Love and the Super Bowl
If you watched the Super Bowl this evening you'll have seen a video from Google called "Parisian Love". In fact you might have watched it before, because it's been on YouTube for over three months. We didn't set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search. Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact. But we liked this video so much, and it's had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience.
If you like it too, we hope you'll watch the others. Enjoy.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at February 07, 2010 05:51 PM
This week in search 2/5/10
This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.
In addition to language improvements this week, we released several other new features:
Haitian Creole translation
We've now added Haitian Creole (kreyòl ayisyen) translation to Google Translate, so that you can translate between Creole and 51 other languages, and also hear spoken versions of Creole translations. While this translation system is still evolving (when translating to/from Creole, English performs better than other languages), we hope it will help relief volunteers communicate better with Haitian earthquake victims, and serve as a useful resource for people in Haiti and elsewhere. To learn more about ways you can help with Haiti relief efforts, please visit our Crisis Response page.
Example translations: [Kijan ou ye ?] and [How can I help you?]
Improvement for Arabic searches
Sometimes when people conduct a search, they forget to separate words with spaces or mistakenly repeat a letter within a word. These types of errors are much more common in languages like Arabic, where some letters are considered word breaks. In other words, if the last letter of one word is a word break, the following word may not be separated with a space. To address issues like this, we recently developed a search ranking improvement that targets certain Arabic queries. Our algorithm employs rules of Arabic spelling and grammar and signals from historical search data to indicate when to leave out spaces between words or when to remove unnecessarily repeated letters. Now, when you type a query leaving out spaces or repeating a letter, you'll see better results based not only on what you typed, but also on what our algorithm understands is the "correct" query.
Example search: [التربيةوالتعلييم] Incorrectly typed, this Arabic query may not produce a relevant search result. With our algorithm change, the query returns better results for the correct meaning: "Ministry of Education."
Doodle 4 Google
This week marks our third annual Doodle 4 Google contest in the U.S. The competition gives K-12 kids the opportunity to design their own Google logo and the winner appears on Google.com for a day so that hundreds of millions of searchers can enjoy it as well. In addition to the bragging rights, there are a number of great prizes including a college scholarship and computer's for the winner's school. If you or your child are interested in getting involved, check out our announcement or visit the Doodle 4 Google contest page for entry rules.
Stars in Google News
A couple of months back, we launched the Custom Sections Directory feature in Google News, enabling you to setup and share sections on topics of interest. Now there's an even easier way to keep up to date with particular news stories. Mark a story cluster by clicking on the star next to it — just like you do with messages in Gmail and items in Google Reader. Once you've starred a story in Google News, when there are significant updates, we'll alert you by putting the headline in boldface. You can also follow your most recent starred stories in the Starred section of Google News. Learn more about this, and get starring!
Thanks for following news of our search enhancements, and stay tuned for more.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at February 05, 2010 06:16 PM
Update on Google I/O BootCamp
Earlier this week, we announced the introduction of I/O BootCamp, a new event happening the day before Google I/O. We didn't anticipate the level of interest we've seen in just the last few days, and we're both excited and sorry to let you know that I/O BootCamp is now sold out.
However, we are accepting waitlist sign-ups. So if you'd like to attend I/O BootCamp, submit your info on the BootCamp website, and we'll email you if a spot opens up.
Please remember that I/O BootCamp is only available to those who've already registered for Google I/O. If you'd like learn more about and register for Google I/O, visit code.google.com/io.
Google Apps highlights – 2/5/2010
This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label "Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.
Developments over the last couple weeks really showcase how Google's other innovation focus areas — including Search, Mobile and Chrome — help make Google Apps even more useful.
Updates to Google Search in Gmail Labs
On Tuesday we made some helpful changes to the Google Search feature in Gmail Labs. The search gadget now runs some of Google's most popular search features, like dictionary definitions, spelling suggestions, calculations, local results, weather info and news. You don't even need to type your search query anymore; just highlight text in the compose area and click the multicolored "g" button to run a search on those terms.
Gmail Chrome extensions
Several convenient extensions for Gmail are now available to Chrome users. The "Google Mail" extension adds a small button next to Chrome's address bar that displays your unread mail count. "Send from Gmail" makes Gmail your default mail program, and opens a Gmail compose window when you click an email link on a web page. The button for this extension helps you quickly share the web page you're viewing over email.
Easier file location in Google Docs
Last week we introduced a pair of improvements to make finding files in Google Docs easier. First, we launched an option to show file thumbnails in your Documents List, which is great for quickly spotting what you're looking for. Just click the view option buttons in the toolbar to toggle between thumbnails and the standard text layout.
Scripts for Google Apps Standard Edition
At the end of last week we launched application scripting for Google Apps Standard Edition. (Before it was only available to businesses and schools using Premier and Education Editions.) Scripts can be triggered from spreadsheets to perform automated tasks and calculations, but scripts go far beyond spreadsheets; they can be used to fire off automated email messages, create appointments in Google Calendar and accomplish other actions across the whole Google Apps suite. We've written up a few script tutorials if you have the itch to give scripting a try.
Mobile device management
Just yesterday, Google Apps Premier and Education Edition customers got a boost in their ability to manage mobile devices synced with Google Apps. Right from the online control panel, IT admins can remotely wipe data from lost or stolen mobile phones, configure devices to lock after a period of inactivity and set password strength requirements. These new capabilities are available for iPhones, Windows Mobile devices and Nokia E-series phones. Stay tuned for similar features for Android devices.
Who's gone Google?
It's been another very active couple weeks helping more businesses and schools move to the cloud. The team is happy to welcome the latest crop of Google Apps customers, including Complinet, The Open University, Villanova University, Small World Financial Services, Tuskegee University, Clemson University and the New Zealand Post.
Saline Area Schools in Michigan has an especially impressive "gone Google" story. They're saving $400,000 in the first year, spending much less time on server administration, keeping spam at bay and fostering better collaboration among faculty.
Fairchild Semiconductor also recounted their experience switching 6,000 employees spread across 20 countries off their legacy Lotus Notes installation, selecting Google Apps and Postini over hosted email alternatives from Microsoft and IBM. Barry Driscoll, Senior Director of IT for Fairchild summed it up best: "Now we are providing our employees with a lot more functionality for a lot less money."
Hope you're enjoying the latest round of new capabilities, whether you're using Google Apps with friends and family, with work colleagues, or with classmates. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at February 05, 2010 01:04 PM
Google-inspired designer collections
Each year, Vogue and the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) sponsor a Fashion Fund to support emerging designers. In 2009, each participating designer was asked to create a one-of-a-kind item inspired by Google in some way — whether through our logo's colors, technology or our commitment to equal access to information. Last October, we transformed 10 of the finalists’ designs into iGoogle Artists themes. While we loved seeing fashion meet iGoogle, we wanted to see these pieces in person — and wear them! Today, we’re debuting three of our favorite designs from this challenge. These three featured designers have customized their original designs for a broader audience, and we’re making them available to the public to purchase for a limited time. Check out this page to learn more about the items, the designers and how they were inspired by Google.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at February 05, 2010 08:41 AM
Quick Survey on the Help Center
We're always looking for ways to improve Google Analytics - not just the product itself, but also the ways in which we provide information about the product. So help us help you - take a minute to fill out this quick survey on our Help Center, and let us know what we can improve!
by Jeff Gillis (noreply@blogger.com) at February 04, 2010 05:29 PM
Donate your AdSense earnings to help Haiti
As you may have already seen, Google has made various efforts to contribute to the earthquake relief response in Haiti. We've heard repeatedly from AdSense publishers on forums about wanting to help, and today, we're pleased to let you know how you can do so with your AdSense earnings.
We're currently accepting donations from AdSense publishers with an unpaid account balance through January 31, 2010. To see what your unpaid account balance is, please visit the 'Payment History' page within your account. Your January earnings will post in the next few days, so feel free to refer to your 'Advanced Reports' page for an earnings estimate until those are finalized.
Working with our teammates at Google.org, we've identified Partners In Health (PIH) as the recipient of these funds. Your funds will go to provide medical aid via PIH and their Haiti-based partner organization. Any contribution you can make will help to ensure that PIH can continue their work throughout this time of great need.
Photo courtesy of PIHYou can donate a portion or all of your entire unpaid balance as of the end of January. Whether you have a balance of $0.10 or $100 in your account, we invite you to participate within the next week.
As you may expect, there are certain restrictions to donating, and all our normal policies still apply -- so even if you're donating, please don't ask others to click on your ads in order to increase your earnings. For more information on how to participate, visit our donation form.
by Inside AdSense Team (noreply@blogger.com) at February 04, 2010 03:36 PM
Bringing log search to the cloud: Introducing Message Log Search for Postini
Today, we're introducing a new feature for Google Postini Services: Message Log Search. This feature delivers the search and analysis capabilities normally available with on-premise solutions, but without the associated complexity or maintenance.
When messages pass through the Postini service, header and transaction data about these messages is stored in a log. Previously, admins only had access to this data through customer support. With the Message Log Search feature, email administrators can now easily run searches on these logs and drill down to the details about how specific messages were processed.
For example, admins can view the disposition of messages, such as whether a message or group of messages was delivered, quarantined, archived, or encrypted.
Say an admin was checking the delivery status of all inbound emails from Matthew Smith:
Message Log Search returns results which include who received the message, date/time, disposition, and more. Click the image below for full view.
Customers trying a beta version of Message Log Search have found many useful, time-saving applications for the feature. For example, Dave Lugo at Affiliated Computer Systems is "very happy" that Message Log Search helps him track errant emails and easily resolve the "they didn't get it / we didn't get it" tickets he receives from his users. Joe Stark at HeidelbergCement uses log searching to "proactively search for problem senders" and block them entirely from his network.
Other customers have found that the Message Log Search interface is "very fast and responsive," and helps them to determine the effectiveness of new content policies and gain insight into traffic patterns across their organization.
These are a few examples that illustrate the flexibility and power of Message Log Search, and starting today, you can try the feature for yourself. Message Log Search is now available through the Postini service administration console to Postini and Google Apps Premier Edition customers.
For more information on Google Postini Services, please visit www.google.com/postini.
Note: Message Log Search data is managed and stored in Google datacenters pursuant to the privacy and data confidentiality provisions spelled out in our customer agreements. The message security service stores information about messages in a log, such as how it is processed, but does not store the content of messages.
Posted by Gopal Shah, Google Postini team
by Ellen Petry Leanse (eleanse@google.com) at February 04, 2010 10:00 AM
Google Cluster Data
Google faces a large number of technical challenges in the evolution of its applications and infrastructure. In particular, as we increase the size of our compute clusters and scale the work that they process, many issues arise in how to schedule the diversity of work that runs on Google systems.
We have distilled these challenges into the following research topics that we feel are interesting to the academic community and important to Google:
- Workload characterizations: How can we characterize Google workloads in a way that readily generates synthetic work that is representative of production workloads so that we can run stand alone benchmarks?
- Predictive models of workload characteristics: What is normal and what is abnormal workload? Are there "signals" that can indicate problems in a time-frame that is possible for automated and/or manual responses?
- New algorithms for machine assignment: How can we assign tasks to machines so that we make best use of machine resources, avoid excess resource contention on machines, and manage power efficiently?
- Scalable management of cell work: How should we design the future cell management system to efficiently visualize work in cells, to aid in problem determination, and to provide automation of management tasks?
- Time (int) - time in seconds since the start of data collection
- JobID (int) - Unique identifier of the job to which this task belongs
- TaskID (int) - Unique identifier of the executing task
- Job Type (0, 1, 2, 3) - class of job (a categorization of work)
- Normalized Task Cores (float) - normalized value of the average number of cores used by the task
- Normalized Task Memory (float) - normalized value of the average memory consumed by the task
by Research Admin (noreply@blogger.com) at February 04, 2010 07:31 AM
Troubleshooting tips part I: Implementing your ad code
Today, we're beginning a troubleshooting series to help you diagnose and solve common issues with your ads, search boxes, and account functionality. We're kicking things off with a look at how to correctly implement your ad code and an explanation of why ads may not appear on your pages at times.
First, the best way to ensure ads are served correctly is to copy and paste the code exactly as it's provided in your account. Changing the code and manipulating ad behavior aren't permitted by our program policies, and in most cases will prevent your ad from appearing at all.
If you've noticed that your ad units aren't showing ads, here are a few things to check for:
- Did you just add the code to that page? Relevant ads should appear on your pages shortly after you add the code, but sometimes it can take up to 48 hours for ads to show. This is because our crawler has to visit your page and determine its content so we can serve targeted ads.
- Does the code on your page match the code in your account? Make sure to copy the code exactly as it appears in your account, and paste it within the body tags of your HTML code. Be sure not to make any changes to the linebreaks of the code (e.g. pasting the code all in one line) as this will break the code and prevent ads from showing entirely.
- Are you using an HTML editor? Publishers often use a design-enhanced HTML editor like Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage (aka WYSIWIG, "what you see is what you get" software). If you use such an editor, you may see errors if you paste your ad code into a WYSIWYG view such as the "Design" or "Layout" view. For the ads to function properly, you'll have to copy and paste the ad code into the HTML source code of your webpage using the editor's HTML view or HTML insert function. Check for any additional tags inserted by the system or changes in the linebreaks.
- Are you using a content management system (CMS)? If you have trouble implementing AdSense with a specific content management system, we recommend searching for the name of the CMS (eg. Drupal, WordPress) and 'AdSense implementation'. You can also ask in the forum if other publishers have mastered similar problems, or contact your program provider directly.
- Are the ads inside nested frames? While you can choose where to position your ads on your pages, be sure to avoid embedding the ad code in excessive div tags or nested frames. Depending on your browser settings, implementing your ad code in this way might prevent ads from appearing correctly.
- Is JavaScript enabled in your browser? Ensure that you have JavaScript enabled in your browser, as this is necessary to view ads! If you're having trouble seeing the ads, please also check for any conflicting JavaScript on your site that might prevent ads from showing.
- Is your page dynamically generated? If you'd like to implement AdSense ads on a dynamically generated site -- for example, a site with session IDs or pages behind a login -- you should take a look at this Help Center entry for more information on how to receive targeted ads.
by Inside AdSense Team (noreply@blogger.com) at February 04, 2010 01:05 AM
Create Pages in Blogger
In the Pages widget, you can decide which pages will be linked and in what order they will appear. You can also choose whether you want new pages to appear automatically in the Pages widget by checking or unchecking the box to the left of Add new Pages by default.
Finally, for those of you that have custom templates, your custom template may not automatically support Pages as horizontal "tabs". If you are familiar with HTML, follow these instructions on how to add Pages to your custom template.
by seanmccullough (noreply@blogger.com) at February 03, 2010 11:28 PM
Calling All SaaS ISVs: Don't forget to sign up for Google I/O!
- Add Single Sign On to your app using OpenID
- Connect your app with Google Docs and Sites
- Learn how Google architects its own GWT applications for production
- GWT + HTML5 can do what?!
- Making Freemium work - converting free users to paying customers - VC panel
- Learn how to acquire additional customers using the Google Solutions Marketplace
- Network with Google Apps Resellers and find new channel opportunities
- Network with other ISVs in the Developer Sandbox that are already selling to Google Apps customers
Google I/O is our biggest developer event of the year, and it's also the best chance you'll get to learn about the technologies that can help you build a thriving business extending Google Apps. We hope you'll register today!
by Ellen Petry Leanse (eleanse@google.com) at February 03, 2010 11:06 PM
Google Apps adds enterprise admin policies for iPhone, Nokia, and Windows Mobile devices
In a world focused on improving business productivity, companies look to solutions like Google Apps to provide employees with seamless access to information regardless of location or device. With the rising adoption of Internet-enabled devices, employees increasingly seek access to their email, documents, and other corporate data from their mobile phone.
Last year, we addressed this need with a number of enhancements focused on mobile productivity. For BlackBerry users, we launched the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server. For Android phones, we announced new web versions of Gmail and Google Calendar, as well as updates to Google Docs. We also launched Google Sync for iPhone, Nokia E series, and Windows Mobile devices, enabling Google Apps users to access and sync mail, calendar, and contacts from their mobile device to the Google cloud.
Tomorrow, we're expanding these capabilities further by launching new controls that enable administrators to help ensure corporate policy enforcement across a range of mobile devices.
With this change, Google Apps Premier and Education Edition administrators will be able to manage their users' iPhone, Nokia E series and Windows Mobile devices right from the Google Apps administrative control panel, without deploying any additional software or having to manage dedicated enterprise mobile servers.
These new mobile device management capabilities will allow administrators to:
These features will be accessible from the 'Mobile' tab under 'Service Settings' in the Google Apps control panel. Once a user starts syncing their devices with Google Apps, the domain administrator will be able to remotely wipe device data, right from the user settings page.
These policies will let employees access their data from their phone while helping IT administrators easily control access to corporate data on mobile devices.
Stay tuned for similar features for Android devices like the Nexus One and Droid, and if you have any questions, please check out our help page.
Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.
by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager (noreply@blogger.com) at February 03, 2010 04:58 PM
How the Google Page Creator shutdown may affect your blog
Fret not! Rather than see our users' templates break, we built a tool to preserve these links and host the affected files. To find out if your blog is affected, login to your Blogger Dashboard. If we've detected that your blog template contains links to Google Page Creator, you will see the following warning:
If you see this warning, click Update and review to access the Blogger Template Fixer and correct the links on your blog. (Note: you may not notice any problems with your blog until Page Creator shuts down over the coming days). Visit our Help Center to learn more about fixing your template.
Also, if you have issues fixing your template, let us know at the Blogger Help Group.
by Siobhan Quinn (siobhan@gmail.com) at February 03, 2010 04:47 PM
Troubleshooting tips part IIa: Ad relevance and targeting
Last week, we took a closer look at implementing your ad code, and today, we'll address some of the common issues related to ad targeting. 
If you're seeing irrelevant ads or public service ads (PSAs) on your pages after you've pasted the ad code into your HTML source code and waited the recommended 48 hrs, here are a things to check:
- Have you placed the AdSense ad code in frames separate from the main content of your website? If so, you may experience ad targeting issues. In order for our crawlers to match the ads to the content of your website, it is important to place the ad code in the same frame as the main content of your webste. If you're familiar with HTML, and your website is talking about several different topics you could also consider implementing section targeting on your site to highlight relevant content.
- Do you have mostly dynamic content on your site? Our crawlers currently can't derive meaning from these types of files:
- audio and video files (.wma, .mpeg, .mov)
- mp3 files (.mp3)
- images (.jpeg, .bmp)
- Macromedia Flash movies
- Java Applets
To receive more relevant ads, we recommend including plenty of text-based content on your site, including complete sentences and paragraphs. - Do your pages use session IDs? A session ID is a piece of data serves as a unique identifier for a session. If your pages use session IDs, you may not receive targeted ads on those pages. Since this session ID - and therefore the URL - changes every time a different user views a page, the URL will not be indexed and will need to be crawled from scratch. Once the URL is crawled, however, the session will most likely have expired. This means that pages seen by the users are rarely in the index. You'll need to remove the session IDs in order to show more targeted ads to your users.
by Inside AdSense Team (noreply@blogger.com) at February 03, 2010 02:13 PM
Who's @ Google I/O: spotlight on Enterprise sessions
Each week in our "Who's @ Google I/O" blog series, we'll highlight the latest from a featured track at I/O. This week, the spotlight is on Enterprise -- a major theme of this year's event.
In 2009, we saw an increasing number of large companies moving to the cloud (and "Going Google"), choosing the web as their platform of choice. At I/O, we'll share our enterprise and commercial developer offerings and focus on how to build business apps in the cloud.
We'll be adding new Enterprise sessions over the next couple of months, but here's a preview of some of the sessions you'll see at I/O:
Customizing Google Apps & integrating with customer environments
Hear real-life examples of customizing Google Apps to meet customer requirements from several panelists, including two of our Sandbox participants -- Iein Valdez of Appirio and Michael Cohn of CloudSherpas. Explore integration issues and deployment best practices with the people who have done it.
Run corporate applications on Google App Engine? Yes we do.
Our CIO, Ben Fried, describes how Google IT and other companies use the latest Google App Engine enhancements to respond more quickly to business needs while reducing operational burden to near zero.
It’s 2010: How is your move to the cloud doing?
Come discover the latest innovations from Google enabling IT and ISV developers to build on Google's cloud-based storage and computing offerings. This talk will give a complete overview of Google's commercial developer products and provide insights and best practices so enterprise developers can take more advantage of the cloud.
Launch your app inside of Google Apps with gadgets
Gadgets represent a valuable opportunity to get in front of the many Google Apps users who use Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Sites throughout the day. This session will talk about how you can write gadgets as natural extensions of your existing products and take advantage of the unique opportunities available to gadgets in Google Apps.
Making Freemium work - converting free users to paying customers
Don Dodge will moderate a panel of prominent venture capital leaders (Brad Feld, Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier, Matt Holleran) to help you understand how to build free apps that can be upgraded to paid & how to build products that can be profitable.
You can find the current list of Enterprise sessions here.
To learn more about and register for Google I/O, visit code.google.com/io. We add new sessions and content to the I/O website each week so follow @googleio on Twitter to keep up with changes!
Doodle 4 Google — Tell us what you would do if you could do anything...
Today, we're excited to announce our third annual Doodle 4 Google contest in the U.S. Google doodles, created by our talented team of doodlers, have helped us celebrate events and anniversaries from Van Gogh's birthday to Valentine's Day. And since 2008, Doodle 4 Google has given K-12 kids the opportunity to create their own logo and have it displayed on the Google homepage for hundreds of millions of users to enjoy for a day.
In addition to the winner's art appearing on Google.com on May 27, 2010, they'll also receive a $15,000 college scholarship, a laptop computer and a $25,000 technology grant for their school.
This year's theme is "If I Could Do Anything, I Would..." and it's all about pushing the limits, dreaming big, and seeing what you can accomplish in life. When coming up with inspiration for this year's contest, we turned to some of our very own Googlers, including Ed Lu, a former astronaut.
Ed typifies this year's theme in action, and shares an inspiring anecdote:
On my first mission STS-84, one of my crewmates and I were having dinner aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis. After all our work for the day was done, we decided to eat "upside down" on the ceiling, gazing out at the Earth moving by below our feet. As we flew around the Earth, watching the continents go by, my crewmate remarked how amazingly large the Earth really is. But at that same time, it also felt small to us. There we were, flying at 18,000 miles per hour around the Earth in a machine built by humans, with a crew made up of astronauts from all over the world. Both of our observations were true at the same time. The world is indeed a big place with many challenges. But by using science, technology and the power of people working together, nearly anything is possible.
So dream big! If you could do anything, what would you do?
For even more inspiration, you can see last year's winner, Christin Engelberth, a sixth grader at Bernard Harris Middle School in San Antonio, Texas. She titled her doodle "A New Beginning" to express her wish that "out of the current crisis, discoveries will be found to help the Earth prosper once more."
We're happy to let you know that this year, we've also assembled a panel of well-known "Expert Jurors," including creative directors, cartoonists and famous animators ranging from Sesame Workshop to Pixar Animation Studios. Our Expert Jurors will help us narrow down the cream of the crop to 40 regional finalists, who will come to the Google office in New York City on May 26, 2010. For the second year, we'll also be partnering with the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, where the top 40 regional finalists will get to have their artwork displayed in a national exhibit. And for the first time this year, we'll give out eight Technology Booster awards to schools that submit maximum number of doodles per school by March 10th and have students in our 400 State Finalists.
Please visit the official competition website for a full listing of all contest rules and requirements. Only students from registered schools can enter, so be sure your school is registered by March 17, 2010. All doodles must be submitted by March 31, 2010.
We hope you're as excited about this year's contest as we are. Good luck!
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at February 03, 2010 10:57 AM
Introducing click-to-call phone numbers in local ads on mobile devices
by Inside AdWords Crew (noreply@blogger.com) at February 03, 2010 10:35 AM
Web Analytics TV #5 with Avinash and Nick
This is the fifth installment in our Web Analytics TV series in which you share your most burning questions via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them.
Here is the list of this week's questions. You all are keeping us on our toes!
In this episode we discuss:
- Tracking online conversions and success for small, local, businesses
- Tracking the number of times a visitor converts in one visit
- How the e-commerce conversion rate can be greater than 100%
- How you can change the duration of Google Analytics campaigns
- How you can differentiate between paid and organic search in Google Analytics
- What is the recommended % balance between branded and category terms
- Why is time spent 0 for visits with 1 page/visit
- Why unique visitor numbers are higher than visits
- How visits and unique pageviews are calculated
- Would survey and qualitative help measure "engagement" ?
- How to best track mailto: links on your site
- What are the best practices for using virtual pageviews, event tracking and custom variables?
- How to see dimensions and metrics by location
- Where to find custom variables reports Google Analytics
- You can change how long Google Analytics attributes visits to a referral source by using the _setCampaignCookieTimout() javscript tracking method. When you set this to 0, the cookies becomes a session cookie and will be deleted once the user leaves the site. Using this method will make Google Analytics attribute only the first click of a campaign to a visit.
- How to link your Google Analytics and AdWords campaigns to differentiate between paid and organic search
- Help Center article: How do I link my Google Analytics account to my AdWords account?
- Help Center article: What is Autotagging?
- Help Center article: How to manually tag your referrals.
- Avinash's Blog: How to Monetize The Value of The Long Tail.
- Avinash's Blog: Calculating Time on Site & Time on Page.
- Caleb's Dimensionator plugin that exposes DMA and other data in your Google Analytics reports.
We hope you found episode helpful, and we'd love to hear your comments and have your questions. Please use the comment form below.
In case you missed them, here are our previous videos:
Episode #1
Episode #2
Episode #3
Episode #4
Please add your thoughts about the Q&A via comments below. Thanks!
Announcing Third Annual US Doodle 4 Google Competition
by Cathy (noreply@blogger.com) at February 03, 2010 06:25 AM
How did you do on the Webmaster Quiz?
Webmaster Level: All
Thanks to all of you who took our webmaster quiz and waited patiently to see how well you did! Today, we're pleased to present the Webmaster Quiz answers! We hope this quiz has provided some clarity on common issues users ask about in the Webmaster Help Forum. We'll go over a few of the questions and answers here, but if some of the answers lead you to ask more questions, we encourage you to continue the discussion in the forum!
1) You have moved your site to a new domain name. For users and search engines, the preferred way to permanently redirect traffic is:
Correct answer: a) 301 redirect
Explanation: A 301 redirect is preferred because it tells search engines, "Ok, this is the new domain I want you to show to users from now on," as opposed to something like a 302 redirect, which tells search engines, "Hey, this is only a temporary redirect--so, uh, I might change the URL soon, okay?" In addition to implementing a 301 redirect, the Change of Address feature in Webmaster Tools can help Google find your new site.
2) Your server is going to be moved and unavailable for a day. What should you do?
Correct answer: c) Return "Network Unavailable (503)" with a helpful message to all requests
Explanation: Maybe not as commonly known to webmasters, but very useful if your site is down! This tells crawlers to come back later, rather than crawling and indexing your "Down for maintenance" pages when you respond with 200 rather than 503. Check out the Help Center to learn more about HTTP status codes.
3) Your website is not in the index five days after you've put it online; what should you do?
Correct answer: b) Continue working on the site
Explanation: This one is a bit tricky. There could be a number of reasons why your site is not indexed. For example, a site's robots.txt file may contain a directive to inadvertently block crawlers from searching its contents. But the main take-away from this question is that if your site is pretty new, it may just be a matter of time before it gets indexed. You should continue to focus on improving your site for your users.
6) You need to remove 192 PDF files from the /private-files/ folder which have gotten indexed. What's the fastest way to do this?
Correct answer: d) Disallow the folder in robots.txt and request removal of the whole folder in Webmaster Tools.
Explanation: Before removing a directory that you don't want indexed, you need to include the Disallow directive in your robots.txt file to tell search bots not to crawl it anymore.
9) You have a country-coded domain name called example.es. To associate your site with Spain, you need to:
Correct answer: c) None of this is necessary. Google should already associate a domain ending in .es with Spain.
Explanation: Some country-coded domains may overlap with international ones, like .tv--which could also be a site from Tuvalu. But these sort of cases are rare and if they do arise, don't be shy to seek out help on the forum.
Great job to everyone who took the quiz and tested their know-how! And last but certainly not least, kudos to the top scorers! Congratulations on a quiz well done!
40/40:
- ChrisRaimondi
- theopeek
- beussery
- Petro
- pornel
- Ian Macfarlane
- g1smd
- Mattman
- thinkpragmatic
- GLV
- GoalGorilla
- rssmarketer
- BartVB
- Kim Minh Kaplan
- Ippi
- Erik Dafforn
- scole01
- Konstantin
- John
- fer.vazquez
- eMBe
- Todd Nemet
- p.jaroszynski
- ph0b
by Chark (noreply@blogger.com) at February 02, 2010 06:13 PM
A recent improvement for Arabic searches
This post is the latest in an ongoing series about how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users. - Ed.
We've learned that when performing a search on Google, people sometimes forget to separate words with spaces. Moreover, people often mistakenly repeat a letter within a single word. For instance, when writing the query [amazingly beautiful poem], you might write it as [amazingly beautiifullpoem].
These types of errors are much more common in languages like Arabic, where most of the letters are cursive. That means that the shapes of the letters change, based on the position of the letter in the word (initial, middle, final or isolated). Moreover, some Arabic letters are considered word breaks, meaning that the following letter must be in an "initial" shape. In other words, if the last letter of one word is a word break, the following word may not be separated with a space.
For example, the queries [وزارةالتعليم] and [وزارة التعليم] have an identical meaning (Ministry of Education) and they're both written in a common form for Arabic documents. But they have different, albeit correct, formats — the first query is written as a single word, while the second is written as two. Google needs to understand that while they're written differently, they mean the same thing and should yield the exact same search results. In this example, both queries were written correctly, just in different formats. But sometimes people just make errors — like repeating the same letter twice. For example, you might write [راائعة الجماال], repeating the letter "ا" twice in both query words. In this case the correct spelling should be [رائعة الجمال]. It's important that Google search recognizes your query — despite spelling errors.
To address issues like this, we recently developed a search ranking improvement that targets certain Arabic queries. Our algorithm employs rules of Arabic spelling and grammar along with signals from historical search data to decide when to leave out spaces between words or when to remove unnecessarily repeated letters. Now, when you type a query leaving out spaces or repeating a letter, we'll return better results based not only on what you typed, but also on what our algorithm understands is the "correct" query. For example, here's what happens when you type [قصيدة راائعةالجماال] ([amazingly beautiful poem] in Arabic) with repeated letters and dropped spaces between words.
As you can see, the Google results contain the corrected query, the terms قصيدة رائعة الجمال, in bold.
For most people, this might seem like a small enhancement. But for us, it’s a big change. Our tests show we've improved search for 10% of Arabic language queries. Which, when you think about it, is a lot of people.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at February 02, 2010 03:56 PM
Helping computers understand language
This post is the latest in an ongoing series about how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users. - Ed.
An irony of computer science is that tasks humans struggle with can be performed easily by computer programs, but tasks humans can perform effortlessly remain difficult for computers. We can write a computer program to beat the very best human chess players, but we can't write a program to identify objects in a photo or understand a sentence with anywhere near the precision of even a child.
Enabling computers to understand language remains one of the hardest problems in artificial intelligence. The goal of a search engine is to return the best results for your search, and understanding language is crucial to returning the best results. A key part of this is our system for understanding synonyms.
What is a synonym? An obvious example is that "pictures" and "photos" mean the same thing in most circumstances. If you search for [pictures developed with coffee] to see how to develop photographs using coffee grinds as a developing agent, Google must understand that even if a page says "photos" and not "pictures," it's still relevant to the search. While even a small child can identify synonyms like pictures/photos, getting a computer program to understand synonyms is enormously difficult, and we're very proud of the system we've developed at Google.
Our synonyms system is the result of more than five years of research within our web search ranking team. We constantly monitor the quality of the system, but recently we made a special effort to analyze synonyms impact and quality. Most of the time, you probably don't notice when your search involves synonyms, because it happens behind the scenes. However, our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports. We took a set of these queries and analyzed how precise the synonyms were, and were happy with the results: For every 50 queries where synonyms significantly improved the search results, we had only one truly bad synonym.
An example of a bad synonym from this analysis is in the search [dell system speaker driver precision 360], where Google thinks "pc" is a synonym for precision. Note that you can still see that on Google today, because while we know it's a bad synonym, we don't typically fix bad synonyms by hand. Instead, we try to discover general improvements to our algorithms to fix the problems. We hope it will be fixed automatically in some future changes.
We also recently made a change to how our synonyms are displayed. In our search result snippets, we bold the terms of your search. Historically, we have bolded synonyms such as stemming variants — like the word "picture" for a search with the word "pictures." Now, we've extended this to words that our algorithms very confidently think mean the same thing, even if they are spelled nothing like the original term. This helps you to understand why that result is shown, especially if it doesn't contain your original search term. In our [pictures developed with coffee] example, you can see that the first result has the word "photos" bolded in the title:
(Note that because our synonyms depend on the other words in your search and use many signals, you won't necessarily always see the word "photos" bolded for "pictures", only when our algorithms think it is useful and important to bold.)
We use many techniques to extract synonyms, that we've blogged about before. Our systems analyze petabytes of web documents and historical search data to build an intricate understanding of what words can mean in different contexts. In the above example "photos" was an obvious synonym for "pictures," but it's not always a good synonym. For example, it's important for us to recognize that in a search like [history of motion pictures], "motion pictures" means something special (movies), and "motion photos" doesn't make any sense. Another example is the term "GM." Most people know the most prominent meaning: "General Motors." For the search [gm cars], you can see that Google bolds the phrase "General Motors" in the search results. This is an indication that for that search we thought "General Motors" meant the same thing as "GM." Are there any other meanings? Many people can think of the second meaning, "genetically modified," which is bolded when GM is used in queries about crops and food, like in the search results for [gm wheat]. It turns out that there are more than 20 other possible meanings of the term "GM" that our synonyms system knows something about. GM can mean George Mason in [gm university], gamemaster in [gm screen star wars], Gangadhar Meher in [gm college], general manager in [nba gm] and even gunners mate in [navy gm].
Here are screenshots of those disambiguations of GM in action:
As a nomenclatural note, even obvious term variants like "pictures" (plural) and "picture" (singular) would be treated as different search terms by a dumb computer, so we also include these types of relationships within our umbrella of synonyms. Pictures/picture are typically called stemming variants, which refers to the fact that they share the same word stem, or root. The same systems that need to understand that "pictures" and "photos" mean the same thing also need to understand that "pictures" and "picture" mean the same thing. This is something that is even more obvious to a human but is also still a difficult task for a computer. An example of how this is difficult are the words "animal" and "animation," which share the same stem and etymology, but don't mean the same thing in standard use. Another tricky case that is very dependent on the other words in the query is "arm" vs. "arms." Arms might seem like the plural of arm, but consider how it might be used in a search: [arm reduction] vs. [arms reduction]. Google search is smart enough to know that the former is about removing fat from one's arm, and the latter is about reducing stockpiles of weaponry, and that arm/arms are dangerous synonyms in that case because they would change the meaning. These subtle differences between words that seem related is what makes synonymy very hard to get right.
Here are some other examples of synonyms we thought were interesting:
[song words], "lyrics" is bolded for "words".
[what state has the highest murder rate], "homicide" is bolded for "murder".
[himalayan kitten breeder], Google knows that "cat breeder" is the same as "kitten breeder".
[dura ace track bb axle njs], Google knows that "bb" here means "bottom bracket".
[software update on bb color id], "blackberry is bolded for "bb".
[bb cream dark], Google knows here that bb means "blemish balm".
[southeastern usa bb fitness & figure], "bodybuilding" is bolded for "bb."
Lastly, language is used with as much variety and subtlety as is present in human culture, and our algorithms still make mistakes. We flinch when we find such mistakes; we're always working to fix them. One of the best ways for us to discover these problems is to get feedback from real users, which we then use to inspire improvements to our computer programs. If you have specific complaints about our synonyms system, you can post a question at the web search help center forum or you can tweet them with the hash tag #googlesyns. You can also turn off a synonym for a specific term by adding a "+" before it or by putting the words in quotation marks.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at February 02, 2010 03:55 PM
Announcing Google's Focused Research Awards
[cross-posted with the Official Google Blog]
It is said that Google is like a university — and not just because everyone eats their lunch off trays in the cafeteria. Like a university, we devote significant energy to research across a wide array of subjects — from semantics to help improve search, to ways we can improve the efficiency of our data centers. Along with our internal efforts, we've long invested in building a strong, mutually beneficial relationship with universities and the research community. We give approximately 150 research grants a year to fund projects across a variety of subjects, we host visiting faculty members here at Google on sabbatical, and last year we started the Google Fellowship Program to fund graduate students doing innovative research in several fields.
Today, we're announcing the first-ever round of Google Focused Research Awards — funding research in areas of study that are of key interest to Google as well as the research community. These awards, totaling $5.7 million, cover four areas: machine learning, the use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring, energy efficiency in computing, and privacy. These are all areas in which Google is already deeply invested, and yet there is a long way to go. We're excited to see what these projects contribute to the body of research in these important areas.
These unrestricted grants are for two to three years, and the recipients will have the advantage of access to Google tools, technologies and expertise. We've given awards to 12 projects led by 31 professors at 10 universities:
Machine Learning: William Cohen, Christos Faloutsos, Garth Gibson and Tom Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon University
Use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring: Gaetano Borriello, University of Washington and Deborah Estrin, UCLA
Energy efficiency in computing:
- Ricardo Bianchini, Rutgers, Fred Chong, UC Santa Barbara, Thomas F. Wenisch, University of Michigan and Sudhanva Gurumurthi, University of Virginia
- Christos Kozyrakis, Mark Horowitz, Benjamin Lee, Nick McKeown and Mendel Rosenblum, Stanford
- David G. Andersen and Mor. Harchol-Balter, Carnegie Mellon University
- Tajana Simunic Rosing, Steven Swanson and Amin Vahdat, UCSD
- Thomas F. Wenisch, Trevor Mudge, David Blaauw and Dennis Sylvester, University of Michigan
- Margaret Martonosi, Jennifer Rexford, Michael Freedman and Mung Chiang, Princeton
- Ed Felten, Princeton
- Lorrie Cranor, Allesandro Acquisti and Norman Sadeh, Carnegie Mellon University
- Ryan Calo, Stanford CIS
- Andy Hopper, Cambridge University Computing Laboratory
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at February 02, 2010 01:14 PM
Announcing Google's Focused Research Awards
Today, we're announcing the first-ever round of Google Focused Research Awards — funding research in areas of study that are of key interest to Google as well as the research community. These awards, totaling $5.7 million, cover four areas: machine learning, the use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring, energy efficiency in computing, and privacy. These are all areas in which Google is already deeply invested, and yet there is a long way to go. We're excited to see what these projects contribute to the body of research in these important areas.
These unrestricted grants are for two to three years, and the recipients will have the advantage of access to Google tools, technologies and expertise. We've given awards to 12 projects led by 31 professors at 10 universities:
Machine Learning: William Cohen, Christos Faloutsos, Garth Gibson and Tom Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon University
Use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring: Gaetano Borriello, University of Washington and Deborah Estrin, UCLA
Energy efficiency in computing:
- Ricardo Bianchini, Rutgers, Fred Chong, UC Santa Barbara, Thomas F. Wenisch, University of Michigan and Sudhanva Gurumurthi, University of Virginia
- Christos Kozyrakis, Mark Horowitz, Benjamin Lee, Nick McKeown and Mendel Rosenblum, Stanford
- David G. Andersen and Mor. Harchol-Balter, Carnegie Mellon University
- Tajana Simunic Rosing, Steven Swanson and Amin Vahdat, UCSD
- Thomas F. Wenisch, Trevor Mudge, David Blaauw and Dennis Sylvester, University of Michigan
- Margaret Martonosi, Jennifer Rexford, Michael Freedman and Mung Chiang, Princeton
- Ed Felten, Princeton
- Lorrie Cranor, Alessandro Acquisti and Norman Sadeh, Carnegie Mellon University
- Ryan Calo, Stanford CIS
- Andy Hopper, Cambridge University Computing Laboratory
Update at 1:13 PM: Added Allesandro Acquisti and Norman Sadeh to the list of PIs on the CMU privacy project.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at February 02, 2010 01:13 PM
Enlist in BootCamp for Google I/O
This year, we're introducing I/O BootCamp, a new event happening the day before Google I/O. BootCamp is an opportunity for attendees to get a crash course in our major development platforms and tools before they head into Google I/O. BootCamp will feature introductory "101" content, hands-on lab sessions, and community-led discussions.
BootCamp is only available to those who are registered to attend Google I/O. Since space is limited, we ask that interested Google I/O attendees please register at our BootCamp site.
To register for Google I/O, please visit code.google.com/io.
80 days until major AdWords API v13 sunset
by Inside AdWords crew (noreply@blogger.com) at February 01, 2010 02:12 PM
Wrapping up our Free Holiday WiFi program
In November, we officially launched our Free Holiday WiFi gift. 54 airports, one airline and many millions of connected WiFi users later, our two-month Free Holiday WiFi sponsorship ended on January 15. We're happy to have made this year's holiday travel season just a bit easier for the millions of people who logged on and connected at our participating airports and on Virgin America flights.
Though some airports will no longer have free WiFi, we're excited that Burbank, Seattle and most recently, Boston airports have all decided to offer free WiFi all year.
In the spirit of the season, passengers connecting to the networks donated over $250,000 to Engineers Without Borders, One Economy Corporation and Climate Savers Computing Initiative. With Google's matching donation, the three charities received over $500,000 in total.
Finally, Edward Doan of Austin, Texas won the grand prize of ten Virgin America tickets, a Motorola Droid from Verizon Wireless and a Canon SX200 digital camera. You can view a complete list of winners on the contest site.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at February 01, 2010 09:09 AM
This week in search 1/31/10
This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.
From Google Squared enhancements to search becoming more social, this week brought a slew of exciting and (we hope) useful search feature releases:
Social Search
Sometimes, there might be relevant content on the web from people in your social circle. For example, learning what your friend thinks about the latest gadget or exotic travel location (e.g. in his or her blog) can help enhance your search experience. Until recently, there was no easy way to find this type of content published by your friends. Last October, we launched Social Search in Google labs to help solve this problem.
After a large number of users opted in and tried out the feature, Social Search has graduated and is available in beta for all signed-in users on google.com in English. We also added this feature to Google Images and gave you a way to visualize your social circle. To learn more about Social Search and how to get better social search results check out this post or this video.
Google Squared single item landing page
Last year we launched Google Squared, an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet. For categorical searches like [us presidents] or [dog breeds], Google Squared produces the type of extracted facts you might be interested in, and presents them in a meaningful way. Starting this week, Google Squared has a new design to better handle queries looking for a single thing, like a specific president or a particular breed of dog. The page is now easier to read and includes multiple images, and you can still add, remove or change the type of facts that are visible.
Example searches: [barack obama] and [boston terrier]
Better labels for Time/LIFE images
In late 2008, we worked with Time/LIFE to digitize several million archival images never been seen before, and made them available in Image Search. At that time, many images in the collection had descriptions and labels and were easy to search for. But some had less descriptive information, making them more difficult to find. Now it's possible for knowledgeable users to label images and enrich the collection. Over time, we hope the Google community will make the quality of image search better than ever before.
Example: [Cincinnati baseball]. Note the "labels" in the bottom righthand corner.
We hope you enjoy the variety of new features this week.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at January 31, 2010 10:58 AM
Flashy New Authentication: AuthSub Adds Support for ActionScript
Today, we are happy to announce the launch of AuthSub for ActionScript, a new component of the well-known AuthSub authentication interface for the Google Data Protocol. This new feature enables Flash and Silverlight applications to access data securely on behalf of a user, without the application ever seeing the user’s private login credentials.
To use AuthSub for Actionscript (or as we’re calling it, AuthSubAS), first ensure that the API you are accessing offers cross-domain support. To do this, simply check for a crossdomain.xml file like those offered by the Picasa Web Albums Data API and the YouTube Data API. Then, if the API supports cross-domain scripting, you can simply point your Flash app to https://accounts.googleapis.com/accounts/AuthSub{Request,SessionToken} and authenticate. If you’re familiar with how AuthSub for JavaScript works, AuthSubAS works in much the same way. For more information, see the AuthSub for ActionScript guide and check out this code sample.
Currently, cross-domain requests are only supported by the Picasa Web Albums Data API and the YouTube Data API. However, as more APIs offer cross-domain scripting through an open crossdomain.xml file, the AuthSubAS authentication will work automatically. For questions about a specific API or to encourage your API to provide AuthSubAS support sooner, visit your API’s support group in Google Groups.
Google Analytics Even More Global
Today, Google Analytics is available in 6 more languages: Bulgarian, Catalan, Greek, Lithuanian, Slovak and Vietnamese, bringing the total to 31 languages. It's a large cross-functional effort to localize the product, and we're so proud to welcome these new languages and users!
We also now have over 150 Google Analytics Authorized Consultants (GAACs), from every major region (US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Middle East & Africa, and Asia Pacific) and over 35 countries! Chances are, there's one near you.
GAACs are our partners; each has been vetted by an internal team here at Google. They are experienced Google Analytics experts (and often, also SEM, SEO and testing specialists) who are available for anything from hourly consultations to training to advanced implementation and analysis.
It's been amazing to see the growth in the analytics industry over the past few years, and as usage and the analytics dialogue scales internationally, our product, team and ecosystem are scaling right along with it.
by Jeff Gillis (noreply@blogger.com) at January 29, 2010 05:25 PM
Modern browsers for modern applications
The web has evolved in the last ten years, from simple text pages to rich, interactive applications including video and voice. Unfortunately, very old browsers cannot run many of these new features effectively. So to help ensure your business can use the latest, most advanced web apps, we encourage you to update your browsers as soon as possible. There are many choices:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0+
Mozilla Firefox 3.0+
Google Chrome 4.0+
Safari 3.0+
Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products -- as well as new Docs and Sites features -- won’t work properly in older browsers.
2010 is going to be a great year for Google Apps and we want to ensure that everyone can make the most of what we are developing. Please take the time to switch your organization to the most up-to-date browsers available.
Posted by Rajen Sheth, Google Apps Senior Product Manager
by Ellen Petry Leanse (eleanse@google.com) at January 29, 2010 02:08 PM
Migrating 6,000 users in 20 countries from Lotus Notes/Domino to Google Apps
Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Barry Driscoll, Senior Director of IT for Fairchild Semiconductor, the $1.2 billion chipmaker. Barry has more than 15 years of IT experience in the semiconductor industry. His responsibilities include enterprise IT support for telecommunications, messaging, database administration, and product design infrastructure as well as responsibility for business applications supporting finance, human resources, and business intelligence.
Barry will be available on a live webcast this Thursday, January 28, at 2:00 p.m. EST, 11:00 a.m. PST, 7:00 p.m. GMT to talk about his company's experience switching to Google Apps, and to answer your questions about this process.
At the end of 2008, we were at a crossroads for our email and collaboration tools. We had to make a long-term decision on what direction to take. At the time, we had over 6,000 Lotus Notes/Domino users around the world using an older platform (Lotus Notes/Domino version 6.5). We had some serious challenges: our users were frustrated with the outdated Notes/Domino functionality, the IT environment was complicated, and the ongoing maintenance costs were high. At the same time, we were working to implement an email archiving and e-discovery solution that was, frankly, not going well. To add to the mix, the world economy was in free-fall and our business was seeing those effects.
We wanted to improve our messaging tools while simplifying the IT environment, but needed a cost-effective approach. We originally thought we should upgrade our existing solutions to the latest releases, but knew that was going to be a time-consuming and expensive approach. So, we started seriously evaluating other options. During our review, we considered the hosted versions of the Lotus and Microsoft offerings, but ultimately focused our attention on evaluating Google Apps.
When Paul Lones, our SVP of IT, first suggested taking a look at using Google Apps as our enterprise email tool, we thought he was joking. But when we started looking at the capabilities, benefits, and costs of Google's enterprise offering, we were very impressed. We then began a more thorough technical and functional review. We determined that the core capabilities for email, calendar, contacts, and IM would probably meet our needs. Since email archiving and discovery were also critical for us, we looked at the Postini solutions. Again, we thought the delivered Postini features would work for Fairchild. Beyond the basics, we also saw the added value of Google's collaboration features available from Google Sites and Google Docs, and the anywhere/anytime access provided by Google's cloud-based services. Finally, we did an ROI analysis and estimated we’d save about $500,000 per year by migrating off of Lotus Notes/Domino. So, we made a case to our CEO and executive team to move forward with a pilot project using Google Apps.
For the pilot, we selected a core group of IT and business employees and asked for some volunteers. To our surprise the CEO and the entire executive team volunteered. As a result, we also included the executive assistants. Although having the execs in the pilot raised the stakes, it turned out to be one of the keys to the project's success. To help us get up to speed quickly and run the pilot smoothly, we partnered with Appirio Consulting. Appirio had previous experience converting large corporations from Lotus Notes/Domino to Google Apps. Appirio conducted one-on-one or small group training sessions for the pilot users and targeted training for the executive admins because of the complexity of their jobs when it comes to collaboration, email, and calendar management.
After a successful pilot, we made the decision to migrate the whole company to Google. The next group of employees migrated were 400 "early adopters" from across the company, including all owners of Notes/Domino applications and databases. The idea was to give these people a head start in moving any important non-email content from Lotus to Google Apps. For the early adopters, we used a combination of live and recorded web-based training. These early adopters also became "Google guides" for the rest of the user base during the full company migration.
Ultimately, we deployed Google Apps to over 6,000 users in 20 countries in less than five months. This deployment included migrating contacts, calendar entries, and up to 12 months of historical email, plus providing BlackBerry support. At the same time, we implemented the email security and email archiving capabilities available using Google's Postini platform.
Now we are providing our employees with a lot more functionality for a lot less money. Google Docs and Sites are really changing the way people work as teams, and the way information is shared. This new way of doing working is really powerful, especially for a company that does business in so many countries and timezones. We are now looking at Google Sites to replace our existing intranet. But the ability to access Gmail and the other Google Apps from anywhere – without having to use a VPN – has probably been the biggest hit.
We learned a lot of valuable lessons throughout the process of evaluating and migrating to Google Apps that we’d be happy to share with you. Please join me to discuss our experience in more detail and to learn how you might leverage Google Apps for your company.
Join us for this LIVE Event on:
Switching from Lotus Notes/Domino to Google Apps by Fairchild Semiconductor
Thursday, January 28, 2010
2:00 p.m. EST / 11:00 a.m. PST / 7:00 p.m. GMT
Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team
Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.
by Ellen Petry Leanse (eleanse@google.com) at January 29, 2010 10:58 AM
Launched: Google Apps Script for Google Apps Standard Edition
Google Apps Script provides the ability to automate a variety of tasks such as modifying Spreadsheets, creating Calendar appointments, checking stock prices, sending email, looking up Contacts and much, much more. For a more detailed overview, check out the video below:
Getting started is easy. You can take a look at the Apps Script Welcome Page, and then work through some of the Tutorials. Before long you'll be writing scripts to automate all kinds of repetitive tasks like keeping track of group expenses and sending out automated reminders triggered by values in a spreadsheet.
In this example, we're using a Google Docs spreadsheet to keep track of our soccer team's weekly dues. Each player owes $5 per game towards shared expenses. Unfortunately the players can be an absentminded bunch that need frequent payment reminders. In the spreadsheet, every amount entered updates a player's column to indicate which weeks are PAID (in green), and how much is DUE (in red). We've also used Apps Script to add a custom menu:
- 'Refresh' recalculates and colors cells to indicate which weeks are PAID and which are DUE
- 'Send Reminders' emails a polite message reminding players in debt to pay up
Check it out, and let us know what you think!
Posted by Evin Levey, Product Manager, Google Apps team
by Ellen Petry Leanse (eleanse@google.com) at January 29, 2010 10:13 AM
Annotations Now Available In All Accounts
In December, we announced the phased roll out of Annotations. It's now available in all accounts! Thanks for your patience and enjoy!
Here's a fantastic video on Annotations. You've asked for it for so long, and we hope you'll use it to great effect to better work in concert in your company, using phrases like, "Add it to annotations," or, "It's in annotations." If anything of note happens, log it there. Go tribal with your knowledge.
by Jeff Gillis (noreply@blogger.com) at January 28, 2010 07:10 PM
Request visitors' permission before installing software
(Cross-posted on the Google Korea Blog)
Webmaster Level: All
Legitimate websites may require that their visitors install software. These sites often do so to provide their users with additional functionality beyond what's available in standard web browsers, like viewing a special type of document. Please note, however, that if your site requires specific software for your visitors, the implementation of this software installation process is very important. Incorrect implementation can appear as though you're installing malware, triggering our malware detection filters, and resulting in your site being labeled with a 'This site may harm your computer' malware warning in our search results.
If using your site requires a special software install, you need to first inform visitors why they need to install additional software. Here are two bad examples and one good example of how to handle the situation of a new visitor to such a site:
Bad: Install the required software without giving the visitor a chance to choose whether or not they want to install the software.
Bad: Pop up a confirmation dialog box that prompts the visitor to agree to install the software, without providing enough detail for the visitor to make an informed choice. (This includes the standard ActiveX control installation dialog box, since it doesn't contain enough meaningful information for a visitor to make an informed decision about that particular piece of software.)
Good: Redirect the new visitor to an information page which provides thorough details on why a special software installation is required to use the site. From this page the visitor can initiate the installation of the required software if they decide to proceed with installation.
Has your site been labeled with a malware warning in our search results due to a poorly implemented software installation requirement? Updating the installation process to ensure that visitors are fully informed on why the installation is necessary, and giving them a chance to opt out, should resolve this issue. Once you've got this in place, you can go to Webmaster Tools and request a malware review to expedite the process of removing any malware warnings associated with your site in Google's search results.
by Jonathan Simon (noreply@blogger.com) at January 28, 2010 05:17 PM
Share the love with Valentine's Day savings
This Valentine's Day discover sweet savings with Google Checkout.
Now through February 11th, save $5, $10 or $20 on gifts for you and your loved ones. A variety of stores are offering exclusive discounts with Google Checkout, including BlueNile.com, FromYouFlowers.com and ShoeBuy.com.
It's easy to find places to save. Simply browse participating stores on the Checkout deals page or search for products on Google.com, and look for the Google Checkout promotion badge. Happy shopping!
Posted by
by Jessica Smallman (noreply@blogger.com) at January 28, 2010 10:53 AM
Unicode nearing 50% of the web
About 18 months ago, we published a graph showing that Unicode on the web had just exceeded all other encodings of text on the web. The growth since then has been even more dramatic.
Web pages can use a variety of different character encodings, like ASCII, Latin-1, or Windows 1252 or Unicode. Most encodings can only represent a few languages, but Unicode can represent thousands: from Arabic to Chinese to Zulu. We have long used Unicode as the internal format for all the text we search: any other encoding is first converted to Unicode for processing.
This graph is from Google internal data, based on our indexing of web pages, and thus may vary somewhat from what other search engines find. However, the trends are pretty clear, and the continued rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the processing for the many languages that we cover.
Searching for "nancials"?
Unicode is growing both in usage and in character coverage. We recently upgraded to the latest version of Unicode, version 5.2 (via ICU and CLDR). This adds over 6,600 new characters: some of mostly academic interest, such as Egyptian Hieroglyphs, but many others for living languages.
We're constantly improving our handling of existing characters. For example, the characters "fi" can either be represented as two characters ("f" and "i"), or a special display form "fi". A Google search for [financials] or [office] used to not see these as equivalent — to the software they would just look like *nancials and of*ce. There are thousands of characters like this, and they occur in surprisingly many pages on the web, especially generated PDF documents.
But no longer — after extensive testing, we just recently turned on support for these and thousands of other characters; your searches will now also find these documents. Further steps in our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
And we're angling for a party when Unicode hits 50%!
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at January 28, 2010 10:52 AM
Store and share files in the cloud with Google Docs
Let's say you're about to make a very important presentation to a prospective client on the other side of the country. Before you depart on your business trip, you download all of your presentation materials and InDesign® hand-outs onto your trusty thumbdrive. Just in case, you also email the files to yourself.
But while you're in the air, your colleagues back at the office are making last minute edits to the files and your copies are now out of date. Worse yet, when you arrive at your destination, you realize you left your thumbdrive at home.
Sound familiar? The good news is that things are about to become a whole lot easier.
Over the next couple of weeks, we are rolling out the ability for Google Apps users to easily upload and securely share any type of file internally and externally using Google Docs. You get 1 GB of storage per user, and you can upload files up to 250 MB in size.
Now accessing your work files doesn't require a connection to your internal office network. Nor do you need to email files to yourself, carry around a thumbdrive, or use a company network drive – you can access your files using Google Docs from any web-enabled computer.
Combined with shared folders in Google Docs, the upload feature is a great way to collaborate on files with coworkers and external parties. Instead of using cumbersome email attachments, you can upload files to a folder and share it with coworkers, who can then access and edit the files from a single place. You can even have your sales team securely share contracts with external clients for review.
And of course, by using Google Docs, you can quickly and easily search across all your files from one place, getting access to the right file when and where you need it.
Google Apps Premier Edition users can also use the Google Documents List Data API to upload files to Google Docs in batch, or purchase applications offered by third parties that enable you to migrate and sync your files to Google Docs:
We're always looking for ways to make it easier for you to access and organize your information online and we hope you find the ability to store, share, and collaborate on files in Google Docs helpful. In the coming months, we will enable Google Apps Premier Edition customers to purchase additional storage for $3.50/GB/yr (or €3.00/gb/yr in the EU). If you'd like to be notified when additional storage can be purchased, please fill out this form and we will contact you as soon as it's available. As always, we’d love your feedback and if you have any questions, please check out our help forum.
Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.
Updated: description of Syncplicity, 01/14/2010.
by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager (noreply@blogger.com) at January 28, 2010 01:10 AM
Updated Books Home Page and My Library
by Brandon Badger (noreply@blogger.com) at January 27, 2010 07:41 PM
Google's Privacy Principles
Thursday, January 28th marks International Data Privacy Day. We're recognizing this day by publicly publishing our guiding Privacy Principles.
- Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.
- Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
- Make the collection of personal information transparent.
- Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
- Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.
We've always operated with these principles in mind. Now, we're just putting them in writing so you have a better understanding of how we think about these issues from a product perspective. Like our design and software guidelines, these privacy principles are designed to guide the decisions we make when we create new technologies. They are one of the key reasons our engineers have worked on new privacy-enhancing initiatives and features like the Google Dashboard, the Ads Preferences Manager and the Data Liberation Front. And there is more in store for 2010.
You can find out more about our efforts at the Google Privacy Center and on our YouTube channel.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at January 27, 2010 07:16 PM
A proposal to extend the DNS protocol
Today a group of DNS and content providers, including Neustar/UltraDNS and Google are publishing a proposal to extend the DNS protocol. DNS is the system that translates an easy-to-remember name like www.google.com to a numeric address like 74.125.45.104. These are the IP addresses that computers use to communicate with one another on the Internet.
By returning different addresses to requests coming from different places, DNS can be used to load balance traffic and send users to a nearby server. For example, if you look up www.google.com from a computer in New York, it may resolve to an IP address pointing to a server in New York City. If you look up www.google.com from the Netherlands, the result could be an IP address pointing to a server in the Netherlands. Sending you to a nearby server improves speed, latency, and network utilization.
Currently, to determine your location, authoritative nameservers look at the source IP address of the incoming request, which is the IP address of your DNS resolver, rather than your IP address. This DNS resolver is often managed by your ISP or alternately is a third-party resolver like Google Public DNS. In most cases the resolver is close to its users, in which case the authoritative nameservers will be able to find the nearest server. However, some DNS resolvers serve many users over a wider area. In these cases, your lookup for www.google.com may return the IP address of a server several countries away from you. If the authoritative nameserver could detect where you were, a closer server might have been available.
Our proposed DNS protocol extension lets recursive DNS resolvers include part of your IP address in the request sent to authoritative nameservers. Only the first three octets, or top 24 bits, are sent providing enough information to the authoritative nameserver to determine your network location, without affecting your privacy.
The Internet-Draft was posted to the dnsext mailing list today, and over the next few months our group hopes to see this proposal accepted as an official Internet standard. We plan to continue working with all interested parties on implementing this solution and are looking forward to a healthy discussion on the dnsext mailing list.
Supporting students from under-represented backgrounds in the pursuit of a technical education
Over time, we've dedicated time, people, and financial resources to organizations, events and schools to help advance this mission — and we're excited to share that we rounded out 2009 with a donation of $8 million to a variety of organizations who share our dedication to this cause. Our efforts were focused in four key areas:
Starting in high school
STEM education at an elementary and high school level builds technical skills early and encourages interest in technology. To support the ongoing education of these subjects, we identified more than 600 high schools with significant populations of students from under-represented and economically disadvantaged backgrounds and are providing laptops to their computer science and math departments. We are also offering laptops to some of the most promising students in these schools. In a time when many of these schools are experiencing decreased funding, we wanted to support their continued commitment to learning and teaching these subjects, and recognize the exceptional work done by teachers in these communities. If you're interested in learning more about our efforts in this field, check out Google Code University (CS tutorials for students and teachers) as well as our tools, tips and lesson plans for K-12 educators.
Growing promising talent
We've worked with over 200 outstanding students as part of our FUSE, CSSI, BOLD and BOLD Practicum summer programs. To help the alumni of our 2009 summer programs pursue their studies, we awarded former program participants with school-based scholarships. We hope that this support for tuition will lessen the financial burden on these students and their families, reduce work-study commitments and free them up to explore other educational opportunities, like studying abroad.
Advancing technical knowledge through universities
We have close relationships with universities around the world — not only do we employ their alumni, but they are also a source of groundbreaking research and innovation. We awarded grants ranging in size from $20k to $100k to 50 U.S.-based universities with whom we already have relationships and directed these funds toward departments that are closely aligned with promoting under-represented minorities in technology. We hope to expand this effort both to more U.S.-based universities and to universities around the world in the future.
Partnerships with the organizations that make it happen
Our commitment to promote women and under-represented minorities in technology is shared by dozens of local and national organizations around the country. We awarded grants to 22 partner organizations, almost all of which we have worked with in the past. These organizations are on the front lines, making sure that under-represented groups have the support, resources and contacts they need. You'll find a list of these organizations with a quick overview of the work they focus on here.
This was a terrific way to close out 2009 and we look forward to attracting and encouraging more students from traditionally under-represented backgrounds to pursue studies and careers in science, technology, engineering and math. In the meantime, you can find news especially for students on the Students Blog and by following us on @googlestudents.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at January 27, 2010 04:44 PM
v2009 Hack Day Video Preview
Our recent AdWords API Hack Days in San Francisco and New York were a huge success, filled with presentations, question and answer sessions, and one-on-one coding help. We were glad to see that many developers have already started the migration to the v2009 API, and these events were a great way to kick off the process for those just getting started. Don't forget that most v13 services will be turned off on April 22.
We will be posting videos of the presentations on YouTube over the coming weeks, starting this week with Migrating from v13 to v2009 by Adam Rogal. The presentation gives an overview of the suggested migration process, provides some tips and tricks, and includes live coding examples.
This video is the first of many, and if you'd like to get the full experience there is still space available in our upcoming Paris Hack Day. Get more information and register for an upcoming Hack Day.
Best,
- Eric Koleda, AdWords API Team
by AdWords API Team (noreply@blogger.com) at January 27, 2010 01:18 PM
Search is getting more social
Late last year we released the Social Search experiment to make search more personal with relevant web content from your friends and online contacts. We were excited by the number of people who chose to try it out, and today Social Search is available to everyone in beta on google.com.
We've been having a lot of fun with Social Search. It's baby season here on our team — two of us just had little ones, and a third is on the way. We're all getting ready to be parents for the first time and we have lots of questions. So, what do we do? We search Google, of course! With Social Search, when we search for [baby sleep patterns], [swaddling] or [best cribs], not only do we get the usual websites with expert opinions, we also find relevant pages from our friends and contacts. For example, if one of my friends has written a blog where he talks about a great baby shop he found in Mountain View, this might appear in my social results. I could probably find other reviews, but my friend's blog is more relevant because I know and trust the author.
While we've been enjoying Social Search (and having babies), we've been hard at work on new features. For example, we've added social to Google Images. Now when you're doing a search on Images, you may start seeing pictures from people in your social circle. These are pictures that your friends and other contacts have published publicly to the web on photo-sharing sites like Picasa Web Albums and Flickr. Just like the other social results, social image results appear under a special heading called "Results from your social circle." Here's what it looks like:
Looking at the screenshot, you may notice two new links for "My social circle" and "My social content." These links will take you to a new interface we've added where you can see the connections and content behind your social results. Clicking on "My social circle" shows your extended network of online contacts and how you're connected.
Clicking on "My social content" lists your public pages that might appear in other people's social results. This new interface should give you a peek under the hood of how Social Search builds your social circle and connects you with web content from your friends and extended network. You can check out your social circle directly by visiting this link. (Note that it may take some time for the connections and content to update.)
We think there's tremendous potential for social information to improve search, and we're just beginning to scratch the surface. We're leaving a "beta" label on social results because we know there's a lot more we can do. If you want to get the most out of Social Search right away, get started by creating a Google profile, where you can add links to your other public online social services. Check out this short video to learn more:
The new features are rolling out now on google.com in English for all signed-in users, and you should start seeing them in the next few days. Time to socialize!
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at January 27, 2010 12:00 PM
Research Areas of Interest: Building scalable, robust cluster applications
As part of our series on research areas of interest to Google, we discuss some important areas relating to cluster applications in distributed systems. In the last two decades distributed systems have undergone a metamorphosis from academic curiosities to the foundation of an entire industry. Despite these successes, at Google we see distributed systems as a technology in its infancy, with huge gaps in the supporting research (some examples here and here) that represent some of the most important problems in the space. Here are some examples:
- Resource sharing: Stranded resources like idle memory, CPU, and disk bandwidth represent huge capital and operating expenses that deliver no business value. A cluster system based upon the best published research would be likely to leave 50% or more of hardware resources idle. We encourage researchers to explore hardware/software architectures that facilitate more supple sharing to avoid stranded and underutilized computational resources.
- Balancing cost, performance, and reliability: Current cluster applications tend to be excessively rigid and brittle, offering only coarse controls to tune the balance between reliability, performance and cost. We envision systems that allow cost to be optimized based on an input specification of performance and reliability requirements. An effective solution might allow service level settings to propagate downward through the layered structure of the system.
- Self-maintaining systems: The level of expertise required to troubleshoot today's large systems is one of the biggest barriers to more and larger deployments. The published research in this area has at best marginally improved the need for such rare expertise. We envision systems that can adapt automatically to changing conditions, in which redundancy and multiple geographically distributed data centers simplify rather than complicate manageability. This will require breakthroughs in monitoring and data analysis to address the diversity of failure modes and simplify the task of keeping systems healthy.
Previous posts in the series: Mulitmedia
by Research Admin (noreply@blogger.com) at January 27, 2010 07:34 AM
We're raising the bar on Google Analytics IQ
by Alden DeSoto (noreply@blogger.com) at January 26, 2010 04:42 PM
Site creation, sharing management and more with the Google Sites API
Since we launched the Google Sites Data API last fall, we've heard great feedback from businesses and schools using the API to update sites from 3rd party applications, migrate data from legacy workspace solutions into Google Sites and more.
Today, we're releasing several improvements to the API: the abilities to list a user's sites, create new sites, copy existing sites, and manage sharing permissions. You can read more about these updates to the Google Sites Data API on the Google Code Blog.
Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.
by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager (noreply@blogger.com) at January 26, 2010 03:51 PM
Spelling Suggestions and Thumbnail View in Google Docs
Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Product Manager, Google Apps
by Ellen Petry Leanse (eleanse@google.com) at January 26, 2010 03:46 PM
Create and share Google Sites with new Sites Data API features
Several months ago we launched the Google Sites Data API. Since then, we've worked hard to respond to your top feature requests: the ability to list a user's sites, create new sites, copy existing sites, and manage sharing permissions. Today, we are very excited to announce the release of the Site and Access Control List feeds that make these new features possible.
The Site feed allows your client to list sites and update their properties, such as the title or the theme of the site. Google Apps users can also create new sites. Because creating new sites often involves copying existing ones (perhaps using a site template), we've enabled that feature too.
Here's an example of the kinds of applications you can build with those features. Let's say you're a professor at a university and you'd like to create a Google Site for each of the courses you teach. The Site feed makes it possible for you to create a site course template, use the site feed to create several course sites, and personalize them with the content feed.
But what if you want to restrict access to your sites to just the students taking those courses? With the ACL (Access Control List) feed, you can manage sharing permissions. Everything you can do in the Google Sites admin panel, you can do with the API.
To get the full scoop, review the documentation and change log. We've loaded the Java client library and Python client library with the new features, and offer updated developer guides for both.
Visit us in our new developer forum if you have questions!
Protect your site from spammers with reCAPTCHA
by Michael Wyszomierski (noreply@blogger.com) at January 26, 2010 10:01 AM
Reminder: Version v200906 will be shut down in one week
by AdWords API Team (noreply@blogger.com) at January 26, 2010 09:33 AM
Follow changes to any website
At Google we're always looking for ways to take advantage of work being done in other parts of the organization. So when a team approached us with a way to follow changes from websites without feeds, we jumped at the opportunity. Post by Liza Ma, Product Manager.
Feeds make it easy to follow updates to all kinds of webpages, from blogs to news sites to Craigslist queries, but unfortunately not all pages on the web have feeds. Today we're rolling out a change in Google Reader that lets you create a custom feed to track changes on pages that don't have their own feed.
These custom feeds are most useful if you want to be alerted whenever a specific page has been updated. For example, if you wanted to follow Google.org's latest products, just type "http://www.google.org/products.html" into Reader's "Add a subscription" field. Click "create a feed", and Reader will periodically visit the page and publish any significant changes it finds as items in a custom feed created just for that page.
Here are some more example feeds for sites without feeds that you could follow:
- Macy's - special offers [view in Reader]
- NYU Computer Science homepage [view in Reader]
- Zillow.com homepage [view in Reader]
We provide short snippets of page changes to help you quickly decide if the page is worth revisiting and we're working on improving the quality of these snippets. If you don't want Google to crawl or create feeds for a specific site, site owners can opt-out.
If you have a feed-less page you've been dying to follow, sign in to Google Reader and try it out for yourself. As always, if you have any feedback, please visit our official help forums or our Twitter account.
by Brian Shih (noreply@blogger.com) at January 25, 2010 02:01 PM
How search can add real ROI to eCommerce websites
Although it "makes sense" that good search can increase website ROI, especially for eCommerce websites, it's important to back that intuition with quantifiable data supporting the value of online research search. Thanks to recent research from Market Strategy Group, the evidence is in.
Market Strategy Group's new white paper, titled "Search for Revenue: Leveraging Powerful Search to Boost eTail Sales" shares a range of data indicating how adding or improving search capability on eTail sites can significantly raise revenues. The study covers why site search is more important today than ever before, and delves into the potential ROI companies can achieve by having advanced search on their eCommerce sites.
We're sharing firsthand perspecitves on that value in an upcoming webinar hosted by eCommerce specialists MultiChannel Merchant:
Search: adding real ROI to eCommerce websites
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
1:00 p.m. EST / 10:00 a.m. PST
During this hour-long webinar, you'll hear from:
- Leslie Bacon, Group Publisher at Penton Marketing Media Group, delivering insights on the online channel and how Multichannel Merchant is addressing the shift towards online sales
- Joyce Wu, Partner at Market Strategy Group, covering their recent white paper, Search for Revenue: Leveraging Powerful Search to Boost eTail Sales
- Vijay Koduri, Product Marketing Manager at Google Enterprise, discussing how Google Commerce Search addresses the problems of e-commerce site search speed and relevancy
Register here. We hope you'll join us to get the facts on how effective search boosts results for online retailers.
Posted by Ashley Gorringe, Enterprise Search team
by Ellen Petry Leanse (eleanse@google.com) at January 25, 2010 12:20 PM
100 days until major v13 sunset
In October of last year we launched the v200909 API and shared with you that the majority of v13 services would be turned off on April 22 of this year. This is a reminder to our developers that less than 100 days are left before most v13 services will be turned off.
As of April 22, 2010, the following v13 services will no longer be accessible:
CampaignService
AdGroupService
CriterionService
AdService
InfoService
KeywordToolService
SiteSuggestionService
The AccountService, TrafficEstimatorService, and ReportService v13 services will continue to be accessible because they are not yet available in the v2009 API. In the coming months, we'll announce the launch dates for these services in the v2009 API and corresponding sunset dates for the v13 services.
Want to learn more about migrating your application to the v2009 API? Review the side-by-side differences between v13 and v2009. Try out the code examples in these client libraries: Java, .NET, Python, Ruby, and PHP. You can also learn more from our Discover v2009 series of blog posts.
As we go into the last 100 days before migration to v2009, please continue to ask us your questions and share your feedback on the AdWords API Developer Forum.
–- Jason Shafton, Product Marketing Manager
by AdWords API Team (noreply@blogger.com) at January 25, 2010 11:46 AM
Extensibility + new HTML and JavaScript APIs for Google Chrome
Today's new stable release of Google Chrome for Windows includes a bundle of browser goodness, including extensions and new HTML and JavaScript APIs.
Extensions -- previously available on Google Chrome for Windows on the beta channel -- and are now available to all users. Extensions enable you to provide additional functionality not just on your site, but to bring content and functionality from your site into the browser regardless of what sites the user has open. Google Chrome extensions use the same multiprocess technology that makes the browser fast and more secure, so that extensions won't crash or slow down your browser.
In addition, we're excited to introduce a number of new HTML and JavaScript APIs in Google Chrome, including the Web Storage and Web SQL Database APIs, WebSockets, and more. For more details about these APIs, read further on the Chromium Blog.
If you have questions about the extensions APIs, the extensions discussion group continues to be the best place to get answers. For the new HTML and JavaScript APIs, check out the newly created Chromium HTML5 group. And for those of you who are interested in attending Google I/O, check out the current list of Google Chrome sessions.
Extensions, bookmark sync and more for Google Chrome
Today we're excited to introduce a new stable release of Google Chrome for Windows, which includes two of the browser's most frequently requested features: extensions and bookmark sync.
Extensions let you add new features and functions to your browser. Some provide one-click access to some of your favorite web applications like eBay and digg, or news and information sources such as NPR and Time.com. Others are useful tweaks for performing common online tasks such as browsing photos, getting directions or shopping.
We previously launched extensions on the beta channel, and many new extensions have since been contributed by developers from all over the world. Now you can browse over 1,500 in our extensions gallery and install them on the stable version of Google Chrome.
Bookmark sync is a handy feature for those of you who use several computers — say, a laptop at work and a desktop at home. You can enable bookmark sync to synchronize your bookmarks on all of your computers so that when you create a bookmark on one computer, it's automatically added across all your computers. This means that you won't need to manually recreate the bookmark each time you switch computers.
You can read more about today's stable release — including performance improvements — on the Google Chrome Blog. Or if you want a look under the hood at what this update means for web developers (including new HTML and Javascript APIs), check out the Chromium blog.
To those using Google Chrome on Linux, extensions are enabled on the beta channel. And for those using Google Chrome for Mac, hang tight — we're working on bringing extensions, bookmark sync and more to the beta soon. Those currently using the stable version for Windows will be automatically updated within the next week (or you can check for updates manually).
If you're on a PC and haven't tried Google Chrome yet, you can download Google Chrome and give all these new features a whirl.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at January 25, 2010 08:10 AM
This week in search 1/22/10
This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.
The Google that you used today is actually better than the Google that you used yesterday. On a daily basis, we make a number of algorithmic enhancements and release other search features that ultimately make finding what you're looking for quick, easy and enjoyable. Here are a few of the exciting feature releases this week:
Hours and menu information in universal search
Want to know when your favorite museum is open? Interested in ordering in and need to quickly check the menu for that restaurant around the corner? This week we were excited to launch hours and menu information in local results for universal Google search. Now you can add the words "hours" or "menu" to your search to get back the information you want in a snap.
Example searches: [computer history museum mountain view hours], [sushi sakae burlingame menu]
Rich Snippets for events
What are Rich Snippets? They show brief annotations that webmasters make to summarize what's on the page so you can see it at a glance on your search results page. So far we've launched improved snippets for two formats: reviews and people. Today, we unveiled a new Rich Snippets format for events. The next time you're searching for events, you'll see how the new format lists them as search result snippets, along with dates, locations and links directly to pages about those specific events. And, as webmasters implement the new markup on their webpages, you'll begin to see these event results more frequently.
Example search: [concerts in san jose]
Answer highlighting
Earlier today, we were excited to release the answer highlighting feature, which helps you get to information more quickly by delivering the likely answer to your question in boldface type right in search results. If the pages returned for these searches contain a simple answer to a factual-based search, the snippet will more often include the relevant text in boldface for easy reference. Read more about answer highlighting here.
Example searches: [who is the author of 1984], [p.s. i love you release date], [terminator salvation director]
We hope that you enjoy the features we launched this week — and that they make your search experience even better than yesterday.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at January 22, 2010 04:36 PM
Web Analytics TV with Avinash and Nick
This is the fourth video in our recent Rapid Fire series which we are now calling Web Analytics TV. In this series you share your most burning questions via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them.
Here's the list of last week's questions. We enjoy hearing from you, so please keep the questions coming. Like the hosts Click and Clack from a long-standing radio show called CarTalk, who will answer any car question that exists, we'd love to do the same for web analytics. Call us Data and Point? Hm. Click and Clack is catchier. If you can think of a name let us know. But please, ask any question related to web analytics. Tools. HiPPO's. Reporting tips. Challenges. All are fair game, so ask away.
In this episode we discuss:
- Tracking social media referrals in Google Analytics
- Why do I see clicks with 0 visits in Google Analytics keyword reports
- Does sharing data with Google Analytics have an impact on Organic Search rankings?
- How to track Google custom site search engines in Google Analytics
- In keyword reports how to change '+' characters into whitespaces
- How advanced profile filters work
- Best practices for reporting user "engagement"
- What insights can you gain from the content drilldown report
- How can one change the cookie duration of visits
- How does one become excellent at web analytics
Here are links to resources we discussed in the video:
- Tracking Custom Search Engine with Google Analytics help center article
- An article discussing tracking custom search engine by Robbin Steif
- Custom Advanced Filters explained by Robbin Steif
- How regular expressions work in Google Analytics by Robin Steif
- Why engagement is an "excuse" by Avinash Kaushik
- Example Engagement API report using the Google Analytics API (check out the Solving Business Problems section)
- Tracking methods to change the duration of the visitor, session and campaign cookies in ga.js
Also, if you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question or vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site. Avinash and I will answer your latest questions in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video. Thanks!
by Jeff Gillis (noreply@blogger.com) at January 22, 2010 04:22 PM
Important Note to FTP Users
Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.
Three years ago we launched Custom Domains to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year's post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you're interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.
For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:
- We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
- We will be providing a dedicated blog and help documentation to provide as much information as possible to help guide users through the migration off of FTP.
- Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.
by Rick Klau (noreply@blogger.com) at January 22, 2010 04:06 PM