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Google-inspired designer collections
February 5, 2010
Each year,
Vogue
and the
Council of Fashion Designers of America
(CFDA) sponsor a Fashion Fund to support emerging designers. In 2009, each participating designer was asked to create a one-of-a-kind item inspired by Google in some way — whether through our logo's colors, technology or our commitment to equal access to information. Last October,
we transformed
10 of the finalists’ designs into iGoogle Artists themes. While we loved seeing fashion meet iGoogle, we wanted to see these pieces in person — and wear them! Today, we’re debuting three of our favorite designs from this challenge. These three featured designers have customized their original designs for a broader audience, and we’re making them available to the public to purchase for a limited time. Check out
this page
to learn more about the items, the designers and how they were inspired by Google.
Posted by Michaela Prescott, Group Product Marketing Manager
Doodle 4 Google — Tell us what you would do if you could do anything...
February 3, 2010
Today, we're excited to announce our third annual
Doodle 4 Google
contest in the U.S. Google doodles, created by our talented team of doodlers, have helped us celebrate events and anniversaries from
Van Gogh's birthday
to
Valentine's Day
. And since 2008, Doodle 4 Google has given K-12 kids the opportunity to create their own logo and have it displayed on the Google homepage for hundreds of millions of users to enjoy for a day.
In addition to the winner's art appearing on Google.com on May 27, 2010, they'll also receive a $15,000 college scholarship, a laptop computer and a $25,000 technology grant for their school.
This year's theme is "If I Could Do Anything, I Would..." and it's all about pushing the limits, dreaming big, and seeing what you can accomplish in life. When coming up with inspiration for this year's contest, we turned to some of our very own Googlers, including Ed Lu, a former astronaut.
Ed typifies this year's theme in action, and shares an inspiring anecdote:
On my first mission STS-84, one of my crewmates and I were having dinner aboard the
Space Shuttle Atlantis
. After all our work for the day was done, we decided to eat "upside down" on the ceiling, gazing out at the Earth moving by below our feet. As we flew around the Earth, watching the continents go by, my crewmate remarked how amazingly large the Earth really is. But at that same time, it also felt small to us. There we were, flying at 18,000 miles per hour around the Earth in a machine built by humans, with a crew made up of astronauts from all over the world. Both of our observations were true at the same time. The world is indeed a big place with many challenges. But by using science, technology and the power of people working together, nearly anything is possible.
So dream big! If you could do anything, what would you do?
For even more inspiration, you can see last year's winner, Christin Engelberth, a sixth grader at Bernard Harris Middle School in San Antonio, Texas. She titled her
doodle
"A New Beginning" to express her wish that "out of the current crisis, discoveries will be found to help the Earth prosper once more."
We're happy to let you know that this year, we've also assembled a panel of well-known "
Expert Jurors
," including creative directors, cartoonists and famous animators ranging from
Sesame Workshop
to
Pixar Animation Studios
. Our Expert Jurors will help us narrow down the cream of the crop to 40 regional finalists, who will come to the Google office in New York City on May 26, 2010. For the second year, we'll also be partnering with the
Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
, where the top 40 regional finalists will get to have their artwork displayed in a national exhibit. And for the first time this year, we'll give out eight Technology Booster awards to schools that submit maximum number of doodles per school by March 10th and have students in our 400 State Finalists.
Please visit the official
competition website
for a full listing of all contest rules and requirements. Only students from registered schools can enter, so be sure your school is registered by March 17, 2010. All doodles must be submitted by March 31, 2010.
We hope you're as excited about this year's contest as we are. Good luck!
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience and Ed Lu, Program Manager, Advanced Projects
A recent improvement for Arabic searches
February 2, 2010
This post is the latest in an ongoing
series
about how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users. - Ed.
We've learned that when performing a search on Google, people sometimes forget to separate words with spaces. Moreover, people often mistakenly repeat a letter within a single word. For instance, when writing the query [amazingly beautiful poem], you might write it as [
amazingly beautiifullpoem
].
These types of errors are much more common in languages like Arabic, where most of the letters are
cursive
. That means that the shapes of the letters change, based on the position of the letter in the word (initial, middle, final or isolated). Moreover, some Arabic letters are considered word breaks, meaning that the following letter must be in an "initial" shape. In other words, if the last letter of one word is a word break, the following word may not be separated with a space.
For example, the queries [وزارةالتعليم] and [وزارة التعليم] have an identical meaning (Ministry of Education) and they're both written in a common form for Arabic documents. But they have different, albeit correct, formats — the first query is written as a single word, while the second is written as two. Google needs to understand that while they're written differently, they mean the same thing and should yield the exact same search results. In this example, both queries were written correctly, just in different formats. But sometimes people just make errors — like repeating the same letter twice. For example, you might write [راائعة الجماال], repeating the letter "ا" twice in both query words. In this case the correct spelling should be [رائعة الجمال]. It's important that Google search recognizes your query — despite spelling errors.
To address issues like this, we recently developed a search ranking improvement that targets certain Arabic queries. Our algorithm employs rules of Arabic spelling and grammar along with signals from historical search data to decide when to leave out spaces between words or when to remove unnecessarily repeated letters. Now, when you type a query leaving out spaces or repeating a letter, we'll return better results based not only on what you typed, but also on what our algorithm understands is the "correct" query. For example, here's what happens when you type [
قصيدة راائعةالجماال
] ([amazingly beautiful poem] in Arabic) with repeated letters and dropped spaces between words.
As you can see, the Google results contain the corrected query, the terms قصيدة رائعة الجمال, in bold.
For most people, this might seem like a small enhancement. But for us, it’s a big change. Our tests show we've improved search for 10% of Arabic language queries. Which, when you think about it, is a lot of people.
Posted by Moustafa Hammad and Mohamed Elhawary, Software Engineers, Search Quality Team
Announcing Google's Focused Research Awards
February 2, 2010
(Cross-posted with the
Google Research Blog
)
It is said that Google is like a university — and not just because everyone eats their lunch off trays in the cafeteria. Like a university, we devote significant energy to research across a wide array of subjects — from semantics to help improve search, to ways we can improve the efficiency of our data centers. Along with our internal efforts, we've long invested in building a strong, mutually beneficial relationship with universities and the research community. We give approximately 150 research grants a year to fund projects across a variety of subjects, we host visiting faculty members here at Google on sabbatical, and last year we started the Google Fellowship Program to fund graduate students doing innovative research in several fields.
Today, we're announcing the first-ever round of
Google Focused Research Awards
— funding research in areas of study that are of key interest to Google as well as the research community. These awards, totaling $5.7 million, cover four areas: machine learning, the use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring, energy efficiency in computing, and privacy. These are all areas in which Google is already deeply invested, and yet there is a long way to go. We're excited to see what these projects contribute to the body of research in these important areas.
These unrestricted grants are for two to three years, and the recipients will have the advantage of access to Google tools, technologies and expertise. We've given awards to 12 projects led by 31 professors at 10 universities:
Machine Learning
: William Cohen, Christos Faloutsos, Garth Gibson and Tom Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon University
Use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring
: Gaetano Borriello, University of Washington and Deborah Estrin, UCLA
Energy efficiency in computing
:
Ricardo Bianchini, Rutgers, Fred Chong, UC Santa Barbara, Thomas F. Wenisch, University of Michigan and Sudhanva Gurumurthi, University of Virginia
Christos Kozyrakis, Mark Horowitz, Benjamin Lee, Nick McKeown and Mendel Rosenblum, Stanford
David G. Andersen and Mor. Harchol-Balter, Carnegie Mellon University
Tajana Simunic Rosing, Steven Swanson and Amin Vahdat, UCSD
Thomas F. Wenisch, Trevor Mudge, David Blaauw and Dennis Sylvester, University of Michigan
Margaret Martonosi, Jennifer Rexford, Michael Freedman and Mung Chiang, Princeton
Privacy
:
Ed Felten, Princeton
Lorrie Cranor, Alessandro Acquisti and Norman Sadeh, Carnegie Mellon University
Ryan Calo, Stanford CIS
Andy Hopper, Cambridge University Computing Laboratory
We look forward to working with these researchers over the coming years. And, as we continue to identify key areas of research that are of mutual interest to both university researchers and Google, we will provide awards to support these collaborations. For more information about all of our research programs, check out our
University Relations
site.
Update
at 1:13 PM:
Added Allesandro Acquisti and Norman Sadeh to the list of PIs on the CMU privacy project.
Posted by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives
Wrapping up our Free Holiday WiFi program
February 1, 2010
In November, we officially
launched our Free Holiday WiFi gift
. 54 airports, one airline and many millions of connected WiFi users later, our two-month Free Holiday WiFi sponsorship ended on January 15. We're happy to have made this year's holiday travel season just a bit easier for the millions of people who logged on and connected at our participating airports and on Virgin America flights.
Though some airports will no longer have free WiFi, we're excited that Burbank,
Seattle
and most recently,
Boston
airports have all decided to offer free WiFi all year.
In the spirit of the season, passengers connecting to the networks donated over $250,000 to
Engineers Without Borders
,
One Economy Corporation
and
Climate Savers Computing Initiative
. With Google's matching donation, the three charities received over $500,000 in total.
Finally,
Edward Doan of Austin, Texas
won the grand prize of ten Virgin America tickets, a Motorola Droid from Verizon Wireless and a Canon SX200 digital camera. You can view a complete list of winners on the
contest site
.
Posted by Jeff Aguero and Missy Krasner, Product Marketing Managers
This week in search 1/31/10
January 31, 2010
This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label
This week in search
and subscribe to the series. - Ed.
From Google Squared enhancements to search becoming more social, this week brought a slew of exciting and (we hope) useful search feature releases:
Social Search
Sometimes, there might be relevant content on the web from people in your social circle. For example, learning what your friend thinks about the latest gadget or exotic travel location (e.g. in his or her blog) can help enhance your search experience. Until recently, there was no easy way to find this type of content published by your friends. Last October, we
launched Social Search in Google labs
to help solve this problem.
After a large number of users opted in and tried out the feature, Social Search has graduated and is available in beta for all signed-in users on google.com in English. We also added this feature to Google Images and gave you a way to visualize your social circle. To learn more about Social Search and how to get better social search results check out this
post
or this
video
.
Google Squared single item landing page
Last year we launched Google Squared, an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet. For categorical searches like [
us presidents
] or [
dog breeds
], Google Squared produces the type of extracted facts you might be interested in, and presents them in a meaningful way. Starting this week, Google Squared has a new design to better handle queries looking for a single thing, like a specific president or a particular breed of dog. The page is now easier to read and includes multiple images, and you can still add, remove or change the type of facts that are visible.
Example searches: [
barack obama
] and [
boston terrier
]
Better labels for Time/LIFE images
In late 2008, we worked with Time/LIFE to digitize several million archival images never been seen before, and made them
available in Image Search
. At that time,
many images
in the collection had descriptions and labels and were easy to search for. But some had less descriptive information, making them more difficult to find. Now it's possible for knowledgeable users to label images and enrich the collection. Over time, we hope the Google community will make the quality of image search better than ever before.
Example: [
Cincinnati baseball
]. Note the "labels" in the bottom righthand corner.
We hope you enjoy the variety of new features this week.
Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search
Unicode nearing 50% of the web
January 28, 2010
About 18 months ago, we published a
graph
showing that
Unicode
on the web had just exceeded all other encodings of text on the web. The growth since then has been even more dramatic.
Web pages can use a variety of different character encodings, like ASCII, Latin-1, or Windows 1252 or Unicode. Most encodings can only represent a few languages, but Unicode can represent thousands: from Arabic to Chinese to Zulu. We have long used Unicode as the internal format for all the text we search: any other encoding is first converted to Unicode for processing.
This graph is from Google internal data, based on our indexing of web pages, and thus may vary somewhat from what other search engines find. However, the trends are pretty clear, and the continued rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the processing for the many
languages
that we cover.
Searching for "nancials"?
Unicode is growing both in usage and in character coverage. We recently upgraded to the latest version of Unicode,
version 5.2
(via
ICU
and
CLDR
). This adds over 6,600 new characters: some of mostly academic interest, such as Egyptian Hieroglyphs, but many others for living languages.
We're constantly improving our handling of existing characters. For example, the characters "fi" can either be represented as two characters ("f" and "i"), or a special display form "fi". A Google search for [financials] or [office] used to not see these as equivalent — to the software they would just look like *nancials and of*ce. There are thousands of characters like this, and they occur in surprisingly many pages on the web, especially generated PDF documents.
But no longer — after extensive testing, we just recently turned on support for these and thousands of other characters; your searches will now also find these documents. Further steps in our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
And we're angling for a party when Unicode hits 50%!
Posted by Mark Davis, Senior International Software Architect
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