About Me
Friday, July 11, 2008
YouTubing the conventions
Through unprecedented partnerships with both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, we just debuted a video contest that will send one talented winner from each side of the aisle onto their candidate's campaign trail, and ultimately into their party's national convention in Denver or Minneapolis-St. Paul. The call to action is simple: submit a video explaining why you're a Democrat or Republican in 2008. The five most compelling and creative videos selected by each convention will be voted on by the YouTube community, who will determine the final winner.
Learn more by watching these videos from Republican Chairman Mike Duncan or Democratic Chairman Howard Dean.
These contests are a part of our larger partnership with the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. As the official providers for search and online video community, Google and YouTube are contributing a broad range of technology and services to help delegates, members of the media and interested citizens around the country to access convention events and information. And on YouTube, the two convention staffs have been busy posting videos to build buzz about the exciting events in Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul this summer - like speeches from great moments in convention history.
So check out YouTube's Convention Headquarters and submit your video to the contest today. It's your chance to get involved in what promise to be two of the most exciting political events this summer.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Google Mobile App: faster, easier search on iPhone & iPod Touch
Our first downloadable iPhone application is here. It's free, and it makes searching faster and easier. It's never as easy to type on a mobile phone as on a full keyboard and the mobile network is rarely as fast as a desktop connection. So Google Mobile App starts working as soon as you type. Smart features mean you'll get what you're looking for in fewer key presses than before. For instance, we've added the power of suggest (type "lost in" and one touch completes "lost in translation") and My Location (type "coffee" and one touch shows cafes right where you are on a map) to help you search.
We've also brought Google search to your iPhone's address book to make it easy to contact the people you call or text most often. To learn more and see a video showing the App in action, check out this post on the Google Mobile Blog.
U.S. users can get Google Mobile App right now. Tap the App Store icon on your iPhone, or open iTunes, and search for 'Google Mobile App'. (You need to have the latest iPhone software update to see it.)
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Introduction to Google Ranking
In May, Udi Manber introduced our search quality group, the group responsible for the ranking of search results. He introduced various teams within "Quality" (as we like to call the group) including Core Ranking, International Search, User Interfaces, Evaluation, Webspam, and other teams. In this post, I want to tell you more about one of these: the Core Ranking team.
Let me introduce myself. My name is Amit Singhal. I'm a Google Fellow in charge of the ranking team at Google. I've worked in the field of search for the past eighteen years, having been introduced to search in 1990 as a graduate student in computer science. In the academic world, the field of search is known as Information Retrieval (or IR). After spending a decade as an IR researcher, I came to Google in 2000, and have worked on Google ranking ever since.
Google ranking is a collection of algorithms used to find the most relevant documents for a user query. We do this for hundreds of millions of queries a day, from a collection of billions and billions of pages. These algorithms are run for every query entered into most of Google's search services. While our web search is the most used Google search service and the most widely known, the same ranking algorithms are also used - with some modifications - for other Google search services, including Images, News, YouTube, Maps, Product Search, Book Search, and more.
The most common question I get asked about Google's ranking is "how do you do it?" Of course, there is a lot that goes into building a state-of-the-art ranking system like ours, and I will delve deeper into the technology behind it in a later post. Today, I would like to briefly share the philosophies behind Google ranking:
1) Best locally relevant results served globally.The first one is obvious. Given our passion for search, we absolutely want to make sure that every user query gets the most relevant results. We often call this the "no query left behind" principle. Whenever we return less than ideal results for any query in any language in any country - and we do (search is by no means a solved problem) - we use that as an inspiration for future improvements.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.
The second principle seems obvious. Isn't it the desire of all system architects to keep their systems simple? Well, as search systems go, given the wide variety of user queries we have to respond to in multiple languages, it is easy to go down the path where more and more complexity creeps into the system to serve the next incremental fraction of the queries. We work very hard to keep our system simple without compromising on the quality of results. This is an ongoing effort, and a worthy one. We make about ten ranking changes every week and simplicity is a big consideration in launching every change. Our engineers understand exactly why a page was ranked the way it was for a given query. This simple understandable system has allowed us innovate quickly, and it shows. The "keep it simple" philosophy has served us well.
No discussion of Google's ranking would be complete without asking the common - but misguided! :) - question: "Does Google manually edit its results?" Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us. We believe that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well ... subjective, and information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity.
The second reason we have a principle against manually adjusting our results is that often a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and often for all languages. I should add, however, that there are clear written policies for websites recommended by Google, and we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies or for a small number of other reasons (e.g. legal requirements, child porn, viruses/malware, etc).
Stay tuned for my followup post, where I will discuss in detail the technologies behind our ranking and show examples of several state-of-the-art ranking techniques in action. Let me just conclude this post by saying, our passion for search is stronger than ever - and as a search researcher, I have the best job in the world :-).
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Be who you want on the web pages you visit
A while ago, I looked around the social web and wished that it could be less static. Sure, you can leave a comment on a blog or write a text blurb on your social networking profile. But what if you want to express yourself in a more fun way, with 3D graphics and real-time avatar interactions? I started asking this question as a 20% project, and I'm excited to announce today's release of Lively by Google - a 3D virtual experience that is the newest addition to Google Labs.
The Lively team wants to help people experience another dimension of the web. We hope you will use the product to express yourself with and without words, and to do this in the places you already visit on the web.
If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website, you can immediately get a sense of the room creator's interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose. You can also express your own personality by customizing your avatar's look, showing people who you are without having to say a word. Of course, you can chat with each other, and you can also interact through animated actions. In our user research, we’ve been amazed at how much more poignant it is to receive an animated hug than seeing the text “[[hug]]”.
Prior to this release, we worked closely with Arizona State University. Based on feedback from ASU students and with help from the Google Desktop team, we added support for playing YouTube videos in virtual TVs and showing photos in virtual picture frames inside our rooms. Better yet, the gadgets you have in your Lively rooms can also run on your desktop.
To learn more about Lively, please visit www.lively.com. We’re eager to hear your feedback. Maybe we'll bump into you in one of our rooms!
Monday, July 7, 2008
Protocol Buffers: Our open source data interchange format
Today we have something special for all you coders: we're releasing one of our most widely-used internal development tools. We call it "Protocol Buffers." It's the way we encode almost any sort of structured information which needs to be passed across the network or stored on disk. We thought Protocol Buffers might be useful to other people, too, so we've decided to release it as open source software. Check out the details on the Google Open Source Blog, or head directly to the project page on Google Code.
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