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The Internet in America: A YouTube Interview with the FCC
by A Googler
10 Mar 2010 at 4:16pm
(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)
If you’re reading this, then you’re probably on the Internet ? via your laptop, your mobile phone or other handheld device, or maybe even through your television. But in 2010, millions of Americans still do not have access to the wealth of information made available on the Web. Even though the Internet was invented in the U.S. over 20 years ago, many Americans lag behind in both access to the Internet and speed of connections, which is why the Federal Communications Commission (or the FCC, the federal agency that oversees the U.S. communications industry) is launching its much-anticipated National Broadband Plan next Tuesday, to lay out its strategy for connecting all Americans to fast, affordable high-speed Internet.
After this plan is announced, you have the opportunity to interview FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in the second of a series of in-person YouTube interviews with government leaders. (Our first, with U.S. President Barack Obama, took place last month.) Go to CitizenTube today to submit your video or text question via Google Moderator, and vote on your favorites; we’ll bring a selection of the top-voted questions to Chairman Genachowski in our interview next Tuesday, March 16. The deadline for submission is Sunday night, March 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT.
To help structure our conversation with the Chairman, we’ve broken the interview down into seven topics. To learn more about what the FCC is doing in each area, click on the links for each topic below. Then submit your question on CitizenTube under one of the topic headings.
Access and AffordabilityMobile and WirelessSecurity and PrivacyDigital EconomyInternet in SchoolsOpen Internet/Network NeutralityOthers (learn more at Broadband.gov)Access to the Internet has transformed almost every aspect of our economy and society. This is your chance to press the FCC on how the National Broadband Plan will work, and ask your questions about improving the Internet in America. We’re looking forward to seeing your questions and hearing what the Chairman has to say.
YouTube calling: Now serving ads on the YouTube mobile site
by A Googler
10 Mar 2010 at 3:01pm
(Cross-posted with the YouTube Biz Blog)
Mobile phones are rapidly becoming essential tools for surfing the web, connecting with friends, and sharing and watching video online, and we’re seeing these effects at YouTube. The YouTube mobile site is more popular than ever: site traffic grew by over 160% in 2009, and now millions of people all over the world are streaming tens of millions of videos every day on their mobile phones. The mobile space moves fast, so we’ve been working hard to roll out new features and functionality quickly, especially as more and more people adopt YouTube-capable phones.
The increased usage of high-end devices like the iPhone and Android is also making mobile advertising easier and more effective for advertisers. So today, we’re launching ads on the home, search and browse pages of the American and Japanese YouTube mobile websites (m.youtube.com from your mobile browser). This is a great way for advertisers to reach YouTube viewers across multiple platforms. In fact, at launch YouTube will immediately provide one of the largest audiences for a mobile ad campaign anywhere on the mobile web. And because YouTube mobile attracts early adopters, the site can deliver to advertisers a coveted demographic of tech savvy trendsetters. We’ve already seen some early campaigns run on YouTube’s mobile site by advertisers like Sony (for the DVD release of “District 9″) and Kia, both of whom were able to easily reach their target audience, no matter where they were looking for video.
Our first tests of YouTube mobile ads ? with brands ranging from L’Oreal to Land Rover ? showed strong results related to click-throughs, user experience and brand awareness, and we’ve learned a lot in the months since then. As a result, ads on the YouTube mobile website will be banner ads sold on a full-day basis (like with the YouTube homepage on the web), making a mobile buy an easy and valuable addition to any YouTube campaign. For example, today Mazda is running a homepage ad on YouTube.com, and extended their campaign to run ads on our mobile site as well.
If you’re interested in learning more, reach out to your YouTube or Google sales rep, or visit youtube.com/advertise.
Biking directions added to Google Maps
by A Googler
10 Mar 2010 at 1:00pm
Whenever I meet someone who finds out that I work on the directions team for Google Maps, the first question I’m asked is often “So when’s Google Maps going to add biking directions?” We’re big biking fans too, so we’ve been itching to give you a concrete answer. I don’t want to keep the good news a secret any longer, so the answer is: right now!
Today we’ve added biking directions and extensive bike trail data to Google Maps for the U.S. My team has been keeping close tabs on all the public support for biking directions that?s been steadily coming in, but we knew that when we added the feature, we wanted to do it right: we wanted to include as much bike trail data as possible, provide efficient routes, allow riders to customize their trip, make use of bike lanes, calculate rider-friendly routes that avoid big hills and customize the look of the map for cycling to encourage folks to hop on their bikes. So that’s exactly what we’ve done.
Let’s say you want to bike to work, or maybe you want to drive less and spend more time outdoors. Biking directions can help you find a convenient and efficient route that makes use of dedicated bike trails or lanes and avoids hills whenever possible. To find biking directions, select “Bicycling” from the drop-down menu when you do a directions search:
So, how does it work? Well, I’m based in Seattle, along with the rest of the biking directions team. The city is notoriously hilly, but also has some great trails and a strong cycling community. Let’s say I’m trying to get from Golden Gardens to a friend’s house in Montlake:
This route avoids hills (phew!) and puts me on the Burke-Gilman trail for most of the journey. When I need to get off the trail to cross town, biking directions makes sure to keep me on bike-friendly roads and avoid some of the city’s busiest intersections. The time estimate for the route is based on a complex set of variables accounting for the type of road, terrain and turns over the course of my ride. If I decide that I want to stop at Woodland Park Zoo along the way, I can click on the blue path and drag it to my desired route ? just like with driving directions ? and we’ll still customize the journey for cycling suitability. Over on the Lat Long Blog, you can read more about all the unique tweaks and calculations factored into our routing algorithm.
We’ve also added information about bike trails, lanes and recommended roads directly onto the map. This can help you get a better sense of your route, or let you find trails nearby for a recreational ride. When you’re zoomed into a city, click on the “More” button at the top of the map to turn on the “Bicycling? layer. You’ll see three types of lines appear on the map:
Dark green indicates a dedicated bike-only trail;Light green indicates a dedicated bike lane along a road;Dashed green indicates roads that are designated as preferred for bicycling, but without dedicated lanes
Thanks primarily to our partnership with the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, we now have more than 12,000 miles of trails included in biking directions and outlined directly on the map. We also have data on bike lanes and recommended streets for 150 cities across the country. We’ll continue to add new trail information and encourage riders to send feedback (biking directions is in beta, after all) and route information for inclusion via the ?Report a Problem? tool. When Map Maker is available in the U.S., all riders will be able to directly contribute their local knowledge about trails, bike lanes and suggested routes.
We know that many of you have been anxiously awaiting this feature, so head over to http://maps.google.com/biking to try it for yourself and then hop on your bike!
A digital renaissance: partnering with the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage
by A Googler
10 Mar 2010 at 12:00pm
The Renaissance, Europe’s period of cultural, political and scientific rebirth, began in Florence around 600 years ago. At Google we’re interested in a (small ?r?) renaissance of a different kind ? a digital one. Since the launch of Google Books, we?ve been working with libraries and publishers around the globe to bring more of the world’s books to more readers around the globe. Any school child should be able to access the works of Petrarch, Dante or Vico (or, if they’re so inclined, Machiavelli). In the case of these more famous authors, this is already largely possible, but what about the work of Guglielmo il Giuggiola or Coluccio Salutati? We want all of the great literature and writings of Italy to be accessible to the general public.
Today we?re announcing an agreement with the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage that will push this vision forward. Working with the National Libraries of Florence and Rome, we?ll digitize up to a million out-of-copyright works. The libraries will select the works to be digitized from their collections, which include a wealth of rare historical books, including scientific works, literature from the period of the founding of Italy and the works of Italy’s most famous poets and writers. It marks the first time we?ve ever joined forces with Italian libraries, and the first time we’ve worked with a ministry of culture.
Around Europe and the rest of the world, we are effectively witnessing a digital renaissance, with an increasing number of organizations running ambitious and promising book digitization projects. We’re not the only ones who have seen the need to bring the world’s books into digital form. Digitization of books is a tremendous undertaking, requiring the joint effort of a great number of public and private stakeholders. For this reason, we?re supportive of many other efforts at digitization, such as the European Commission’s Europeana. We want to see these books have the broadest reach possible ? the books we scan are available for inclusion in Europeana, of which the Florence Library is a contributing member, and other digital libraries. The more of the world’s historical, cultural treasures we can bring online, the more we can unlock our shared heritage.
We believe today?s announcement is an important step, and we look forward to working with more libraries and other partners. We envision a future in which people will be able to search and access the world’s books anywhere, anytime. After all, Antonio Beccadelli and Anastasius Germonius ? like Shakespeare and Cervantes ? are part of our human cultural history.
Open for business: the Google Apps Marketplace
by A Googler
10 Mar 2010 at 3:09am
Every day, thousands of businesses choose the cloud. More than 2 million businesses have adopted Google Apps over the last three years, eliminating the hassles associated with purchasing, installing and maintaining hardware and software themselves.
We’ve found that when businesses begin to experience the benefits of cloud computing, they want more. We’re often asked when we’ll offer a wider variety of business applications ? from accounting and project management to travel planning and human resources management. But we certainly can’t and won’t do it all, and there are hundreds of business applications for which we have no particular expertise.
In recent years, many talented software providers have embraced the cloud and delivered a diverse set of features capable of powering almost any business. But too often, customers who adopt applications from multiple vendors end up with a fractured experience, where each particular application exists in its own silo. Users are often forced to create and remember multiple passwords, cut and paste data between applications, and jump between multiple interfaces just to complete a simple task.
Today, we’re making it easier for these users and software providers to do business in the cloud with a new online store for integrated business applications. The Google Apps Marketplace allows Google Apps customers to easily discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps. More than 50 companies are now selling applications across a range of businesses, including:Intuit Online Payroll: A small business application that offers business owners a new way to efficiently run payroll, pay taxes and let employees check paystubs all within one integrated online office environment.Manymoon: The company’s free work and project management application for Google Apps makes it simple for businesses and teams to organize and share information including tasks, projects, documents, status updates and links with co-workers, customers and partners.Professional Services Connect (PS Connect): This new cloud-based offering coming soon from Appirio, pulls contextually relevant information on people, projects, customers and transactions from a user’s domain and surfaces it directly inside a Gmail message so services professionals can make more informed, real-time decisions.JIRA Studio: A hosted software development suite from Atlassian enables software developers to flow naturally between Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and other design and development tools in order to better track and manage project issues and workflow.Once installed to a company’s domain, these third-party applications work like native Google applications. With administrator approval, they may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity. Administrators can manage the applications from the familiar Google Apps control panel, and employees can open them from within Google Apps. With OpenID integration, Google Apps users can access the other applications without signing in separately to each. The Google Apps Marketplace eliminates the worry about software updates, keeping track of different passwords and manual syncing and sharing of data, thereby increasing business productivity and lessening frustrations for users and IT administrators alike. That’s the power of the cloud.
For more information on the benefits of the Google Apps Marketplace to businesses, check out our Enterprise Blog post. Developers interested in learning how to integrate with Google Apps can check out our post on the Google Code Blog. Or, you can explore the Google Apps Marketplace directly at http://google.com/appsmarketplace.
Finally, we’ll be diving deeper into application development for the enterprise at Google I/O on May 19-20. We hope to see you there!
Ode to AdWords
by A Googler
9 Mar 2010 at 5:37pm
[From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest, and are very pleased to have Allison Schwam, Senior Search Analyst at Backcountry, join us here. -Ed.]
When you don?t have to sacrifice your love of the outdoors for your career or vice versa, it?s something special. In fact, my love of both skiing and marketing has grown dramatically since I took my job at Backcountry. Getting to work with Google, specifically managing our AdWords account, is an online marketing geek?s dream come true. Combine that with every skier?s dream of Utah powder, and life is good.
Day traders wake up every morning to check their portfolio ? I get up and check my AdWords accounts. Backcountry sells gear and equipment for the outdoor enthusiast from ski boots to tents, and we sell all of it online. My job is to drive valuable, qualified traffic 365 days a year to Backcountry using AdWords. The AdWords platform lets me manage hundreds of campaigns and hundreds of thousands of keywords with relative ease. I have access to huge amounts of data that are revealed as daily ebbs and flows in impressions, clicks and bids. If you do a Google search for [telemark ski gear], you?ll see our ad:
Backcountry was founded in 1996 by two self-proclaimed ski bums, John Bresee and Jim Holland. Since then, the company has grown to hundreds of employees. I?ve been working here for over two years. Ultimately, our goal is to ?crush it,? as some ski town folk say: work hard, play hard.
A typical powder day for me is like this one last Friday when Park City got 12 inches of new snow overnight. Here?s how AdWords helps me manage both work and fun.
7 ? 7:45am
Roll out of bed.
Get the coffee going.
Fry eggs and bacon.
Check snow totals.
If it looks like a good ski morning, I first check my email and glance over our AdWords campaigns. All I need to do is my daily reporting to see that I?m on target for my revenue and cost goals. As long as things are okay, I email my boss to say I?ll be out slaying the white dragon.
Just as I have the ideal tools to maximize our online campaign performance, I have the tools avid skiers covet for deep days: fat, rockered skis, stiff ski boots, Gore-Tex jacket and pants, helmet, goggles, merino wool layers, etc. After I grab my gear, I?m off.
7:45am ? 12noon
My commute to The Canyons Ski Resort takes 10 minutes. My friends and I know how to get the most out of our time on the mountain, balancing chair lift time, snow quality and vertical. Does that sound a bit like cost-per-click, conversion rate and top-line revenue? Take this lift to that lift, ski the trees while we wait for that chair to open, get after our favorite steep lines. Next thing you know:
Photo by Jim Harris
Face shots are invigorating. Hard to explain, best to experience! After a few glances at the time and collecting my thoughts, I make my way off the mountain.
12pm ? 5pm
I head a few miles down the road to the office. As the afternoon goes by, co-workers will emerge from their cubicles; sometimes because legs are cramping up but also to share stories about how the morning was. Where did you ski? How was the snow? Smiles all around.
I settle into work knowing what I need to succeed at my job is at my fingertips. AdWords gives me visibility into my programs to prioritize and understand trends. It also makes it easy to add and edit my account without getting bogged down in manual work. I regularly use Keyword Performance Reports to monitor both head terms and tail terms to stay on top of revenue opportunities. I?ll take into account the average order value and also the percentage of clicks that turn into sales (rate of conversion) in order to manage our keyword bids. As I do bid updates, I also check the AdWords Preview Tool to see how our ads are ranked and what is going on with our competition. We don?t really focus on ?cost-per-click? but instead on ?cost as percentage of revenue,? which means the more people purchase, the more ads we can run. So the higher the return on advertising spend, the more room we have to grow our paid search presence.
5 pm ? 8 pm
I like this afternoon time in particular because it?s quiet and I can really focus on data-crunching. Uninterrupted time and a strong cup of coffee are essential for doing long-term analysis.
Campaign Performance Reports are great for identifying long- and short-term trends as seasons shift or for changes in demand by brand. We just wrapped up our winter sale, so this is a great time for me to run an Ad Performance Report to analyze which versions of ad copy had the strongest clickthrough rates for future reference. Finally, Google Insights for Search is a fun tool. It?s a great way to connect with our buyers by discussing big-picture trends with the brands we carry. We can look at AdWords Campaign performance and try to tie it back to general search volume in the marketplace and identify product searches on the rise. In short, given our metrics focus, AdWords gives me the information I need to make decisions about specific keywords, bids, and our overall spend.
There are typically the same few folks hanging out at the office this late. We?ll exchange some pleasantries, and as the lights get turned off I?ll shut down my computer.
When I earned an undergraduate degree in marketing and cultural anthropology, I had only a vague idea how I was going to create a career with behavioral and analytical activities. It turns out online marketing is an exciting mix of real-time data and customer service. AdWords lets me manage campaigns very efficiently, so I have time to dig deeper and do the strategic analysis that makes this job about much more than just meeting revenue goals.
Finally, I picked Park City because it?s more than a ski town. Here fanatical skiers, trail runners, bikers, snowboarders and climbers can live year round and still have a meaningful career. I?ll always be grateful to companies like Backcountry and Google for making this possible: Backcountry for fostering the passions of the outdoor enthusiast, and Google for innovation in creating the forums and tools that really work for us.
And the searches go to…
by A Googler
8 Mar 2010 at 9:41pm
The Oscars®: glitz, glamor, gossip, gold statuettes, much fanfare ? and for many fans, Google search is increasingly a part of watching this live TV experience. Before and during the Academy Awards® broadcast in the U.S., we saw related queries on Google dominating the hot searches list on Google Trends. People searched for the TV schedule, printable ballots for voting on favorites, streaming video sites, nominee and film information, celebrity chatter and whatever else caught your attention. Here’s a snapshot:
Fashion
Everyone knows the red carpet is all about the gowns. So which actresses made the best (or worst!) dressed list in search? Zoe Saldana’s purple Givenchy haute couture gown won the day in searches, with just a few more queries than runner up Miley Cyrus, who walked down the carpet in one of Jenny Packham’s finest. Both beat searches for Sandra Bullock’s dress (Marchesa) by large margins. Sarah Jessica Parker, always the fashionista, ranked a distant fourth in Chanel. Certain designers were also popular in search, thanks to the stars who wore (and name-dropped) them. Elie Saab (worn by Anna Kendrick), Armani Prive (Amanda Seyfried, Jennifer Lopez) and Marchesa (Sandra Bullock, Vera Farmiga) were all rising trends.
Winners
Throughout the night Oscar®-related searches rose and fell as nominations were introduced and winners announced. Avatar had the most searches before the ceremony, but as The Hurt Locker received more awards, searches for that film exceeded all others and peaked when it won Best Picture. Precious also had a good run throughout the night. Its peak matched that of “Avatar” during the ceremony:
The awards for best actor, best actress and best director are some of the most-anticipated in the program. There was a considerable amount of buzz about Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock and Kathryn Bigelow before last night, and considerable spikes in search volume when they each won. Here’s a look at a few of the star searches last night:
Finally, the evening wasn’t all about big wins. The awards help expose more obscure films ? shorts, documentaries and foreign-language ? to a much larger audience. Searches for these titles typically went up tenfold during the evening, and if they took home a gold statue, search volume spiked as much as 100 times higher. Music by Prudence, Logorama, Food, Inc., The Cove and The Secrets in their Eyes all experienced an exponential explosion of queries.
Gossip and memorable moments
People are always eager for more information about the Hollywood stars ? personal stats like age, height, family and dating status. During this year?s Oscar® ceremonies, Kathryn Bigelow’s height and Miley Cyrus’s mother’s tattoos were hot topics. Whose girlfriend was most searched for? Easy. George Clooney’s (Elisabetta Canalis).
So what were the most memorable moments of the broadcast? When George Clooney wandered off the red carpet to greet the crowd, queries on [clooney] shot through the roof. Ben Stiller?s appearance as a Na’vi was another draw, and queries on him were high during his spoof. Molly Ringwald and Matthew Broderick?s John Hughes tribute triggered a flood of nostalgia; Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Home Alone all saw huge query spikes as well. During the memorial portion of the show, queries surged for those in the industry who passed away in the last year, including Ron Silver, Natasha Richardson, Patrick Swayze and Brittany Murphy. On a lighter note, Sandra Bullock set off a frenetic amount of searches when she mentioned a Meryl Streep kiss in her acceptance speech.
As we’ve seen in presidential debates, unusual words also generate great interest. The Oscars led to spikes in searches for [catharsis] (from Robert Downey Jr.’s presentation with Tina Fey) and [spooning] (Colin Farrell talking about Jeremy Renner).
We hope you enjoyed the evening, and want to thank everyone for turning to Google search to see the latest. And our parents deserve huge thanks, and our agent… oh, they’re telling me to wrap it up…!
An update on Google.org and philanthropy @ Google
by A Googler
8 Mar 2010 at 6:56pm
(Cross-posted from the Google.org Blog)
What do tracking flu, helping consumers monitor their home electricity use, slowing deforestation and perhaps most importantly in 2010, helping the people of Haiti have in common?
While they are all part of the wide-ranging work of Google.org over the last year, they also show what our technical teams can accomplish in critical areas that don’t always get the attention they need and deserve.
A year ago we outlined our goals for the next chapter for Google.org. We talked about our vision to use strengths of Google in information and technology to build products and advocate for critical policies that address global challenges. Ideas for projects continue to pour in from Googlers and partners around the globe, and we’re incubating several new projects in the areas of economic development, clean energy and access to technology.
This past year, we:
Ramped up Google PowerMeter to help consumers reduce their electricity use and save money, secured utility and device partners, and launched the API on code.google.com to help expand partner access globally.Introduced Earth Engine, a new computational platform we have begun building for global-scale analysis of satellite imagery to monitor changes in key environmental indicators like forest coverage, at COP15 in December.Quickly expanded Google Flu Trends to 20 countries and 38 languages as the H1N1 flu virus spread around the world. We also added city-level flu estimates to 121 U.S. cities and developed the Flu Shot Finder to help people find vaccine locations.Responded to earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, with maps, updated earth imagery, and networking projects, and built Person Finder to help people find information about their loved ones after a disaster.Advocated for policies to spur innovation of renewable energy technologies that are cheaper than coal (RE<C), and our engineers worked on ways to reduce the cost of solar thermal and other RE<C technologies.We will continue to greenlight large scale engineering projects that build on Google’s strengths in technology, our computing infrastructure and global teams.
Overall, our philanthropic mission at Google includes our Google.org projects and a range of other initiatives ? from grants, scholarships and other charitable giving programs to in-kind product support for non-profits. Our founders have set a goal of devoting approximately 1% of Google’s equity and yearly profits to philanthropy. In 2009, we devoted around $100 million plus in-kind giving to a broad range of philanthropic efforts. Here are some highlights:
Academic scholarships and awards: We provide scholarships to encourage students of various backgrounds, ethnicities and gender to excel in their studies in hopes that these and other programs will help dismantle barriers that keep women and minorities from entering computing and technology fields.Academic grants: We support the next generation of engineers and maintain strong ties with academic institutions worldwide that are pursuing research in core areas relevant to our mission. We fund projects across a variety of subjects, host visiting faculty members at Google, and have launched the Google Fellowship Program to fund graduate students doing innovative research in several fields.Holiday charitable gift: We made $22 million in donations in 2009 to a couple of dozen deserving charities around the world to help organizations that have been stretched thin by more requests for help in a year of fewer donations.Employee gift matching: Google matches up to $6,000 for each employee’s annual charitable contributions and contributes $50 for every five hours an employee volunteers through our “Dollars for Doers” program to encourage employee participation in charitable causes.Charitable Giving Council: We support grants for Googler-led partnerships on causes such as K-12 educational initiatives in science, math and technology.Community affairs: We invest in communities where Google has a presence around the world, creating opportunities for Googlers to invest time and expertise, engage in local grant making and build partnerships with local stakeholders.?In addition, our Google for Non-Profits site provides information and links to free tools to help charitable groups promote their cause, raise money, collaborate with others and operate more efficiently. Google Grants, for example, offers in-kind AdWords advertising to non-profit organizations. Since the program began, we’ve donated over $625 million worth of AdWords advertising to all kinds of charitable organizations.
To keep up with our activities, check out the Google.org blog.
Statistics for a changing world: Google Public Data Explorer in Labs
by A Googler
8 Mar 2010 at 4:25pm
Last year, we released a public data search feature that enables people to quickly find useful statistics in search. More recently, we expanded this service to include information from the World Bank, such as population data for every region in the world. More and more public agencies, non-profits and other organizations are looking for ways to open up their data and expand global access to this kind of information. We want to help keep that momentum going, so today we’re sharing a snapshot of some of the most popular public data search topics on Google. We’re also launching the Google Public Data Explorer, an experimental visualization tool in Google Labs.
Popular public data topics on Google
We know people want to be able to find reliable data and statistics on a variety of subjects. But what kind of statistics are they looking for most? To help us better prioritize which data sets to include in our public data search feature, we’ve analyzed anonymous search logs to find patterns in the kinds of searches people are doing, similar to the patterns you can find on Google Trends and Insights for Search. Some public data providers have asked us to share what we’ve learned, so we decided to put together an approximate list of the 80 most popular data and statistics search topics.
You can read the complete list at this link (PDF), but here’s the top 20 to get you started:
1. School comparisons
2. Unemployment
3. Population
4. Sales tax
5. Salaries
6. Exchange rates
7. Crime statistics
8. Health statistics (health conditions)
9. Disaster statistics
10. Gross Domestic Product (GDP)11. Last names
12. Poverty
13. Oil price
14. Minimum wage
15. Consumer price index, inflation
16. Mortality
17. Cost of living
18. Election results
19. First names
20. Accidents, traffic violations
You’ll notice some interesting entries in the list. For example, we were surprised by how many people search for data about popular first and last names. Perhaps people are trying to decide what to name a new baby boy or girl? As it turns out, people are interested in a wide range of statistical information.
To build the list, we looked at the aggregation of billions of queries people typed into Google search, using data from multiple sources, including Insights for Search, Google Trends and internal data tools ? similar to what we do for our annual Zeitgeist. We combined search terms into groups, filtering out spam and repeats, to prepare a list reflecting the most popular public data topics. As a statistician, it’s important for me to note that the data only covers one week’s worth of searches in the U.S., so there could be seasonal and other confounding factors (perhaps there was an election that week). In addition, preparing a study like this requires a fair amount of manual grouping of similar queries into topics, which is fairly subjective and prone to human error. While imperfect, we still think the list is helpful to consider.
The Public Data Explorer
As you can see, people are interested in a wide variety of data and statistics, but this information is only useful if it’s easy to access, understand and communicate. That’s why today we’re also releasing the Google Public Data Explorer in Labs, a new experimental product designed to help people comprehend data and statistics through rich visualizations. With the Data Explorer, you can mash up data using line graphs, bar graphs, maps and bubble charts. The visualizations are dynamic, so you can watch them move over time, change topics, highlight different entries and change the scale. Once you have a chart ready, you can easily share it with friends or even embed it on your own website or blog. We’ve embedded the following chart using the new feature as an example:
This chart compares life expectancy and the number of births per woman over the last 47 years for most economies of the world. The bubble sizes show population, and colors represent different geographic regions. Press the play button to see the dramatic changes over time. Click “explore data” to dig deeper.
Animated charts can bring data to life. Click the play button in the chart to watch life expectancy increase while fertility rates fall around the world. The bubble colors make it quick and easy to see clusters of countries along these variables (e.g., in 1960 the European and Central Asian countries were in the lower right and Sub-Saharan Africa in the upper left). The bubble sizes help you follow the most populous countries, such as India and China. These charts are based on the Trendalyzer technology we acquired from the Gapminder Foundation, which we’ve previously made available in the Motion Chart in Google Spreadsheets and the Visualization API.
With a handful of data providers, there are already billions of possible charts to explore. We currently provide data from the same three providers currently available in our search feature: the World Bank, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, we’ve added five new data providers: the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), the California Department of Education, Eurostat, the U.S. Center for Disease Control, and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. We’re excited that all around the world new data providers are deciding to make their information freely available on the Internet, enabling innovators to create interesting applications, mash up the data in new ways and discover profound meaning behind the numbers.
We hope our list and new tool help demonstrate both the public demand for more data and the potential for new applications to enlighten it. We want to hear from you, so please share your feedback in our discussion forum. If you’re a data provider interested in becoming a part of the Public Data Explorer, contact us.
This week in search 3/7/10
by A Googler
8 Mar 2010 at 3:32am
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.
This week’s enhancements include:
Stars in search
Every day, we work to improve the four key components of search: comprehensiveness, latency, user experience and relevance. Of these, relevance is dramatically enhanced by more personalized results. This week, we announced a new feature that makes it much easier to mark and rediscover your favorite content. Stars in search are just like the stars you see in Google Toolbar or in Maps ? they act like bookmarks. When you star a search result, and it happens to appear again in future results, you’ll see that you already found that particular result. Starred items will appear at the top of your results. Stars in search has been rolling out this week, and will be available globally for all users who are signed in to their Google account.
Auto-spell for images
This week, we unveiled automatic spell correction for images. In cases where we’re highly confident you had intended to type something else, we’ll replace results from the typo query with those from the spell-corrected version ? just like when you misspell a query in Google search. Ultimately, this change will reduce the time it takes to get you the result you’re looking for (and that’s a good thing).
Example searches: [butterflys], [roman architecture] and [apollo ohno]
Sidewiki page owner entry
In September, we launched Sidewiki, which lets you contribute helpful information to any webpage using a sidebar in Google Toolbar or a Chrome extension. Afterward, webmasters asked, “How can I quickly put Sidewiki on all pages of my site?” Now webmasters can create a special entry, called a page owner entry, that appears above all entries written by users. Webmaster tool improvements ultimately create a better web experience for us all, so we’re pleased about this. Let us know what you think about our webmaster enhancements.
Stay tuned for next week’s news on more search launches.
Over 4,000 developers at Google I/O 2010
by A Googler
4 Mar 2010 at 7:30pm
As of today, this year’s Google I/O conference has sold out and registration is closed. That means more than 4,000 developers will be joining us on May 19-20 at Moscone West in San Francisco.
Like years past, I/O will feature over 90 in-depth sessions and the opportunity to meet and learn from other developers, including those from the more than 160 companies that will demo in the Developer Sandbox. For those unable to attend, video recordings of technical sessions will be available on YouTube following the conference.
From now until May, we’ll continue to list new speakers, new sessions, and new Sandbox participants on the Google I/O website. To keep up with the latest event info and details, follow us on Twitter.
Stars make search more personal
by A Googler
3 Mar 2010 at 9:13pm
We’ve long believed that personalization makes search more relevant and fun. For nearly five years, we’ve been tailoring results with personalized search. Today we’re announcing a new feature in search that makes it easier for you to mark and rediscover your favorite web content ? stars.
With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant. That means if you star the official websites for your favorite football teams, you might see those results right at the top of your next search for [nfl]. Here’s what the new “Starred results” feature looks like:
The great thing about stars is that you don’t have to keep track of them. You don’t even have to remember whether or not you starred something. Simply perform a search and you’ll rediscover your starred items right when you need them. Stars sync with your Google Bookmarks and the Google Toolbar, so you can always see your list of starred items in one place and easily organize them. Even beyond the results page, while browsing the web you can quickly click the star icon in Toolbar to create a bookmark, and those pages will start showing up in the new stars feature.
Stars in search replace SearchWiki. In our testing, we learned that people really liked the idea of marking a website for future reference, but they didn’t like changing the order of Google’s organic search results. With stars, we’ve created a lightweight and flexible way for people to mark and rediscover web content. For people who like annotations, we have Sidewiki, a more powerful way for people to contribute and discover helpful information next to pages across the Internet. All your existing SearchWiki edits will be preserved with your Google Account. You can learn more on our help center.
Stars in search are rolling out in the next couple days and will be available globally for all signed-in users.
Searching for gold during the Games
by A Googler
2 Mar 2010 at 7:33pm
During the past two weeks, athletes from around the world competed at the Games in Vancouver. While these thousands strove for gold, millions around the world searched for 2010 Winter Olympics, ??? ????? (Korean for “Vancouver Winter Olympics”), and Juegos Olimpicos de Invierno 2010 (Spanish for “2010 Olympic Winter Games”) using Google search. Now that the medals have been handed out, we thought we’d take a moment to share how some people from around the world searched for information about the Games.
Norway
Norway won 23 medals, including nine gold, and became the first region to win 300 medals at winter events and to win 100 golds. The timeline shows approximate Olympics-related queries from Norway. Although interest was slow to start, it built and repeatedly peaked as Norwegians won in cross-country skiing events: individual (February 17), team (February 22), and men’s 50km (February 28); and biathlon events: individual (February 18) and men’s team (February 26).
(Click on any image to enlarge)
Japan
Japanese athletes won silver and bronze medals in speed skating and figure skating ? correspondingly, interest peaked on the days when those competitions took place. And although they ended the Games ranked eighth in the world, ????? (“Team Aomori”) generated a lot of queries for ????? (“curling”), ????? ????? (“Curling Team Aomori”), and team member ???? (Mari Motohashi). Queries also peaked when snowboarder Kazuhiro Kokubo, who had previously caused controversy by wearing sloppy attire, competed in the men’s halfpipe event. The timeline also clearly shows the effect of television, with each day’s first peak representing the actual time of the event and the second, larger peak occurring in the evening.
Korea
Korean athletes won medals in speed skating, short-track speed skating ? and one gold medal in Ladies’ Figure Skating by Kim Yu-Na. Queries such as ??? ????? (“Yu world record”), ??? 007 (“Yu 007″), and just plain ??? (“Kim Yu-Na”) increased an order of magnitude as Kim won the Ladies’ Short Program on February 23 and ended the Ladies’ Free Skating on February 25 with a new world record score of 228.56.
United States
Americans were interested in both the opening ceremonies and the unfortunate death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili. The men’s free skating program on February 18, when Evan Lysacek won gold, drew many more searchers than the women’s skating program on February 25, in which there was no American medalist. Interest in the unexpectedly good performance of the USA men’s hockey team versus Canada (February 21) and against Switzerland (February 24) was exceeded by the exciting Canada v. USA final (February 28), which ended with a Canadian win in overtime. (Incidentally, the success of the men’s hockey team also led searchers to look for information about a historic USA win. Searches for Miracle on Ice peaked the day after the USA team beat the Canadian team in the preliminary rounds.) Much of the television coverage in the U.S. was tape-delayed; queries arrived during the events but typically peaked during the evening TV broadcasts.
Canada
Canada was not only the host ? it also won the most gold medals of any region during any such games. Like the U.S., interest began with the opening ceremonies, and was dominated by men’s hockey queries, causing a huge spike during the gold-medal game on February 28 as well as smaller spikes for games against USA (February 21) and Russia (February 24). The final women’s hockey game against the U.S. on February 25 also caused a small bump in searches.
Canada took home the most gold medals, while the U.S. won the most medals overall. But where did Games-related searches dominate? To find out, we looked at the regions which had the highest percentage of Games-related searches out of all queries. Perhaps not surprisingly, Canadians were more than twice as likely to search for “Vancouver 2010″, “medal count,” or their favorite athletes as their southern neighbors, which were the second most likely to make Games-related queries. And although the Netherlands was not a leader in the medals count, its citizens’ Games-related query proportion was the third highest in the world.
And finally, the Games wouldn’t be the same without the stars ? the athletes. The most searched-for individual gold medal-winning athletes were:
1. Shaun White (U.S. men’s halfpipe)
2. ??? (Kim Yu-Na; Korea ladies’ figure skating)
3. Lindsey Vonn (U.S. ladies’ downhill Alpine skiing)
4. Sven Kramer (Netherlands men’s 5000m speed skating)
5. Evan Lysacek (U.S. men’s figure skating)
We hope you had a great time watching ? and searching for info about ? the Games. We’ll see you again in a few years!
Google welcomes Picnik
by A Googler
1 Mar 2010 at 8:42pm
(Cross-posted from the Google Photos Blog)
More than ever before, people are sharing and storing their photos online. But until recently, you had to edit your photos using client software on your computer. Today, we’re excited to announce that Google has acquired Picnik, one of the first sites to bring photo editing to the cloud. Using Picnik, you can crop, do touch-ups and add cool effects to your photos, all without leaving your web browser.
We’re not announcing any significant changes to Picnik today, though we’ll be working hard on integration and new features. As well, we’d like to continue supporting all existing Picnik partners so that users will continue to be able to add their photos from other photo sharing sites, make edits in the cloud and then save and share to all relevant networks.
We’re very impressed with the Picnik team and the product they’ve created, and we’re excited to welcome them to Google. We’re looking forward to collaborating closely with them to improve the online photo editing experience on the web. In the meantime, we encourage you to head to Picnik, import some of your photos from Picasa Web Albums, Flickr or Facebook and try your hand at photo editing in the cloud!
Announcing the winners of the Street View trike contest
by A Googler
1 Mar 2010 at 4:00pm
The polls have closed, the votes have been tallied and the people have spoken: it?s time to announce the winners of our Street View trike suggestions contest. Last October, we gave Street View fans the opportunity to vote for the special attractions around the United States that they most want to see featured on Google Maps. In the first round, we received more than 25,000 suggestions, which we narrowed down to the 24 finalists that were put up to a public vote. All in all, nearly a quarter million votes were cast.
The most popular category among all voters was University Campuses, racking up nearly 70,000 votes. Topping the list was Rochester Institute of Technology (Rochester, New York). Reminiscing alumni, prospective students or empty-nest parents will be able to tour the university through Street View for a unique look at campus life.Cyclists also came out in droves to cast their ballots for their favorite riding spots, and the Boulder Creek Path (Boulder, Colorado) rode away with victory in the Parks & Trails category. Our trike riders ? and the avid bike riders in Google?s Boulder office ? are looking forward to the chance to take a ride along this scenic 5½-mile greenway.History buffs, potential tourists and online window-shoppers will soon be able to take a virtual stroll through the grounds of Faneuil Hall Marketplace (Boston, Massachusetts), the most popular submission in the Pedestrian Malls category.In the National Landmarks category, voters elected a location that actually encompasses many of the United States? most famous landmarks, including the Smithsonian Insitution museums, the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building. That?s right: the National Mall in Washington, D.C. emerged victorious.The manually-pedaled trike will soon be making its way to the Motor City to ride through the Detroit Zoo, the top vote-getter in the Theme Parks & Zoos category. With this imagery, families and animal lovers will be able visit the kangaroos and wallabies from the Australian Outback Adventure and the polar bears in the Arctic Ring of Life.We?re now working directly with each of the winning organizations to arrange a visit from our trike in the coming months, so don?t be surprised if you see this quirky contraption at your favorite destination sometime soon:
?Because so many of you ? 238,000, to be exact ? expressed a desire to have the trike visit your favorite place, also be working with many of the other finalists, so stay tuned for more exciting special collections from our trike. And if you happen to manage or work at another attraction that you think absolutely needs to be featured in Street View, please let us know!
