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Reinventing the wheel

About a month ago, we found out that our team, along with all of Offline Ads, would be moving from our comfortable 4th floor cubicles in New York City all the way up to the comparatively uninhabited 6th floor. It was definitely a change of pace from the Manhattan-esque bustle of our old space to a quieter, more Brooklyn-esque feel. So the question arose: what happens when you drop an entire floor's worth of Googlers into a new office? The answer: a cubicle decorating contest to end all cubicle decorating contests. It wasn't initially clear what sort of decoration would be fitting for our team (Print Ads Engineering). While the rest of the floor had been caught up in the decorating fervor, it seemed our team was completely lacking enthusiasm. We watched morosely as everyone else paraded their grass hula skirts and mariachi music in our faces. But what could we do? We were more into building things, designing robust programs, and, well, being engineers. We couldn't see how anything in the way of decorating would represent the personality of our team, short of building a giant LED display flashing, "Print Ads Eng." So we set out on the task to figure out what we could feasibly build. We do happen to have have a large supply of Legos here at Google NY, so that came to mind first. But alas, co-founder <a href="http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html#larry" id="mqex" title="Larry Page">Larry Page</a> was already legendary for building a working printer out of Legos. We definitely couldn't top that. An erector set, perhaps? Too much hardware. Finally we settled on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%27NEX">K'Nex</a>. So we went online and found the biggest K'Nex set we could: a 6' tall Ferris Wheel of Doom. With the contest deadline looming, we purchased the set and started building. Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into. We got to the table with over 8500 parts, roughly 40 lbs. of plastic, and only 4 of us. Perhaps we had bitten off a little more than we could chew. We resolved to have it done by the following Monday, but the fact is we were all busy with actual work. So we came in on the weekend and dragged along a few "contractors" (read: personal friends) whose manual labor was rewarded in snacks. Still, even with all of the extra help, it was a daunting task. The instruction book wasn't always the most helpful, with only pictures of what we had to build and how many. (The box wasn't kidding when it said, "for ages 16 and up.") The first few pages had pictures with only "x2" or "x3" next to them, but things started getting intense as we got towards the end, seeing "x48," "x96," and even, "x192." Since we are engineers, and aim to maximize efficiency, we formed assembly lines to expedite the repetitive tasks. It was quite a sight. (We also discovered the detriments of assembly lines and repetitive motion injuries, but that's anot<a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="return false;" tabindex="11"></a>her story altogether.) By Monday, it was done. Well, all except for one thing: no Google logo. So we built one. We may have had to stray a little from the specifications to fit it in, but all in a good day's work for a few engineers. Upon completion, we put it on display for everyone to see. (In fact, sitting atop two tables, roughly 5 feet above ground, it's pretty hard to miss.) We certainly won't have to worry about anyone questioning our team's enthusiasm anytime soon. <div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFL3VsCh-i6KFMSYb1n6FjE0cp7zluIP0amUf9aYoz-7QY1zlRUXzEl5Ax-WWvSP3GqXjYeQwx_V88C9zmOY5fYpQcSbt6_69lzrcOjUzkcOUlz5H6-qD8dljMHtHSNMrHbLlSflfgvizp/s1600-h/ferriswheel_NYC.gif" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5231904102987432194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFL3VsCh-i6KFMSYb1n6FjE0cp7zluIP0amUf9aYoz-7QY1zlRUXzEl5Ax-WWvSP3GqXjYeQwx_V88C9zmOY5fYpQcSbt6_69lzrcOjUzkcOUlz5H6-qD8dljMHtHSNMrHbLlSflfgvizp/s320/ferriswheel_NYC.gif" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" /></a> L to R: Ben, Hunter, Tristan, Autumn. </div> Posted by Tristan Naumann, Ben Cole, Autumn Petros-Good, & Hunter Freyer, Print Ads Interns

Reinventing the wheel

About a month ago, we found out that our team, along with all of Offline Ads, would be moving from our comfortable 4th floor cubicles in New...

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Keeping up with the Summer Games

As we mark the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Games, I can’t help but remember eight years ago, <a href="http://www.dylancasey.com/biography.cfm" id="fi-h" title="when I competed">when I competed</a> on the U.S. cycling team. Even though I didn’t walk away with any medals then, training and competing involved a herculean effort - but that pales in comparison to what we’re unveiling today. I’m happy to present the <a href="http://www.google.com/landing/summergames2008/index.html#source=sgob" id="b-bq18" title="2008 Summer Games on Google">2008 Summer Games on Google</a>, a site that features a number of our products to help you stay updated on Summer Games happenings. And it's available in 66 countries and 31 languages, from Australia to Uruguay, and from Arabic to Vietnamese. We collaborated with a data provider to make it easy for you to keep current on event schedules and get updates on results, as well as track medal counts with an iGoogle gadget. You can also get schedules and results on Google search results. (Check out the results for <a href="http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS241&=&q=olympic+water+polo&btnG=Google+Search" id="nk9w" title="water polo results">water polo</a>.) We're also including the newest Summer Games highlights through Google News. The <a href="http://maps.google.com/help/maps/2008summergames/" id="ixe9" title="Summer Games Google Maps">Summer Games Google Maps</a> lets you view medal and event information based on your favorite regions and sports, and there's a 3D video of the various Games venues you can tour: <object height="350" width="425"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/0p2cEQCsBuY"> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/0p2cEQCsBuY" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="350" width="425"></embed> </object> Also, be sure to check out this cool collection of <a href="http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/cldetails?mid=efe83785f1aaaae0ae682533f3f1d4dd&ct=hpr2" id="eegu9" target="_blank">3D stadiums and venues in Beijing</a> created with Google SketchUp. <a href="http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2008/08/off-to-games.html">Read more</a> about these efforts on the Lat Long Blog. Since we know many of you are on the go this summer, all this information is <a href="http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2008/08/on-your-mark-get-set-go-follow-summer.html">available for mobile devices</a>, where Google Mobile is available. We hope these tools make it easy and enjoyable for you to follow all the action at the Summer Games. Posted by Dylan Casey, Product Manager

Keeping up with the Summer Games

As we mark the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Games, I can’t help but remember eight years ago, when I competed on the U.S. cycling ...

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New enhancements on the Google content network

Today we're announcing some key enhancements on the Google content network (partner sites for which we provide advertising) that will offer a better experience for users and better value for advertisers and publishers. These enhancements are the latest result of our integration with DoubleClick and our commitment to making advertising on the Google content network more efficient and accountable. When we purchased DoubleClick, we talked about how we would empower agencies, advertisers and publishers to collaborate more efficiently and effectively, and provide a better experience for our users. We are happy that we have been able to deliver on this promise already, like <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/opening-our-content-network-to-third.html" id="ddz7" title="Opening our content network to third parties">support for third party vendors</a> on the Google content network. The new enhancements that we are announcing today and that will be available in the coming months are the next step in our integration and in enabling standard industry functionality on the Google content network: <ul><li>Frequency Capping: Enables advertisers to control the number of times a user sees an ad. Users will have a better experience on Google content network sites because they will no longer see the same ad over and over again. </li></ul><ul><li>Frequency Reporting: Provides insight into the number of people who have seen an ad campaign, and how many times, on average, people are seeing these ads. </li></ul><ul><li>Improved Ads Quality: Brings performance improvements within the Google content network.</li></ul><ul><li>View-Through Conversions: Enables advertisers to gain insights on how many users visited their sites after seeing an ad. This helps advertisers determine the best places to advertise so users will see more relevant ads.</li></ul>We are enabling this functionality by implementing a DoubleClick ad-serving cookie across the Google content network. Using the DoubleClick cookie means that DoubleClick advertisers and publishers don't have to make any changes on their websites as we continue our integration efforts and offer additional enhancements. This also means that with one click, users can <a href="http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html" id="d:.r" title="opt out">opt out</a> of a single cookie for both DoubleClick ad serving and the Google content network. (If a user has already opted out of the DoubleClick cookie, that opt-out will also automatically apply to the Google content network.) To learn more, you can check out our updated <a href="http://www.google.com/privacypolicy.html"> main privacy policy </a> and a new <a href="http://www.google.com/privacy_cookies.html" id="mvt3">advertising-specific privacy policy</a> that reflects our integration with the DoubleClick ad serving cookie, and you can visit a <a href="http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html" id="og98">section</a> in our <a href="http://www.google.com/privacy.html">Privacy Center</a> devoted to advertising and privacy. We're excited about our integration of DoubleClick and the improvements we're making to the Google content network. And I am personally excited about seeing more relevant ads, especially if I don't have to see the same ads over and over! Posted by Rajas Moonka, Senior Business Product Manager

New enhancements on the Google content network

Today we're announcing some key enhancements on the Google content network (partner sites for which we provide advertising) that will of...

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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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