December 4th, 2014 | by Google Testing Bloggers | published in Google Testing
by Anthony Vallone on behalf of the GTAC Committee On October 28th and 29th, GTAC 2014, the eighth GTAC (Google Test Automation Conference), was held at the beautiful Google Kirkland office. The conference was completely packed with presenters and atte…
December 4th, 2014 | by Jane Smith | published in Google Apps
The Apps Search lab feature, launched in 2010, extends Gmail search to include relevant results from one’s Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides content and displays them in a separate section below email search results when typing a query and hitting ‘Enter/Return.’ Currently, Google Apps admins have the option in the Admin console to enable this lab feature for everyone in their domain, or allow users to add it individually if they so desire.
Since 2010, Gmail search has been improved to automatically display results from Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides―plus Calendar and G+ content―in the instant results dropdown, which appears when entering a query in the search box:
With the improved experience provided by the instant results search feature, we’ll be ending the Apps Search lab experiment and removing it from Gmail Labs and the Advanced Labs Management section in Admin console in early 2015. We will provide additional guidance on the specific date of the feature removal on the Google Apps Release calendar.
Note: all launches are applicable to all Google Apps editions unless otherwise noted
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December 4th, 2014 | by The Gmail Team | published in Gmail (Google Mail)
Posted by Vijay Umapathy, Product Manager
The holiday season is chock full of to-dos. Instead of having to keep a separate to-do list, Inbox makes it easy to focus on your priorities by letting you add Reminders right to the top of your inbox. In fact, Reminders go beyond your typical task list by actually helping you get stuff done. Here are just a few examples:
Inbox helps you cross items off your to-do list faster by providing Assists–handy pieces of information to help you get started, like customer service phone numbers, countdowns to important deadlines, and more.
And sometimes–who are we kidding, all the time–friends and family email you with things they want you to do. With Inbox you can add Reminders to emails: just pin the email, and you’ll see a field where you can add a Reminder. Never re-read that to-do, disguised as an email, again!
Of course, it’s safe to put off some to-dos. Whether you’re dreading that call to your talkative Uncle or simply need to focus on something else first, you can snooze Reminders just like email. You can even set up repeating Reminders for to-dos that happen on a regular basis such as taking medication or paying rent.
Reminders go beyond your inbox. If you use Google Now and want to quickly set a reminder, you can simply say “Remind me to…” and it will appear in your inbox. And if you’re using the new Google Calendar app, any reminder you snooze to a specific day and time will appear in your calendar automatically.
No matter what you need to remember, with Reminders, your inbox becomes a centralized place to keep track of the the things you need to get back to, and that’s especially helpful during the holidays. As always, if you aren’t using Inbox yet, you can email to request an invite and we’ll email you an invite as soon as more become available.
December 4th, 2014 | by John A.Smith | published in Google Adsense
(Originally posted on the Google Webmaster Central Blog)
Have you ever tapped on a Google Search result on your mobile phone, only to find yourself looking at a page where the text was too small, the links were tiny, and you had to scroll sideways to see all the content? This usually happens when the website has not been optimized to be viewed on a mobile phone.
This can be a frustrating experience for our mobile searchers. Starting today, to make it easier for people to find the information that they’re looking for, we’re adding a “mobile-friendly” label to our mobile search results.
This change will be rolling out globally over the next few weeks. A page is eligible for the “mobile-friendly” label if it meets the following criteria as detected by Googlebot:
- Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash
- Uses text that is readable without zooming
- Sizes content to the screen so users don’t have to scroll horizontally or zoom
- Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped
If you want to make sure that your page meets the mobile-friendly criteria:
- Check your pages with the Mobile-Friendly Test
- Read our updated documentation on our Webmasters Mobile Guide on how to create and improve your mobile site
- See the Mobile usability report in Google Webmaster Tools, which highlights major mobile usability issues across your entire site, not just one page
- Check our how-to guide for third-party software like WordPress or Joomla, in order to migrate your website hosted on a CMS (Content Management System) to use a mobile-friendly template
The tools and documentation above are currently available in English. They will be available in additional languages within the next few weeks.
We see these labels as a first step in helping mobile users to have a better mobile web experience. We are also experimenting with using the mobile-friendly criteria as a ranking signal.
If you have any questions or want to help others make mobile-friendly sites, visit our Webmaster Help Forum. We hope to see many more mobile-friendly websites in the future. Let’s make the web better for all users!
Posted by Ryoichi Imaizumi and Doantam Phan, Google Mobile Search
For AdSense publishers: Don’t forget to check our Multi-Screen Starter Guide to start building your mobile-friendly website today.
December 4th, 2014 | by Research Blog | published in Google Research
Posted by Beryl Nelson, Software Engineering Manager
By becoming more conscious of our own stereotypes and biases, and making use of the insights revealed by the research on bias and stereotype threat, unconscious decision making, and cognitive illusions, each of us can bring more to our work and create diverse, innovative, and meaningful organizations.
Since 2009, I’ve been reading literature about the challenges and successes in making diverse teams effective, and speaking about this research. My goal is to help everyone understand more about unconscious decision-making and other barriers to inclusion, and through knowledge, combat these effects.
A short summary:
- A team that is heterogeneous in meaningful ways is good for innovation, and good for business.
- There are many challenges to making such teams effective, such as unconscious decision making, stereotype threat, and other cognitive illusions.
- There is repeatable quantitative research which shows ways to combat some of these effects.
- The barriers to effectiveness may seem overwhelming, but there is hope! Meaningful change is possible, and some examples of successful change are cited below.
In a bit more detail:
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Diversity is good for innovation and business. There is a correlation between financial success and the diversity of leadership teams, as shown in research by Catalyst, McKinsey and Cedric Herring. Further, research shows a strong correlation between having women on teams and innovation; concluding that there is a strong correlation between the presence of women and the social skills required to get ideas percolating into the open.
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We all make decisions unconsciously, influenced by our implicit associations. As an example of these effects, a large proportion of CEOs are taller than the average population and height is strongly correlated with financial and career success. It’s long been argued that women and underrepresented minorities are not represented in CEO leadership because there aren’t enough qualified individuals in the labor pool. This “pipeline issue” argument can’t be made for short and average-height people, however. Simple, repeatable tests measure, via response time and error rate, the implicit associations we have between concepts. These associations are created as an adaptive response, but we must understand our own implicit biases in order to make better decisions.
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Stereotype threat plays a role in preventing people from being fully effective. The low representation of women and minorities in Science has long been the source of a troubling question: is this an indication of a difference in innate ability (see Ben Barre’s response to Lawrence Summers’ remarks), or the result of some other effect? Claude Steele and his colleagues elegantly showed that two groups of people can have similar or opposite reactions, depending on the way a situation is presented. These and other experiments show that stereotype threat can compromise the performance of the subject of a stereotype, if he or she knows about the stereotype and cares about it.
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Change is possible. The above and other challenges may make it seem nearly impossible to create a diverse and highly functioning organization, but dramatic change can be made. Take, for example, the discovery of biased decision making and effective changes made via the use of data in the MIT Science Faculty Study, or the amazing changes at Harvey Mudd college, which not only increased participation of women as Computer Science majors from 12% to 40% in five years, but also increased the total number of CS majors from 25 to 30 per year to 70 CS graduates in the class of 2014.
If you’re interested in learning more, watch the video about the data on diversity below. You can read the full research in the November issue of Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery. You can read even more using the full bibliography.
December 4th, 2014 | by Jane Smith | published in Google Apps
Posted by Lucia Fedorova, Tech Lead, Google Calendar API
(Cross-posted on the Google Developers Blog)
At Google we like to make 10x rather than 10% improvements. In this spirit, we are increasing the default quota for the Calendar API v3 by a factor of ten, to 1 million requests per day. That means your application can support ten times as many users without any need to apply for more quota.
And if you need even more free quota, you can apply for it in the developer console under APIs -> Calendar API -> Quota -> “Apply for higher quota.” We have also streamlined the process of quota handling to make sure you receive your quota as quickly as possible.
A few tips to work efficiently with your quota:
- Use push notifications instead of polling.
- If you cannot avoid polling, make sure you only poll when necessary (for example poll very seldomly at night).
- Use incremental synchronization with sync tokens for all collections instead of repeatedly retrieving all the entries.
- Increase page size to retrieve more data at once by using the maxResults parameter.
- Update events when they change, avoid re-creating all the events on every sync.
- Use exponential backoff for error retries.
Note: all launches are applicable to all Google Apps editions unless otherwise noted
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