=&type=energy">Head of Renewable Energy</a> to run our internal R&D effort, which is focused initially on solar thermal power, advanced wind technologies, and enhanced geothermal systems.

Google.org announces investment in BrightSource Energy

Posted by Chris Busselle, Investments Manager and Kevin Chen, Green Energy Strategy Today we are pleased to announce our participation in Br...

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Looking towards IPv6

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Lorenzo Colitti, Network Engineer, and Erik Kline, IPv6 Evangelist</span><br /><br />We care a lot about the health of the Internet. Recently, we've become increasingly concerned that <a title="IPv4" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4" id="m2cr">IPv4</a> addresses — the numbers that computers use to connect to the Internet — are running out. <span style="text-decoration: underline;"></span><a title="Current projections" href="http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/" id="lv_-">Current projections</a> place IPv4 address space exhaustion somewhere in late 2011, and while technologies such as <a title="Network Address Translation" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_address_translation" id="tc7t">Network Address Translation</a> (NAT) can offer temporary respite, they complicate the Internet's architecture, pose barriers to the development of new applications, and run contrary to network openness principles.<br /><br />That's why we're pleased to let you know that Google search is also available over <a title="IPv6" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6" id="w90w">IPv6</a> at <a id="i4d05" href="http://ipv6.google.com/" target="_blank">ipv6.google.com</a> (you'll need an IPv6 connection to view it). While IPv4 provides about four billion IP addresses — not enough to assign one to every one of Earth's more than six billion inhabitants — IPv6 provides enough address space to assign almost three billion networks to every person on the planet. We hope that by allowing every computer and mobile device on the network to talk to each other directly — an idea known as the "end-to-end principle" that was crucial to the original design of the Internet — IPv6 will allow the continued growth of the Internet and enable new applications yet to be invented.<br /><br />With current operating systems such as Windows Vista, Mac OS X, and Linux providing high-quality support for IPv6, we hope it's only a matter of time before IPv6 is widely deployed. We will be doing our part.<br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">Update:</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Changed three million networks to three billion networks in the second paragraph.</span></span>

Looking towards IPv6

Posted by Lorenzo Colitti, Network Engineer, and Erik Kline, IPv6 Evangelist We care a lot about the health of the Internet. Recently, we...

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A friend connected web

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager</span><br /><br />Have you ever wished you could share information and interact with friends while visiting some of your favorite websites? There are a number of great social networking sites out there that let you stay connected, but the rest of the web typically hasn't been social. Yet.<br /><br />Site owners have been saying for a while that they would love to provide this functionality, but, frankly, it's been too hard to add social features. A lot of code has to be written to create a site where visitors can sign up and bring their friends along, form new friendships, and do engaging things together. And not to mention that if you're a site visitor, it's pretty inconvenient to create a new account and try to rebuild a network of friends each time you visit a site.<br /><br />Enter <a href="http://www.google.com/friendconnect">Google Friend Connect</a>. This new service, announced as a preview release tonight at <a href="http://code.google.com/campfire/">Campfire One</a>, lets non-technical site owners sprinkle social features throughout their websites, so visitors will easily be able to join with their AOL, Google, OpenID, and Yahoo! credentials. You'll be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web like <a href="http://www.facebook.com/">Facebook</a>, <a href="http://www.google.com/talk/">Google Talk</a>, <a href="http://www.hi5.com/">hi5</a>, <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/">LinkedIn</a>, <a href="http://www.orkut.com/">orkut</a>, <a href="http://www.plaxo.com/">Plaxo</a>, and others. And quite simply, you'll be able to do things together.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx1WRO1AjiLxHgcb1v1RFjcCTlva42PcXTA2iFna09-3IEyMd4RXiQubvsUkppYrVxWmtC3_wVTRecRA_sE15PYoMP20imDbctmWYyBO2odH7mb44wYbY9Ws0agvxziBtBo8wb0KLXMwR5/s1600-h/1_friend_connect_image.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5199737755096007378" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx1WRO1AjiLxHgcb1v1RFjcCTlva42PcXTA2iFna09-3IEyMd4RXiQubvsUkppYrVxWmtC3_wVTRecRA_sE15PYoMP20imDbctmWYyBO2odH7mb44wYbY9Ws0agvxziBtBo8wb0KLXMwR5/s400/1_friend_connect_image.jpg" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" /></a>Having faces show up at a site is not enough. Friend Connect lets site owners include OpenSocial apps made by a world of developers. We're providing a few apps, such as posts and ratings, to get the ball rolling. And many more will be provided by the <a href="http://sites.google.com/a/opensocial.org/opensocial/Home">OpenSocial</a><a href="http://sites.google.com/a/opensocial.org/opensocial/Home"> community</a>.<br /><br />With this functionality, there's no end to the possibilities. A small site dedicated to mountain biking in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moab">Moab</a>, for example, would be able to have members who could exchange maps, tips, and pictures of their latest rides. A stroke victims support site could help grieving family members assist one another by sharing advice. A politician's site could enable supporters to advocate their viewpoints. A musician's site could give fans the chance to interact full tilt with the band and one another.<br /><br />Take a look at a few white-listed sites using Google Friend Connect: <a href="http://www.ingridmichaelson.com/">Ingrid Michaelson's official website</a>, which includes the <a href="http://www.ilike.com/">iLike music application</a>, and <a href="http://www.bibleapps.com/">Bible Apps</a>, owned by an OpenSocial developer fully dedicated to his "Verses" application -- where people can post prayers and test their knowledge of the Bible as a quiz game with their friends.<br /><br />If you run a website and would like to add social features, you can now sign up for the wait list and learn more by visiting <a href="http://www.google.com/friendconnect">www.google.com/friendconnect</a>. We're going to keep things pretty limited at first so we can gather feedback from site owners, developers, and users, but, in the weeks ahead, we'll be reaching out to more site owners and adding more social apps to the gallery.<br /><br />You can also learn more about Google Friend Connect, OpenSocial, and other social initiatives at Google I/O, a two-day developer gathering about building the next generation of web applications. It takes place May 28-29 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Register now for Google I/O at <a href="http://code.google.com/events/io/">http://code.google.com/events/io/</a>.

A friend connected web

Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager Have you ever wished you could share information and interact with friends while visiting some of yo...

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