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An invitation from the mayor of Rome: Come see Ancient Rome in 3D

As you read this, I am standing beneath a marble statue of Julius Caesar, participating in an event that means a lot to me: the launch of the <a href="http://earth.google.com/rome/">Ancient Rome 3D</a> layer in Google Earth. Thanks to Google and the <a href="http://www.romereborn.virginia.edu/">Rome Reborn Project</a>, everyone in the world, from Rome itself to Calcutta, can now travel through time and discover Ancient Rome as it was 1,688 years ago when it was ruled by Emperor Constantine. The project includes more than 6,700 buildings of Ancient Rome rebuilt in 3D — a true record. This accomplishment demonstrates how technology can be helpful in promoting culture and disseminating knowledge. Ancient Rome 3D is a great opportunity to rediscover the importance of Ancient Roman culture, which is at the base of the Italian, European and, more generally, Western identities. The archaeological heritage and the artistic monuments of the Roman Empire have found their way to many continents, but it is in the capital city (known in Roman times as Caput Mundi, which is Latin for "Capital of the World") that we can still find most of it. For example, architectural masterpieces like the Colosseum (considered one of the seven wonders of the world) have managed to withstand the tests of time — resisting sacks, invasions and world wars over the centuries and proving, with the immortality of their stones, the grandness of one of the most majestic empires that has ever existed. What fascinates me most about this project is the accuracy of the details of the three-dimensional models. It's such a great experience to be able to admire the monuments, streets and buildings of Ancient Rome with a virtual camera that lets you go inside and see all the architectural details. From the Colosseum to the Ludus Magnus, from the Forum Caesar to the Arch of Septimius Severus, from the Rostra to the Basilica Julia, you can get up close to them all. The idea that virtual technologies now let people experience the city that I guide as it appeared in 320 A.D. fills me with pride — a pride that I inherited from Rome's glorious past. (To find out more about the new layer, visit <a href="http://earth.google.com/rome/">http://earth.google.com/rome/</a>, watch the video tour below, or check out the <a href="http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/">Google Lat Long Blog</a>.) <object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/MqMXIRwQniA&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/MqMXIRwQniA&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object> Update @ 12:10 PM: Rome wasn't built in a day! The Ancient Rome 3D layer will be available soon. We're sorry for the delay, and we'll post here when it's live. Update @ 6:50 PM: The layer is now live in Google Earth, in the Gallery folder of the Layers panel. When you zoom in on Rome, you will see yellow Ancient Rome 3D icons. To load the terrain and buildings, click on any icon and then click the links at the bottom of the bubble. Posted by Gianni Alemanno, Mayor of Rome

An invitation from the mayor of Rome: Come see Ancient Rome in 3D

As you read this, I am standing beneath a marble statue of Julius Caesar, participating in an event that means a lot to me: the launch of th...

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About our Veterans Day logo

Today is <a href="http://www1.va.gov/opa/vetsday/index.asp">Veterans Day</a> in the U.S., a day to honor all veterans of military service. As we often do, we created a special design of the Google logo (which we call a "doodle") in honor of the event. The design for the doodle featured a few military-style hats. We weren't trying to represent all of the branches or all of the symbols of military service and, as a result of space and design limitations, we inadvertently left the <a href="http://www.uscg.mil/" title="U.S. Coast Guard" target="_blank">U.S. Coast Guard</a> out of our depiction. Understandably, we have heard from many veterans and Coast Guard members, and have now posted an updated version of our Veterans Day doodle, including all five branches of the military. Our sincere apologies for what may seem like a slight -- this was not in any way our intention. Our thanks to those of you who were alert enough to catch our omission and diligent enough to tell us about it. Thank you very much to all current and former Coast Guard members for your outstanding service. And finally, thank you very much to all U.S. veterans, for protecting our nation and the ideals it stands for. Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience, and Dennis Hwang, Chief Doodler and Webmaster

About our Veterans Day logo

Today is Veterans Day in the U.S., a day to honor all veterans of military service. As we often do, we created a special design of the Goog...

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Tracking flu trends

Like many Googlers, we're fascinated by trends in online search queries. Whether you're interested in <a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/trends/elections/">U.S. elections</a>, today's <a href="http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends">hot trends</a>, or each year's <a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist/yearend.html">Zeitgeist</a>, patterns in Google search queries can be very informative. Last year, a small team of software engineers began to explore if we could go beyond simple trends and accurately model real-world phenomena using patterns in search queries. After meeting with the public health gurus on Google.org's <a href="http://www.google.org/predict.html">Predict and Prevent team</a>, we decided to focus on outbreaks of infectious disease, which are responsible for <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fncidod%2Feid%2Fvol11no04%2F04-1167-G1.htm&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFrqEzd5dpNCZOv4sqDG1EchqxQo5DVC6Q">millions of deaths</a> around the world each year. You've probably heard of one such disease: influenza, commonly known as "the flu," which is responsible for <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.who.int%2Fmediacentre%2Ffactsheets%2F2003%2Ffs211%2Fen%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFrqEzdiBKLXp_cfNJbmkw6PZD7tvltWSQ">up to 500,000 deaths</a> worldwide each year. If you or your kids have ever caught the flu, you know just how awful it can be. Our team found that certain aggregated search queries tend to be very common during flu season each year. We compared these aggregated queries against data provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and we found that there's a very close relationship between the frequency of these search queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms each week. As a result, if we tally each day's flu-related search queries, we can estimate how many people have a flu-like illness. Based on this discovery, we have launched <a href="http://www.google.org/flutrends/">Google Flu Trends</a>, where you can find up-to-date influenza-related activity estimates for each of the 50 states in the U.S. The CDC does a great job of surveying real doctors and patients to accurately track the flu, so why bother with estimates from aggregated search queries? It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza. For epidemiologists, this is an exciting development, because early detection of a disease outbreak can reduce the number of people affected. If a new strain of influenza virus emerges under certain conditions, a pandemic could emerge and cause millions of deaths (as happened, for example, in <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FSpanish_flu&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFrqEzeBgXCvIl8-_OCgiZioR0sQsm9TGQ">1918</a>). Our up-to-date influenza estimates may enable public health officials and health professionals to better respond to seasonal epidemics and — though we hope never to find out — pandemics. We shared our preliminary results with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at CDC throughout the 2007-2008 flu season, and together we saw that our search-based flu estimates had a consistently strong correlation with real CDC surveillance data. Our system is still very experimental, so anything is possible, but we're hoping to see similar correlations in the coming year. We couldn't have created such good models without aggregating hundreds of billions of individual searches going back to 2003. Of course, we're keenly aware of the trust that users place in us and of our responsibility to protect their privacy. Flu Trends can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week. The patterns we observe in the data are only meaningful across large populations of Google search users. Flu season is here, so avoid becoming part of our statistics and get a flu shot! And keep an eye on those graphs if you're curious to see how the flu season unfolds... Update on 11/21: The team just published an <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature07634.html">academic paper</a> in Nature, the international journal of science, explaining the science and methodology behind Flu Trends. Check it out for more information. Posted by Jeremy Ginsberg and Matt Mohebbi, Software Engineers

Tracking flu trends

Like many Googlers, we're fascinated by trends in online search queries. Whether you're interested in U.S. elections , today's h...

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Talk face-to-face right from within Gmail

From viewing videos on YouTube to screening family events, people love being able to watch something exactly as it happened. And as webcams have become popular, more and more of us are realizing that video is the next best thing to an in-person conversation. Today we're introducing Gmail voice and video chat, which lets you have free voice and video conversations right from within Gmail. Video chatting from Gmail is as easy as sending an instant message. With our team spread out across Google offices in Sweden and the U.S., it's been really handy in helping us work together. Just click on the new "Video & more" menu in a Gmail chat window and select "Start video chat" or "Start voice chat." You can switch to a full screen view or pop out the chat window and change the size and positioning as you wish. Of course, not everyone has a webcam, but even if you don't, you can still have voice conversations alongside your email and regular chat. Take a look at this short video to see more: <object height="350" width="425"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/JFGJRfoK9xQ"> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/JFGJRfoK9xQ" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350"></embed> </object> Gmail voice and video chat will be rolled out globally over the next day or so for Macs and PCs. The first time you use this feature, you'll be prompted to download and install a small plugin. To get started, visit <a href="http://www.gmail.com/videochat">http://www.gmail.com/videochat</a> or click on the "Options" menu in a Gmail chat window and choose "Add voice/video chat." Find out more on our <a href="http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/say-hello-to-gmail-voice-and-video-chat.html">Gmail Blog</a>. Posted by Serge Lachapelle, Product Manager, Stockholm

Talk face-to-face right from within Gmail

From viewing videos on YouTube to screening family events, people love being able to watch something exactly as it happened. And as webcams ...

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New Google Help Forums

For the last few years, the <a title="Google Help Forums" href="http://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=portal_groups.cs&hl=en" id="nxic" style="color: rgb(85, 26, 139);">Google Help Forums</a> have been a great gathering place for users, developers, and anyone else who has an opinion about Google or its products. We've been taking stock of what you have to say, and we've been impressed by the hundreds of thousands of people who really understand our products and are willing to share their knowledge. It's because of experts like the <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/orkut-help/web/who-are-the-orkuteers" id="j85a" title="orkuteers" style="color: rgb(85, 26, 139);">orkuteers</a>, <a href="http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/static.py?page=power_poster_bios.html" id="y5iu" title="Google Apps Power Posters" style="color: rgb(85, 26, 139);">Google Apps Power Posters</a>, <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help/web/google-webmaster-help-bionic-posters" id="d_0g" title="SketchUp Sages">Webmaster Help Bionic Posters</a> and many others that the forums are a great place for getting quality answers, reporting bugs, offering product suggestions and sharing tips and tricks. To make it even easier to get you the right answers to your questions as quickly as possible and to spot the most helpful commenters, we are converting our forums to a new system designed to help, encourage and reward everyone who visits. Some of the features include: <ul><li> improved search results, including posts from current and new forums</li></ul><ul><li> the ability to designate especially helpful forum members as "Top Contributors"</li></ul><ul><li> a reputation and ranking system</li></ul><ul><li> the ability for users, Top Contributors and Googlers to mark questions as answered</li></ul><ul><li> easier access to Help Center content</li></ul><ul><li> expanded user profiles that highlight your forum activity</li></ul> This video gives you a few more details on our latest changes: <object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/6ka0bvcbuSo&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/6ka0bvcbuSo&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object> A few products -- <a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdWords?hl=en&utm_source=googleblog&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=awforum">AdWords</a>, <a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdSense?hl=en&utm_sourceid=aso&utm_campaign=ww-en-et-google_blog_11-06-08&utm_medium=link">AdSense</a>, <a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Android+Market?hl=en">Android Market</a>, <a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps?hl=en">Google Apps</a>, <a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome?hl=en">Google Chrome</a> and most of our <a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/?hl=pl">Polish products</a> -- have already switched to this system. Over the next several months, we'll convert more product Help Forums, initially in English and then in other languages. If you have a question, bug report, suggestion, or just want to mix and mingle, we welcome you to "stop by" our forums. Googlers will check in from time to time to answer questions, listen to feedback, and highlight great responses and the people who provided them. Posted by Katina Johnson, Google Help Team

New Google Help Forums

For the last few years, the Google Help Forums have been a great gathering place for users, developers, and anyone else who has an opinion ...

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The art of the field study

I'm Dan Russell, a member of the Search Quality team doing user experience research. This post is part of our <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/search%20quality">ongoing series</a> to talk about the Search Quality team at Google, showing a bit of what we do in the day-to-day course of improving the quality of the user experience. The role of "user experience" research is to try and get the inside story on what people do when they search. We're constantly asking: What's the user's experience of search? What works and doesn't work for them? What are they looking for? What DO they want? To understand the full richness and variety of what people do when they are using Google, we spend many hours in the field, watching people search and listening to what they say as they do this. We hear it when they're happy, and when they're terribly frustrated. And perhaps most importantly, we also pay attention to the things they don't say -- the inexpressible "gotchas" that slow users down or get in the way of their search. It turns out that people are masters of saying one thing and doing another, particularly when it comes to nearly automatic behavior. We find that searchers often turn so quickly to Google that they don't really think too much about what they're actually searching for. It's surprising, but often we'll see people trying to find out something about a topic, but then never actually mention the topic itself. That is, there's often a big discrepancy between what they'll tell me (the human observer) they're trying to do, and the search terms they enter into Google. One person I shadowed for the day spent ten minutes trying to find the schedule of the ferry that runs between San Francisco and Larkspur, but somehow only thought of adding the word "ferry" much later in their search. We also study eye tracking. The eye makes a complex scan path over the search results, building up a composite picture of what is presented on the page. It's clear that what actually happens is a very rapid scan and assessment of each result as they are seen. In those milliseconds between the eye landing on the first fixation and seeing a few results, all kinds of decisions and choices are made--nearly all of them subconsciously. In this short video, you can see three different searchers all looking for the same thing (in this case, a child's backpack). The red dot is the searcher's gaze moving around on the search results page. Notice how methodically the gaze moves from result title to title, occasionally inspecting the snippet text to gain more detail about the result. <object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/bZ5Be93RTeY&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/bZ5Be93RTeY&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object> (Video courtesy of Kerry Rodden) So the job of figuring out what people actually do when they search isn't as simple as asking someone what they search for during the day. It's basically impossible to give an accurate telling of what you saw (or didn't see) on the results page while actively searching for a high quality results. Memories of your own behavior are also notoriously unreliable. People's search behavior in the lab is often different than when they're at home or at work. This is a natural (and expected) side effect of lab studies: people will work especially hard to please a researcher. If we ask them to search for a pair of brown shoes they'd like to buy for themselves, in the lab they'll find the first pair that seems reasonable and then stop, satisfied. If it was real, they would go on and spend more time. We still do lab studies, but we know what to watch for, and what to ignore. Data from field studies gives us insight into how people respond to the Google experience in ways that we can't otherwise measure. For instance, in several field studies we discovered that many of the people who went to the previous version of the Advanced Search page had a strong, almost visceral negative reaction when the page appeared. The text of the original page had language that many people saw as intimidating--words like "Domain," "Usage Rights" and "Safe Search" can be a bit much if you're not sure what they mean. The old Advanced Search page was a little off-putting (click on the image to see a larger version): <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheW61EfyCXnPcXef902wlidfZMatVZqxSFSyDUp3p0b-z-9OkJuXzM4HzUsyYu3LnWZE-auWL8oMlh8G1kgnyNmko8qbT85kuUj5RPyMzSjUki3RaBvKozXr2aTEZrSYiMIWM_Nf_JM-w5/s1600-h/Google-adv-search.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5265610667405350274" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheW61EfyCXnPcXef902wlidfZMatVZqxSFSyDUp3p0b-z-9OkJuXzM4HzUsyYu3LnWZE-auWL8oMlh8G1kgnyNmko8qbT85kuUj5RPyMzSjUki3RaBvKozXr2aTEZrSYiMIWM_Nf_JM-w5/s1600/Google-adv-search.jpg" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 525px;" /></a> Based on our field studies, we dug more deeply into how people were actually using our Advanced Search page, and quickly discovered that, indeed, a large number of users were going to the page, and then leaving it without ever filling in any of the slots. Armed with this insight from field studies, we redesigned the page, simplifying it by removing terms that were unclear to the average user (the word "occurrences," for example, just didn't mean anything to many of the Advanced Search page users), moving rarely used features (numeric range searches, date searches, etc.) into a part of the page that was expandable with a single click. That made them easy to get to for people who knew they wanted to search with those restrictions, but out of the way in a non-threatening way. One of the other things we noted in the field study was that people often didn't understand how the Advanced Search page worked. So we added a "visible query builder" region at the top of the page. As you fill in the blanks, the box at the top of the page fills in with the query that you could type into Google. It was our way of making visible the effects of advanced search operators. The Advanced Search page post-redesign (click on the image to see a larger version): <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0CkUiPUDgpsAWsbrmnpIjkcNaS-hQ217KKpW4bBtou2Hk6ZP2Mef4hU7C38yXShRRoxnpbCx9V_BeRPnwPUn8XIvEGdVGRR8Qbj2fMpLHSjWG-rq2cHHBxoDlRCqTbWlS6f9tEoz61Qlv/s1600-h/Google-adv-search-Oct-2008.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5265611107869300194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0CkUiPUDgpsAWsbrmnpIjkcNaS-hQ217KKpW4bBtou2Hk6ZP2Mef4hU7C38yXShRRoxnpbCx9V_BeRPnwPUn8XIvEGdVGRR8Qbj2fMpLHSjWG-rq2cHHBxoDlRCqTbWlS6f9tEoz61Qlv/s1600/Google-adv-search-Oct-2008.jpg" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 525px;" /></a> The good effect of these changes quickly became clear. The number of users that bounced out of the Advanced Search page dropped significantly. Interestingly, the total number of Advanced Search page users didn't increase significantly... at least not yet. By improving the UI on the page, we hope to attract even more searchers to the large range of search options available on Google. In the end, this example shows the kind of insights that field studies can bring. As with the eye-tracking example, asking someone about their emotional response to a web page just isn't a useful way to get that data. But watching them in situ, as they actually use Google to go about their daily search lives can reveal all kinds of remarkable, otherwise undiscoverable, and actionable insights into searcher behavior. Posted by Daniel Russell, Uber Tech Lead, Search Quality

The art of the field study

I'm Dan Russell, a member of the Search Quality team doing user experience research. This post is part of our ongoing series to talk ab...

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Accessible View: An ARIA for web search

From time to time, our own <a href="http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/raman/">T.V. Raman</a> shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. In the spirit of a <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/search-experiments-large-and-small.html">recent post</a> discussing some of our search experiments, last week we launched an opt-in search experiment we're calling <a href="http://www.google.com/experimental/">Accessible View</a>, which makes it easy to navigate search results using only the keyboard. Like many of our recent accessibility-related enhancements, this experiment is built using the basic functionality provided by W3C ARIA and <a href="http://google-axsjax.googlecode.com/">Google-AxsJAX</a>, an evolving set of HTML DOM properties that enable adaptive technologies to work better with AJAX-style applications. The Accessible View experiment is another step toward making our search results more accessible for everyone. In July 2006, we launched <a href="http://labs.google.com/accessible/">Accessible Search</a> on Google Labs, where the goal was to help visually impaired users find content that worked well with adaptive technologies. We continue to refine and tune the ranking on Accessible Search. And with Accessible View, users can easily toggle between regular Google search results and Accessible Search results by using the 'A' and 'W' keys. When we designed the Accessible View interface, we first looked at how people used screen readers and other adaptive technologies when performing standard search-related tasks. We then asked how many of these actions we could eliminate to speed up the search process. The result: a set of keyboard shortcuts for effectively navigating the results page, and to arrange for the user's adaptive technology to speak the right information during navigation. We've also added a magnification lens that highlights the user's selected search result. Since launching Accessible Search, one of the most requested features has been support for low-vision users. While implementing the keyboard navigation described here, we incorporated the magnification lens first introduced by <a href="http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2008/05/reader-can-i-have-lens-with-that-please.html">Google Reader</a>. Bringing it all together, we implemented <a href="http://www.google.com/experimental">keyboard shortcuts</a> that extend what was originally pioneered by the keyboard shortcuts experiment. These shortcuts help users navigate through different parts of the results page with a minimal number of keystrokes. The left and right arrows cycle through the various categories of items on the page (e.g., results, ads, or search refinements), and the up and down arrow keys move through the current category. Power users can leave their hands on the home row by using the h, j, k, and l keys. In addition, we enable an infinite stream of results viewed through the n and p keys — so you can move through the results without getting disoriented by a page refresh after the first 10 results. <table><tbody><tr><td>Key</td><td>Behavior</td></tr><tr><td>j/k</td><td>next/previous result</td></tr><tr><td>n/p</td><td>next/previous result, scroll if necessary</td></tr><tr><td>enter</td><td>open current result</td></tr><tr><td>up/down</td><td>next/previous result</td></tr><tr><td>left/right</td><td>switch categories (results, ads, refinements)</td></tr><tr><td>a</td><td>jump to ads </td></tr><tr><td>A</td><td>switch to Accessible Search results</td></tr><tr><td>W</td><td>switch to default Google results</td></tr><tr><td>r</td><td>jump to related searches</td></tr></tbody></table> Try out <a href="http://www.google.com/experimental/">the experiment</a> and give us <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/accessible/">your feedback</a>. Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist, and Charles L. Chen, Software Engineer

Accessible View: An ARIA for web search

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips th...

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