If you’re reading this, then you’ve probably watched your share of tech demos in your life, possibly on this very blog. Like broccoli, tech demos are good for you. But kids don’t line up for broccoli—just like the majority of people don’t line up for tech demos.
So how do we get more free, amazing tech goodness to more people? Well, as you’ll see, there’s nothing we won’t try.
Introducing Demo Slam, a place where boring tech demos become (hopefully) gotta-show-my-friends awesome—thanks to the creativity of Google users like you. Here’s a slam from the Paul brothers:
A big shout out to the Paul family for not just making us smile, but showing potentially millions of people the time they could save by speaking instead of typing to search.
Beginning today, you can watch Preseason Slams and declare a Champ of the week. Then each week, new featured slams will vie for your attention and a shot at demo glory. Think you can create a Slam-worthy demo? Choose a bit of tech you love and show the world what you can do.
Let’s get the people who would never watch a tech demo—the people who ironically need them most (hi mom)—to not only watch them, but like them and share them with their friends.
Let the Slams begin.
About Me
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Monday, October 18, 2010
More transparency and control over location
We’ve always focused on offering people the most relevant results. Location is one important factor we’ve used for many years to customize the information that you find. For example, if you’re searching for great restaurants, you probably want to find ones near you, so we use location information to show you places nearby.
Today we’re moving your location setting to the left-hand panel of the results page to make it easier for you to see and control your preferences. With this new display you’re still getting the same locally relevant results as before, but now it’s much easier for you to see your location setting and make changes to it.
We do our best to automatically detect the most useful location, but we don’t always get it right—so in some cases you’ll want to change the setting. At other times, you may want to change your location to explore information relevant to another area. For example, let’s say you’re at work in Mountain View and you’re making plans to see a movie in San Francisco (a common occurrence here at Google). You can change your location to “San Francisco” and search for [showtimes] to find movie listings in San Francisco or search for [restaurants] to find places to eat before the show. Similarly, if you’re planning a trip to Hawaii, you can change the location to “Honolulu” and start exploring the [weather], [hotels] and of course the [beaches]. The location you set can be as specific as a particular zip code or as general as an entire country, but more specific settings generally lead to better search results.
You used to be able to see and control your location settings, but it was a little clunky. To see your settings, you could click “View customizations” on the results page and to modify them you could click “Change location” next to a variety of search results, such as maps and movie listings. As time has gone by, more and more locally relevant information has come online, whether it’s local business listings or a blog from your hometown. Meanwhile, Google has become much better at presenting this locally relevant content—so it felt like the right time to make this setting easier to find.
The new interface is rolling out now and will be available in more than 40 languages soon. We’re not changing anything about how we use location information to improve search, so it doesn’t change our existing privacy policies. To learn more about our new interface and how we use location in search, check out our help center.
Today we’re moving your location setting to the left-hand panel of the results page to make it easier for you to see and control your preferences. With this new display you’re still getting the same locally relevant results as before, but now it’s much easier for you to see your location setting and make changes to it.
Your location setting is now always visible on the left side of the search results page.
We do our best to automatically detect the most useful location, but we don’t always get it right—so in some cases you’ll want to change the setting. At other times, you may want to change your location to explore information relevant to another area. For example, let’s say you’re at work in Mountain View and you’re making plans to see a movie in San Francisco (a common occurrence here at Google). You can change your location to “San Francisco” and search for [showtimes] to find movie listings in San Francisco or search for [restaurants] to find places to eat before the show. Similarly, if you’re planning a trip to Hawaii, you can change the location to “Honolulu” and start exploring the [weather], [hotels] and of course the [beaches]. The location you set can be as specific as a particular zip code or as general as an entire country, but more specific settings generally lead to better search results.
Click “Change location” to specify your location preference.
You used to be able to see and control your location settings, but it was a little clunky. To see your settings, you could click “View customizations” on the results page and to modify them you could click “Change location” next to a variety of search results, such as maps and movie listings. As time has gone by, more and more locally relevant information has come online, whether it’s local business listings or a blog from your hometown. Meanwhile, Google has become much better at presenting this locally relevant content—so it felt like the right time to make this setting easier to find.
The new interface is rolling out now and will be available in more than 40 languages soon. We’re not changing anything about how we use location information to improve search, so it doesn’t change our existing privacy policies. To learn more about our new interface and how we use location in search, check out our help center.
The new Google Search Appliance—a bridge to the cloud
(Cross-posted from the Enterprise Blog)
In the last year, businesses have started using cloud-based applications from Google and other technology providers at an accelerated rate. While many organizations still have information that resides in on-premise systems, more and more important business information today is living in the cloud, in collaborative tools like Google Apps—now used by more than 3 million businesses—and services like Twitter. Starting today, Cloud Connect for the Google Search Appliance lets workers search across both on-premise and cloud-based content from a single search box, delivering more comprehensive results and improving productivity. We’ve also added a few other handy features that make it easier to collaborate and find information faster.
Cloud Connect for the Google Search Appliance
Cloud Connect displays relevant, personalized results from Google Docs and Google Sites alongside results from more traditional repositories, like file shares and content management systems. Easier access to collaborative documents, spreadsheets, presentations and sites with Cloud Connect speeds up how quickly coworkers can complete projects. Cloud Connect also lets users search content from Twitter, as well as blogs and industry websites via Google Site Search.
For organizations such as Delta Hotels and Avago that have already deployed both Google Apps and the Google Search Appliance, the Cloud Connect feature brings “universal search” to a new level, with more accessible business systems and content now spanning from cloud to ground.
People Search
This new version also helps foster faster collaboration between employees with the addition of People Search, which makes it easy to find experts and contact coworkers who are related to a search query, right from the search results page. For example, a search for “field marketing” would return a list of field marketing team members alongside other relevant content. Organizations can index personnel information like department, interests, expertise and location, and there’s an LDAP connector to help get People Search up and running quickly.
Dynamic Navigation and more
Our new Dynamic Navigation feature allows users to drill down into search results based on search modifiers for their queries, and Active-Active Mirroring improves reliability by spreading search traffic across multiple boxes. Dynamic Navigation was a top user request and we’re glad to be able to add it. In addition, the Search Appliance now supports Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 content without the need for additional connectors.
As you move your business to the cloud, the Google Search Appliance’s new features can be an important bridge between on-premise and cloud-based systems, while enhancing employee collaboration. You can learn more about this latest release at www.google.com/gsa.
In the last year, businesses have started using cloud-based applications from Google and other technology providers at an accelerated rate. While many organizations still have information that resides in on-premise systems, more and more important business information today is living in the cloud, in collaborative tools like Google Apps—now used by more than 3 million businesses—and services like Twitter. Starting today, Cloud Connect for the Google Search Appliance lets workers search across both on-premise and cloud-based content from a single search box, delivering more comprehensive results and improving productivity. We’ve also added a few other handy features that make it easier to collaborate and find information faster.
Cloud Connect for the Google Search Appliance
Cloud Connect displays relevant, personalized results from Google Docs and Google Sites alongside results from more traditional repositories, like file shares and content management systems. Easier access to collaborative documents, spreadsheets, presentations and sites with Cloud Connect speeds up how quickly coworkers can complete projects. Cloud Connect also lets users search content from Twitter, as well as blogs and industry websites via Google Site Search.
For organizations such as Delta Hotels and Avago that have already deployed both Google Apps and the Google Search Appliance, the Cloud Connect feature brings “universal search” to a new level, with more accessible business systems and content now spanning from cloud to ground.
People Search
This new version also helps foster faster collaboration between employees with the addition of People Search, which makes it easy to find experts and contact coworkers who are related to a search query, right from the search results page. For example, a search for “field marketing” would return a list of field marketing team members alongside other relevant content. Organizations can index personnel information like department, interests, expertise and location, and there’s an LDAP connector to help get People Search up and running quickly.
Dynamic Navigation and more
Our new Dynamic Navigation feature allows users to drill down into search results based on search modifiers for their queries, and Active-Active Mirroring improves reliability by spreading search traffic across multiple boxes. Dynamic Navigation was a top user request and we’re glad to be able to add it. In addition, the Search Appliance now supports Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 content without the need for additional connectors.
As you move your business to the cloud, the Google Search Appliance’s new features can be an important bridge between on-premise and cloud-based systems, while enhancing employee collaboration. You can learn more about this latest release at www.google.com/gsa.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
This week in search 10/16/10
This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.
Search is always evolving, and we’re excited to share the latest this week—from Google Autocomplete to our fun homepage doodles—as well as a glimpse at what the U.S. is searching for. Here’s this week’s round up of updates:
A birthday surprise
Because doodles are such a fun part of the search experience, we thought we’d share a fun little way Google will help celebrate your birthday. When you include your date of birth on your Google profile, you may notice a special treat on the Google homepage on your birthday (be sure to sign in). Click on the doodle for another birthday surprise!
Renaming Google Suggest
We first launched Google Suggest in 2004 in Labs to help people enter their searches faster. Suggest has been a very popular feature, and some people have been asking what happened to it. Never fear, it hasn’t gone anywhere—we just renamed it to “Google Autocomplete.” As part of our launch of Google Instant, we thought "Autocomplete" fit better with the new functionality—automatic queries and automatic results.
Google Instant in new countries across Asia
We’ve been rapidly expanding Google Instant around the globe. Last week we launched Instant in Australia, India, Korea, New Zealand and Singapore. Now that it’s been a few weeks since our initial release, we’ve been finding that people are really learning how to get the most out of Instant. For example, in just two weeks, we saw an increase in the fraction of searches performed without hitting enter or clicking search. This is a very demanding launch for our infrastructure and we’re expanding around the globe as soon as we can.
Eurostat data in search
We’ve also rolled out some improvements our public data search features. We’ve been working closely with Eurostat to surface some really useful and interesting data about unemployment rates, government debt, minimum wage and broadband penetration across Europe. Try searching for [arbeitslosenstatistik deutschland], [smic france] or [deuda publica españa] to see examples of this data visualisation in action. The data is available across 34 languages. We’ve also internationalized data from the World Bank. You can learn more on our European policy blog.
The week in searches
Curious to know what Google Searches skyrocketed in the U.S. this week? Check out the Google Beat, where you’ll find an inside look into what people are clicking on Google. This week, we cover everything from Columbus Day to Brett Favre and the buzz around “Cigar Guy.”
We hope you find these updates useful. Stay tuned for more next week.
Search is always evolving, and we’re excited to share the latest this week—from Google Autocomplete to our fun homepage doodles—as well as a glimpse at what the U.S. is searching for. Here’s this week’s round up of updates:
A birthday surprise
Because doodles are such a fun part of the search experience, we thought we’d share a fun little way Google will help celebrate your birthday. When you include your date of birth on your Google profile, you may notice a special treat on the Google homepage on your birthday (be sure to sign in). Click on the doodle for another birthday surprise!
Renaming Google Suggest
We first launched Google Suggest in 2004 in Labs to help people enter their searches faster. Suggest has been a very popular feature, and some people have been asking what happened to it. Never fear, it hasn’t gone anywhere—we just renamed it to “Google Autocomplete.” As part of our launch of Google Instant, we thought "Autocomplete" fit better with the new functionality—automatic queries and automatic results.
Google Instant in new countries across Asia
We’ve been rapidly expanding Google Instant around the globe. Last week we launched Instant in Australia, India, Korea, New Zealand and Singapore. Now that it’s been a few weeks since our initial release, we’ve been finding that people are really learning how to get the most out of Instant. For example, in just two weeks, we saw an increase in the fraction of searches performed without hitting enter or clicking search. This is a very demanding launch for our infrastructure and we’re expanding around the globe as soon as we can.
Eurostat data in search
We’ve also rolled out some improvements our public data search features. We’ve been working closely with Eurostat to surface some really useful and interesting data about unemployment rates, government debt, minimum wage and broadband penetration across Europe. Try searching for [arbeitslosenstatistik deutschland], [smic france] or [deuda publica españa] to see examples of this data visualisation in action. The data is available across 34 languages. We’ve also internationalized data from the World Bank. You can learn more on our European policy blog.
The week in searches
Curious to know what Google Searches skyrocketed in the U.S. this week? Check out the Google Beat, where you’ll find an inside look into what people are clicking on Google. This week, we cover everything from Columbus Day to Brett Favre and the buzz around “Cigar Guy.”
We hope you find these updates useful. Stay tuned for more next week.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Clean water for those who need it
In August, I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro—the highest mountain in Africa, at 19,340 feet (5895 meters). I practiced by going for a three-day hike along the “Lost Coast” of California. One thing I noticed while hiking is that you're continually thinking about water. How much do you need to carry on your back? Do you have enough water to last until you can refill your supply? How do you take water from a stream and make it safe to drink?
When I left for Tanzania, I ran a campaign to raise money for charity:water, a non-profit that brings clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. Many of us take water for granted: you turn on the tap, or buy a bottle at the store, and there it is. But it's not like that for everyone. Many people in the world have to think about water all the time. People often walk miles to get water and miles to carry it back, and worry about whether it’s safe to drink. More than a billion people lack access to clean drinking water. As a result of unsafe water and bad sanitation, people in some developing countries are more likely to contract illnesses that are basically preventable but still kill thousands of people, including many children, every day.
Organizations are stepping up to the plate to focus on this issue. While there is much more work to do, the United Nations is on track to meet its Millennium Development Goal of halving, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. This year’s Blog Action Day theme is water, and with that in mind, we thought we’d share a bit about Google’s efforts to conserve water, in a variety of ways.
One of key area where we can make a contribution is through our data center operations. On average, two gallons of water is consumed for every kilowatt-hour of electricity produced in the U.S., because water is needed for power plants to operate. That means that by building what we believe to be the most efficient data centers in the industry, we’re saving fresh water. Every year, our data centers save hundreds of millions of gallons of drinking water simply by consuming 50% less electricity than the industry average for technology companies.
A major reason why our data centers are so energy efficient is that we use evaporation to cool our facilities, rather than a more traditional chiller. Evaporative cooling uses far less power than a chiller—so by using a fraction of a gallon of water for evaporative cooling, we save a gallon of water at the power plant. We’ve also made an effort to minimize the amount of fresh water directly consumed by our facilities by using recycled water. Rather than use clean, potable water, we treat wastewater until it’s clean enough to be used for cooling. Two of our data centers run on 100% recycled water already—one by filtering water taken from an industrial canal, and one by taking “greywater” from a city wastewater treatment plant and cleaning it before using it in our cooling towers. We’re also working on new, geographically appropriate systems, like large rainwater capture ponds at one site and a seawater cooling system at a data center that is currently under construction. We set an aggressive goal a few years ago to use recycled water for 80% of our total data center water consumption by the end of 2010. Although we’re unlikely to meet that stretch goal, we believe we’ve made a lot of progress and are hopeful that by the end of this year recycled water will account for almost half of our total consumption.
We’ve also made some small changes at the Googleplex in Mountain View. Earlier this spring, we worked with the city of Mountain View to become the first commercial customer of recycled water for irrigation. We’re using it now on our sports fields as well as in a few of our buildings here in Mountain View. A few years ago we did water audits of our buildings to determine where we could make changes to save more water. We’ve since refreshed several of our buildings with new, very low-water use fixtures. And we’ve also experimented with phasing out the use of bottled water on campus, replacing plastic bottles with water filters and reusable cups. Not only does bottled water use up more energy in production and transportation, and create waste through plastic bottles (many of which are never recycled)—the Sierra Club estimates (PDF) that it takes three liters of water to produce one liter of bottled water.
This Blog Action Day, I hope you’ll take a moment to reflect on your own water use, and on what you might be able to do to make a difference. You don’t have to climb a mountain to help others gain access to clean water.
When I left for Tanzania, I ran a campaign to raise money for charity:water, a non-profit that brings clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. Many of us take water for granted: you turn on the tap, or buy a bottle at the store, and there it is. But it's not like that for everyone. Many people in the world have to think about water all the time. People often walk miles to get water and miles to carry it back, and worry about whether it’s safe to drink. More than a billion people lack access to clean drinking water. As a result of unsafe water and bad sanitation, people in some developing countries are more likely to contract illnesses that are basically preventable but still kill thousands of people, including many children, every day.
Organizations are stepping up to the plate to focus on this issue. While there is much more work to do, the United Nations is on track to meet its Millennium Development Goal of halving, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. This year’s Blog Action Day theme is water, and with that in mind, we thought we’d share a bit about Google’s efforts to conserve water, in a variety of ways.
One of key area where we can make a contribution is through our data center operations. On average, two gallons of water is consumed for every kilowatt-hour of electricity produced in the U.S., because water is needed for power plants to operate. That means that by building what we believe to be the most efficient data centers in the industry, we’re saving fresh water. Every year, our data centers save hundreds of millions of gallons of drinking water simply by consuming 50% less electricity than the industry average for technology companies.
A major reason why our data centers are so energy efficient is that we use evaporation to cool our facilities, rather than a more traditional chiller. Evaporative cooling uses far less power than a chiller—so by using a fraction of a gallon of water for evaporative cooling, we save a gallon of water at the power plant. We’ve also made an effort to minimize the amount of fresh water directly consumed by our facilities by using recycled water. Rather than use clean, potable water, we treat wastewater until it’s clean enough to be used for cooling. Two of our data centers run on 100% recycled water already—one by filtering water taken from an industrial canal, and one by taking “greywater” from a city wastewater treatment plant and cleaning it before using it in our cooling towers. We’re also working on new, geographically appropriate systems, like large rainwater capture ponds at one site and a seawater cooling system at a data center that is currently under construction. We set an aggressive goal a few years ago to use recycled water for 80% of our total data center water consumption by the end of 2010. Although we’re unlikely to meet that stretch goal, we believe we’ve made a lot of progress and are hopeful that by the end of this year recycled water will account for almost half of our total consumption.
We’ve also made some small changes at the Googleplex in Mountain View. Earlier this spring, we worked with the city of Mountain View to become the first commercial customer of recycled water for irrigation. We’re using it now on our sports fields as well as in a few of our buildings here in Mountain View. A few years ago we did water audits of our buildings to determine where we could make changes to save more water. We’ve since refreshed several of our buildings with new, very low-water use fixtures. And we’ve also experimented with phasing out the use of bottled water on campus, replacing plastic bottles with water filters and reusable cups. Not only does bottled water use up more energy in production and transportation, and create waste through plastic bottles (many of which are never recycled)—the Sierra Club estimates (PDF) that it takes three liters of water to produce one liter of bottled water.
This Blog Action Day, I hope you’ll take a moment to reflect on your own water use, and on what you might be able to do to make a difference. You don’t have to climb a mountain to help others gain access to clean water.
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