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Mini Hear, Mini Do

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Product Manager, Google Enterprise The <a href="http://mini.google.com/" id="kgli">Google Mini</a> has been making its way <a href="http://www.google.com/enterprise/mini/map/index.html" id="fv_o">across the globe</a>, reaching <a href="http://www.google.com/enterprise/mini/success_stories.html" id="knz_">thousands of businesses</a> that have taken to our little blue box, and along the way picking up suggestions for improvement from devoted users. As a result we've just introduced to the Mini three greatly requested features that can make search inside businesses even more powerful. Finding the most up-to-date and authoritative document within your company has never been easier now that you can search for documents filed in shared drives and weight documents by date or value. We've also added support for six new languages (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Hungarian, and Polish). We're listening, so keep those suggestions <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Mini" id="e3ef">coming</a>. Read more about the new Mini features on the <a title="Google Enterprise Blog" href="http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-mini-gets-not-so-mini-upgrade.html" id="bhbd">Google Enterprise Blog</a>.

Mini Hear, Mini Do

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Product Manager, Google Enterprise The Google Mini has been making its way across the globe , reaching thousands of...

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Treasure Hunt - week 3

Posted by Phillip Grasso, Manager, Engineering/Operations We're now entering the third week of Google's Treasure Hunt competition, a puzzle contest designed to test your knowledge of computer science, networking, and low-level UNIX trivia. Last week <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-treasure-hunt-update.html">we posted the second puzzle</a>. This week's puzzle is set to be released on Tuesday, May 27 at 10 a.m. PDT. We'll also be featuring our brand-new San Francisco office along with it. We'll be giving out a few prizes for the fastest contestants to complete each question. There will also be a grand prize for the contestant who correctly answers all four questions in the shortest cumulative time (time is defined as the time between the question's release and the submission of the correct answer). The previous puzzles will still be accessible off of the <a id="oinp9" href="http://treasurehunt.appspot.com/" target="_blank">main page</a>. The treasure is within reach, so grab yer shovels and keep on diggin', mateys!

Treasure Hunt - week 3

Posted by Phillip Grasso, Manager, Engineering/Operations We're now entering the third week of Google's Treasure Hunt competition, a...

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San Francisco office rides the wave

Posted by Todd Curtiss, Director of Engineering, Site Reliability (SRE) San Francisco has been attracting freethinking writers, artists, instigators, and entrepreneurs for more than 150 years. The people who built, experienced, and created this diverse place have all shared a passion for innovation and extending beyond the conventional. San Franciscans kicked off the gold rush and made the first pair of <a title="jeans" href="http://www.levistrauss.com/Downloads/History_Jacob_Davis_Biography.pdf" id="dqfg">jeans</a>, received the <a title="first transcontinental telephone call" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_telephone" id="dcx8">first transcontinental telephone call</a> in 1915, came together for the <a title="Summer of Love" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Love" id="jur4">Summer of Love</a> and the <a title="original Burning Man" href="http://www.zpub.com/burn/bm-history.html" id="vr_2">original Burning Man</a>, and played a major role in the dot-com and Web 2.0 booms. The City always seems to blaze new trails. Sure, our summers are cool and foggy, our hills are steep, and our streets are twisty. But SF Googlers think this is the perfect place to work. Earlier this year, our own "Father of the Internet" <a title="Vint Cerf" href="http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html#vint" id="uerq">Vint Cerf</a> launched the office by inspiring the assembled engineers to think about today's challenges at scale, speaking about the challenges of interplanetary IP communication, the future of the Internet, and who's to blame for IPv4's limited address space (Vint says it's him). We in the <a title="our office" href="http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&dq=google+loc:+San+Francisco,+CA&daddr=345+Spear+St,+San+Francisco,+CA+94105&geocode=14010683919168600159,37.789538,-122.390278&f=d&ll=37.789538,-122.390278&spn=0.004612,0.009452&z=17" id="gujp">SF office</a> contribute to a broad cross-section of the Google world in a number of ways: we write software for managing big computing clusters and keeping them efficient; we analyze vast piles of data to understand how the web works; we engineer reliability, scalability, and security into the apps many people rely on; we share our tools and methods with the open source community; we create internal productivity apps to support our engineers. And that's just in engineering. The SF office also supports ad agency customers, local markets and classifieds. We're home to our philanthropic arm <a href="http://www.google.org/" target="_blank" title="Google.org home" id="ll3y">Google.org</a>, and we make time to participate in community volunteer programs through our employee-created Google Cares-SF program. We have an active green committee, access to the GFleet car-share program, and we're the first plastic-bottle–free office among all of the Googleplexes. Here's what some of us have to say about working here: <object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/z_MszKIc6uI&hl=en"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/z_MszKIc6uI&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed></object> While we may be new, Google SF is growing fast. With close proximity and access to Mountain View and the rest of the Silicon Valley, we span the best of worlds: local and global, campus and city, 'burbs and urban, highways and dirt roads. We're always looking for talented and passionate people to <a title="join our team" href="http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/topic.py?loc_id=13043&dep_id=1173" id="x8ln">join our team</a>, so if you want to be part of building the next big thing, we'd love to hear from you. And in case you need another reason to come visit us in Shaky Town, <a title="Google I/O" href="http://code.google.com/events/io/index.html" id="appr">Google I/O</a>, our largest developer conference to date, takes place at the <a title="Moscone Center" href="http://code.google.com/events/io/location.html" id="wsww">Moscone Center</a> on May 28-29. It's not too late to <a title="Registration" href="https://www.weboom.com/sparks/google_io/forms/" id="xra5">register</a> -- we hope to see you there.

San Francisco office rides the wave

Posted by Todd Curtiss, Director of Engineering, Site Reliability (SRE) San Francisco has been attracting freethinking writers, artists, ins...

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Exploring "las oportunidades" for small businesses

Posted by Carolina Shea, AdSense Account Strategist Last week, I flew from our Phoenix office to Washington, D.C. to deliver our first U.S. seminar for small business. It's a simple and straightforward presentation about how Google tools can help small businesses establish a presence online, work more collaboratively and efficiently, and earn money from their websites through our <a href="https://www.google.com/adsense/">AdSense</a> program. If you were able to catch a glimpse of our <a href="http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2008/04/creating-opportunities-for-small.html">testimony</a> in front of the U.S. House Small Business Committee a couple of weeks ago, you'll know that helping small businesses thrive on the Internet is something we're really passionate about. And we thought we should share the training first with one of the most entrepreneurial communities in the U.S.: Hispanic Americans. Working with the enthusiastic support of the <a href="http://www.ushcc.com/" id="fnkx" title="U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce"> U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce</a> and the <a href="http://www.lulac.org/" id="h8b9" title="League of United Latin American Citizens"> League of United Latin American Citizens</a>, I'm happy to say that this first session is in Spanish. We call it "Google 101 para pequeñas empresas." Check out the seminar in this video (in Spanish, with an introduction in English), or have a look at our small business resource page (<a href="http://www.google.com/growyourbusiness" id="bkrg" title="in English">in English</a>) and (<a href="http://www.google.com/sunegociocrece" id="z530" title="in Spanish">en Español</a>). <object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/e4DhXr_lLs0&hl=en"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/e4DhXr_lLs0&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed></object>

Exploring "las oportunidades" for small businesses

Posted by Carolina Shea, AdSense Account Strategist Last week, I flew from our Phoenix office to Washington, D.C. to deliver our first U.S. ...

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Google Sites now open to everyone

Posted by Andrew Zaeske, Engineering Manager A few months ago we <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/bringing-it-all-together.html">launched Google Sites</a> exclusively as part of Google Apps for companies and organizations that wanted to use the service on their own domains. Now we've made it easy for anyone to set up a website to share all types of information -- team projects, company intranets, community groups, classrooms, clubs, family updates, you name it -- in one place, for a few people, a group or the world. You can securely host your own website at http://sites.google.com/[your-website] and add as many pages as you like for free. Getting started with <a href="http://sites.google.com/site/sites/">Google Sites</a> is easy. You can create different types of pages from scratch with the click of a button, and you can embed documents, calendars, photos, videos and gadgets directly into those pages. Similar to Google Docs, built-in editing tools allow for popular text and formatting changes to be made in a straightforward, WYSIWYG manner. Once your site is up and running, inviting people to edit or view your content is as simple as entering in their email address (of course, you can change access levels at any time). And you (or anyone who has editing privileges) can add or edit information whenever you'd like. Here's a quick look: <object height="350" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/fD-4FRTzxkI"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/fD-4FRTzxkI" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="350" width="425"></embed></object> Stay up to date with the latest news on our new <a id="r4vs" title="Google Sites blog" href="http://googlesitesblog.blogspot.com/">Google Sites blog</a>.

Google Sites now open to everyone

Posted by Andrew Zaeske, Engineering Manager A few months ago we launched Google Sites exclusively as part of Google Apps for companies and...

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We have a Doodle 4 Google national winner!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, and Dennis Hwang, Webmaster Manager and Chief Doodler The results are in from last week's <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/your-vote-matters.html">public vote</a> for its favorite doodle from the <a href="http://www.google.com/doodle4google">Doodle 4 Google art competition</a>, in which we invited students in grades K-12 to design the Google logo around the theme "What if...?" Today, we're pleased to announce the winner: Grace (Suryung) Moon, a 6th grader from Canyon Middle School in Castro Valley, California. Her creation, "Up in the Clouds" was selected for its artistry and creativity as well as for its interpretation of our "What if...?" theme. Grace's doodle will replace our regular logo on our homepage tomorrow, May 22nd, and Grace will be awarded a $10,000 college scholarship and a $25,000 technology grant for her school in recognition of this achievement. <div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim1f_09jlrbYTmDTynDCoD-d-0_NGpXzU4aVcaIG4_th0kjdOTpB0LDbRkOG8iWjHoPKB0DB-J5kan1ZX5n7l0ph0mVYeuxgfZsQgH6u7Z_3YiRpOiAKyoYFpvyLOc3VtnhaNh-gXEpsDv/s1600-h/D4G_2008.gif"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5202982836064109954" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim1f_09jlrbYTmDTynDCoD-d-0_NGpXzU4aVcaIG4_th0kjdOTpB0LDbRkOG8iWjHoPKB0DB-J5kan1ZX5n7l0ph0mVYeuxgfZsQgH6u7Z_3YiRpOiAKyoYFpvyLOc3VtnhaNh-gXEpsDv/s320/D4G_2008.gif" style="cursor: pointer; width: 270px; height: 116px;" /></a> </div>Congratulations also go to the three national finalists. They were selected as having the best doodle in their grade groups and will each receive a laptop computer: <div style="text-align: left;"> Grades K-3 Spencer Norton ~ Ashbrook Elementary School, Lumberton, NJ Grades 7-9 Rebecca Olene ~ Pioneer Ridge Freshmen Center, Carver, Minnesota Grades 10-12 Gabriel Kitzman ~ Elbert School Dist. #200, Kiowa, Colorado </div>To celebrate our winner and <a href="http://www.google.com/doodle4google/finalists.html">all of the talented finalists</a>, we held an awards ceremony at the Googleplex for the 40 regional winners today. The finalists and their families joined us for a fun-filled day with activities ranging from face painting to a doodling master class with our own Chief Google Doodler <a href="http://www.google.com/doodle4google/doodler.html" id="zwpn">Dennis Hwang</a>, and we couldn't have had more fun. Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's Doodle 4 Google competition. We enjoyed seeing the creativity and imagination of students across the U.S. and hope you did too.

We have a Doodle 4 Google national winner!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, and Dennis Hwang, Webmaster Manager and Chief Doodler The ...

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Introduction to Google Search Quality

Posted by Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Search Quality Search Quality is the name of the team responsible for the ranking of Google search results. Our job is clear: A few hundreds of millions of times a day people will ask Google questions, and within a fraction of a second Google needs to decide which among the billions of pages on the web to show them -- and in what order. Lately, we have been doing other things as well. But more on that later. For something that is used so often by so many people, surprisingly little is known about ranking at Google. This is entirely our fault, and it is by design. We are, to be honest, quite secretive about what we do. There are two reasons for it: competition and abuse. Competition is pretty straightforward. No company wants to share its secret recipes with its competitors. As for abuse, if we make our ranking formulas too accessible, we make it easier for people to game the system. Security by obscurity is never the strongest measure, and we do not rely on it exclusively, but it does prevent a lot of abuse. The details of the ranking algorithms are in many ways Google's crown jewels. We are very proud of them and very protective of them. By some estimate, more than one thousand programmer/scientist years have gone directly into their development, and the rate of innovation has not slowed down. But being completely secretive isn’t ideal, and this blog post is part of a renewed effort to open up a bit more than we have in the past. We will try to periodically tell you about new things, explain old things, give advice, spread news, and engage in conversations. Let me start with some general pieces of information about our group. More blog posts will follow. I should take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Udi Manber, and I am a VP of engineering at Google in charge of Search Quality. I have been at Google for over two years, and I have been working on search technologies for almost 20 years. The heart of the group is the team that works on core ranking. Ranking is hard, much harder than most people realize. One reason for this is that languages are inherently ambiguous, and documents do not follow any set of rules. There are really no standards for how to convey information, so we need to be able to understand all web pages, written by anyone, for any reason. And that's just half of the problem. We also need to understand the queries people pose, which are on average fewer than three words, and map them to our understanding of all documents. Not to mention that different people have different needs. And we have to do all of that in a few milliseconds. The most famous part of our ranking algorithm is <a href="http://www.google.com/technology/" id="b0hb" title="PageRank">PageRank</a>, an algorithm developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded Google. PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger system. Other parts include language models (the ability to handle phrases, synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes, and so on), query models (it's not just the language, it's how people use it today), time models (some queries are best answered with a 30-minutes old page, and some are better answered with a page that stood the test of time), and personalized models (not all people want the same thing). Another team in our group is responsible for evaluating how well we're doing. This is done in many different ways, but the goal is always the same: improve the user experience. This is not the main goal, it is the only goal. There are automated evaluations every minute (to make sure nothing goes wrong), periodic evaluations of our overall quality, and, most importantly, evaluations of specific algorithmic improvements. When an engineer gets a new idea and develops a new algorithm, we test their ideas thoroughly. We have a team of statisticians who look at all the data and determine the value of the new idea. We meet weekly (sometimes twice a week) to go over those new ideas and approve new launches. In 2007, we launched more than 450 new improvements, about 9 per week on the average. Some of these improvements are simple and obvious -- for example, we fixed the way Hebrew acronym queries are handled (in Hebrew an acronym is denoted by a (") next to the last character, so IBM will be IB"M), and some are very complicated -- for example, we made significant changes to the PageRank algorithm in January. Most of the time we look for improvements in relevancy, but we also work on projects where the sole purpose is to simplify the algorithms. Simple is good. International search has been one of our key focus areas in the past two years. This means all spoken languages, not just the major ones. Last year, for example, we made major improvements in Azerbaijani, a language spoken by about 8 million people. In the past few months, we launched spell checking in Estonian, Catalan, Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, Ukranian, Bosnian, Latvian, <strike>Filipino</strike> Tagalog, Slovenian and Farsi. We organized a network of people all over the world who provide us with feedback, and we have a large set of volunteers from all parts of Google who speak different languages and help us improve search. Another team is dedicated to new features and new user interfaces. Having a great engine is necessary for a great car, but it is not sufficient. The car has to be comfortable and easy to drive. The Google search user interface is quite simple. Very few of our users ever read our <a href="http://www.google.com/support/?ctx=web" id="w0:e" title="help pages">help pages</a>, and they can do very well without them (but they're good reading nevertheless, and we're working to improve them). When we add new features we try to ensure that they will be intuitive and easy to use for everyone. One of the most visible changes we made in the past year was <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/05/behind-scenes-with-universal-search.html" id="lsn6" title="Universal Search">Universal Search</a>. Others include the <a href="http://www.google.com/notebook" id="chsw" title="Google Notebook">Google Notebook</a>, <a href="http://www.google.com/cse" id="brd:" title="Custom Search Engines">Custom Search Engines</a>, and of course, many improvements to iGoogle. The UI team is helped by a team of usability experts who conduct user studies and evaluate new features. They travel all over the world, and they even go to people's homes to see users in their natural habitat. (Don't worry, they do not come unannounced or uninvited!) There is a whole team that concentrates on fighting <a href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#quality" id="e-24" title="webspam and other types of abuse">webspam and other types of abuse</a>. That team works on variety of issues from hidden text to off-topic pages stuffed with gibberish keywords, plus many other schemes that people use in an attempt to rank higher in our search results. The team spots new spam trends and works to counter those trends in scalable ways; like all other teams, they do it internationally. The webspam group works closely with the <a href="http://www.google.com/webmasters/" id="gr:b" title="Google Webmaster Central">Google Webmaster Central</a> team, so they can share insights with everyone and also listen to site owners. There are other teams devoted to particular projects. In general, our organizational structure is quite informal. People move around, and new projects start all the time. One of the key things about search is that users' expectations grow rapidly. Tomorrow's queries will be much harder than today's queries. Just as Moore's law governs the doubling of computing speed every 18 months, there is a hidden unwritten law that doubles the complexity of our most difficult queries in a short time. This is impossible to measure precisely, but we all feel it. We know we cannot rest on our laurels, we have to work hard to meet the challenge. As I mentioned earlier, we will continue providing you with updates on search quality in the coming months, so stay tuned.

Introduction to Google Search Quality

Posted by Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Search Quality Search Quality is the name of the team responsible for the ranking of Google search res...

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