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Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Registration open for 2008 scalability conference
As we noted earlier, our Conference on Scalability is taking place in Seattle on Saturday, June 14. And now registration is open until June 6.
We have some great talks lined up from industry and academia, covering everything from scalability of storage, communication and transactions to scaling applications into the mobile space or, in one case, under water. Space is limited, so do sign up now.
We're excited to bring together so many talented people from the Seattle area. Looking forward to seeing you there!
Google.org announces investment in BrightSource Energy
Today we are pleased to announce our participation in BrightSource Energy's $115 million venture financing with a $10 million equity investment as part of Google's RE<C initiative.
Solar thermal energy generation is one of the key emerging industries addressing the changing global climate and we are excited about both of our current investments in solar thermal technology -- BrightSource Energy and eSolar.
In addition to making investments in renewable energy startups, we plan to make grants to support the research and development of enabling technologies to help the solar thermal industry achieve larger scale and lower costs. We believe that by supporting researchers and entrepreneurs taking different, ambitious approaches and risks to generate clean energy, we can help to accelerate progress and increase the collective economic value of these new clean energy industries.
We are also looking for a Head of Renewable Energy to run our internal R&D effort, which is focused initially on solar thermal power, advanced wind technologies, and enhanced geothermal systems.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Looking towards IPv6
We care a lot about the health of the Internet. Recently, we've become increasingly concerned that IPv4 addresses — the numbers that computers use to connect to the Internet — are running out. Current projections place IPv4 address space exhaustion somewhere in late 2011, and while technologies such as Network Address Translation (NAT) can offer temporary respite, they complicate the Internet's architecture, pose barriers to the development of new applications, and run contrary to network openness principles.
That's why we're pleased to let you know that Google search is also available over IPv6 at ipv6.google.com (you'll need an IPv6 connection to view it). While IPv4 provides about four billion IP addresses — not enough to assign one to every one of Earth's more than six billion inhabitants — IPv6 provides enough address space to assign almost three billion networks to every person on the planet. We hope that by allowing every computer and mobile device on the network to talk to each other directly — an idea known as the "end-to-end principle" that was crucial to the original design of the Internet — IPv6 will allow the continued growth of the Internet and enable new applications yet to be invented.
With current operating systems such as Windows Vista, Mac OS X, and Linux providing high-quality support for IPv6, we hope it's only a matter of time before IPv6 is widely deployed. We will be doing our part.
Update: Changed three million networks to three billion networks in the second paragraph.
Monday, May 12, 2008
A friend connected web
Have you ever wished you could share information and interact with friends while visiting some of your favorite websites? There are a number of great social networking sites out there that let you stay connected, but the rest of the web typically hasn't been social. Yet.
Site owners have been saying for a while that they would love to provide this functionality, but, frankly, it's been too hard to add social features. A lot of code has to be written to create a site where visitors can sign up and bring their friends along, form new friendships, and do engaging things together. And not to mention that if you're a site visitor, it's pretty inconvenient to create a new account and try to rebuild a network of friends each time you visit a site.
Enter Google Friend Connect. This new service, announced as a preview release tonight at Campfire One, lets non-technical site owners sprinkle social features throughout their websites, so visitors will easily be able to join with their AOL, Google, OpenID, and Yahoo! credentials. You'll be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web like Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, LinkedIn, orkut, Plaxo, and others. And quite simply, you'll be able to do things together.
Having faces show up at a site is not enough. Friend Connect lets site owners include OpenSocial apps made by a world of developers. We're providing a few apps, such as posts and ratings, to get the ball rolling. And many more will be provided by the OpenSocial community.With this functionality, there's no end to the possibilities. A small site dedicated to mountain biking in Moab, for example, would be able to have members who could exchange maps, tips, and pictures of their latest rides. A stroke victims support site could help grieving family members assist one another by sharing advice. A politician's site could enable supporters to advocate their viewpoints. A musician's site could give fans the chance to interact full tilt with the band and one another.
Take a look at a few white-listed sites using Google Friend Connect: Ingrid Michaelson's official website, which includes the iLike music application, and Bible Apps, owned by an OpenSocial developer fully dedicated to his "Verses" application -- where people can post prayers and test their knowledge of the Bible as a quiz game with their friends.
If you run a website and would like to add social features, you can now sign up for the wait list and learn more by visiting www.google.com/friendconnect. We're going to keep things pretty limited at first so we can gather feedback from site owners, developers, and users, but, in the weeks ahead, we'll be reaching out to more site owners and adding more social apps to the gallery.
You can also learn more about Google Friend Connect, OpenSocial, and other social initiatives at Google I/O, a two-day developer gathering about building the next generation of web applications. It takes place May 28-29 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Register now for Google I/O at http://code.google.com/events/io/.
How auctions set ad prices
All of the major search engines use auctions to price ads. The reason is simple: there are millions of keywords that need to be priced and it would be impossible to set all those prices by hand.
Using an auction removes the burden of having to do this: the prices are determined by the auction participants. These auctions run every time a user enters a query, so they always reflect the current values that advertisers place on keywords.
The outcome of the ad auction is efficient in the sense that the available ad slots are awarded to those who value them mostly highly. The outcome is also equitable in that the price an advertiser has to pay is determined by the other advertisers -- those with whom it has to compete for slots.
But how do they actually work? There are several steps in the process.
1) Each advertiser enters a list of keywords, ads, and bids.
2) When a user enters a query, Google compiles a list of all the ads whose keywords match that query.
3) The list of ads is then ordered based on the bids and the Ad Quality Scores, which measure the relevance of the ad to the user.
4) The highest ranked ad is displayed in the most prominent position, the second highest ranked ad gets the second most prominent position, and so on.
5) If the user clicks on an ad, the advertiser is charged a price that depends on the bid and Quality Score of the advertiser below it. The price charged is the minimum necessary to retain the advertiser's position in the list.
A simple example is when all ads have the same Quality Score. In this case, the ads will be ranked by bids and the price an advertiser pays per click will just be the bid of advertiser below it in the ranking. Hence the amount that advertisers pay is no more than what they bid and typically less.
In the general case, where ad qualities differ, the price an advertiser pays for a click will depend on its Quality Score relative to the quality of the ad below it in the auction. Roughly speaking, an ad that has twice the quality of another ad will tend to get about twice as many clicks, and will only have to pay half as much per click as the competing ad.
Where does this Ad Quality Score come from? It was originally determined by historical click through rates but has been refined over the years using sophisticated statistical models. Using ad quality as a factor in ranking ads provides strong incentives to advertisers to make sure that they provide relevant ads to end users.
There are many additional tweaks on top of this basic design. For example, Google actually runs two auctions: one for ads at the top of the page, and one for ads on the side of the page. Only ads with particularly high quality are eligible to compete in the top-ad auction. Ads that have particularly low quality may be disabled, and not shown at all. Advertisers also can set and adjust their daily and monthly budget so as to cap their maximum spend.
But the essential structure is that outlined above: advertisers bid for position and pay just enough to beat their runner-up. Prices for keywords are, ultimately, determined by the advertisers.
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