A few weeks ago we announced our adventurous (some call it crazy) plan to drive across the US in an eco-friendly retrofitted 1970s bus, visiting ten college campuses that have deployed Google Apps Education Edition. Well, we just hit the street, and starting this week we will be visiting thousands of college students across the country to hear how Google Apps is helping them to bring learning into the cloud. You can keep up with the bus at www.google.com/apps/bus through maps, photos, videos, and live blog posts on our recently launched the Google Students blog.
In addition to the bus, a few other things are getting us excited, like the 17 new schools that have chosen Google Apps in the last few weeks, taking us to over two million active users. And then there's a new feature to celebrate: Google Video for Apps, which enables schools to securely share videos of recorded classes, lectures, school events, and more.
With these developments, I guess it's "so long" to summer. It really is time for us to head App to School...
About Me
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
More eye candy for iGoogle
In case you're looking for some more personality to add to your iGoogle page, we've just launched a fresh collection of iGoogle artist themes -- an ongoing project we launched in April for which we invited world-class artists to design dynamic themes for your iGoogle homepage.
The new collection features designs from 28 leading artists from the worlds of fashion and music. This group is amazing, spanning a wide range of styles and genres: Radiohead and Gnarls Barkley used radiant colors; Gucci, Burberry, and Vera Wang illustrated beautiful patterns; and Bob Dylan and Celine Dion created an iconic look (of course). So depending on what you're interested in, there's lots of great art to choose from to suit your personality, taste or mood.
Why did we focus on musicians and fashion designers this round? It's often the clothes we wear and the music we listen to that help express our personality and style. And when we first unveiled iGoogle artist themes, we heard that many of you wanted even more themes in these areas. We hope this new collection gives you more choices so that your iGoogle page reflects your personal style.
So check out the new collection of themes and pick one that appeals to you. Changing it up is easy and requires only a few clicks. If you have a hard time selecting just one, add the sampler theme, which displays a different artist every day.
Stay tuned as we continue to collaborate with more artists from around the world.
The new collection features designs from 28 leading artists from the worlds of fashion and music. This group is amazing, spanning a wide range of styles and genres: Radiohead and Gnarls Barkley used radiant colors; Gucci, Burberry, and Vera Wang illustrated beautiful patterns; and Bob Dylan and Celine Dion created an iconic look (of course). So depending on what you're interested in, there's lots of great art to choose from to suit your personality, taste or mood.
Why did we focus on musicians and fashion designers this round? It's often the clothes we wear and the music we listen to that help express our personality and style. And when we first unveiled iGoogle artist themes, we heard that many of you wanted even more themes in these areas. We hope this new collection gives you more choices so that your iGoogle page reflects your personal style.
So check out the new collection of themes and pick one that appeals to you. Changing it up is easy and requires only a few clicks. If you have a hard time selecting just one, add the sampler theme, which displays a different artist every day.
Stay tuned as we continue to collaborate with more artists from around the world.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
At the Republican Convention: Politics in the cloud and on the ground
After Hurricane Gustav blew through and Americans started searching for Sarah Palin, the Google and YouTube teams got down to business at the Republican Convention.
A large part of Google's work with the convention lived in the clouds. Delegates registered and stayed informed through a cloud-based system that combined SalesForce and Google technology. The new system means simpler, faster communication with delegates when it mattered most - as the convention had to quickly inform large delegations about the latest updates on Hurricane Gustav.
Members of the media were able to search schedules, speeches, releases, bios and video put out by the Convention on their News and Media Portal System powered by Google. The site put a range of Google tools to use - from Picasa to Calendar to Site Search - to give reporters fast access to information coming out of the Xcel Center.
Google hosted two blogger brunches with RedState.com. At the first, Fred Thompson gave a rousing talk the morning of his convention speech about the changes that needed to be made in Washington, conservative values and strengths of both Senator McCain and Governor Palin. At the second, Google CEO Eric Schmidt emphasized the importance of conservative bloggers and rise of new media this election cycle.
Meanwhile, the YouTube team was quite busy collecting videos throughout the week. At upload booths stationed in the Xcel Energy Center, and on a mobile camera roving through the Convention hall, nearly 500 RNC attendees took the opportunity to post their thoughts onto YouTube. Among those to upload from the Convention were actor Jon Voight, former congressman Tom Delay, and former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, CNN's Jon King, and former Virginia Senator George Allen:
In addition, the GOP staff uploaded all of the major speeches from the Convention to their YouTube Channel, including both McCain and Palin's acceptance speeches, as well as behind-the-scenes footage and videos from events around the Convention center.
To celebrate the closing night of the convention, we partnered with Vanity Fair to throw a party for press, celebrities, political leaders and executives in attendance. Guests grabbed a few treats from the open candy bar and enjoyed catering from Wolfgang Puck at the Walker Art Center.
If both conventions were any indication of the general election, the Republicans and Democrats will go head to head in their use of technology and the Internet to reach voters, spread their message and bring more Americans into the election. You can stay up to date on the Google's election efforts on our US Election page.
A large part of Google's work with the convention lived in the clouds. Delegates registered and stayed informed through a cloud-based system that combined SalesForce and Google technology. The new system means simpler, faster communication with delegates when it mattered most - as the convention had to quickly inform large delegations about the latest updates on Hurricane Gustav.
Members of the media were able to search schedules, speeches, releases, bios and video put out by the Convention on their News and Media Portal System powered by Google. The site put a range of Google tools to use - from Picasa to Calendar to Site Search - to give reporters fast access to information coming out of the Xcel Center.
Google hosted two blogger brunches with RedState.com. At the first, Fred Thompson gave a rousing talk the morning of his convention speech about the changes that needed to be made in Washington, conservative values and strengths of both Senator McCain and Governor Palin. At the second, Google CEO Eric Schmidt emphasized the importance of conservative bloggers and rise of new media this election cycle.Meanwhile, the YouTube team was quite busy collecting videos throughout the week. At upload booths stationed in the Xcel Energy Center, and on a mobile camera roving through the Convention hall, nearly 500 RNC attendees took the opportunity to post their thoughts onto YouTube. Among those to upload from the Convention were actor Jon Voight, former congressman Tom Delay, and former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, CNN's Jon King, and former Virginia Senator George Allen:
In addition, the GOP staff uploaded all of the major speeches from the Convention to their YouTube Channel, including both McCain and Palin's acceptance speeches, as well as behind-the-scenes footage and videos from events around the Convention center.
To celebrate the closing night of the convention, we partnered with Vanity Fair to throw a party for press, celebrities, political leaders and executives in attendance. Guests grabbed a few treats from the open candy bar and enjoyed catering from Wolfgang Puck at the Walker Art Center.
If both conventions were any indication of the general election, the Republicans and Democrats will go head to head in their use of technology and the Internet to reach voters, spread their message and bring more Americans into the election. You can stay up to date on the Google's election efforts on our US Election page.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Update to Google Suggest
There's been quite a bit of comment in the last few days about Google Suggest, particularly how it's used in Google Chrome. Google Suggest is actually built into a number of different products including Google Search, Google Toolbar, browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox, and the Google Search application on the iPhone.
But what is Google Suggest? It's a feature designed to make searching both faster and easier. Whether you are typing into the search box on Google Toolbar or Google.com, or the Omnibox in Google Chrome, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing and offers suggestions in real time. So for example, if you type "bass," Google Suggest might offer a list of refinements that include "bass fishing" or "bass guitar." Similarly, if you type in only part of a word, like "prog," Google Suggest might offer you refinements such as "programming," "programming languages," "progesterone," or "progressive." Again, these suggestions allow you to enter your searches faster, but also in a way that will more likely get you the results you're looking for.
That's what occurs on the surface of Google Suggest. Here's what happens under the hood. To provide its recommendations Google Suggest needs to know what you've already typed, so these partial queries are sent to Google. For 98% of these requests, we don't log any data at all and simply return the suggestions. For the remaining 2% of cases (which we select randomly), we do log data, like IP addresses, in order to monitor and improve the service.
However, given the concerns that have been raised about Google storing this information -- and its limited potential use -- we decided that we will anonymize it within about 24 hours (basically, as soon as we practically can) in the 2% of Google Suggest requests we use. This will take a little time to implement, but we expect it to be in place before the end of the month.
All data retention is a balance between user privacy and trust on the one hand, and security and innovation on the other. In the case of Google Suggest we decided it's possible to provide a great service while anonymizing data almost immediately. But in other cases - such as our core web search - storing data like IP addresses for a time is crucial to make improvements to search quality, improve security, fight fraud and reduce spam.
You can read more about our privacy policies on the Google Privacy Center, check out the Google Search Privacy: Plain and Simple video for more information about how our server logs work.
Update October 5, 2010: We launched Google Instant last month, and we now store Google Instant's partial query data for up to two weeks in unanonymized form, at which time we will delete 100 percent of it. These data retention changes apply only to queries made when Google Instant is active.
But what is Google Suggest? It's a feature designed to make searching both faster and easier. Whether you are typing into the search box on Google Toolbar or Google.com, or the Omnibox in Google Chrome, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing and offers suggestions in real time. So for example, if you type "bass," Google Suggest might offer a list of refinements that include "bass fishing" or "bass guitar." Similarly, if you type in only part of a word, like "prog," Google Suggest might offer you refinements such as "programming," "programming languages," "progesterone," or "progressive." Again, these suggestions allow you to enter your searches faster, but also in a way that will more likely get you the results you're looking for.
That's what occurs on the surface of Google Suggest. Here's what happens under the hood. To provide its recommendations Google Suggest needs to know what you've already typed, so these partial queries are sent to Google. For 98% of these requests, we don't log any data at all and simply return the suggestions. For the remaining 2% of cases (which we select randomly), we do log data, like IP addresses, in order to monitor and improve the service.
However, given the concerns that have been raised about Google storing this information -- and its limited potential use -- we decided that we will anonymize it within about 24 hours (basically, as soon as we practically can) in the 2% of Google Suggest requests we use. This will take a little time to implement, but we expect it to be in place before the end of the month.
All data retention is a balance between user privacy and trust on the one hand, and security and innovation on the other. In the case of Google Suggest we decided it's possible to provide a great service while anonymizing data almost immediately. But in other cases - such as our core web search - storing data like IP addresses for a time is crucial to make improvements to search quality, improve security, fight fraud and reduce spam.
You can read more about our privacy policies on the Google Privacy Center, check out the Google Search Privacy: Plain and Simple video for more information about how our server logs work.
Update October 5, 2010: We launched Google Instant last month, and we now store Google Instant's partial query data for up to two weeks in unanonymized form, at which time we will delete 100 percent of it. These data retention changes apply only to queries made when Google Instant is active.
Another step to protect user privacy
Today, we're announcing a new logs retention policy: we'll anonymize IP addresses on our server logs after 9 months. We're significantly shortening our previous 18-month retention policy to address regulatory concerns and to take another step to improve privacy for our users.
Back in March 2007, Google became the first leading search engine to announce a policy to anonymize our search server logs in the interests of privacy. And many others in the industry quickly followed our lead. Although that was good for privacy, it was a difficult decision because the routine server log data we collect has always been a critical ingredient of innovation. We have published a series of blog posts explaining how we use logs data for the benefit of our users: to make improvements to search quality, improve security, fight fraud and reduce spam.
Over the last two years, policymakers and regulators -- especially in Europe and the U.S. -- have continued to ask us (and others in the industry) to explain and justify this shortened logs retention policy. We responded by open letter to explain how we were trying to strike the right balance between sometimes conflicting factors like privacy, security, and innovation. Some in the community of EU data protection regulators continued to be skeptical of the legitimacy of logs retention and demanded detailed justifications for this retention. Many of these privacy leaders also highlighted the risks of litigants using court-ordered discovery to gain access to logs, as in the recent Viacom suit.
Today, we are filing this response (PDF file) to the EU privacy regulators. Since we announced our original logs anonymization policy, we have had literally hundreds of discussions with data protection officials, government leaders and privacy advocates around the world to explain our privacy practices and to work together to develop ways to improve privacy. When we began anonymizing after 18 months, we knew it meant sacrifices in future innovations in all of these areas. We believed further reducing the period before anonymizing would degrade the utility of the data too much and outweigh the incremental privacy benefit for users.
We didn't stop working on this computer science problem, though. The problem is difficult to solve because the characteristics of the data that make it useful to prevent fraud, for example, are the very characteristics that also introduce some privacy risk. After months of work our engineers developed methods for preserving more of the data's utility while also anonymizing IP addresses sooner. We haven't sorted out all of the implementation details, and we may not be able to use precisely the same methods for anonymizing as we do after 18 months, but we are committed to making it work.
While we're glad that this will bring some additional improvement in privacy, we're also concerned about the potential loss of security, quality, and innovation that may result from having less data. As the period prior to anonymization gets shorter, the added privacy benefits are less significant and the utility lost from the data grows. So, it's difficult to find the perfect equilibrium between privacy on the one hand, and other factors, such as innovation and security, on the other. Technology will certainly evolve, and we will always be working on ways to improve privacy for our users, seeking new innovations, and also finding the right balance between the benefits of data and advancement of privacy.
Back in March 2007, Google became the first leading search engine to announce a policy to anonymize our search server logs in the interests of privacy. And many others in the industry quickly followed our lead. Although that was good for privacy, it was a difficult decision because the routine server log data we collect has always been a critical ingredient of innovation. We have published a series of blog posts explaining how we use logs data for the benefit of our users: to make improvements to search quality, improve security, fight fraud and reduce spam.
Over the last two years, policymakers and regulators -- especially in Europe and the U.S. -- have continued to ask us (and others in the industry) to explain and justify this shortened logs retention policy. We responded by open letter to explain how we were trying to strike the right balance between sometimes conflicting factors like privacy, security, and innovation. Some in the community of EU data protection regulators continued to be skeptical of the legitimacy of logs retention and demanded detailed justifications for this retention. Many of these privacy leaders also highlighted the risks of litigants using court-ordered discovery to gain access to logs, as in the recent Viacom suit.
Today, we are filing this response (PDF file) to the EU privacy regulators. Since we announced our original logs anonymization policy, we have had literally hundreds of discussions with data protection officials, government leaders and privacy advocates around the world to explain our privacy practices and to work together to develop ways to improve privacy. When we began anonymizing after 18 months, we knew it meant sacrifices in future innovations in all of these areas. We believed further reducing the period before anonymizing would degrade the utility of the data too much and outweigh the incremental privacy benefit for users.
We didn't stop working on this computer science problem, though. The problem is difficult to solve because the characteristics of the data that make it useful to prevent fraud, for example, are the very characteristics that also introduce some privacy risk. After months of work our engineers developed methods for preserving more of the data's utility while also anonymizing IP addresses sooner. We haven't sorted out all of the implementation details, and we may not be able to use precisely the same methods for anonymizing as we do after 18 months, but we are committed to making it work.
While we're glad that this will bring some additional improvement in privacy, we're also concerned about the potential loss of security, quality, and innovation that may result from having less data. As the period prior to anonymization gets shorter, the added privacy benefits are less significant and the utility lost from the data grows. So, it's difficult to find the perfect equilibrium between privacy on the one hand, and other factors, such as innovation and security, on the other. Technology will certainly evolve, and we will always be working on ways to improve privacy for our users, seeking new innovations, and also finding the right balance between the benefits of data and advancement of privacy.
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