Google’s 2010 U.S. Economic Impact

This week is National Small Business Week, an opportunity to celebrate the spirit and ingenuity of small businesses like Everblue, a start-up in North Carolina.

Everblue was founded in 2008 by veterans Chris and Jon Boggiano along with fellow entrepreneur Grant McGregor. The brothers’ goal was to make the U.S. more energy independent by helping people get certified in sustainable building practices. With old-fashioned hard work and some help from Google AdWords, their business has quadrupled in size. They now have 80 full time employees and instructors, and this year alone they’ll train tens of thousands of people—architects, engineers, electricians and others—to build smarter and greener.

Chris and Jon Boggiano, veterans and co-founders of Everblue, a training institute for sustainable building.

Today we’re announcing that Google provided $64 billion of economic activity to businesses, website publishers and non-profits in 2010. This is an 18% increase from the economic impact total in 2009. Here’s how it works: for every $1 a business spends on Google AdWords, they receive an average of $8 in profit through Google Search and AdWords.

We’re proud that Everblue and over one million American businesses use our advertising services to tell consumers about their products and services. Learn more at google.com/economicimpact.

Posted by Claire Hughes Johnson, Vice President, Global Online Sales

Expanding Google News for more variety and multimedia

(Cross-posted from the Google News blog)

Every day, Google News crawls through thousands of news articles to present you with the most relevant and recent stories. For a long time, we’ve realized that bringing relevant news to the surface is only part of the puzzle—it should also be easy to scan for stories of interest and dig deeper when you find them.

The newly expandable stories on Google News in the U.S., released today, give you greater story diversity with less clutter.

Now you can easily see more content, see less of what you don’t use and have a more streamlined experience:

• Click-to-expand: Each story cluster is collapsed down to one headline with the exception of the top story. When something grabs you, click nearby anywhere but the title to expand the story box.
• Labeled diversity: For stories you’ve expanded, you’ll see genre labels for some of the additional articles that explain why they were chosen and how they add value. For example, you might see something labeled as an “Opinion” piece or an indication that an article is “In Depth.”
• Multimedia and more: Within each expanded story box, you’ll find a sliding bar of videos and photos, links to related sections and easier-to-use sharing options, so you can quickly digest the sights and sounds of a news story, dig into different types of publications and share what you find interesting with one click.
• Personalized top stories: The Top Stories section is expanded to six or more stories from three to give you more topic diversity. The first three stories remain unpersonalized and the same as before. The rest may be personalized based on your interests. To personalize your Google News experience you can click on “Edit” under “News for you.” You can choose the “Standard Edition” if you don’t want personalization.
• Less is more: The default view is now the popular “One Column” (formerly “Section”) view. We merged List View into Top Stories, as described above. You can still switch to “Two Column” view, which resembles classic Google News.

We hope you like these changes—please share your feedback and visit our Help Center to learn more.

Posted by Chase Hensel, Associate Product Manager, Google News

Remembering fallen journalists on video

We live in a world that feels smaller every day. As we become accustomed to nearly ubiquitous coverage of the news and events unfolding around the world, it’s easy to forget the price that is sometimes paid to obtain quality, accurate reporting on important stories—particularly in areas of conflict or in cases of government repression of the media. With this in mind, today, the Newseum in Washington, D.C., Google and YouTube are together launching the Journalists Memorial channel on YouTube to remember the journalists who have died in the last year while reporting news around the world.

Their stories are incredible: heading into a street battle with no weapon other than your camera; talking about politics over the radio, only to be beaten to death with iron bars by a group of thugs on the way to work. The risks and sacrifices that many have made in order to provide us with accurate information is remarkable. On the Journalists Memorial channel you can watch a collection of videos representing these journalists’ lives and their work.



This channel will become a digital version of the Newseum’s Journalists Memorial, which is re-dedicated annually to honor journalists worldwide who have died during the preceding year. This year, 77 names are being added to the list of the more than 2,000 journalists who have been recognized for their sacrifices since 1837. At today’s rededication ceremony, Krishna Bharat, the founder and head of Google News, will be delivering the keynote address, which the Newseum will post to the new YouTube channel later today.

In tribute to those who are being honored at today’s ceremony, we would like your help finding videos that profile or represent the work of all journalists who have risked or lost their lives doing the important work they do. We invite you to go to the Journalists Memorial channel and submit videos you think deserve recognition to the Moderator platform on the channel. The Newseum will be featuring additional submissions there.

Posted by Steve Grove, YouTube News and Politics

Celebrating 150 years of MIT

2011 marks the 150th anniversary of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded to speed along America’s industrial progress through scientific innovation. MIT has been at the forefront of computer science with key advancements in the field, like the invention of core memory, the first file sharing system and RSA, the algorithm for public key encryption. MIT and Google share many of the same goals and philosophies, and as part of MIT's 150th anniversary celebration, we wanted to take stock of the many ways we've been working together.

More than 500 MIT graduates work at Google, in Boston and beyond—on Android, Chrome, crisis relief efforts and more. At our Cambridge, Mass., office—just down the road from MIT’s campus—and at the newly acquired ITA office, you can spot many MIT alumni Googlers proudly sporting red and gray in celebration of the milestone anniversary.

We love our Googler MIT grads, but our partnership with the university goes beyond an alumni relationship: we also support the university’s mission of discovery and innovation in the sciences. Recently, we gave a focused research award to CSAIL to further research in computer science and artificial intelligence. We also partnered with researchers at the MIT Media Lab on Konbit, a service that helps communities rebuild themselves after a crisis. In the same lines, we’re sponsoring MIT Next Lab, a group that researches and develops ways in which people can use mobile platforms to solve global and economic issues. And finally, as part of their 150th anniversary celebration, MIT announced a major Intelligence Initiative (I²) that we’re helping to support. Beyond the pure scientific goals, it’s hoped that this research will lead to practical applications in the form of more intelligent systems and software that will benefit society broadly

In addition, we have close relationships with some of MIT's faculty, like Hal Abelson, Professor of Computer Science and a member of Google's Visiting Faculty program, who has used our technology to conduct education outreach. He started the Young Android Project in 2007 and helped design App Inventor, which launched in 2010. Hal also teaches classes to non-engineers about building Android apps.

This summer we’re looking forward to welcoming high school students into our Boston office through the MIT MITES program to introduce a whole new crop of future scientists to the joys of science and engineering. Plus, 50 MIT students will join Google as interns this summer alone.

Although MIT was established more than 100 years before the Internet was invented, the institution has continued to remain a world leader in technological research, development and advancement. We’re excited to celebrate the university on its anniversary, and look forward to a continued and strong relationship for the next century to come.

Posted by Steve Vinter, Engineering Director, Google Boston

Keynote and session videos from Google I/O now live

With Google I/O 2011 just two days behind us, we wanted to thank the nearly 1 million developers who joined us at Moscone Center, attended I/O Extended events and watched online via I/O Live from 161 countries around the world.

The keynote presentations highlighted the momentum and vision for two of our most important developer platforms: Android and Chrome.

On the topic of Android, Hugo Barra, director of Android Product Management, opened Day 1 of the conference with the themes of “Momentum, Mobile and More,” announcing Movies in Android Market, Music Beta by Google, Android @ Home, Android Open Accessory and a preview of the new Ice Cream Sandwich logo. Read the blog post summary or watch the keynote in its entirety below.



The Day 2 keynote was all about Chrome, which has grown to 160 million active users, up from 70 million last year. Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome, discussed the launch of the HTML5 version of Angry Birds built with GWT on App Engine, Chromebooks for consumers and businesses and in-app payments. If you missed it, watch the Chrome keynote below.



These launches are just a few of the more than 30 announcements we made over the two days, including the launch of Google App Engine 1.5, a updated Google Prediction API, new additions to the Fusion Tables API and many more. For more information about these and the other news coming out of the event, visit the Google I/O label on the Google Code Blog.

Additionally, in case you missed any of these announcements, HD recordings of the sessions are now available online.

Find the highlights from this year’s event at www.google.com/io, where we’ll feature photos, announcements and the latest videos. Also stay tuned for a feature on “Backstage at Google I/O” where we’ll highlight the developers and artists who helped to make the event possible this year.

Google I/O kicked off the year as our biggest developer event—but we’re only getting started. As of today, we’re announcing locations for our eight Google Developer Days (GDDs), which will take place all over the world with more than a few DevFests in between. Stay tuned for more info on the 2011 event details, but we’ll look forward to seeing you in Brazil, Argentina, Prague, Moscow, Tokyo, Sydney, Israel and Germany for our Google Developer team world tour.

Posted by Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice President of Engineering