Whether you’re a seasoned century rider or a casual beach cruiser, finding the best biking routes can be a challenge. That’s why today we’re bringing mobile biking directions and navigation to the 10 countries where we launched desktop biking directions last month (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK). Plus, we’re adding turn-by-turn, voice-guided biking navigation to Google Maps Navigation (beta) in every country with biking directions. Mount your device on your handlebars to see the turn-by-turn directions and navigation, or use speaker-mode to hear voice-guided directions.
Turn-by-turn biking navigation in Copenhagen
We know there are lots of ways to get from here to there, which is why in 2010, we added biking directions to Google Maps in the U.S. and Canada, and continue to work to bring more biking features to more places. Today, there are more than 330,000 miles (equal to more than 530,000 kilometers, or half a gigameter) of green biking lines in Google Maps. Dark green lines on the map show dedicated bike trails and paths with no motor vehicles, light green lines show streets with bike lanes and dashed green lines show other streets recommended for cycling. Biking navigation even helps you avoid steep hills.
Bike layer showing recommended streets for cycling in Stockholm
Where Map Maker and biking directions are both available, riders can add bike trails, lanes and suggested routes to Google Maps, helping to create a more comprehensive map for everyone living in or visiting their community. Thanks to the contributions of members of the biking community like Todd Scott and our partnership with nonprofits like Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, we’ve added bike data for hundreds of cities and trails to Google Maps in the past two-and-a-half years.
When you’re pedaling from Point A to Point B, we hope biking navigation will make Google Maps for Android more useful to you.
Posted by Larry Powelson, Software Engineer, Google Maps
Posted by Javier Bargas-Avila, Senior User Experience Researcher at YouTube UX Research
I’m sure you’ve experienced this at some point: You click on a link to a website, and after a quick glance you already know you’re not interested, so you click ‘back’ and head elsewhere. How did you make that snap judgment? Did you really read and process enough information to know that this website wasn’t what you were looking for? Or was it something more immediate?
We form first impressions of the people and things we encounter in our daily lives in an extraordinarily short timeframe. We know the first impression a website’s design creates is crucial in capturing users’ interest. In less than 50 milliseconds, users build an initial “gut feeling” that helps them decide whether they’ll stay or leave. This first impression depends on many factors: structure, colors, spacing, symmetry, amount of text, fonts, and more.
In our study we investigated how users' first impressions of websites are influenced by two design factors:
Visual complexity -- how complex the visual design of a website looks
Prototypicality -- how representative a design looks for a certain category of websites
We presented screenshots of existing websites that varied in both of these factors -- visual complexity and prototypicality -- and asked users to rate their beauty.
The results show that both visual complexity and prototypicality play crucial roles in the process of forming an aesthetic judgment. It happens within incredibly short timeframes between 17 and 50 milliseconds. By comparison, the average blink of an eye takes 100 to 400 milliseconds.
And these two factors are interrelated: if the visual complexity of a website is high, users perceive it as less beautiful, even if the design is familiar. And if the design is unfamiliar -- i.e., the site has low prototypicality -- users judge it as uglier, even if it’s simple.
In other words, users strongly prefer website designs that look both simple (low complexity) and familiar (high prototypicality). That means if you’re designing a website, you’ll want to consider both factors. Designs that contradict what users typically expect of a website may hurt users’ first impression and damage their expectations. Recent research shows that negative product expectations lead to lower satisfaction in product interaction -- a downward spiral you’ll want to avoid. Go for simple and familiar if you want to appeal to your users’ sense of beauty.
The conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) is one of the premier venues for research related to probabilistic models and reasoning under uncertainty. This year's conference (the 28th) set several new records: the largest number of submissions (304 papers, last year 285), the largest number of participants (216, last year 191), the largest number of tutorials (4, last year 3), and the largest number of workshops (4, last year 1). We interpret this as a sign that the conference is growing, perhaps as part of the larger trend of increasing interest in machine learning and data analysis.
There were many interesting presentations. A couple of my favorites included:
"Video In Sentences Out," by Andrei Barbu et al. This demonstrated an impressive system that is able to create grammatically correct sentences describing the objects and actions occurring in a variety of different videos.
"Exploiting Compositionality to Explore a Large Space of Model Structures," by Roger Grosse et al. This paper (which won the Best Student Paper Award) proposed a way to view many different latent variable models for matrix decomposition - including PCA, ICA, NMF, Co-Clustering, etc. - as special cases of a general grammar. The paper then showed ways to automatically select the right kind of model for a dataset by performing greedy search over grammar productions, combined with Bayesian inference for model fitting.
A strong theme this year was causality. In fact, we had an invited talk on the topic by Judea Pearl, winner of the 2011 Turing Award, in addition to a one-day workshop. Although causality is sometimes regarded as something of an academic curiosity, its relevance to important practical problems (e.g., to medicine, advertising, social policy, etc.) is becoming more clear. There is still a large gap between theory and practice when it comes to making causal predictions, but it was pleasing to see that researchers in the UAI community are making steady progress on this problem.
There were two presentations at UAI by Googlers. The first, "Latent Structured Ranking," by Jason Weston and John Blitzer, described an extension to a ranking model called Wsabie, that was published at ICML in 2011, and is widely used within Google. The Wsabie model embeds a pair of items (say a query and a document) into a low dimensional space, and uses distance in that space as a measure of semantic similarity. The UAI paper extends this to the setting where there are multiple candidate documents in response to a given query. In such a context, we can get improved performance by leveraging similarities between documents in the set.
The second paper by Googlers, "Hokusai - Sketching Streams in Real Time," was presented by Sergiy Matusevych, Alex Smola and Amr Ahmed. (Amr recently joined Google from Yahoo, and Alex is a visiting faculty member at Google.) This paper extends the Count-Min sketch method for storing approximate counts to the streaming context. This extension allows one to compute approximate counts of events (such as the number of visitors to a particular website) aggregated over different temporal extents. The method can also be extended to store approximate n-gram statistics in a very compact way.
In addition to these presentations, Google was involved in UAI in several other ways: I held a program co-chair position on the organizing committee, several of the referees and attendees work at Google, and Google provided some sponsorship for the conference.
Overall, this was a very successful conference, in an idyllic setting (Catalina Island, an hour off the coast of Los Angeles). We believe UAI and its techniques will grow in importance as various organizations -- including Google -- start combining structured, prior knowledge with raw, noisy unstructured data.
The first presidential nominating convention, held in 1832, was meant to give Americans a voice in the selection of the presidential nominee. Fast forward to 2012 and these conventions still represent a major moment in American politics—and we’re helping the conventions reach a larger audience by being the official live stream provider and social networking platform for the Republican National Convention in Tampa and the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte.
In conjunction with our on-the-ground efforts, we’re making a number of online tools available to help you get organized and informed as Election Day approaches.
Get informed Our Google Politics & Elections site enables you to see the latest Google News, YouTube videos, search and video trends, and Google+ content about the election in one place. You can also visit our live Elections Hub to watch the national political conventions, debates and even election night LIVE right from your mobile phone or laptop.
Register to vote To make it easy to navigate the rules and deadlines about registering to vote and how to vote by mail, we put together an online voter guide. We’ve also added a special section to make it easier for military and overseas voters to find information about their different rules and deadlines.
As we approach the final days of the election, we’ll continue to develop useful ways for voters and campaigns to engage one another around the important issues in 2012.
We hope these tools will help you stay informed and participate in the election!
Posted by Eric Hysen, Google Politics & Elections Team
Posted By Johnny Chen, Product Manager, Google Research
The Web offers a trove of structured data in the form of tables. Organizing this collection of information and helping users find the most useful tables is a key mission of Table Search from Google Research. While we are still a long way away from the perfect table search, we made a few steps forward recently by revamping how we determine which tables are "good" (one that contains meaningful structured data) and which ones are "bad" (for example, a table that hold the layout of a Web page). In particular, we switched from a rule-based system to a machine learning classifier that can tease out subtleties from the table features and enables rapid quality improvement iterations. This new classifier is a support vector machine (SVM) that makes use of multiple kernel functions which are automatically combined and optimized using training examples. Several of these kernel combining techniques were in fact studied and developed within Google Research [1,2].
We are also able to achieve a better understanding of the tables by leveraging the Knowledge Graph. In particular, we improved our algorithms for identifying the context and topics of each table, the entities represented in the table and the properties they have. This knowledge not only helps our classifier make a better decision on the quality of the table, but also enables better matching of the table to the user query.
Finally, you will notice that we added an easy way for our users to import Web tables found through Table Search into their Google Drive account as Fusion Tables. Now that we can better identify good tables, the import feature enables our users to further explore the data. Once in Fusion Tables, the data can be visualized, updated, and accessed programmatically using the Fusion Tables API.
These enhancements are just the start. We are continually updating the quality of our Table Search and adding features to it.
Stay tuned for more from Boulos Harb, Afshin Rostamizadeh, Fei Wu, Cong Yu and the rest of the Structured Data Team.
Search for [cambridge bay] on Google Maps and you’ll fly to a tiny hamlet located deep in the Kitikmeot Region of Nunavut in Canada’s Arctic, surrounded by an intricate lacework of tundra, waterways and breaking ice. High above the Arctic circle, it’s a place reachable only by plane or boat. Zoom in on the map, and this isolated village of 1,500 people appears as only a handful of streets, with names like Omingmak (“musk ox”) Street and Tigiganiak (“fox”) Road.
There are 4,000 years’ worth of stories waiting to be told on this map. Today, we’re setting out on an ambitious mission to tell some of those stories and to build the most comprehensive map of the region to date. It is the furthest north the Google Maps Street View team has traveled in Canada, and our first visit to Nunavut. Using the tools of 21st century cartography, we’re empowering a community and putting Cambridge Bay on the proverbial map of tomorrow.
The hamlet of Cambridge Bay
We’re not doing it alone, but with the help of the community and residents like Chris Kalluk. We first met Chris, who works for the nonprofit Nunavut Tunngavik, last September at our Google Earth Outreach workshop in Vancouver, where he learned how to edit Google Maps data using Google Map Maker. Today Chris played host to a community Map Up event in Cambridge Bay, where village elders, local mapping experts and teenagers from the nearby high school gathered around a dozen Chromebooks and used Map Maker to add new roads, rivers and lakes to the Google Map of Cambridge Bay and Canada's North. But they didn’t stop there. Using both English and Inuktitut, one of Nunavut’s official languages, they added the hospital, daycare, a nine-hole golf course, a territorial park and, finally, the remnants of an ancient Dorset stone longhouse which pre-dates Inuit culture.
Catherine Moats, a member of the Google Map Maker Team, working with Chris Kalluk and others at the Community Map Up.
Now we’re pedaling the Street View trike around the gravel roads of the hamlet and using a tripod—the same used to capture business interiors—to collect imagery of these amazing places. We’ll train Chris and others in the community to use some of this equipment so they can travel to other communities in Nunavut and continue to build the most comprehensive and accurate map of Canada’s Arctic. As Chris put it to us, “This is a place with a vast amount of local knowledge and a rich history. By putting these tools in the hands of our people, we will tell Nunavut’s story to the world.”
The Street View Trike collecting imagery of Cambridge Bay.
So stay tuned, world. We look forward to sharing with you the spectacular beauty and rich culture of Canada’s Arctic—one of the most isolated places on the planet that will soon be, thanks to the people of Cambridge Bay, just a click away.
Posted by Karin Tuxen-Bettman, Google Earth Outreach team
Today we’re introducing the YouTube Elections Hub, a one-stop channel for key political moments from now through the upcoming U.S. election day on November 6. You can watch all of the live speeches from the floor of the upcoming Republican and Democratic National Conventions, see Google+ Hangouts with power brokers behind the scenes, and watch a live stream of the official Presidential and Vice Presidential debates. You won’t need to go anywhere else for the must-watch moments of this election cycle...they’re all happening on the Hub live.
In addition to videos from politicians and parties, a diverse range of news organizations—both established names in media and sought-after new voices—are sharing their coverage of the political process on the new hub. You’ll find live and on-demand reporting and analysis from ABC News, Al Jazeera English, BuzzFeed, Larry King, The New York Times, Phil DeFranco, Univision and the Wall Street Journal. Each will put their own stamp on the Presidential race—from the conventions to the debates to election night.
Of course, we’ll have special live coverage around the Republican National Convention from August 27 to 30, the Democratic National Convention from September 4-6, the Presidential and Vice Presidential debates in October, and election night. Bookmark the Elections Hub now for a front row seat along the road to the White House.
Our machine learning book, The Foundations of Machine Learning, is now published! The book, with authors from both Google Research and academia, covers a large variety of fundamental machine learning topics in depth, including the theoretical basis of many learning algorithms and key aspects of their applications. The material presented takes its origin in a machine learning graduate course, "Foundations of Machine Learning", taught by Mehryar Mohri over the past seven years and has considerably benefited from comments and suggestions from students and colleagues at Google.
The book can serve as a textbook for both graduate students and advanced undergraduate students and a reference manual for researchers in machine learning, statistics, and many other related areas. It includes as a supplement introductory material to topics such as linear algebra and optimization and other useful conceptual tools, as well as a large number of exercises at the end of each chapter whose full solutions are provided online.
Hailed as the birthplace of the automotive revolution, the city of Detroit, Mich. is taking its transportation legacy down new paths. As Detroit embraces a greener, non-motorized outlook, cycling is steadily increasing in popularity. The Michigan Trails and Greenways Alliance is facilitating this transition by creating an interconnected statewide system of trails and greenways, including the development of bike paths throughout the Detroit area.
As these new bike paths change the city’s landscape, Motor City residents need a more comprehensive map showing bike friendly routes. Todd Scott, the Detroit Greenways Coordinator, discovered that he could use Google Map Maker—a free tool that allows anyone to make contributions to Google Maps—to add new information on biking paths and trails in and around Detroit. Adding new bike paths not only makes the map more accurate, it also improves biking directions, making it even easier for people to find the quickest routes through town. Anyone can also enhance existing trails by including details such as the official name, surface type and bicycle suitability. Keeping Google Maps updated with the latest information means everyone in the community is able to find and enjoy these new additions to the trail system.
Learn more about Todd Scott and his mission to improve the map for cyclists in Detroit.
Building a more comprehensive, accurate and usable map for local cyclists is just one part of Todd’s mission. From the smallest town to a rapidly evolving city like Detroit, maps reflect the heart of a community. Whether you’re improving directions, adding local businesses or mapping an entire area from scratch, your local expertise will help make life easier for not only you, but all Google Maps users. As Todd says, “It goes beyond map making. It’s a way to take back your neighborhood.”
How are you mapping your world? Join the Map Maker Community and tell us your story.
Posted by Lori Savageau, Map Maker Community Manager
On July 26th, Google's 2012 Faculty Summit hosted computer science professors from around the world for a chance to talk and hear about some of the work done by Google and by our faculty partners. One of the sessions was a panel on Online Education. Daphne Koller's presentation on "Education at Scale" describes how a talk about YouTube at the 2009 Google Faculty Summit was an early inspiration for her, as she was formulating her approach that led to the founding of Coursera. Koller started with the goal of allowing Stanford professors to have more time for meaningful interaction with their students, rather than just lecturing, and ended up with a model based on the flipped classroom, where students watch videos out of class, and then come together to discuss what they have learned. She then refined the flipped classroom to work when there is no classroom, when the interactions occur in online discussion forums rather than in person. She described some fascinating experiments that allow for more flexible types of questions (beyond multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank) by using peer grading of exercises.
In my talk, I describe how I arrived at a similar approach but starting with a different motivation: I wanted a textbook that was more interactive and engaging than a static paper-based book, so I too incorporated short videos and frequent interactions for the Intro to AI class I taught with Sebastian Thrun.
Finally, Bradley Horowitz, Vice President of Product Management for Google+ gave a talk describing the goals of Google+. It is not to build the largest social network; rather it is to understand our users better, so that we can serve them better, while respecting their privacy, and keeping each of their conversations within the appropriate circle of friends. This allows people to have more meaningful conversations, within a limited context, and turns out to be very appropriate to education.
By bringing people together at events like the Faculty Summit, we hope to spark the conversations and ideas that will lead to the next breakthroughs, perhaps in online education, or perhaps in other fields. We'll find out a few years from now what ideas took root at this year's Summit.
In addition to all they do for their country overseas, service members are also a markedly entrepreneurial group: although veterans represent only 6% of the U.S. population, they account for an impressive 13.5% of all U.S. small business owners. This entrepreneurial spirit is contributing to business growth around the country, and last week we decided to head down to San Diego to see how Google for Entrepreneurs and Startup Weekend could help.
On August 9, Google for Entrepreneurs, along with the Syracuse University Institute for Veterans and Military Families and Startup Weekend, hosted a series of events focused on giving business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs from the military community the training and tools they need to take advantage of the web to build and grow businesses. More than 200 service members learned about free tools to create a web site, track and measure their web presence and market their product or service.
Engaged and full of pride, the veteran-owned businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs came from across California. Misty Birchall, a Navy veteran and founder of PubCakes, delighted attendees when she gave us a taste of her passion for combining baking and craft beer. Marine Corps sergeant turned organic farmer Colin Archipley brought many participants from Veterans Sustainable Agriculture Training, an entrepreneurial incubator program he founded to help transitioning veterans train for careers in sustainable agriculture. Even the underdogs (and undercats) were well-represented—Precious Paw Prints, an online retailer selling creative pet accessories owned by Marine veteran Kiersten Carlin, shared that small business can win by providing a higher level of quality and service that larger brands cannot.
Over the following weekend, aspiring entrepreneurs from the veterans community attended the local Startup Weekend, where they formed teams to turn their idea ideas into products. By Sunday night, five teams had launched businesses.
Being a successful entrepreneur means having an appetite for risk, an ability to navigate ambiguity and a passion to get things done at all costs; it’s no mystery why such a large number of small businesses are started by veterans or service-disabled veterans. They certainly have what it takes to be entrepreneurs.
You can read more about our recent programs for members of the veterans’ community here.
Posted Bridgette Sexton, Global Entrepreneurship Manager
Our ongoing effort to build great maps—ones that are accurate, easy to navigate and cover every corner of the world—continues to progress. Over the last few months, Google Maps has taken people everywhere from the Amazon to Antarctica, and we’re continuing to add imagery of even more places around globe. Beginning this week, you can dive even deeper into Latin America with new Street View imagery of Brazil and Mexico.
Street View first became available for Brazil in 2010, and as of this week, we’ve grown our collection of panoramic imagery to more than 70 cities throughout the country. You’ll now find colonial cities like Fortaleza, architecturally compelling cities like Brasilia and coastal landmarks like Recife, Natal and Salvador. You can even virtually travel to the west side of Brazil and visit Foz de Iguaçu, or if you’re planning an upcoming trip, preview the the area around your hotel as well as nearby shopping malls, historic monuments, restaurants and more. With so many upcoming events, like the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, we’re excited to share the riches of Brazil’s cities not only with tourists from around the world, but also with locals who might want to visit a city, neighborhood or landmark they’ve not yet experienced.
Street View imagery of Brazil available before mid-August 2012
Street View imagery of Brazil available beginning mid-August 2012
We’ve also introduced Street View imagery of 30 Mesoamerican archaeological sites in Mexico. Start your adventure by exploring Kukulkan’s Temple, a 1,100-year-old pyramid whose peak is reached by climbing 365 steps, one for each day of the year. When visitors clap their hands, the architectural acoustics at the base of the pyramid’s steps are designed to mimic the sound of the Quetzal, a bird that the Mayans regard as representative of their gods.
Find hundreds of magical stories like this one by visiting the colossal pyramids of Teotihuacan, emblematic sites for the Mayans such as Chichen Itza or seaside archaeological jewels like Tulum. These and other famous sites from around the world can be seen in our Street View Gallery.
We’re always improving the comprehensiveness of our maps so you can experience more imagery from around the world. Whether you’re planning a visit to one of these areas or touring these locations from the comfort of your armchair, we hope you enjoy these captivating new images of Latin America.
Posted by Ricardo Blanco, Communications Manager for Google in Latin America
“Norwegian restaurants in New York City.” I can type that phrase fast, but I can say it even faster—and when I’m on the go, speed is what I’m looking for. With Voice Search, you can speak into your phone to get search results quickly and easily. Voice Search is already available in 29 languages, and today, we're bringing support to 13 new languages for Android users—bringing the total to 42 languages and accents in 46 countries. In fact, 100 million new speakers can use Voice Search now, with the addition of:
Basque
Bulgarian
Catalan
European Portuguese
Finnish
Galician
Hungarian
Icelandic
Norwegian
Romanian
Serbian
Slovak
Swedish
Each new language usually requires that we initially collect hundreds of thousands of utterances from volunteers and, although we’ve been working on speech recognition for several years, adding these new languages led our engineers and scientists to tackle some unique challenges. While languages like Romanian follow predictable pronunciation rules, others, like Swedish, required that we recruit native speakers to provide us with the pronunciations for thousands of words. Our scientists then built a machine learning system based on that data to predict how all other Swedish words would be pronounced.
This update has already started to roll out, and will continue to do so over the course of the next week. How you get started with Google Voice Search depends on what kind of phone you have. If your phone runs Android 2.2 or later, and you see the microphone icon on the Google Search widget on your homescreen, all you have to do is tap the icon to start a voice-powered search. Otherwise, you can install the Voice Search app from Google Play. Note that you can only speak one language into the app at a time, and you may need to change your language settings to use one of these new languages.
As with other languages we’ve added, one of the major benefits to Google’s cloud-based model is that the more people use Voice Search, the more accurate it becomes.
Since 2005, we’ve collaborated with hundreds of transit authorities around the world to make a comprehensive resource for millions of riders to find out which bus, train, subway or tram can take them to their next destination. Today, Google Maps has public transportation schedules for more than one million transit stops worldwide, in nearly 500 cities including New York, London, Tokyo and Sydney.
Public transportation information is especially useful when it’s in the palm of your hand. Today we’re releasing an update to the Google Maps for Android app (version 6.10) which makes this transit information even more useful. We’ve made some changes to the Transit Lines layer, so that you can select a specific mode of public transportation (train, bus, tram or subway) to display on the mobile map, hiding the other modes. This is helpful in areas where there is a tight concentration of several types of public transit.
Left: Mobile map with all modes of public transit shown; Right: Transit Lines layer in Subway mode
We’ve also updated the layout of station pages to be more useful. Open it by tapping on the name of the station on your mobile map.
Updated station pages show you departure times, lines serving the station and the distance to nearby stations.
In addition to these new transit features, we’ve updated region highlighting, My Places and Location History displays in Google Maps for Android:
Now, whenever you search for a city or postal code, the borders of that region are highlighted.
Under My Places you’ll notice we’ve added new tabs, which will help you access all your information from a single place; from your saved maps for use offline to your starred places and Custom Maps created on your desktop.
If you enable Location History, you’ll be able to browse the places you’ve been on a daily basis with an updated Location History dashboard.
Whether you’re looking for schedule and fare information, directions by public transit or nearby stations, Google Maps puts comprehensive, accurate and useful transit information at your fingertips. Update to the latest version of Google Maps for Android in the Google Play store.
Posted by Christopher Van Der Westhuizen, Software Engineer, Google Maps
The stats are in, and one clear winner from this year’s summer sports has emerged: digital media. Here’s a quick look behind the “screens” at how the web blew records away around the world, at the most wired Games ever.
Searches set a new pace Mirroring the growth of the web and digital media, Google search volume around the world was dramatically higher this year than during Beijing in 2008:
Driven by a 900 percent increase in [ryan lochte] searches, American interest in [swimming] spiked 25 percent higher than 2008 levels.
The “Fierce Five” vaulted U.S. searches for [gymnastics] to almost double the 2008 peak.
Spurred on by a record-breaking performance by sprinter Usain Bolt, Jamaican searches for [track and field] raced up 40 percent from 2008.
Japanese gymnast and first-time gold medalist [kohei uchimura] proved he’s a “superman” in search as well as on the tumbling mat, with search volume in his home country up 420 percent over the last games.
Success may have been sweeter the second time around for wrestler [sushil kumar], the first Indian athlete to win an individual medal at successive Olympics, with searches up more than 375 percent from the 2008 games.
Global streaming goes the distance YouTube powered the live stream for NBC Olympics and for the International Olympic Committee’s YouTube Channel, making the world’s games even more global and accessible. NBC Olympics saw more live streams than during the entire Beijing Games—more than 159 million total video streams and more than 64 million live streams across YouTube's online, mobile and tablet experiences. In all, more than 20 million hours of total video was streamed over 17 days. And of course, the Games were also streamed on the IOC’s channel (youtube.com/olympic), with tens of millions of streams to 64 countries in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. We’ll have more details on the YouTube blog soon.
The multi-screen relay More than ever, people experienced the Games not just via the TV broadcast, but on desktops, mobile phones and tablets. Through research panels conducted in partnership with NBC in the U.S., we learned a bit more about how this played out:
Mobile makes a strong showing: Many viewers turned to one or more “second screens” beyond TV to keep updated on the Olympics—nearly half of those who did (44 percent) did so via a mobile phone or tablet.
Power viewers: Second-screen viewing didn’t seem to diminish participants’ interest in watching the games on TV...in fact, it increased it. People who followed the Games on TV plus one other screen watched 52 percent more Olympics on TV than those who didn’t; people who followed on two additional screens spent more than twice as much time (105 percent) with TV. And people who watched live streams of events online watched 66 percent more Olympics on television than people who followed exclusively on TV.
Synchronized usage: Overall, nearly 56 percent of people who followed the Games on TV and at least one other screen did so simultaneously. These simultaneous viewers also watched TV for 67 percent longer than those who only watched TV.
Gold for digital businesses Brands who invest in digital marketing to connect with customers grow their own businesses and help make great content possible. A few campaigns that caught our eye:
Visa’s global “Go World" campaign invited fans to show their support for Team Visa athletes in the form of cheers across social media. The campaign generated more than 59 million cheers, and Visa’s YouTube channel accounted for more than 47 million views of Visa’s commercials and athlete training videos from around the world.
Insurance provider Zurich launched a successful “Share your Sports Moments” marketing campaign on Google and YouTube, featuring members of the German Olympic team. The result: a significant uplift in the number of leads who then signed insurance contracts.
Lloyds TSB Bank, presenting partner of the Olympic Torch relay, conducted a successful AdWords campaign that kept pace with the Olympic torch as it passed through towns in the U.K., resulting in more than 190,000 clicks and more than 2 million impressions over three months.
Higher traffic and increased investment in the web also helped online publishers in a big way:
In the U.S., across 2 million sites in our Google Display Network and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, ads shown on sports-related websites increased by 19 percent, while revenues (RPMs) for these sites increased by 14 percent, compared to the two previous weeks.
Our premium ad serving platform for publishers (DoubleClick for Publishers), which helps some of the web’s largest publishers make money from their content, broke a new record, with one major publisher serving more than 400 million ad impressions in a day across its website and mobile content—driving higher revenues and more free content.
A fun note to end on: showing how the web can fuse data and creativity while opening the playing field, one of our software engineers used Google App Engine to create a “per capita” medal tally (the data is real, the accounting is somewhat creative). On this basis, one country stands above all others—congratulations to the most successful nation of the last two weeks, Grenada!
Posted by Richard Keelty, Product Marketing Manager, U.K.
Cross-posted with the US Public Policy Blog, the European Public Policy Blog, and Inside Search Blog At Google, we're constantly trying to make important collections of information more useful to the world. Since 2006, we’ve let people discover, search, and read United States patents online. Starting this week, you can do the same for the millions of ideas that have been submitted to the European Patent Office, such as this one.
Typically, patents are granted only if an invention is new and not obvious. To explain why an invention is new, inventors will usually cite prior art such as earlier patent applications or journal articles. Determining the novelty of a patent can be difficult, requiring a laborious search through many sources, and so we’ve built a Prior Art Finder to make this process easier. With a single click, it searches multiple sources for related content that existed at the time the patent was filed.
Patent pages now feature a “Find prior art” button that instantly pulls together information relevant to the patent application.
The Prior Art Finder identifies key phrases from the text of the patent, combines them into a search query, and displays relevant results from Google Patents, Google Scholar, Google Books, and the rest of the web. You’ll start to see the blue “Find prior art” button on individual patent pages starting today.
Our hope is that this tool will give patent searchers another way to discover information relevant to a patent application, supplementing the search techniques they use today. We’ll be refining and extending the Prior Art Finder as we develop a better understanding of how to analyze patent claims and how to integrate the results into the workflow of patent searchers.
These are small steps toward making this collection of important but complex documents better understood. Sometimes language can be a barrier to understanding, which is why earlier this year we released an update to Google Translate that incorporates the European Patent Office’s parallel patent texts, allowing the EPO to provide translation between English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Swedish, with more languages scheduled for the future. And with the help of the United States Patent & Trademark Office, we’ve continued to add to our repository of USPTO bulk data, making it easier for researchers and law firms to analyze the entire corpus of US patents. More to come!
August is both an end to the lush freedom of summer and the beginning of another year of student life. As a rising senior at the University of Florida, this time is both exciting and anxiety-inducing. Even though I’m looking forward to many aspects of the school year, there are certain things about college—from book budgets to calculus study sessions—that can make it a headache.
But this fall, I feel more prepared to face the daily student grind. This summer, I had the chance to intern on the communications team at Google and got the inside track on some tools and tricks to make school a snap. For example, did you know there was an extension for Chrome that helps you stay focused on your work? Yup, didn’t think so! So I thought I’d share some of my new favorite tips—my “Survival Guide for Student Life”—to help make it easier for all students to get through the coming months.
Easy ways to coordinate your social and extracurricular life
Google+ Hangouts enables you to video chat with up to nine friends from your desktop, mobile phone or tablet. A great feature for when your club needs to discuss some last minute changes for the upcoming meeting.
Stay on task with Hangout Apps like Symphonical, which provides a digital wall of sticky notes for virtual brainstorm sessions.
With Google+ Events, invite all your friends to your get-together and attach a personalized video greeting to the invitation. During the event, photos from the party can be uploaded to the event page in real-time using Party Mode. So if you have to miss a party due to a study session, you can avoid that pesky FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)!
Let your friends know what you’re up to by sharing your Google Calendar with them. Or create a shared calendar just for your study group.
Stay organized and efficient—and be prepared for the unexpected
Stop the email flood from the ridiculous number of email lists you signed up for using Gmail’s auto-unsubscribe feature.
No more sore eyes from crowded inboxes—Gmail's default mode is Priority Inbox so it automatically sorts your important messages for you.
Cite your sources! Use Google Docs’ research tool to investigate highlighted portions of your essay and then generate a citation.
Group projects call for collaboration. With Google Drive, you can use shared folders so everyone can access materials without having to email updates to each other.
Using your laptop or phone, you can send any documents or presentations saved on your Google Drive to Fedex to be printed, thanks to Google Cloud Print.
Get what you need and where you’re going faster
For those of you starting at university this year, Google Maps has 360-degree panoramic Street View imagery for many campuses around the world to give you a preview of your new stomping grounds.
Back to school shopping is one of the most fun things about August. Find your way in and out of malls and department stores with indoor Google Maps on Android devices.
We college students can’t go too long without homemade food. Search for your next flight home with Flight Search. (If flying makes you a bit queasy, track any care packages by typing the tracking code into the Google search bar.)
Stay informed with Google Now. This feature, available on Android devices running Jelly Bean, can update you when the next bus is coming or provide the weather forecast for Saturday’s big game.
Reading, writing, 'rithmetic and... YouTube
Don’t break the bank on textbooks. Google Play has millions of FREE (emphasis is important) books readily available such as "Pride and Prejudice" and "Gulliver’s Travels."
Not a fan of traditional note taking? Chromebooks are a super fast and virus-proof laptop. It starts seconds after you boot it and will last through a whole day of classes.
A fair portion of us students aren’t fans of mental math. Type any equation into the Google search box to get the answers you need. It can graph functions as well.
We know we spend too much of our time watching funny videos on YouTube, but there are video channels that can actually help us learn more about a variety of subjects—from astrophysics to world history. Find more educational channels at YouTube EDU.
I’m resting a bit easier now that I know there are tools that make student life a bit less overwhelming. Here’s hoping you, too, feel armed to face the fall semester—and beyond—with Google in your backpack.
Posted by Jenise Araujo, BOLD Intern, Communications Team
Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations
For two weeks in July, we ran Power Searching with Google, a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) similar to those pioneered by Stanford and MIT. We blended this format with our social and communication tools to create a community learning experience around search. The course covered tips and tricks for Google Search, like using the search box as a calculator, or color filtering to find images.
The course had interactive activities to practice new skills and reinforce learning, and many opportunities to connect with other students using tools such as Google Groups, Moderator and Google+. Two of our search experts, Dan Russell and Matt Cutts, moderated Hangouts on Air, answering dozens of questions from students in the course. There were pre-, mid- and post-class assessments that students were required to pass to receive a certificate of completion. The course content is still available.
We had 155,000 students register for the course, from 196 countries. Of these, 29% of those who completed the first assessment passed the course and received a certificate. What was especially surprising was 96% of the students who completed the course liked the format and would be interested in taking other MOOCs.
This learning format is not new, as anyone who has worked in eLearning over the past 20 years knows. But what makes it different now is the large, global cohort of students who go through the class together. The discussion forums and Google+ streams were very active with students asking and answering questions, and providing additional ideas and content beyond what’s offered by the instructor. This learning interaction enabled by a massive “classroom”, is truly a new experience for students and teachers in an online environment.
Going forward, we will be offering Power Searching with Google again, so if you missed the first opportunity to get your certificate, you’ll have a second chance. Watch here for news about Power Searching as well as some educational ideas that we are exploring.
Larry Page once described the perfect search engine as understanding exactly what you mean and giving you back exactly what you want. It’s very much like the computer I dreamt about as a child growing up in India, glued to our black-and-white TV for every episode of Star Trek. I imagined a future where a starship computer would be able to answer any question I might ask, instantly. Today, we’re closer to that dream than I ever thought possible during my working life—and here are some of the latest steps we’re taking today to make search even more intelligent:
1. Understanding the world In May we launched the Knowledge Graph, our database of more than 500 million real-world people, places and things with 3.5 billion attributes and connections among them. The feedback has been phenomenally positive and we want to extend this feature to people outside the U.S. So starting today, you’ll see Knowledge Graph results across every English-speaking country in the world. If you’re in Australia and search for [chiefs], you’ll get the rugby team—its players, results and history.
We’ll also use this intelligence to help you find the right result more quickly when your search may have different meanings. For example, if you search for [rio], you might be interested in the Brazilian city, the recent animated movie or the casino in Vegas. Thanks to the Knowledge Graph, we can now give you these different suggestions of real-world entities in the search box as you type:
Finally, the best answer to your question is not always a single entity, but a list or group of connected things. It’s quite challenging to pull these lists automatically from the web. But we’re now beginning to do just that. So when you search for [california lighthouses], [hurricanes in 2008] or [famous female astronomers], we’ll show you a list of these things across the top of the page. And by combining our Knowledge Graph with the collective wisdom of the web, we can even provide more subjective lists like [best action movies of the 2000s] or [things to do in paris]. If you click on an item, you can then explore the result more deeply on the web:
So far we can produce hundreds of thousands of lists involving millions of items, and we’ll keep growing to match your curiosity. A quick preview:
2. Putting your info at your fingertips Sometimes the best answer to your question isn’t available on the public web—it may be contained somewhere else, such as in your email. We think you shouldn’t have to be your own mini-search engine to find the most useful information—it should just work. A search is a search, and we want our results to be truly universal. So we’re developing a way to find this information for you that’s useful and unobtrusive, and we’d love your feedback. Starting today, we’re opening up a limited trial where you can sign up to get information from your Gmail right from the search box.
So if you’re planning a biking trip to Tahoe, you might see relevant emails from friends about the best bike trails, or great places to eat on the right hand side of the results page. If it looks relevant you can then expand the box to read the emails:
We’re working on some even more useful features. For example, if you search for [my flights] we will organize flight confirmation emails for any upcoming trips in a beautifully easy-to-read way right on the search results page:
3. Understanding your intent Often the most natural way to ask a question is by asking aloud. So we’ve combined our speech recognition expertise, understanding of language and the Knowledge Graph so that Voice Search can better interpret your questions and sometimes speak the answers back as full sentences. This has been available on Android for a few weeks and people love it. It’ll soon be available on your iPhone or iPad (iOS version 4.2+).
You just need to tap the microphone icon and ask your question, the same way you’d ask a friend. For example, ask “What movies are playing this weekend?” and you’ll see your words streamed back to you quickly as you speak. Then Google will show you a list of the latest movies in theaters near you, with schedules and even trailers. It works for everything from celebrity factoids to the height of Kilamanjaro and more. When Google can supply a direct answer to your question, you’ll get a spoken response too.
These are baby steps, but important ones on our way to building the search engine of the future—one that is much more intelligent and useful than it was just a few years ago. It’s a very exciting time to be working in this field.
Technology is at its best when it makes people’s lives better, and that’s precisely what we’re going for with our self-driving car project. We’re using advanced computer science to try and make driving safer and more enjoyable.
Our vehicles, of which about a dozen are on the road at any given time, have now completed more than 300,000 miles of testing. They’ve covered a wide range of traffic conditions, and there hasn’t been a single accident under computer control.
We’re encouraged by this progress, but there’s still a long road ahead. To provide the best experience we can, we’ll need to master snow-covered roadways, interpret temporary construction signals and handle other tricky situations that many drivers encounter. As a next step, members of the self-driving car team will soon start using the cars solo (rather than in pairs), for things like commuting to work. This is an important milestone, as it brings this technology one step closer to every commuter. One day we hope this capability will enable people to be more productive in their cars. For now, our team members will remain in the driver’s seats and will take back control if needed.
And while these team members are commuting, many of them will be testing our algorithms on a new type of vehicle we’ve added to the self-driving car family over the past few months to help us refine our systems in different environments and on different terrain: the Lexus RX450h.
With each breakthrough we feel more optimistic about delivering this technology to people and dramatically improving their driving experience. We’ll see you on the road!
Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing. —Abraham Lincoln
When I was looking for investors for my startup in 1997, I was a lot more interested in the values and character of my potential investors than in the name of the firm on the door. My first investors were not from Sand Hill Road or Palo Alto, but were people I knew would support my company (and me) in the ways we most needed help.
As an entrepreneur, you want to know if your investors will be there for you, help you do the right things, and encourage you to persist and evolve when things seem dark. Perhaps most of all, you want to know they’ve been there before, and that they’ll be calm and confident when things go wrong—when giving up sounds like a pretty good option.
At Google Ventures, we try to be the kind of hands-on investors that quietly help to build companies. We try to be the kind of investors we sought as entrepreneurs ourselves. Starting a company can be a lonely business, and it helps to know you’ve got someone on your side who has been through it before.
Today, we're launching a new Google Ventures blog as an experiment, hoping it will help you get to know the people and companies at Google Ventures a little better. We’ll share how we think about things and why, if you’re an entrepreneur, you might want to talk to Joe, Rich, Kevin and the rest of the team.
Posted by Bill Maris, Managing Partner, Google Ventures
Posted by Vincent Vanhoucke, Research Scientist, Speech Team
The New York Times recently published an article about Google’s large scale deep learning project, which learns to discover patterns in large datasets, including... cats on YouTube! What’s the point of building a gigantic cat detector you might ask? When you combine large amounts of data, large-scale distributed computing and powerful machine learning algorithms, you can apply the technology to address a large variety of practical problems.
With the launch of the latest Android platform release, Jelly Bean, we’ve taken a significant step towards making that technology useful: when you speak to your Android phone, chances are, you are talking to a neural network trained to recognize your speech.
Using neural networks for speech recognition is nothing new: the first proofs of concept were developed in the late 1980s(1), and after what can only be described as a 20-year dry-spell, evidence that the technology could scale to modern computing resources has recently begun to emerge(2). What changed? Access to larger and larger databases of speech, advances in computing power, including GPUs and fast distributed computing clusters such as the Google Compute Engine, unveiled at Google I/O this year, and a better understanding of how to scale the algorithms to make them effective learners.
The research, which reduces the error rate by over 20%, will be presented(3) at a conference this September, but true to our philosophy of integrated research, we’re delighted to bring the bleeding edge to our users first.
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1 Phoneme recognition using time-delay neural networks, A. Waibel, T. Hanazawa, G. Hinton, K. Shikano and K.J. Lang. IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, vol.37, no.3, pp.328-339, Mar 1989. 2 Acoustic Modeling using Deep Belief Networks, A. Mohamed, G. Dahl and G. Hinton. Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing. 3 Application Of Pretrained Deep Neural Networks To Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition, N. Jaitly, P. Nguyen, A. Senior and V. Vanhoucke, Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of Interspeech 2012.
Did you know that 60 percent of all violent deaths are due to small arms and light weapons? Small arms, such as revolvers, assault rifles and light machine guns, and ammunition represent a multi-billion dollar industry, and three quarters of the world’s small arms lie in the hand of civilians—more than 650 million civilian arms. As part of the Google Ideas initiative on illicit networks, we’ve created an interactive data visualization of global small arms and ammunition trading to better understand and map the global arms trade.
The tool was produced by Google’s Creative Lab team in collaboration with the Igarape Institute. More than 1 million data points on imports and exports of small arms, light weapons and ammunition between 1992 and 2010 and across 250 states and territories across the world were provided by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) small arms database. The visualization reveals patterns and trends in imports and exports of arms and ammunition across the world, making it easy to explore how they relate to conflicts worldwide. More of the implications of this data are discussed in this video from the INFO summit hosted by Google Ideas last month:
You can explore these data points by zooming in and out of the globe, clicking on any country to readjust the view, and using the histogram tool at the bottom to see trading patterns over the years. You can see, for example, that the scale of the global trade in ammunition rivals the scale of trade in actual weapons, an insight underexplored by policymakers today in conflict prevention and resolution.
We built this visualization using the open source WebGL Globe on Google’s Chrome Experiments site; since it is open sourced, we hope to see others use the globe as a platform for bringing other complex datasets to life.
Update 8/16/12: This post has been updated to reflect more accurate numbers.
Posted by Scott Carpenter, Deputy Director, Google Ideas
We work every day to create a more seamless, beautiful user experience—to give you a better, easier-to-use Google. This means continuously improving the products we offer, and recognizing when users of one product might have a better experience with another. Over the past year, we’vemadechanges to around 50 products, features and services—donating, merging and shutting things down so we can focus on the high-impact products that millions of people use, multiple times a day. Today, we’re announcing a few more changes:
We introduced Google Apps for Teams in 2008 to allow people with a verified business or school email address to collaborate using non-email applications from Google like Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Talk. Over time, we realized that Google Apps for Teams was not as useful for people as we originally anticipated. Beginning September 4, 2012, we'll start converting existing Google Apps for Teams accounts into personal Google Accounts, and shutting down Google Apps for Teams. This change does not affect other editions of Google Apps.
We launched Google Listen through Google Labs in August 2009, to give people a way to discover and listen to podcasts. However, with Google Play, people now have access to a wider variety of podcast apps, so we’ve discontinued Listen. People who have already installed the app can still use it, but after November 1, podcast search won’t function. You can access your podcast subscriptions in Google Reader in the “Listen Subscriptions” folder and download them from the Import/Export tab.
Google Video for Business is a video hosting and sharing solution that allowed Google Apps for Business and Google Apps for Education customers to use video for internal communication. Starting this fall, we’ll migrate all videos hosted on Google Video for Business over to Google Drive, which has similar storage and sharing capabilities. All migrated videos will be stored for free and will not count against a user’s Google Drive storage quota.
Finally, Google maintains 150+ blogs and other communications channels about our products and services, and so over time we'll also be closing a number of Google-created blogs that are either updated infrequently, or are redundant with other blogs. This doesn't mean that we'll be sharing any less information—we'll just be posting our updates on our more popular channels.
Technology has the power to change people’s lives. But to make a difference, we need to carefully consider what to focus on, and make hard decisions about what we won’t pursue. This enables us to devote more time and resources giving you products you love, and making them better for you.
The application for the 2013 Google RISE (Roots in Science and Engineering) Awards is now open. Given once a year, Google RISE Awards are designed to promote and support education initiatives in two key areas: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM) and Computer Science (CS). Google grants awards of $5,000 - $25,000 USD to organizations around the world working with K-12 and university students in these fields.
This year, our community welcomed more than two dozen organizations from around the world, from Denmark to Uganda and California to Romania. The RISE grants have helped these groups to scale their reach by allowing for more scholarship recipients, to deepen their impact by providing hands on robotics kits, and to ultimately inspire their students by creating a community for CS outreach.
Now, the RISE Awards have expanded to include applicants from Latin America and the Asia Pacific region, bringing our total to six continents and 243 countries. All eligible nations are listed on our website.
The growth of technology is undoubtable, and the impact technology will have on our future is equally undeniable. We believe it’s our duty to support students who have the uncanny ability not only to consume technology, but also to create it. We believe that inspiring the next generation of computer scientists will enrich the lives of not only individual students, but also the communities and countries they live in.
Show us what you can do to get students excited about STEM and CS! Submit your application by September 30, 2012. Awardees will be announced by January 2013.
Posted by Roxana Shirkhoda, K-12 Education Outreach Specialist
Posted by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives
Last week, we held our eighth annual North America Computer Science Faculty Summit at our headquarters in Mountain View. Over 100 leading faculty joined us from 65 universities located in North America, Asia Pacific and Latin America to attend the two-day Summit, which focused on new interactions in our increasingly digital world.
In my introductory remarks, I shared some themes that are shaping our research agenda. The first relates to the amazing scale of systems we now can contemplate. How can we get to computational clouds of, perhaps, a billion cores (or processing elements)? How can such clouds be efficient and manageable, and what will they be capable of? Google is actively working on most aspects of large scale systems, and we continue to look for opportunities to collaborate with our academic colleagues. I note that we announced a cloud-based program to support Education based on Google App Engine technology.
Another theme in my introduction was semantic understanding. With the introduction of our Knowledge Graph and other work, we are making great progress toward data-driven analysis of the meaning of information. Users, who provide a continual stream of subtle feedback, drive continuous improvement in the quality of our systems, whether about a celebrity, the meaning of a word in context, or a historical event. In addition, we have found that the combination of information from multiple sources helps us understand meaning more efficiently. When multiple signals are aggregated, particularly with different types of analysis, we have fewer errors and improved semantic understanding. Applying the “combination hypothesis,” makes systems more intelligent.
Finally, I talked about User Experience. Our field is developing ever more creative user interfaces (which both present information to users, and accept information from them), partially due to the revolution in mobile computing but also due in-part to the availability of large-scale processing in the cloud and deeper semantic understanding. There is no doubt that our interactions with computers will be vastly different 10 years from now, and they will be significantly more fluid, or natural.
This page lists the Googler and Faculty presentations at the summit.
One of the highest intensity sessions we had was the panel on online learning with Daphne Koller from Stanford/Coursera, and Peter Norvig and Bradley Horowitz from Google. While there is a long way to go, I am so pleased that academicians are now thinking seriously about how information technology can be used to make education more effective and efficient. The infrastructure and user-device building blocks are there, and I think the community can now quickly get creative and provide the experiences we want for our students. Certainly, our own recent experience with our online Power Searching Course shows that the baseline approach works, but it also illustrates how much more can be done.
I asked Elliot Solloway (University of Michigan) and Cathleen Norris (University of North Texas), two faculty attendees, to provide their perspective on the panel and they have posted their reflections on their blog.
The digital era is changing the human experience. The summit talks and sessions exemplified the new ways in which we interact with devices, each other, and the world around us, and revealed the vast potential for further innovation in this space. Events such as these keep ideas flowing and it’s immensely fun to be part of very broadly-based, computer science community.
