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Our Googley advice to students: Major in learning

Management guru Peter Drucker noted that companies attracting the best knowledge workers will "secure the single biggest factor for competitive advantage." We and other forward-looking companies put a lot of effort into hiring such people. What are we looking for? At the highest level, we are looking for non-routine problem-solving skills. We expect applicants to be able to solve routine problems as a matter of course. After all, that's what most education is concerned with. But the non-routine problems offer the opportunity to create competitive advantage, and solving those problems requires creative thought and tenacity. Here's a real-life example, a challenge a team of our engineers once faced: designing a spell-checker for the Google search engine. The routine solution would be to run queries through a dictionary. The non-routine, creative solution is to use the query corrections and refinements that other users have made in the past to offer spelling suggestions for new queries. This approach enables us to correct all the words that aren't in the dictionary, helping many more users in the process. How do we find these non-routine savants? There are many factors, of course, but we primarily look for ... ... analytical reasoning. Google is a data-driven, analytic company. When an issue arises or a decision needs to be made, we start with data. That means we can talk about what we know, instead of what we think we know. ... communication skills. Marshalling and understanding the available evidence isn't useful unless you can effectively communicate your conclusions. ... a willingness to experiment. Non-routine problems call for non-routine solutions and there is no formula for success. A well-designed experiment calls for a range of treatments, explicit control groups, and careful post-treatment analysis. Sometimes an experiment kills off a pet theory, so you need a willingness to accept the evidence even if you don't like it. ... team players. Virtually every project at Google is run by a small team. People need to work well together and perform up to the team's expectations. ... passion and leadership. This could be professional or in other life experiences: learning languages or saving forests, for example. The main thing, to paraphrase Mr. Drucker, is to be motivated by a sense of importance about what you do. These characteristics are not just important in our business, but in every business, as well as in government, philanthropy, and academia. The challenge for the up-and-coming generation is how to acquire them. It's easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel. Keep in mind that many required skills will change: developers today code in something called Python, but when I was in school C was all the rage. The need for reasoning, though, remains constant, so we believe in taking the most challenging courses in core disciplines: math, sciences, humanities. And then keep on challenging yourself, because learning doesn't end with graduation. In fact, in the real world, while the answers to the odd-numbered problems are not in the back of the textbook, the tests are all open book, and your success is inexorably determined by the lessons you glean from the free market. Learning, it turns out, is a lifelong major. Posted by Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior VP, Product Management

Our Googley advice to students: Major in learning

Management guru Peter Drucker noted that companies attracting the best knowledge workers will "secure the single biggest factor for com...

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"In their own words": political videos meet Google speech-to-text technology

Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet and Ari Bezman, Product Managers In this U.S. election year, what information could be more important than the candidates' own words to describe their views, actions and platforms? Our teams have been working to develop tools to make it easier for people to track election-related information. A few months back, YouTube encouraged everyone to participate in the discussion process through the CNN/YouTube debates, Google Checkout offered an easy and fast way for individuals to make contributions to political candidates, and the Geo team created maps and layers to inform voters during elections. Today, the Google speech team (part of <a href="http://research.google.com/">Google Research</a>) is launching the <a href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?root=/ig&dpos=top&url=www.google.com/ig/modules/elections_video_search.xml">Google Elections Video Search gadget</a>, our modest contribution to the electoral process. With the help of our speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTube's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/members?s=mv&t=a&g=8">Politicians channels</a> are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed. Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find. Here's a look: <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnEE0yW91NxtSGkaUvdK89P9dKh9B_67eZWoJY8NPqQKsrqe1fvuVGyH6J1i42zNGyZt5_AmfjDPQtiEKen9tRCjnQ23OzuGsoWKF0pRH9422-0r3QncreGEtLQM4jty8SSIoL4p7agaFY/s1600-h/screen-shot-final-final.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5223001365359592226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnEE0yW91NxtSGkaUvdK89P9dKh9B_67eZWoJY8NPqQKsrqe1fvuVGyH6J1i42zNGyZt5_AmfjDPQtiEKen9tRCjnQ23OzuGsoWKF0pRH9422-0r3QncreGEtLQM4jty8SSIoL4p7agaFY/s400/screen-shot-final-final.jpg" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" /></a> In addition to providing voters with election information, we also hope to find out more about how people use speech technology to search and consume videos, and to learn what works and what doesn't, to help us improve our products. The gadget only searches videos uploaded to YouTube's Politicians channels, which include videos from Senator Obama's and Senator McCain's campaigns, as well as those from dozens of other candidates and politicians. It usually takes less than a few hours for a video to appear in the index after it has been published on YouTube. Candidates can control the videos that appear in the gadget by managing the content they upload to YouTube. While some of the transcript snippets you see may not be 100% accurate, we hope that you'll find the product useful for most purposes. Speech recognition is a difficult problem that hasn't yet been completely solved, but we're constantly working to refine our algorithms and improve the accuracy and relevance of these transcribed results. To try it out, just visit our <a href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?root=/ig&dpos=top&url=www.google.com/ig/modules/elections_video_search.xml">iGoogle gadget page</a>. We welcome your feedback, so please feel free to leave a comment while you're there.

"In their own words": political videos meet Google speech-to-text technology

Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet and Ari Bezman, Product Managers In this U.S. election year, what information could be more important than the can...

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Introducing the Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program

Posted by Liza Ma, Associate Product Manager Creating content for the web is easy, but getting people to discover it can be a challenge. When we launched <a href="http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools" id="lqyb" title="Google Webmaster Tools">Google Webmaster Tools</a> in 2006, the goal was to reach as many webmasters as possible in order to help them create more search engine-friendly sites. We wanted to help webmasters understand how their sites interact with Google, and we've introduced a number of features that help webmasters identify and fix problems with their sites that prevented visitors from reaching them. Google Webmaster Tools offers important data such as when sites were last crawled, who's linking to them, and what the most popular search terms are that drive traffic to their sites. To further help webmasters create better sites, we're launching the <a href="http://www.google.com/webmasters/provider/index.html" id="b:il" title="Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program">Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program</a>, which lets domain hosters from all over use our APIs to get their customers started with Google Webmaster Tools. It's an exciting development for us, and we look forward to helping more webmasters understand search. Read more about the program on our <a href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/07/helping-yourself-to-webmaster-tools.html" id="tvzg" title="Webmaster Central blog">Webmaster Central blog</a>.

Introducing the Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program

Posted by Liza Ma, Associate Product Manager Creating content for the web is easy, but getting people to discover it can be a challenge. Whe...

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No cameras. No lights. Just data.

Posted by Ola Rosling, Product Manager A few weeks ago we heard about a project Radiohead was working on. The band was making a new video, but they weren't using any cameras, just lasers and data. As you might imagine, we were intrigued. The song is called “House of Cards,” from Radiohead’s recent “In Rainbows” album. In this new video, there were no cameras on set. Instead, two scanning technologies were used to capture 3D images. <a href="http://www.geometricinformatics.com/"> Geometric Informatics </a>scanning systems produced structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a <a href="http://www.velodyne.com/lidar/" id="tapp">Velodyne LIDAR</a> system that uses multiple lasers was used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In the video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes. Whether you're a music fan or a developer (or both), we agreed with the band that it would be great to give you a deeper look into how all of this was done, and even a chance to play with the data yourself, under a license that allows remixing. You can view the video, watch a short documentary about how it was made, interact with the video in 3D, download some of the data, and download an iGoogle theme and gadget - all at <a href="http://code.google.com/radiohead/" id="b0__" title="http://code.google.com/radiohead/">http://code.google.com/radiohead</a>.

No cameras. No lights. Just data.

Posted by Ola Rosling, Product Manager A few weeks ago we heard about a project Radiohead was working on. The band was making a new video, b...

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YouTubing the conventions

Posted by Steve Grove, YouTube News and Politics Through unprecedented partnerships with both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, we just debuted a video contest that will send one talented winner from each side of the aisle onto their candidate's campaign trail, and ultimately into their party's national convention in Denver or Minneapolis-St. Paul. The call to action is simple: submit a video explaining why you're a Democrat or Republican in 2008. The five most compelling and creative videos selected by each convention will be voted on by the YouTube community, who will determine the final winner. Learn more by watching these videos from <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RSaYVgd7yk">Republican Chairman Mike Duncan</a> or <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_ynUZ6W7xw">Democratic Chairman Howard Dean</a>. These contests are a part of our larger partnership with the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. As the official providers for search and online video community, Google and YouTube are contributing a broad range of technology and services to help delegates, members of the media and interested citizens around the country to access convention events and information. And on YouTube, the two convention staffs have been busy posting videos to build buzz about the exciting events in Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul this summer - like <a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=yt1fYSAChxs">speeches</a> from great <a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=_fMNIofUw2I">moments</a> in convention history. So check out <a href="http://youtube.com/2008conventions">YouTube's Convention Headquarters</a> and submit your video to the contest today. It's your chance to get involved in what promise to be two of the most exciting political events this summer.

YouTubing the conventions

Posted by Steve Grove, YouTube News and Politics Through unprecedented partnerships with both the Democratic and Republican National Convent...

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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 href="http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2008/07/searching-on-iphone-can-be-fun.html" id="jmud" title="this post">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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