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Google Mobile App: faster, easier search on iPhone & iPod Touch

Posted by Robert Hamilton and David Singleton, Google Mobile Team Our first downloadable iPhone application is here. It's free, and it makes searching faster and easier. It's never as easy to type on a mobile phone as on a full keyboard and the mobile network is rarely as fast as a desktop connection. So Google Mobile App starts working as soon as you type. Smart features mean you'll get what you're looking for in fewer key presses than before. For instance, we've added the power of suggest (type "lost in" and one touch completes "lost in translation") and My Location (type "coffee" and one touch shows cafes right where you are on a map) to help you search. We've also brought Google search to your iPhone's address book to make it easy to contact the people you call or text most often. To learn more and see a video showing the App in action, check out <a title="this post" href="http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2008/07/searching-on-iphone-can-be-fun.html" id="jmud">this post</a> on the Google Mobile Blog. U.S. users can get Google Mobile App right now. Tap the App Store icon on your iPhone, or open iTunes, and search for 'Google Mobile App'. (You need to have the latest iPhone software update to see it.)

Google Mobile App: faster, easier search on iPhone & iPod Touch

Posted by Robert Hamilton and David Singleton, Google Mobile Team Our first downloadable iPhone application is here. It's free, and it m...

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Introduction to Google Ranking

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow In May, Udi Manber <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/introduction-to-google-search-quality.html" id="ck7l" title="introduced the search quality group">introduced our search quality group</a>, the group responsible for the ranking of search results. He introduced various teams within "Quality" (as we like to call the group) including Core Ranking, International Search, User Interfaces, Evaluation, Webspam, and other teams. In this post, I want to tell you more about one of these: the Core Ranking team. Let me introduce myself. My name is Amit Singhal. I'm a Google Fellow in charge of the ranking team at Google. I've worked in the field of search for the past eighteen years, having been introduced to search in 1990 as a graduate student in computer science. In the academic world, the field of search is known as Information Retrieval (or IR). After spending a decade as an IR researcher, I came to Google in 2000, and have worked on Google ranking ever since. Google ranking is a collection of algorithms used to find the most relevant documents for a user query. We do this for hundreds of millions of queries a day, from a collection of billions and billions of pages. These algorithms are run for every query entered into most of Google's search services. While our web search is the most used Google search service and the most widely known, the same ranking algorithms are also used - with some modifications - for other Google search services, including Images, News, YouTube, Maps, Product Search, Book Search, and more. The most common question I get asked about Google's ranking is "how do you do it?" Of course, there is a lot that goes into building a state-of-the-art ranking system like ours, and I will delve deeper into the technology behind it in a later post. Today, I would like to briefly share the philosophies behind Google ranking: <blockquote>1) Best locally relevant results served globally. 2) Keep it simple. 3) No manual intervention.</blockquote>The first one is obvious. Given our passion for search, we absolutely want to make sure that every user query gets the most relevant results. We often call this the "no query left behind" principle. Whenever we return less than ideal results for any query in any language in any country - and we do (search is by no means a solved problem) - we use that as an inspiration for future improvements. The second principle seems obvious. Isn't it the desire of all system architects to keep their systems simple? Well, as search systems go, given the wide variety of user queries we have to respond to in multiple languages, it is easy to go down the path where more and more complexity creeps into the system to serve the next incremental fraction of the queries. We work very hard to keep our system simple without compromising on the quality of results. This is an ongoing effort, and a worthy one. We make about ten ranking changes every week and simplicity is a big consideration in launching every change. Our engineers understand exactly why a page was ranked the way it was for a given query. This simple understandable system has allowed us innovate quickly, and it shows. The "keep it simple" philosophy has served us well. No discussion of Google's ranking would be complete without asking the common - but misguided! :) - question: "Does Google manually edit its results?" Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us. We believe that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well ... subjective, and information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity. The second reason we have a principle against manually adjusting our results is that often a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and often for all languages. I should add, however, that there are clear written <a href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#quality" id="ya_e" title="policies">policies</a> for websites recommended by Google, and we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies or for a small number of other reasons (e.g. legal requirements, child porn, viruses/malware, etc). Stay tuned for my followup post, where I will discuss in detail the technologies behind our ranking and show examples of several state-of-the-art ranking techniques in action. Let me just conclude this post by saying, our passion for search is stronger than ever - and as a search researcher, I have the best job in the world :-).

Introduction to Google Ranking

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow In May, Udi Manber introduced our search quality group , the group responsible for the ranking of sear...

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Be who you want on the web pages you visit

Posted by Niniane Wang, Engineering Manager A while ago, I looked around the social web and wished that it could be less static. Sure, you can leave a comment on a blog or write a text blurb on your social networking profile. But what if you want to express yourself in a more fun way, with 3D graphics and real-time avatar interactions? I started asking this question as a 20% project, and I'm excited to announce today's release of Lively by Google - a 3D virtual experience that is the newest addition to Google Labs. The Lively team wants to help people experience another dimension of the web. We hope you will use the product to express yourself with and without words, and to do this in the places you already visit on the web. If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website, you can immediately get a sense of the room creator's interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose. You can also express your own personality by customizing your avatar's look, showing people who you are without having to say a word. Of course, you can chat with each other, and you can also interact through animated actions. In our user research, we’ve been amazed at how much more poignant it is to receive an animated hug than seeing the text “[[hug]]”. Prior to this release, we worked closely with Arizona State University. Based on feedback from ASU students and with help from the Google Desktop team, we added support for playing YouTube videos in virtual TVs and showing photos in virtual picture frames inside our rooms. Better yet, the gadgets you have in your Lively rooms can also run on your desktop. To learn more about Lively, please visit <a title="www.lively.com" href="http://www.lively.com/" id="l:nq">www.lively.com</a>. We’re eager to hear <a href="http://www.lively.com/help/bin/request.py?contact_type=suggest">your feedback</a>. Maybe we'll bump into you in one of our rooms! <object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/5YbwfOucET8&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/5YbwfOucET8&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

Be who you want on the web pages you visit

Posted by Niniane Wang, Engineering Manager A while ago, I looked around the social web and wished that it could be less static. Sure, you c...

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Protocol Buffers: Our open source data interchange format

Protocol Buffers: Our open source data interchange format

Posted by Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager Today we have something special for all you coders: we're releasing one of our most...

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Tour the Tour de France with Street View

Posted by Stephen Chau, Product Manager Today marks the beginning of one of my favorite summer events: the Tour de France. I'm always amazed when I hear about the long, steep climbs through mountains or the blistering speeds of the cyclists as they pass through the French countryside. But since most of us can't head over there to watch it in person, we're giving you the next best thing: Street View of the 2008 Tour de France route. Head to <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF&ll=45.460131,1.208496&z=6&layer=c">google.com/tourdefrance2008</a> to experience the route stage by stage, and learn more about the images (and check out some of the most breathtaking sights) over on the <a href="http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2008/07/tour-tour-de-france-with-street-view.html">Lat Long blog</a>. <iframe marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://maps.google.com/maps/sv?cbp=1,58.924081690356274,,0,-12.847584343719605&cbll=48.855759,2.287608&panoid=qj73CeRqHQoVWOZnrZUZfg&v=1&hl=en&gl=us" frameborder="0" height="240" scrolling="no" width="425"></iframe> <a href="http://maps.google.com/?cbp=1,58.924081690356274,,0,-12.847584343719605&cbll=48.855759,2.287608&layer=c&ie=UTF8&ll=48.857056,2.287656&spn=0.006092,0.016222&z=17&panoid=qj73CeRqHQoVWOZnrZUZfg&source=embed" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255); text-align: left;">View Larger Map</a>

Tour the Tour de France with Street View

Posted by Stephen Chau, Product Manager Today marks the beginning of one of my favorite summer events: the Tour de France. I'm always am...

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More tools for citizen participation

Posted by Peter Foo, Associate Webmaster and Mark Lucovsky, Technical Director Political participation isn't just about casting your vote; everyone should be able to become an informed participant instantly. When Americans want to learn about candidates and issues using Google, we find that they want more than one source, and immediate results. Instead of sitting through entire television broadcasts, voters are going online to get their daily dose of politics - as they did during the primaries, when searches for political queries spiked. We created a page on <a title="2008 US election trends" href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/trends/elections/" id="u685">2008 US election trends</a> that highlights search queries on candidates by location to show how, during this election season, voters across the nation are getting politically engaged online. Use the <a href="http://www.google.com/ig/adde?synd=open&source=ggyp&moduleurl=cqueries.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/queries_1.2.xml%3Fp%3D1">Candidate Search Queries map</a> to see which cities are searching more for Obama or McCain, and the News by Candidate tool on the trends page to see the latest headlines on each of the presidential contenders. Our political outreach efforts are aimed at providing citizens with useful knowledge on where candidates, office holders and advocacy groups stand. As more Americans go online and take simple steps to participate in politics, we aspire to promote democracy and informed participation in the process by equipping voters with useful information through search.

More tools for citizen participation

Posted by Peter Foo, Associate Webmaster and Mark Lucovsky, Technical Director Political participation isn't just about casting your vot...

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What comes next in this series? 13, 33, 53, 61, 37, 28...

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience Late one night in the summer of 2000, I found myself answering user support emails in response to two new features we had just released, Advanced Search and Preferences (at the time catchily called "Language, Display, and Filtering Options" :)). Busy crafting answers about how to set Safesearch or change the number of results offered by default, I worked my way through the email queue. And then I saw it: The next email had just a number ("37") in the subject - and no message text. What a weird form of spam, I thought. Why would anyone be motivated to just send a number? I searched for the user's email address to see what else had been sent. Interesting. Lots of numbers: 33, 53, and then a clue: "61, getting a bit heavy, aren't we?" Furthermore, the date on each of the messages seemed very familiar. Then I realized that's because the dates were all days that I had launched various changes on the homepage. "Getting a bit heavy?" - that one did correspond to one of the wordiest homepage releases we had ever done. Could the sender be counting words? Sure enough, I looked back, counted the words myself, and he was - a manual, human version of a scale for the Google homepage. He was weighing our homepage and letting us know when it was getting too heavy. One of his earliest mails had a note in the body: "What happened to the days of 13?" - referring to the word count on the initial 1999 homepage. This mystery and its revelation was really interesting because I thought about the homepage, and how to keep it simple, all the time. Yet I hadn't thought to look at it through this very simple lens: just count the words. The fewer, the better. Ever since that night, this has been our discipline, and everyone who works on the homepage and its design knows the current number: 28. (That's the word count for the basic page if you are signed out, there's no promotional line running beneath the search box, you've set Google as your homepage and thus don't get the "Make Google Your Homepage!" link, and you count "©2008 Google" as two words.) So, today we're making a homepage change by adding a link to our privacy overview and policies. Google values our users' privacy first and foremost. Trust is the basis of everything we do, so we want you to be familiar and comfortable with the integrity and care we give your personal data. We added this link both to our homepage and to our results page to make it easier for you to find information about our privacy principles. The new "Privacy" link goes to our Privacy Center, which was revamped earlier this year to be more straightforward and approachable, with videos and a non-legalese overview to make sure you understand in basic terms what Google does, does not, will, and won't, do in regard to your personal information. How does privacy relate to homepage word count? Larry and Sergey told me we could only add this to the homepage if we took a word away - keeping the "weight" of the homepage unchanged at 28. Given that the new Privacy link fit best with legal disclaimers on the page, I looked to the copyright line. There, we dropped the word "Google" (realizing it was implied, obviously) and added the new privacy link alongside it. <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhheI1hqEAozhnspac5k1uiUO5zHFjaGpJpXr_my5jqwxNZGeEuxW10g-5Ir7tbC9B6_z-hFKpRk_VgylZI0paAshlmBu1XEBSPuizhRdbW17ht194_pPxwLDNeOVj7YerkTLajL7ynVJCQ/s1600-h/blogpost.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5218887618314035170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhheI1hqEAozhnspac5k1uiUO5zHFjaGpJpXr_my5jqwxNZGeEuxW10g-5Ir7tbC9B6_z-hFKpRk_VgylZI0paAshlmBu1XEBSPuizhRdbW17ht194_pPxwLDNeOVj7YerkTLajL7ynVJCQ/s1600/blogpost.jpg" style="margin: 0px auto 0px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" /></a> We think the easy access to our privacy information without any added homepage heft is a clear win for our users and an enhancement to your experience. You can <a title="check out the new Privacy Center here" href="http://www.google.com/privacy.html" id="dvb2">check out the new Privacy Center here</a>.

What comes next in this series? 13, 33, 53, 61, 37, 28...

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience Late one night in the summer of 2000, I found myself answering user suppor...

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