A new look for Custom Search control panel
March 13th, 2013 | by Custom Search Team | published in Google Custom Search
We hope you enjoy the new look!
Posted by: Neelesh Bodas and Brent VerWeyst, Custom Search team
March 13th, 2013 | by Custom Search Team | published in Google Custom Search
We hope you enjoy the new look!
March 12th, 2013 | by Android Developers | published in Google Android
Posted by Ellie Powers, Google Play team
The new Google Play Developer Console is out of preview and is the default experience. In addition to offering all of the functionality of the old version, the new version features a streamlined publishing flow, store listings in more languages with language-specific graphics, and new user ratings statistics, so you’ll have better tools for delivering great Android apps that delight users. If you haven’t already made the switch, now is the time, as we’ll be retiring the former version on April 15 to focus our efforts on this new experience.
The new Developer Console brings you new functionality built on top of a quick-to-navigate user experience. You can add language-specific graphics to your store listing to help your users around the world understand what your app is about. New graphs let you track your ratings over time with breakdowns by device, country, app version, and more. The statistics page now shows you when you released each version of your app, so you see how each new version changes your installations and ratings, and you can view crashes specific to an application version. These new features are only the beginning of what’s to come for developers on Google Play in the future.
If you’re still using the old Developer Console, now is the time to switch over fully to the new version by clicking “Try the new version” in the header. Let us know what you think by clicking the “Feedback” link in the header in the new Developer Console, and if you experience any serious issues, please contact support. We’re planning some more improvements in the next month and in the future. Your input will continue to be key to what we do.
+Android Developers
March 12th, 2013 | by Google Students | published in Google Student Blog
Originally posted by the Official Google Blog
Algorithmic competitions are to programmers what tournaments are to tennis players: an opportunity to feel the rush of competition, learn new techniques and face off against their best counterparts from around the globe. Code Jam, Google’s worldwide online programming competition, gives developers a chance to use their favorite programming languages to solve algorithmic problems created by a team of contest champions at Google.
Our 10th annual global Code Jam kicks off next month, starting with a qualification round on April 12. After three more online rounds, the top 25 contestants will be invited to Google’s London office on August 16 for a final matchup and a chance to win the coveted title of Code Jam Champion.
With more than 20,000 participants last year, Code Jam has grown leaps and bounds since it began in 2003*. To celebrate the competition’s 10th anniversary, we’ve raised the stakes: the winner will claim $15,000, and will automatically qualify for the 2014 Code Jam finals to defend his or her title.
If you’re up to the challenge of solving tough problems and coding elegant solutions (and perhaps debugging less elegant solutions), then register now. Want to warm up for the Qualification Round with a problem or two? How about finding the margin of safety for contestants on a television show, optimizing a tower defense game or swinging through the jungle on vines? You have a whole month to prepare yourself for the first hurdle on Friday, April 12.
Posted by Onufry Wojtaszczyk, Software Engineer, Google Code Jam
*To the mathematically inclined (all of our competitors), 2003-2013 sounds like enough time for 11 Code Jams. Nevertheless, this one will actually be our tenth global contest: we went through a major format change between 2006 and 2008, and there wasn’t a global contest in 2007.
March 12th, 2013 | by Emily Wood | published in Google Blog
Algorithmic competitions are to programmers what tournaments are to tennis players: an opportunity to feel the rush of competition, learn new techniques and face off against their best counterparts from around the globe. Code Jam, Google’s worldwide online programming competition, gives developers a chance to use their favorite programming languages to solve algorithmic problems created by a team of contest champions at Google.
Our 10th annual global Code Jam kicks off next month, starting with a qualification round on April 12. After three more online rounds, the top 25 contestants will be invited to Google’s London office on August 16 for a final matchup and a chance to win the coveted title of Code Jam Champion.
With more than 20,000 participants last year, Code Jam has grown leaps and bounds since it began in 2003*. To celebrate the competition’s 10th anniversary, we’ve raised the stakes: the winner will claim $15,000, and will automatically qualify for the 2014 Code Jam finals to defend his or her title.
If you’re up to the challenge of solving tough problems and coding elegant solutions (and perhaps debugging less elegant solutions), then register now. Want to warm up for the Qualification Round with a problem or two? How about finding the margin of safety for contestants on a television show, optimizing a tower defense game or swinging through the jungle on vines? You have a whole month to prepare yourself for the first hurdle on Friday, April 12.
Posted by Onufry Wojtaszczyk, Software Engineer, Google Code Jam
*To the mathematically inclined (all of our competitors), 2003-2013 sounds like enough time for 11 Code Jams. Nevertheless, this one will actually be our tenth global contest: we went through a major format change between 2006 and 2008, and there wasn’t a global contest in 2007.
March 12th, 2013 | by Google Analytics team | published in Google Analytics
March 12th, 2013 | by Google Public Policy Blog | published in Google Public Policy
Posted by Bob Boorstin, Director, Public Policy, and Lewis Segall, Senior Counsel, Ethics and Compliance
(Cross-posted from the Google Europe Blog)
We wake up every day at Google asking ourselves: how can we get more information to more people around the world? Unfortunately, officials in too many governments wake up every day asking themselves: how can we stop our people from getting more information?
Those opposing questions lay at the heart of our decision back in 2008 to be a founding member company of the Global Network Initiative (GNI). The GNI is a group of companies, human rights groups and NGOs, socially responsible investors and academics that works to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy in the ICT sector.
From the beginning, we hoped that the GNI would find common ground with other companies and groups around the world. And today we’re happy to report that the GNI is entering into a two-year collaboration with a group of eight European telecommunications firms to “find a shared and practical approach to promoting freedom of expression and privacy rights around the world.”
The eight firms — Alcatel-Lucent, France Telecom-Orange, Millicom, Nokia Siemens Networks, Telefonica, Telenor, TeliaSonera, and Vodafone — provide services and equipment in scores of countries.
The firms, known collectively as the Telecommunications Industry Dialogue, have been meeting among themselves since 2011 to discuss freedom of expression and privacy rights in their sector, and have developed a set of guiding principles. Under the new partnership, they are not joining GNI — but the GNI will house the Industry Dialogue’s work and provide a place where members of both groups can learn from each other, develop new ideas, and collaborate in protecting and advancing user privacy and freedom of expression.
For the Industry Dialogue, we hope the arrangement will give the eight companies the chance to see the advantages we’ve found in an alliance that goes beyond industry and includes NGOs and others. For the GNI — a group born of the conviction that there is strength in numbers and a diverse membership — the arrangement marks a concrete step to building a broader and more global platform to help protect user rights.
March 12th, 2013 | by Emily Wood | published in Google Online Security
Posted by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead
We created a new Help for hacked sites informational series to help all levels of site owners understand how they can recover their hacked site. The series includes over a dozen articles and 80+ minutes of informational videos—from the basics of what it means for a site to be hacked to diagnosing specific malware infection types.
Over 25% of sites that are hacked may remain compromised
In StopBadware and Commtouch’s 2012 survey of more than 600 webmasters of hacked sites, 26% of site owners reported that their site was still compromised while 2% completely abandoned their site. We hope that by adding our educational resources to the great tools and information already available from the security community, more hacked sites can restore their unique content and make it safely available to users. The fact remains, however, that the process to recovery requires fairly advanced system administrator skills and knowledge of source code. Without help from others—perhaps their hoster or a trusted expert—many site owners may still struggle to recover.
Hackers’ tactics are difficult for site owners to detect
Cybercriminals employ various tricks to avoid the site owner’s detection, making recovery difficult for the average site owner. One technique is adding “hidden text” to the site’s page so users don’t see the damage, but search engines still process the content. Often the case for sites hacked with spam, hackers abuse a good site to help their site (commonly pharmaceutical or poker sites) rank in search results.
In cases of sites hacked to distribute malware, Google provides verified site owners with a sample of infected URLs, often with their malware infection type, such as Server configuration (using the server’s configuration file to redirect users to malicious content). In Help for hacked sites, Lucas Ballard, a software engineer on our Safe Browsing team, explains how to locate and clean this malware infection type.
Reminder to keep your site secure
I realize that reminding you to keep your site secure is a bit like my mother yelling “don’t forget to bring a coat!” as I leave her sunny California residence. Like my mother, I can’t help myself. Please remember to:
March 12th, 2013 | by Jane Smith | published in Google Enterprise
Posted by Khushnud Irani, the Chief Information Officer at HolcimEditor’s note: Our guest blogger is Khushnud Irani, Chief Information Officer at Holcim, one of the world’s leading suppliers of cement and aggregates with over 78,000 employees worldwi…
March 12th, 2013 | by Katie Miller | published in Google Adwords
People today are constantly connected, presenting a tremendous opportunity for retailers to deliver the right products to them across devices anytime, anywhere. We recently announced the release of enhanced campaigns to help advertisers reach cus…
March 12th, 2013 | by Research @ Google | published in Google Research
Ed H. Chi, Staff Research Scientist
Social interactions have always been an important part of the human experience. Social interaction research has shown results ranging from influences on our behavior from social networks [Aral2012] to our understanding of social belonging on health [Walton2011], as well as how conflicts and coordination play out in Wikipedia [Kittur2007]. Interestingly, social scientists have studied social interactions for many years, but it wasn’t until very recently that researchers can study these mechanisms through the explosion of services and data available on web-based social systems.
From information dissemination and the spread of innovation and ideas, to scientific discovery, we are seeing how a deep understanding of social interactions is affecting many different fields, such as health and education. For instance, scientists now have strong evidence that social interactions underlie many fundamental learning mechanisms starting from infancy well into adulthood [Meltzoff2009], and that peer discussions are critical in conceptual learning in college classes [Smith2009]. How might these learning science findings be built into social systems and products so that users maximize what they learn on the Web?
We know that interactions on the Web are diverse and people-centered. Google now enables social interactions to occur across many of our products, from Google+ to Search to YouTube. To understand the future of this socially connected web, we need to investigate fundamental patterns, design principles, and laws that shape and govern these social interactions.
We envision research at the intersection of disciplines including Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Social Science, Social Psychology, Machine Learning, Big Data Analytics, Statistics and Economics. These fields are central to the study of how social interactions work, particularly driven by new sources of data, for example, open data sets from Web2.0 and social media sites, government databases, crowdsourcing, new survey techniques, and crisis management data collections. New techniques from network science and computational modeling, social network and sentiment analysis, application of statistical and machine learning, as well as theories from evolutionary theory, physics, and information theory, are actively being used in social interaction research.
We’re pleased to announce that Google has awarded over $1.2 million dollars to support the Social Interactions Research Awards, which are given to university research groups doing work in social computing and interactions. Research topics range from crowdsourcing, social annotations, a social media behavioral study, social learning, conversation curation, and scientific studies of how to start online communities.
We have awarded 15 researchers in 7 universities. We selected these proposals after a rigorous internal review. We believe the results will be broadly useful to product development and will further scientific research.
We look forward to working with these researchers, and we hope that we will jointly push the frontier of social interactions research to the next level.
References
[1] Aral, S., & Walker, D. (2012). Identifying Influential and Susceptible Members of Social Networks. Science , 337 (6092 ), 337–341. doi:10.1126/science.1215842
[2] Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2011). A Brief Social-Belonging Intervention Improves Academic and Health Outcomes of Minority Students. Science , 331 (6023 ), 1447–1451. doi:10.1126/science.1198364
[3] Aniket Kittur, Bongwon Suh, Bryan Pendleton, Ed H. Chi. He Says, She Says: Conflict and Coordination in Wikipedia. In Proc. of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI2007), pp. 453–462, April 2007. ACM Press. San Jose, CA.
[4] Meltzoff, A. N., Kuhl, P. K., Movellan, J., & Sejnowski, T. J. (2009). Foundations for a New Science of Learning. Science , 325 (5938), 284–288. doi:10.1126/science.1175626
[5] Smith, M. K., Wood, W. B., Adams, W. K., Wieman, C., Knight, J. K., Guild, N., & Su, T. T. (2009). Why Peer Discussion Improves Student Performance on In-Class Concept Questions. Science , 323 (5910), 122–124. doi:10.1126/science.1165919
March 12th, 2013 | by Google Public Policy Blog | published in Google Public Policy
Posted by Eric Schulman, Legal Director
We’ve been encouraged by recent proposals for legislation and other reforms aimed at addressing the growing harm that patent trolls are inflicting on U.S. consumers and small businesses. We also think that companies can work together to help curb excessive patent litigation, so we’ve launched a new cooperative licensing website laying out some of our ideas and soliciting feedback from interested companies.
The problem of lawsuits brought by patent trolls—companies that don’t make any products—is huge and getting worse. Additionally, in a growing trend, companies are selling patents to trolls that then use those patents to attack other companies. In some cases, those companies arrange to get a cut of revenue generated from the trolls’ suits.
We think companies should cooperate to reduce patent litigation—what’s been compared to nuclear arms control for the patent world. On our site, we outline several networked, standardized, royalty-free patent licensing agreements that increase companies’ freedom to operate while reducing patent assertions, especially by trolls.
For example, in a License on Transfer (LOT) Agreement, participating companies agree that when a patent is transferred (other than as part of a legitimate spin-out), the transferred patent automatically becomes licensed to other participating companies. Participants are thus protected from any future attacks if the patent was sold to a troll.
The more companies that unite in these kinds of agreements, the more beneficial the agreement becomes to its members, especially companies that don’t regularly sell patents or don’t want to spend money or time defending against trolls.
Take a look at the description of the LOT Agreement and the other approaches on our website and, if you’re interested or have feedback, let us know.
March 11th, 2013 | by Stephanie Taylor | published in Google Open Source
As the student application period rapidly approaches for Google Summer of Code 2013, past students, mentors, and organization administrators are organizing meetups around the globe to talk with university students interested in participating in this year’s program. Over the next couple of months we will feature posts written by some of these meetup organizers in a special blog series.
Colombo, Sri Lanka meetup: held March 4, 2013
We held our first Google Summer of Code meetup at Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (Colombo, Sri Lanka) on the 4th of March 2013. The event was organized with a great deal of support from the Department of Computing. Approximately 150 young enthusiasts took part in the event.
The first speaker was Keshan Sodimana, who is the Manager of Google Developer Group, Sri Lanka. Keshan delivered an excellent presentation on the value of open source software for the world. He explained how the world is heavily dependent on open source infrastructure from the Linux kernel on supercomputers to the Android mobile operating system on millions of phones around the world.
Next, I took to the stage to present the students with an overview of the Google Summer of Code program. I also focused on general open source fundamentals from communication within open source communities to proper email/IRC etiquette and open source culture.
The final speaker was Suranga Nath Kasthurirathne, a mentor and past Google Summer of Code student for OpenMRS. Suranga discussed general information about Google Summer of Code such as important dates for the program, how to apply, guidelines on how to write project proposals, and how students can develop the most suitable project based on their interests.
The meetup concluded with a session on related technologies, including an OpenMRS demonstration and other related tools such as the Student Manual and which would help students prepare for Google Summer of Code 2013. The students were very excited about the program and asked many questions both publicly and individually after the session ended. We tried to clear up doubts they had about their own abilities and encouraged them to participate.
We pointed out the benefits of working on real-life projects, as opposed to the mock projects that they work on in university. We also explained the value of building connections all around the world, and the happiness working on open source projects brings in general. Those of us who had participated as students in previous Google Summer of Code programs shared our experiences on why it was important to continue with a project after Google Summer of Code was over and what benefits it could bring to them.
Good luck to all the hopefuls applying for Google Summer of Code this year!
By Harsha Siriwardena, former Google Summer of Code student for OpenMRS 2012, Google Code-in mentor for the Fedora Project 2012 and Organizer of Google Developer Group Sri Lanka
Stay tuned as we feature more Google Summer of Code meetups over the next 2 months leading up to the student application period, April 22nd-May 3rd.
By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Team
March 11th, 2013 | by Katie Miller | published in Google Adwords
Enhanced campaigns have arrived, featuring bid adjustments, updates to ad extensions, and more options for location and device targeting. We’re here to equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to continue your success as you upgrade and migra…
March 11th, 2013 | by Jane Smith | published in Google Enterprise
Posted by Kristin Phelan, Marketing Director at Faneuil Hall MarketplaceEditor’s note: Boston’s changed a bit since Paul Revere set out on his famous midnight horseback ride in 1775. Belichick and Brady hadn’t met yet, the curse of the Big Bambino …
March 11th, 2013 | by Katie Miller | published in Google Adwords
A few weeks ago, Susan Wojcicki spoke at IAB about building an ads ecosystem for 2020. There, she introduced a new tool, Brand Lift surveys in AdWords, that will help advertisers measure the brand impact of their display campaigns via surveys. &n…