The new Chromebook, for everyone

As a kid growing up in India, I was fascinated with computers and the endless possibilities they presented. I had to wait until college to finally get my hands on one in the computer lab and since then began dreaming of a world where everyone could have access to one. We’re not quite there yet, but every day we get a bit closer.

A few years ago, we set out on a journey to build a better computer that’s faster, simpler and more secure. When we introduced a few Chromebooks into the market, many of you early adopters joined us on this journey. For folks living entirely in the cloud, the Chromebook is now a primary computer.

Many people use the Chromebook today as the perfect additional computer for their home. For families, it’s easy to use and share: for kids doing homework on the couch, parents catching up on emails at the kitchen counter and grandparents staying connected on video chat. There’s no need to worry about security updates and maintenance is easy; all you need to do is charge the battery. It just works.

This gets to the heart of the Chromebook vision. In order to have one, two or more computers around the house, they need to be easy to use and much more affordable. So together with Samsung, we designed a new laptop—the new Samsung Chromebook for $249—the computer for everyone.

    

The new Chromebook is a great computer at any price, but it’s an incredible computer at $249. It’s one of the lightest laptops on the market. You can easily carry it around all day—it’s 2.5 pounds, a mere 0.8 inches thick, with more than 6 hours of battery life for the typical user. And with 100 GB of free storage on Google Drive*, you can get to all of your stuff anytime, anywhere.

Even with its compact design, it’s packed with performance—it boots up in less than 10 seconds and resumes instantly. High-resolution videos (in 1080p) are beautiful to watch and when using the touchpad, you’ll notice smooth scrolling due to a hardware-accelerated user interface. And as you‘d expect from a Chromebook, it’s easy to share with others. Everyone—mom, dad, grandparents, tech lovers, tech haters—can have separate accounts where all of their stuff is kept safe. Finally, if you’re an active Google user of products like Gmail, Drive, Search, Maps, YouTube, Play or Google+ Hangouts, everything just works seamlessly.

Starting today, the new Samsung Chromebook is available for pre-order online from Amazon, Best Buy, PC World and other retailers. Next week it will be available for sale from these same online retailers as well as the Google Play store. You can also buy them at over 500 Best Buy stores across the U.S and over 30 PC World and Currys stores in the U.K.

So if you ever felt it was too complicated and too expensive to have an additional computer (or two), we hope you (and the entire family) will give the new Chromebook a try.

Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Chrome & Apps

*You will have 100 GB of free storage for 2 years, starting on the date you redeem the offer on eligible Chrome devices. 

Ngram Viewer 2.0

Posted by Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager

Since launching the Google Books Ngram Viewer, we’ve been overjoyed by the public reception. Co-creator Will Brockman and I hoped that the ability to track the usage of phrases across time would be of interest to professional linguists, historians, and bibliophiles. What we didn’t expect was its popularity among casual users. Since the launch in 2010, the Ngram Viewer has been used about 50 times every minute to explore how phrases have been used in books spanning the centuries. That’s over 45 million graphs created, each one a glimpse into the history of the written word. For instance, comparing flapper, hippie, and yuppie, you can see when each word peaked:

Meanwhile, Google Books reached a milestone, having scanned 20 million books. That’s approximately one-seventh of all the books published since Gutenberg invented the printing press. We’ve updated the Ngram Viewer datasets to include a lot of those new books we’ve scanned, as well as improvements our engineers made in OCR and in hammering out inconsistencies between library and publisher metadata. (We’ve kept the old dataset around for scientists pursuing empirical, replicable language experiments such as the ones Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden conducted for our Science paper.)

At Google, we’re also trying to understand the meaning behind what people write, and to do that it helps to understand grammar. Last summer Slav Petrov of Google’s Natural Language Processing group and his intern Yuri Lin (who’s since joined Google full-time) built a system that identified parts of speech—nouns, adverbs, conjunctions and so forth—for all of the words in the millions of Ngram Viewer books. Now, for instance, you can compare the verb and noun forms of “cheer” to see how the frequencies have converged over time:

Some users requested the ability to combine Ngrams, and Googler Matthew Gray generalized that notion into what we’re calling Ngram compositions: the ability to add, subtract, multiply, and divide Ngram counts. For instance, you can see how “record player” rose at the expense of “Victrola”:

Our info page explains all the details about this curious notion of treating phrases like components of a mathematical expression. We’re guessing they’ll only be of interest to lexicographers, but then again that’s what we thought about Ngram Viewer 1.0.

Oh, and we added Italian too, supplementing our current languages: English, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Hebrew, and Russian. Buon divertimento!

Google’s data centers: an inside look

Very few people have stepped inside Google’s data centers, and for good reason: our first priority is the privacy and security of your data, and we go to great lengths to protect it, keeping our sites under close guard. While we’ve shared many of our designs and best practices, and we’ve been publishing our efficiency data since 2008, only a small set of employees have access to the server floor itself.

Today, for the first time, you can see inside our data centers and pay them a virtual visit. On Where the Internet lives, our new site featuring beautiful photographs by Connie Zhou, you’ll get a never-before-seen look at the technology, the people and the places that keep Google running.

The server floor in Council Bluffs, Iowa

Night falls over our Lenoir, North Carolina data center  

 In addition, you can now explore our Lenoir, NC data center at your own pace in Street View. Walk in the front door, head up the stairs, turn right at the ping-pong table and head down the hall to the data center floor. Or take a stroll around the exterior of the facility to see our energy-efficient cooling infrastructure. You can also watch a video tour to learn more about what you're viewing in Street View and see some of our equipment in action.



Finally, we invited author and WIRED reporter Steven Levy to talk to the architects of our infrastructure and get an unprecedented look at its inner workings. His new story is an exploration of the history and evolution of our infrastructure, with a first-time-ever report from the floor of a Google data center.

Fourteen years ago, back when Google was a student research project, Larry and Sergey powered their new search engine using a few cheap, off-the-shelf servers stacked in creative ways. We’ve grown a bit since then, and we hope you enjoy this glimpse at what we’ve built. In the coming days we’ll share a series of posts on the Google Green Blog that explore some of the photographs in more detail, so stay tuned for more!

Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure

The meaning of open, redux

Nearly three years ago I wrote a blog post, "The Meaning of Open," about Google’s commitment to openness and how it makes the entire company better. After it was published I received several thoughtful responses from readers—professors and writers appreciative of the look inside Google, business leaders telling me how open affects their business, grad school students surprised that this was the very opposite of the lock-in strategy they were being taught.

This week we released the "Open" issue of Think Quarterly, which includes a few of my thoughts on how the world of open has progressed in the brief time since that December 2009 post. In short, the impact of open systems has been greater than even my most optimistic self would have predicted back then. Open ecosystems are rewriting the rules—not only in the tech industry but in education, healthcare and governance.

My article, "The Future is Open," is just one of several good reads in the "Open" issue. I hope you enjoy it!

Posted by Jonathan Rosenberg, Advisor, Google

Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month

September 15 marked the beginning of Hispanic Heritage Month and the start of our third year celebrating the Hispanic community through events and community outreach initiatives. Googlers from our Corporate Social Responsibility Team, Diversity & Inclusion Team, Engineering Industry Team, the Hispanic Googler Network (HGN), and our Community Partners worked together to host 20+ events focused on this year’s theme of Latinos in Technology.

We kicked things off at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (USHCC) National Conference, where two members from our Google Accelerate team worked one-on-one with business owners during matchmaking sessions to consult on the best use of Google tools for their enterprises. Googler Eliana Murillo spoke on a panel titled “Beyond Social Media: The Potential of Technology & the Internet in a Global Economy,” where she shared how tools like Google Analytics, YouTube and Google for Nonprofits can be useful for businesses.

In early October, we ran a Hispanic Heritage Month 2012 Hangout on Air on the Life at Google page with the Latino Community Foundation (LCF). Raquel Donoso (CEO of LCF) and Googlers Hector Mujica (HGN member) and myself shared the history of the partnership and what our respective goals are. They also talked about the Family Health Day at Google & Olympic Games event, which we held at our Mountain View, Calif. headquarters that same week. Health is a pressing issue (PDF) in the Hispanic community; at this event, part of the Binational Health Week, we encouraged guests to have healthier lifestyles by teaching them some easy exercises, how to be active and eat healthy. More than 380+ community members and 50+ Googlers attended.

Last week we wrapped up a series of networking events in partnership with the Society of Hispanic Engineers (SHPE), where more than 400+ technical professionals came to our Seattle, Cambridge, Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin, New York, and Mountain View Offices to network and learn about how Google is supporting the local hispanic technical community.



Finally, today the Hispanic Googler Network is hosting the Bay Area Latino Employee Resource Group (ERG) Networking Reception in Mountain View. The Honorable Aida Alvarez, Chair of the Latino Community Foundation of the Bay Area, will speak to 300+ guests from local Hispanic ERGs in the Bay Area about what LCF is doing to build a better future for Latino children, youth and families in the Hispanic community.

Though the month officially comes to an end today, we’ll continue to support the Hispanic community as a lead sponsor in the LATISM '12 conference, taking place in two weeks. LATISM ‘12 connects Latinos in social media, technology, education, business and health fields to increase their online footprint through the web and Google's tools for small businesses and communities. We’re also participating in the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers Conference and will soon open up applications for our Hispanic College Fund Google scholarship.

We’ve had a great time celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month, and are already looking forward to next year’s events. We invite you to view the recaps, photos and hangouts on our Life at Google page on Google+ and to visit our Diversity & Inclusion site where you can see more of what we do.

Posted by Sylvia Bonilla Zizumbo, Hispanic Googler Network Chair and Strategic Partnerships Lead 

Bringing history to life

Today you can discover 42 new online historical exhibitions telling the stories behind major events of the last century, including Apartheid, D-Day and the Holocaust. The stories have been put together by 17 partners including museums and cultural foundations who have drawn on their archives of letters, manuscripts, first-hand video testimonials and much more. Much of the material is very moving—and some is on the Internet for the first time.



Each exhibition features a narrative which links the archive material together to unlock the different perspectives, nuances and tales behind these events. Among others you’ll see:

• Tragic love at Auschwitz - the story of Edek & Mala, a couple in love who try to escape Auschwitz
• Jan Karski, Humanity’s hero - first-hand video testimony from the man who attempted to inform the world about the existence of the Holocaust
• Faith in the Human Spirit is not Lost - tracing the history of Yad Vashem’s efforts to honor courageous individuals who attempted to rescue Jews during the Holocaust
• Steve Biko - a 15-year-old’s political awakening in the midst of the Apartheid movement featuring nine documents never released in the public domain before
• D-Day - details of the famous landings including color photographs, personal letters and the D-Day order itself from Admiral Ramsay
• The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II - an account of the 1953 Coronation including color photographs
• Years of the Dolce Vita - a look at the era of the “good life” in Italy including the fashion, food, cars and culture

As with the other archives that we’ve helped bring onto the Internet, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, you can zoom in to see photos in great detail and search through millions of items for a specific country, person, event or date. Watch our video for some guidance about how to find your way around the exhibitions.

The historical collections are the latest chapter in the work of the Google Cultural Institute, following the Art Project, World Wonders and the Nelson Mandela archives. We’re working closely with museums, foundations and other archives around the world to make more cultural and historical material accessible online and by doing so preserve it for future generations.

You can explore the many exhibitions at www.google.com/culturalinstitute. You can also follow us on our Google+ page. What you see today is just the start, so if you’re a partner interested in contributing your own exhibitions, please fill out this form.

Posted by Mark Yoshitake, Product Manager, Google Cultural Institute

Communicate more easily across languages in Gmail

Finding the right words can be difficult, especially across languages, and once you choose them, finding a way to type them can be even harder. Try emailing family in Germany, chatting with friends in China or adding a Russian business partner's name to your contacts and you may find yourself limited by the language of your keyboard.

That's why today we’re adding more than 100 virtual keyboards, transliteration and IMEs—collectively called input tools—in Gmail. These tools enable you to type in the language and keyboard layout you’re accustomed to, making it easy to keep in touch with family, friends and coworkers from any computer. You can even switch between languages with one click.

To try it out, check the box next to Enable input tools under Language in Settings.

Once you’ve enabled it, you’ll see the Input Tools icon next to the Settings button in your toolbar, and you can turn on and off any Input Tool from there.

With these new virtual keyboards, Gmail supports typing in 75 languages—a big jump from the five languages that were initially supported when we introduced Indic transliteration in Gmail in 2009.

Gmail’s users are from all over the world—and language should never get in the way of a good conversation. If you'd like to use Input Tools in other places, try out the Chrome extension, the Windows desktop client or the Android app.

Posted by C. Andrew Warren, Product Manager

(Cross-posted on the Gmail and Enterprise Blogs)

ReFr: A New Open-Source Framework for Building Reranking Models

Posted by Dan Bikel and Keith Hall, Research Scientists at Google

We are pleased to announce the release of an open source, general-purpose framework designed for reranking problems, ReFr (Reranker Framework), now available at: http://code.google.com/p/refr/.

Many types of systems capable of processing speech and human language text produce multiple hypothesized outputs for a given input, each with a score. In the case of machine translation systems, these hypotheses correspond to possible translations from some sentence in a source language to a target language. In the case of speech recognition, the hypotheses are possible word sequences of what was said derived from the input audio. The goal of such systems is usually to produce a single output for a given input, and so they almost always just pick the highest-scoring hypothesis.

A reranker is a system that uses a trained model to rerank these scored hypotheses, possibly inducing a different ranked order. The goal is that by employing a second model after the fact, one can make use of additional information not available to the original model, and produce better overall results. This approach has been shown to be useful for a wide variety of speech and natural language processing problems, and was the subject of one of the groups at the 2011 summer workshop at Johns Hopkins’ Center for Language and Speech Processing. At that workshop, led by Professor Brian Roark of Oregon Health & Science University, we began building a general-purpose framework for training and using reranking models. The result of all this work is ReFr.

From the outset, we designed ReFr with both speed and flexibility in mind. The core implementation is entirely in C++, with a flexible architecture allowing rich experimentation with both features and learning methods. The framework also employs a powerful runtime configuration mechanism to make experimentation even easier. Finally, ReFr leverages the parallel processing power of Hadoop to train and use large-scale reranking models in a distributed computing environment.

EMEA Faculty Summit 2012

Michel Benard, University Relations Manager

Last week we held our fifth Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Faculty Summit in London, bringing together 94 of EMEA’s foremost computer science academics from 65 universities representing 25 countries, together with more than 60 Googlers.

This year’s jam-packed agenda included a welcome reception at the Science Museum (plus a tour of the special exhibition: “Codebreaker - Alan Turing’s life and legacy”), a keynote on “Research at Google” by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives and a welcome address by Nelson Mattos, Vice President of Engineering and Products in EMEA, covering Google’s engineering activity and recent innovations in the region.

The Faculty Summit is a chance for us to meet with academics in Computer Science and other areas to discuss the latest exciting developments in research and education, and to explore ways in which we can collaborate via our our University Relations programs.

The two and a half day program consisted of tech talks, break out sessions, a panel on online education, and demos. The program covered a variety of computer science topics including Infrastructure, Cloud Computing Applications, Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Audio/Video, Machine Learning, User Interface, e-Commerce, Digital Humanities, Social Media, and Privacy. For example, Ed H. Chi summarized how researchers use data analysis to understand the ways users share content with their audiences using the Circle feature in Google+. Jens Riegelsberger summarized how UI design and user experience research is essential to creating a seamless experience on Google Maps. John Wilkes discussed some of the research challenges - and opportunities - associated with building, managing, and using computer systems at massive scale. Breakout sessions ranged from technical follow-ups on the talk topics to discussing ways to increase the presence of women in computer science.

We also held one-on-one sessions where academics and Googlers could meet privately and discuss topics of personal interest, such as how to develop a compelling research award proposal, how to apply for a sabbatical at Google or how to gain Google support for a conference in a particular research area.

The Summit provides a great opportunity to build and strengthen research and academic collaborations. Our hope is to drive research and education forward by fostering mutually beneficial relationships with our academic colleagues and their universities.

Celebrating teachers who make a difference with Google

For most of us, there’s at least one teacher whose name we will never forget—that favorite teacher who made a difference in our education, whether they were our first grade art teacher or a professor in college. For me, that teacher was Ms. Taylor, my 8th grade science teacher. Ms. Taylor didn't just foster my love of science—she understood that 8th grade can be a tough time for students as they try to navigate social cliques and prepare for the pressure of high school. Ms. Taylor knew that taking the time to ask us if we were feeling okay was just as important as teaching us about geological formations. She didn’t just care about teaching us—she genuinely cared about us as people.

This Friday is World Teachers' Day, and we want to honor the teachers like Ms. Taylor who helped make us the people we are today. We’ve long supported education through technology, offering free tools like YouTube Edu and Google Apps for Education, and by developing cost-efficient devices like Chromebooks. But it’s the teachers who really make the difference by creatively incorporating that technology into their classrooms. As technology usage in schools increases, we hear even more amazing stories about how teachers and students are using our products to foster collaborative learning.

And that usage is growing quickly. As of today, more than 20 million students, faculty and staff worldwide use Google Apps for Education. In addition, in the last year we announced that:

• 400+ universities are posting lectures and/or full courses online using YouTube Edu
• 600,000 staff from the Philippines Department of Education will now be using Google Apps
• Universities across the continents are signing up for Apps, including schools in Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and Africa
• More than 500 schools and districts went back to school with Chromebooks this fall
• Seven of the eight Ivy League universities and 72 of this year’s top 100 U.S. universities (as determined by 2013 U.S. News and World Report’s ranking) have gone Google with Google Apps for Education

As a tribute to the educators who are putting these tools to work, this week we’ll be highlighting a few amazing teachers on our Google in Education page on Google+. To kick off the series, we want to celebrate Ms. Kornowski—a science teacher at Kettle-Moraine High School in Wales, WI, who is using Google Forms to bring her students together.



To all the Ms. Taylors and Ms. Kornowskis out there—thank you, both for the positive impact you have on your students and for letting Google be a part of that experience.

Posted by Cristin Frodella, Google in Education