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Tackling information overload, 10 million documents at a time

Imagine the last time you misplaced an important document right when you needed it most: your plane ticket the day of a flight; your driver's license before the morning commute; the warranty on your radio just as the speakers begin to crackle. A frustrating circumstance, perhaps, but a manageable one given the relatively limited landscape of one's personal items. Now imagine you can't find a key statistic before a work presentation, a customer detail before a sales pitch, or product spec before a critical design meeting. To find these, you're navigating the opaque universe of your organization's file shares, content systems and databases. Because we appreciate the universal quality of the first scenario and the high stakes of the second, we've released the <a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20080806_new_gsa.html">latest Google Search Appliance</a>, an <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmyYuXBkrWY" id="h82n" title="enterprise search solution">enterprise search solution</a> that can index all of an organization's content (up to 10 million documents) in a single box. We think that searching for the myriad of business information that helps you do your job should be as easy as searching for information on Google.com -- regardless of how much content your organization has, or where it resides. And since the volume of documents, customer contacts, presentations and other data flowing into your office is probably not going to shrink any time soon, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y29FhWPER4" id="jjip">giving your IT organization access</a> to a high-capacity single appliance (instead of the dozens that come with typical enterprise search implementations) might save your company expense and administrative hours while making it that much easier for you to find the exact piece of information you need to close that sales deal -- 10 million documents at a time. As for finding your driver's license, you're on your own. <a href="http://www.google.com/enterprise/search.html" id="ruww" title="Learn more">Learn more</a> about our search solutions for businesses. Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Enterprise Search

Tackling information overload, 10 million documents at a time

Imagine the last time you misplaced an important document right when you needed it most: your plane ticket the day of a flight; your driver...

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Seeing New Orleans through Street View

Louisiana is a place with heart and soul, a place where culture lives in the streets, in the rhythm of our music and in the flavors of our unique cuisine. I recently had the opportunity to visit the Googleplex and I expressed my interest in seeing Street View come to Louisiana, so I'm excited to see the <a href="http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2008/08/more-streets-in-more-places.html" id="lcmi" title="launch of Street View imagery">launch of Street View imagery</a> for Greater New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport. This remarkable tool allows us to share with the world life as we see it, here on the ground in my home state. In this time of recovery and rebuilding, it is important that we share real images of life in Louisiana and on the Gulf Coast. As you explore the streets of New Orleans, you will discover a city marked by extremes. You will see some areas spared the worst of Katrina’s fury which have quickly recovered, and you will find other neighborhoods that remain flattened by the floodwaters that broke the levees. You will see that our residents call both FEMA trailers and antebellum mansions home. What you might not see is the incredible spirit of those who have given themselves to this city. Those who were lost in the storm, and those who survived and have returned. The thousands who are still searching for a place to call home. The more than one million volunteers who have come from across the nation and the world to give their time, their sweat, and their hearts to rebuilding a great American city. But rebuilding gives us another opportunity – one unprecedented in our lifetimes. Because we are starting from scratch in many cases, we can build back better than before. We can create new solutions to persistent social problems – solutions that can be put to the test in New Orleans. Whether we’re talking about designing new levees to hold back flood waters, schools to prepare our kids for a 21st century economy, or a justice system to keep our citizens safe, Louisiana is addressing all of these issues and more. We can find the answers for our nation’s ills on the streets of this city. Street View for New Orleans will help you get to know the city, its streets and its neighborhoods in a way never before possible. And when you are ready to discover more, I invite you to come see and experience the streets, the soul and the spirit of New Orleans for yourself. Posted by Lt. Governor Mitch Landrieu, State of Louisiana

Seeing New Orleans through Street View

Louisiana is a place with heart and soul, a place where culture lives in the streets, in the rhythm of our music and in the flavors of our u...

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Search quality, continued

A few weeks back Udi Manber <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/introduction-to-google-search-quality.html" id="vd4j" title="introduced the search quality grou">introduced the search quality group</a>, and the <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/introduction-to-google-ranking.html" id="e1kr" title="previous">previous</a> <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/technologies-behind-google-ranking.html" id="qbn7" title="posts">posts</a> in this series talked about the ranking of documents. While the ranking of web documents forms the core of what makes search at Google work so well, your search experience consists of much more than that. In this post, I'll describe the principles that guide our development of the overall search experience and how they are applied to the key aspects of search. I will also describe how we make sure we are on the right track through rigorous experimentation. And the next post in this series will describe some of the experiments currently underway. Let me introduce myself. I'm Ben Gomes, and I've been working on search at Google since 1999, mostly on search quality. I've had the good fortune to contribute to most aspects of the search engine, from crawling the web to ranking. More recently, I've been responsible for the engineering of the interface for search and search features. A common reaction from friends when I say that I now work on Google's search user interface is "What do you do? It never changes." Then they look at me suspiciously and tell me not to mess with a good thing. Google is fine just the way it is -- a plain, fast, simple web page. That's great, but how hard can that be?" To help answer that question, let me start with our main goal in web search: to get you to the web pages you want as quickly as possible. Search is not an end in itself; it is merely a conduit. This goal may seem obvious, but it makes a search engine radically different from most other sites on the web, which measure their success by how long their users stay. We measure our web search success partly by how quickly you leave (happily, we hope!). There are several principles we use in getting you to the information you need as quickly as possible: <ul id="e3ld" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><li id="e3ld0"> A small page. A small page is quick to download and generally faster for your browser to display. This results in a minimalist design aesthetic; extra fanciness in the interface slows down the page without giving you much benefit. </li><li id="vs1t2"> Complex algorithms with a simple presentation. Many search features require a great deal of algorithmic complexity and a vast amount of data analysis to make them work well. The trick is to hide all that complexity behind a clean, intuitive user interface. Spelling correction, snippets, sitelinks and query refinements are examples of features that require sophisticated algorithms and are constantly improving. From the user's point of view search, almost invisibly, just works better. </li><li id="xrq1"> Features that work everywhere. Features must be designed such that the algorithms and presentation can be adapted to work in all languages and countries. Consider the problem of spell correction in Chinese, where user queries are often not broken up into words or Hebrew/Arabic, where text is written right to left (interestingly, this is believed to be an example of first-mover disadvantage -- when chiseling on stone, it is easier to hold the hammer in your right hand!). </li><li id="suk2"> Data driven decisions - experiment, experiment, experiment. We try to verify that we've done the right thing by running experiments. Designs that may seem promising may end up testing poorly.</li></ul>There are inherent tensions here. For instance, showing you more text (or images) for every result may enable you to better pick out the best result. But a result page that has too much information takes longer to download and longer to visually process. So every piece of information that we add to the result page has to be carefully considered to ensure that the benefit to the user outweighs the cost of dealing with that additional information. This is true of every part of the search experience, from typing in a query, to scanning results, to further exploration. The start of your search is typing in a query. A common cause of frustration is if you don't know the correct spelling of a word! Spell correction -- which seems like a simple and obvious feature -- hides many technical challenges. No common English dictionaries would ever include the correct spelling of Britney Spears, for instance (who, probably completely unbeknownst to her, has become the poster child example for <a href="http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html" id="hr2o" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" title="this feature">this feature</a>). We do a huge amount of analysis of the billions of pages on the web and our query logs to determine what are "real words" on the web, and what are likely to be misspellings. The system that gives you the spell correction has to, in a fraction of a second, consider a huge number of possible words you might have meant (vastly greater than any dictionary ever manually constructed) and determine if there is a more likely query you meant to type. When we are confident that you actually meant to type something else, we take a rare liberty with our search results: we try to distract you from looking at the top result on the page. The spelling correction is in your line of sight and colored a bright must-see red. Furthermore, we now make sure that nothing else on the page is red, unless it is as important to you as spelling! (so far, nothing is). The algorithms involved in spell correction are constantly getting better. They now work in a large number of languages and are even better at detecting when you have made a spelling mistake. Getting the spelling of your query right is so important that we are considering showing you the results of the spell-corrected query in the middle of the page (just in case you missed our bright red text at the top and bottom!). Having formulated your query correctly, the next task is to pick a page from the result list. For each result, we present the title and url, and a brief two line snippet. Pages that don't have a proper title are often ignored by users. One of the bigger recent changes has been to extract titles for pages that don't specify an HTML title -- yet a title on the page is clearly right there, staring at you. To "see" that title that the author of the page intended, we analyze the HTML of the page to determine the title that the author probably meant. This makes it far more likely that you will not ignore a page for want of a good title. Below the title comes the snippet, and a key early innovation was in what Google showed for the snippet. At the time, search engines showed you the first two lines of the web page; Google, instead, showed you parts of the page where your actual search keywords showed up (information retrieval experts call this "keywords-in-context"). Showing keywords-in-context is visually simple and virtually indistinguishable from the simpler style of snippets, but vastly more useful in helping you decide which page to visit. This simplicity belies underlying complexity: when we create a snippet we have to go through the actual text from each result to find the most relevant part (which contain your keywords) rather than just giving you the first few lines. We have been making improvements to our snippets over time with algorithms for determining the relevance of portions of the page. The changes range from the subtle -- we highlight synonyms of your query terms in the results -- to more obvious. Here's an example screenshot where the user searched for "arod" and you can see that Alex and Rodriguez are bolded in the search result snippet, based on our analysis that you might plausibly be referring to him: <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfgX4oPSooi56jGCtB05OyOZIB5frKJnGaSkdxvfZbraF6XOWygl0-QOkkIQ15pCE5f3ZW1Fkg1VdaL9LJRdlOxBagxV92i3NBLvtodmVQs4ODSlFXX0-Y6st0IAU4b4xTEtypJEOGgsxl/s1600-h/search_Aug1_ex1.gif" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5229534971213884514" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfgX4oPSooi56jGCtB05OyOZIB5frKJnGaSkdxvfZbraF6XOWygl0-QOkkIQ15pCE5f3ZW1Fkg1VdaL9LJRdlOxBagxV92i3NBLvtodmVQs4ODSlFXX0-Y6st0IAU4b4xTEtypJEOGgsxl/s320/search_Aug1_ex1.gif" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" /></a>As a more obvious example, we now extract and show you the byline date from pages that have one. These byline dates are expressed in a myriad formats which we extract and present uniformly, so that you can scan them easily: <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ5MhxQlJdZpwfG-PdSebgKAnr05wscgoZ7fDhYDjxt3RClHQOAcuQYteCNbgY4WRekKc90u4NsFr8BoRgrXBzGq2PaGhtgFWeqZ7n1OXS8MhdjciCly7fCb26AmhppZ0bGF407f6dpDH5/s1600-h/search_Aug1_ex2.gif" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5229535610787666098" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ5MhxQlJdZpwfG-PdSebgKAnr05wscgoZ7fDhYDjxt3RClHQOAcuQYteCNbgY4WRekKc90u4NsFr8BoRgrXBzGq2PaGhtgFWeqZ7n1OXS8MhdjciCly7fCb26AmhppZ0bGF407f6dpDH5/s320/search_Aug1_ex2.gif" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" /></a>For one of the most common types of user needs, navigational queries -- where you type in the name of a web site you know -- we have introduced shortcuts (we refer to them as sitelinks). These sitelinks allow you to get to the key parts of the site and illustrate many of the same principles alluded to above; they are a simple addition to the top search result that adds a small amount of extra text to the page. <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0dJ6ntM7T8VpDO56BQAVAouCw4UFoctZgc6Zade7UG51vfQXIIftXX32K-mu_BjLSPVSROlybxC9FnaY1ETbHa-bynQ_qGzo9Tdv-CmRo_a8HE1b4PeXFAJAWk_NqEB7IMcAM15SouiqT/s1600-h/search_aug1_ex3.gif" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5229535892770837234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0dJ6ntM7T8VpDO56BQAVAouCw4UFoctZgc6Zade7UG51vfQXIIftXX32K-mu_BjLSPVSROlybxC9FnaY1ETbHa-bynQ_qGzo9Tdv-CmRo_a8HE1b4PeXFAJAWk_NqEB7IMcAM15SouiqT/s320/search_aug1_ex3.gif" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" /></a>For instance, the home page of Hewlett-Packard has almost 60 links, in a two-level menu system. Our algorithms, using a combination of different signals, pick the top ones among these that we think you are most likely to want to visit. What if you did not find what you were looking for among the top results? In that case, you probably need to try another query. We help you in this process by providing a set of query refinements at the bottom of the results page -- even if they don't give you the query that you need, they provide hints for different (likely more successful) directions in which you could refine your query. By placing the query refinements at the bottom of the page, the refinements don't distract users, but are there to help if the rest of the search results didn't serve a user's information need. I've described several key aspects of the search experience, including where we have made many changes over time -- some subtle, some more obvious. In making these changes to the search experience, how do we know we've succeeded, that we've not messed it up? We constantly evaluate our changes by sharing them with you! We launch proposed changes to a tiny fraction of our users and evaluate whether it seems to be helping or hurting their search experience. There are many metrics we use to determine if we've succeeded or failed. The process of measuring these improvements is a science in itself, with many potential pitfalls. Our experimental methodology allows us to explore a range of possibilities and launch the ones that work the best. For every feature that we launch, we have frequently run a large number of experiments that did not see the light of day. So let me answer the question I started with: We're actually constantly changing Google's result page and have been doing so for a long time. And no, we won't mess with a good thing. You won't let us. In the next post in this series, I'll talk about some of the experiments we are running, and what we hope to learn from them. Posted by Ben Gomes, Distinguished Engineer

Search quality, continued

A few weeks back Udi Manber introduced the search quality group , and the previous posts in this series talked about the ranking of docume...

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Google in your language

You may have read a couple of weeks back about our <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/hitting-40-languages.html" id="uw1g" title="Google’s 40 language initiative">40-language initiative</a> and our broader goal of making the world’s information accessible in as many languages as possible. For this reason we were extremely pleased last week to take part in an event in Rotorua, New Zealand for the launch of the Google homepage and search interface in the <a href="http://www.google.co.nz/" id="vw38" title="Maori language">Maori language</a>. I want to emphasize “take part in”, because much of the hard work that made this announcement possible came from a dedicated team of volunteer translators across New Zealand. In conjunction with our active effort to make all of our products and services available in 40 languages, beginning in 2001 we began a program known as <a href="http://www.google.com/transconsole" id="asqb" title="Google in Your Language">Google in Your Language</a>, which is designed to give anyone the tools to translate Google services into languages in which they are fluent. Thanks to this program, as well as our other efforts to localize our products, the Google homepage itself now appears in <a href="http://www.google.com/language_tools" id="lifx" title="more than 100 languages">more than 100 languages</a>. Around the time the Google in Your Language program began, I reached out to a former colleague at Waikato University, Dr. Te Taka Keegan, with the idea of translating Google into Maori. While working on his doctorate, Te Taka began the translation effort in his spare time. Over the course of the next six years, with the help of several other volunteers, he had covered 68% of the messages. It was at this point in 2007 that the husband-and-wife team of Potaua and Nikolasa Biasiny-Tule caught wind of the effort, and took it upon themselves to complete the project. Thanks to their passion for the Maori language and technical savvy, they were able to recruit the help of the Maori Language Commission and dozens of volunteers, leading ultimately to all translations being completed within a year—just in time for Maori Language Week 2008. By the end of it all, more than 1,600 phrases, totaling more that 8,500 words, had been translated. Besides being a fantastic volunteer effort, the Google Maori project is a great example of how the Internet encourages user participation, especially in particular cultural and linguistic communities. I'd like to offer a tremendous thank you and congratulations to the Maori translation team in New Zealand, and to all those who helped make this possible. Posted by Craig Nevill-Manning, Engineering Director

Google in your language

You may have read a couple of weeks back about our 40-language initiative and our broader goal of making the world’s information accessible...

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Hello from A2

We set up shop in Ann Arbor, Mich. nearly two years ago. And we’ve been so busy, we’ve barely had time to say hi. But before we tell you about the interesting things we're doing in <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=201+S+Division+St,+Ann+Arbor,+MI+48104&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=48.50801,89.648437&ie=UTF8&ll=42.280008,-83.743823&spn=0.011145,0.021887&z=16&iwloc=addr" id="h6id">our new location</a>, we figure you might want to know a little bit more about our state and our town. Sandwiched between two Great Lakes, peppered with forestry, and teeming with kindhearted Midwesterners, <a href="http://www.michigan.gov/" id="wtjg">Michigan</a> is the kind of place you'd be lucky to visit and we get to live here. Not only that, but we’re located in <a href="http://www.annarbor.org/" id="ia:6">Ann Arbor</a>, a town with a great progressive story: <ul><li>Popular Science magazine ranked Ann Arbor in the <a href="http://www.popsci.com/environment/article/2008-02/americas-50-greenest-cities?page=1" id="eszy8">top 25 greenest cities</a> in America.Some 50,000 trees grow along Ann Arbor streets, and city parks boast another 50,000. And while no trees actually grow in the Google office, our cheeks do seem to be turning a nice leafy shade of green — probably from walking and biking to work as part of Ann Arbor’s Commuter Challenge, swapping paper for reusable dishes in our cafeteria, and educating ourselves on composting and recycling. </li><li>On Oct. 14, 1960, President John F. Kennedy <a href="http://michigantoday.umich.edu/2008/jan/jfk.php" id="w968">announced his proposal</a> for the Peace Corps on the front steps of the Michigan Union, in downtown Ann Arbor. Nearly 50 years later, we "A2ooglers" feel a similar sense of urgency — but this time, it’s a desire to work with our very own state, from soup kitchens to river cleanups. We’re also connecting local schools and businesses with Google products.</li><li>In the first Rose Bowl Game in 1902, University of Michigan (located in Ann Arbor) defeated Stanford 49 - 0. Like our Wolverine neighbors, we're burning with competitive spirit — one that’s given birth to office teams for kickball, soccer, volleyball, tennis, basketball, skiing, ultimate Frisbee and trivia.</li></ul>Forgive us our moment of boosterism, but there's more: <ul><li id="i9b749"> AARP Magazine recently named Ann Arbor the <a href="http://www.aarpmagazine.org/lifestyle/healthiest_hometowns.html/page=2" id="gqww" title="healthiest hometown in America">healthiest hometown in America</a>, based on 20 factors ranging from the community's water purity to the eating habits of its citizens.</li><li id="qiuq">According to Forbes.com, Ann Arbor is America's <a href="http://www.forbes.com/2008/02/07/americas-smartest-cities-oped-cx_apa_0207smartest_slide_5.html?thisSpeed=15000" id="bf7c" title="4th Smartest City">4th Smartest City</a>.</li><li id="rfne">Oprah Winfrey included a brisket sandwich from our own Zingerman's Deli on her <a href="http://blog.mlive.com/annarbornews/2008/05/zingermans_deli_makes_oprahs_l.html" id="vf.d" title="Top Sandwiches in America.">Top Sandwiches in America.</a> </li><li id="f95f">Ann Arbor ranks in the <a href="http://www.bicycling.com/article/1,6610,s1-2-16-14593-9,00.html" id="ns1m" title="top 21 cities for cyclists">top 21 cities for cyclists</a>, says Bicycling magazine.</li><li id="td5q">And <a href="http://www.concentratemedia.com/features/AnnArborList0017.aspx?utm_campaign=How%20We%20Stack%20Up&utm_medium=Email&utm_source=VerticalResponse&utm_term=Ann%20Arbor%27s%20On%20The%20List" id="jvqk" title="more">even more</a>... </li></ul> Inside our walls, you’ll find a team that's committed to our AdWords advertisers — from identifying potential advertisers, to assisting current ones with day-to-day challenges, to strategizing with others for the future. That’s who we are. We’d love to have you <a href="http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/static.py?page=why-mi-arb.html" id="cuyq" title="join us">join us</a>. <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ9pyEi1EcdnmcL2OOBEfVNM98863UTWXDATtKTcjawGhVVg-9QvC5HAc2arYBBGqv2qaaGt8mywVvHxRATLIu7MG6M2QG-BdNx58zmMeM5OD2Vn3zIMMqbDwrflHCYSvn4gQTdicKI5KW/s1600-h/A2+group+photo.gif" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5228838669681716306" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ9pyEi1EcdnmcL2OOBEfVNM98863UTWXDATtKTcjawGhVVg-9QvC5HAc2arYBBGqv2qaaGt8mywVvHxRATLIu7MG6M2QG-BdNx58zmMeM5OD2Vn3zIMMqbDwrflHCYSvn4gQTdicKI5KW/s320/A2+group+photo.gif" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" /></a>Posted by Eileen Duffy, AdWords Associate

Hello from A2

We set up shop in Ann Arbor, Mich. nearly two years ago. And we’ve been so busy, we’ve barely had time to say hi. But before we tell you abo...

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Back to school with more than 1 million users worldwide

Google Apps is rapidly gaining momentum in education. We now have more than a million people on campuses worldwide actively using Google's suite of email, calendar and docs to share information and study. This makes perfect sense. Schools have always been a proving ground for innovative ideas. And as we prepare for the new school year, we are happy to welcome more than a dozen universities across the U.S., joining the thousands of other schools that have already embraced cloud computing in education. Here are the new additions: <ul><li>Collin County Community College District</li><li>Francis Marion University</li><li>George Washington University</li><li>Indiana University</li><li>Kean University</li><li>Kent State University</li><li>Kishwaukee College</li><li>Loyola Marymount University</li><li>Montgomery County Community College</li><li>New Jersey Institute of Technology</li><li>University of Florida</li><li>University of San Diego</li><li>University of Virginia</li></ul> This is really just the beginning. As we continue working to make it easier to communicate and collaborate online, we are going to meet with some of the top technology experts -- the students themselves. For the entire month of September, we are heading "<a href="http://www.google.com/apps/edu/bus/index.html" id="roir" title="App to School">App to School</a>" by embarking on a cross-country bus tour to visit campuses, listen to students and learn more about how cloud computing is helping education. Please check out our <a href="http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2008/07/enterprise-blog-post-announcing-bus.html" id="vr8m" title="Enterprise blog">Enterprise blog</a> for more info. Posted by Jeff Keltner, Business Development Manager, Google Apps

Back to school with more than 1 million users worldwide

Google Apps is rapidly gaining momentum in education. We now have more than a million people on campuses worldwide actively using Google...

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More transparency in customized search results

As we continue to refine our search algorithms to deliver more relevant results, we strive to be as open as possible about <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/why-data-matters.html" id="or8w" title="how we use data">how we use data</a> to improve your search experience. Today, we're rolling out a new feature in Google Web Search that will help you better understand how your search results are already customized. Over the next few days, you may start to see messages like this in the upper right corner of your search results page (click on the image to view larger): <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdMjNZ9K4NSNzqO9ZjGbSwxFE-8eIuXuAeCgKYe32Sp__RZVYiaHHu2OCjdlD4brQoIlB1Wqu1RspSdkYE7CsXS0PCWXXU-STRuU0jAoWtr6-rp3ZXkJwm1htvb6uhvO_1EsVvuxEXSk5p/s1600-h/customized_search.gif" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5228622444598153922" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdMjNZ9K4NSNzqO9ZjGbSwxFE-8eIuXuAeCgKYe32Sp__RZVYiaHHu2OCjdlD4brQoIlB1Wqu1RspSdkYE7CsXS0PCWXXU-STRuU0jAoWtr6-rp3ZXkJwm1htvb6uhvO_1EsVvuxEXSk5p/s320/customized_search.gif" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" /></a>You can click the "More details" link to get to a page like this: <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsI0dksqIOcf9HKwoIbsJ4YN-sL0CHzTUBqjsmVN5VtlChJ41vsweq1-SLNg9eBSho3MnDkmqAPC6OkHTuQ48oyVMD1dLxmAFH4T0iThG8nWLrG_TYX8WqjBaz8zXggbJwtCQTsX_c-V7R/s1600-h/customized_search2.gif" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5228622966539146498" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsI0dksqIOcf9HKwoIbsJ4YN-sL0CHzTUBqjsmVN5VtlChJ41vsweq1-SLNg9eBSho3MnDkmqAPC6OkHTuQ48oyVMD1dLxmAFH4T0iThG8nWLrG_TYX8WqjBaz8zXggbJwtCQTsX_c-V7R/s320/customized_search2.gif" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" /></a>You'll see these new messages whenever your search results have been customized based on one or more of the following types of information: <ul><li>Location. By default, we identify your approximate city location based on your computer's <a href="https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=32741" id="mkih" title="IP address">IP address</a> and use it to customize your search results. If you'd like Google to use a different location, you can sign into or create a Google Account and provide a city or street address. Your specific location will be used not only for customizing search results, but also to improve your experience in Google Maps and other Google products.</li></ul><ul><li>Recent searches. We take into account whether a particular query followed on the heels of another query. Because recent search activity provides such valuable context for understanding the meaning behind your searches, we use it to customize your results whenever possible, regardless of whether you're signed in or signed out. In order to customize your results and show you the customization details, we keep the most recent query on your browser for a limited time. After that, the information is removed from your browser and disappears immediately if you close your browser.</li></ul><ul><li>Web History. If you're signed in and have <a href="http://www.google.com/psearch" id="ap::" title="Web History">Web History</a> enabled, we customize your search results based on what you've searched for in the past on Google, and what web sites you've visited. One important note about Web History: it belongs to you and you have complete control over it. You can remove specific items or pause the service at any time. And if there's a particular search that you'd rather not have personalized based on your Web History, you can also just temporarily sign out of your Google Account.</li></ul>This new feature doesn't change anything at all about how you search on Google and the results you get; it just gives you more of a behind-the-scenes look at how we customize your search experience. We consider this to be an important step in our <a href="http://www.google.com/privacy" id="jyq_" title="commitment to transparency">commitment to transparency</a>, and we hope you find it informative and useful. Posted by Rachel Garb, Product Manager

More transparency in customized search results

As we continue to refine our search algorithms to deliver more relevant results, we strive to be as open as possible about how we use data ...

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