• Campaign Management
• Deeper Insights
• Bid Optimization
• Better Results

• We held our third annual HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) Faculty Summit at Google New York, hosting 50 professors and administrators from 16 HBCUs, who came together to collaborate, share insights and engage with Googlers.
• We helped 100,000 students and faculty at 22 HBCUs in the U.S. “go Google;” they now use Google Apps for Education.
• To date, 3,000 students in 77 countries have received Google scholarships and we also expanded our scholarship programs for women in technology.
• We piloted the Top Black Talent U.K. program to help the U.K.’s top black engineering and business students transition into the tech industry. We also partnered with the African Caribbean Society to offer 100 students workshops and mentoring with Googlers from engineering, sales and marketing.

• We had more than 10,000 members participate in one of our 18 Global Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). Membership and reach expanded as Women@Google held the first ever Women’s Summit in both Mountain View, Calif. and Japan; the Black Googler Network (BGN) made their fourth visit to New Orleans, La., contributing 360 volunteer hours in just two days; and the Google Veterans Network partnered with GoogleServe, resulting in 250 Googlers working on nine Veteran-related projects from San Francisco to London.
• Googlers in more than 50 offices participated in the Sum of Google, a celebration about diversity and inclusion, in their respective offices around the globe.
• We sponsored 464 events in 70 countries to celebrate the anniversary of International Women's Day. Google.org collaborated with Women for Women International to launch the “Join me on the Bridge” campaign. Represented in 20 languages, the campaign invited people to celebrate by joining each other on bridges around the world—either physically or virtually—to show their support.

• We introduced ChromeVox, a screen reader for Google Chrome, which helps people with vision impairment navigate websites. It's easy to learn and free to install as a Chrome Extension.
• We grew Accelerate with Google to make Google’s tools, information and services more accessible and useful to underrepresented communities and diverse business partners.
• On Veterans Day in the U.S., we launched a new platform for military veterans and their families. The Google for Veterans and Families website helps veterans and their families stay connected through products like Google+, YouTube and Google Earth.

• Be currently enrolled in a 4-year BA/BS program, in any major, at a university in the United States OR matriculate into a United States MBA Program in the Fall of 2012.
  
• Must have served in one of the following United States Military Services: Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marine Corps, or Navy.
  

• 6 of the 10 largest agencies now use DoubleClick Search(1)
• Agencies using DoubleClick Search see significant increases in efficiency, ranging from 25 to 60%.(2) That’s like suddenly finding another few hours in your workday.

• New search funnel tools to better understand a consumer’s path to conversion
• Allowing clients to integrate their own data sources to inform search decisions, and
• Tighter integration between DoubleClick Search and other ad properties for enhanced cross-channel optimization

• Grades 4-5: Talia Mastalski, Grade 5, East Pike Elementary School, Indiana, Penn., for her doodle “Traveling to me.” Talia says, “When I think of Google, I think of a wormhole leading me to knowledge. If I could travel in time, I would visit a similar wormhole into the future to find out about ME.”
• Grades 6-7: Herman Wang, Grade 6, Suzanne Middle School, West Covina, Calif., for his doodle “Retro City.” Herman says, “If I could travel in time, I'd visit Retro City. A future city made of robots and humans.”
• Grades 8-9: Susan Olvera, Grade 8, SOAR Alternative School, Lafayette, In., for her doodle “Traveling Back to the Future.” Susan says, “If I could travel in time, I'd travel back to the future. If there is life on other planets, I believe we'd visit the natives as well as invent different ships and rockets for quicker transportation. With what we have accomplished currently, I believe the ‘future’ isn’t so far away.”
• Grades 10-12: Cynthia Cheng, Grade 11, Edison High School, Edison, NJ, for her doodle “A World of Adventure.” Cynthia says, “If I could travel in time, I'd visit the age of the Vikings. Though their tales of monsters may not have been entirely true, they were some of the greatest explorers in history. It would be a remarkable experience to share adventures and discover new lands with them.”

• May 23 at 10am PDT: Getting Started with Google Analytics
• May 24 at 9am PDT: Building Blocks of Digital Attribution
• May 31 at 10am PDT: Introduction to TrueView for YouTube
• June 5 at 10am PDT: GoMo: Mobilize your Site with Quick and Easy New Tools
• June 6 at 10am PDT: Our Mobile Planet: Understanding U.S. Smartphone Consumers
• June 7 at 10am PDT: Introducing Mobile Apps Inventory in AdWords
• June 12 at 10am PDT: Get Local with ZIP Code Targeting to Increase Sales/Leads
• June 14 at 10am PDT: Search Optimization: Tips, Tricks, and Tools
• June 19 at 10am PDT: Bringing the Power and Control of Search to Display
• July 10 at 10am PDT: Account Management Tools for Large Advertisers and Agencies

Search is a lot about discovery—the basic human need to learn and broaden your horizons. But searching still requires a lot of hard work by you, the user. So today I’m really excited to launch the Knowledge Graph, which will help you discover new information quickly and easily.

Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just that—two words.

But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world’s most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It’s why we’ve been working on an intelligent model—in geek-speak, a “graph”—that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings.

The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.

Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.

The Knowledge Graph enhances Google Search in three main ways to start:

1. Find the right thing
Language can be ambiguous—do you mean Taj Mahal the monument, or Taj Mahal the musician? Now Google understands the difference, and can narrow your search results just to the one you mean—just click on one of the links to see that particular slice of results:

This is one way the Knowledge Graph makes Google Search more intelligent—your results are more relevant because we understand these entities, and the nuances in their meaning, the way you do.

2. Get the best summary
With the Knowledge Graph, Google can better understand your query, so we can summarize relevant content around that topic, including key facts you’re likely to need for that particular thing. For example, if you’re looking for Marie Curie, you’ll see when she was born and died, but you’ll also get details on her education and scientific discoveries:

How do we know which facts are most likely to be needed for each item? For that, we go back to our users and study in aggregate what they’ve been asking Google about each item. For example, people are interested in knowing what books Charles Dickens wrote, whereas they’re less interested in what books Frank Lloyd Wright wrote, and more in what buildings he designed.

The Knowledge Graph also helps us understand the relationships between things. Marie Curie is a person in the Knowledge Graph, and she had two children, one of whom also won a Nobel Prize, as well as a husband, Pierre Curie, who claimed a third Nobel Prize for the family. All of these are linked in our graph. It’s not just a catalog of objects; it also models all these inter-relationships. It’s the intelligence between these different entities that’s the key.

3. Go deeper and broader
Finally, the part that’s the most fun of all—the Knowledge Graph can help you make some unexpected discoveries. You might learn a new fact or new connection that prompts a whole new line of inquiry. Do you know where Matt Groening, the creator of the Simpsons (one of my all-time favorite shows), got the idea for Homer, Marge and Lisa’s names? It’s a bit of a surprise:

We’ve always believed that the perfect search engine should understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want. And we can now sometimes help answer your next question before you’ve asked it, because the facts we show are informed by what other people have searched for. For example, the information we show for Tom Cruise answers 37 percent of next queries that people ask about him. In fact, some of the most serendipitous discoveries I’ve made using the Knowledge Graph are through the magical “People also search for” feature. One of my favorite books is The White Tiger, the debut novel by Aravind Adiga, which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize. Using the Knowledge Graph, I discovered three other books that had won the same prize and one that won the Pulitzer. I can tell you, this suggestion was spot on!

We’ve begun to gradually roll out this view of the Knowledge Graph to U.S. English users. It’s also going to be available on smartphones and tablets—read more about how we’ve tailored this to mobile devices. And watch our video (also available on our site about the Knowledge Graph) that gives a deeper dive into the details and technology, in the words of people who've worked on this project:

We hope this added intelligence will give you a more complete picture of your interest, provide smarter search results, and pique your curiosity on new topics. We’re proud of our first baby step—the Knowledge Graph—which will enable us to make search more intelligent, moving us closer to the "Star Trek computer" that I've always dreamt of building. Enjoy your lifelong journey of discovery, made easier by Google Search, so you can spend less time searching and more time doing what you love.

Posted by Amit Singhal, SVP, Engineering

• May 23 at 10am PDT: Getting Started with Google Analytics
• May 24 at 9am PDT: Building Blocks of Digital Attribution
• May 31 at 10am PDT: Introduction to TrueView for YouTube
• June 5 at 10am PDT: GoMo: Mobilize your Site with Quick and Easy New Tools
• June 6 at 10am PDT: Our Mobile Planet: Understanding U.S. Smartphone Consumers
• June 7 at 10am PDT: Introducing Mobile Apps Inventory in AdWords
• June 12 at 10am PDT: Get Local with ZIP Code Targeting to Increase Sales/Leads
• June 14 at 10am PDT: Search Optimization: Tips, Tricks, and Tools
• June 19 at 10am PDT: Bringing the Power and Control of Search to Display
• July 10 at 10am PDT: Account Management Tools for Large Advertisers and Agencies

• Reach a valuable, complementary, younger audience
• Add much-needed frequency to light TV viewers
• Deliver media more evenly across light and heavy TV viewers, reducing waste
• Do all of this both efficiently and affordably

• Users can visit drive.google.com where they can opt-in to Drive. 
• As part of opting in, they will be shown an interstitial which includes this video. 
• If an opted in user visits docs.google.com, the user will be redirected to drive.google.com. 
• The “Documents” navigation item will change to “Drive.” 

• IAB Innovation Days: On Wednesday, May 16 at 1:45pm, Kate Stanford, Group Product Marketing Manager for Social Ads, will be giving a presentation at IAB Innovation Days at Skylight Soho about connecting with customers through a joint strategy across mobile and social platforms.

• The Webby Awards: On Monday, May 21 at 5:30 PM, celebrate with the whole digital industry and Google+ at the 16th Annual Webby Awards, where we’ll be hosting an exclusive backstage Hangout On Air from the Webbys Google+ page during the show. Whether you're there in person, watching the live stream, or watching our Hangout, expect plenty of surprises and laughs. Connect with the Webby Awards on Google+ for more updates, and if you're there, say hello to the Google+ and Google Creative Lab teams at the afterparty!

The winning team is a dynamic duo: Josetxo Perez Fernandez, 36, is a professional who works in computer administration; and Pedro Domecq Aguirre, 45, is a programmer, 3D data specialist and network administrator. Those are their day jobs, anyway. It turns out that they’re actually world-class, polygon-wrangling, texture-mapping, megabyte-optimizing, geo-modeling superheroes. And now they’re bona fide local heroes, too. Thanks to them, millions of people across the globe can now get familiar with the beautiful little town of Getaria.

Not only that, but we’ll also be awarding US$25,000 to a local school and hosting a celebration with the town of Geteria in honor of Pedro's and Josetxo's accomplishment.

Zorionak to the winning town, to the other five finalists, and to all the other entrants who collectively modeled almost 25,000 local landmarks that are now available for all to enjoy in Google Earth’s 3D Buildings layer. The virtual world is a richer place thanks to your efforts, and the real one is a lot better off, too.

Posted by Allyson McDuffie, SketchUp Team

• Access our research library of studies and whitepapers from across 21 different countries. You can search for research by country, sector, marketing objective or media type.
• Use the Insights MENA tool to explore the media habits of consumers in the Middle East and North Africa, or do the same for consumers in Sub-Saharan Africa with our Insights Africa tool.
• Watch new videos on the consumer journey, with information on behaviors such as “research online, purchase offline” (ROPO).

When searching for business it’s often the case that you have very fine grained requirements. You don’t just want a restaurant, you want a Mexican restaurant. You don’t just want a clothes shop, you want a vintage clothes shop. You don’t just a want a bar, you want a bar that offers live music.

The Google Places API offers filtering over 100 different types, including restaurant, clothing_store, and bar. As rich as this type scheme is, it can not cover the infinite range of fine grained requirements that you or your users might have.

For these situations the Places API now offers keyword search, which searches places based on an arbitrary text string. Results are matched against all the information that Google has about a business, including country specific categories, cuisine, and Google review content.

Keyword searches can also be combined with type filters. For example, you could add a type filter of ‘bar’ to a keyword search for ‘wine’ to ensure your search results include only drinking establishments, and not wine merchants.

By default, the Google Places API orders the search results it returns using the same ranking algorithm as Google Maps, which prioritises places that are popular or prominent. This is great for local discovery and check-in apps, as these are the places likely to be the most interesting or relevant. However for certain types of search, such as gas stations or atms, the closest result is usually preferable.

To help with these use case the Places API can now rank results strictly by distance. In order to rank results by distance you must use some form of query or filter on the search. This can be a name filter, a type filter, or a keyword search. When results are ranked by distance it is not necessary to provide a search radius as the Places API will try to return the 20 closest results within reasonable distance.

• Mobile is not a channel. Mobile is an integrated solution where CMS, CRM and commerce updates should occur at the same time and in the same systems as updates to your traditional website.  
• Research! Engage your team, friends and family to get insights on how they use their mobile devices. Conduct a competitive analysis to learn how your competitors illustrate and deliver their product and services. 
• Design your site to solve the main problems or situations customers might find themselves in. Consider what features, tasks or existing site elements translate best on mobile and implement them.
• And finally, don’t simply duplicate your traditional website. Consumers want and expect a different experience on mobile.

• The mobile momentum
• Why mobile sites matter
• 10 mobile site best practices
• Best practices in action
• Build a mobile website

• More placemarks: Support for 1,000 placemarks and ability to add more as needed
• Flexible balloon design: Take advantage of even more balloon design templates and simplified starter templates
• Simplified publication: Just click “Publish to the web” to share your map (no more fussing with URLs)
• New customization options: Advanced users can change the default view and network link details

1. It is easy to assess product popularity globally and by market. The user experience is seamless and there was no complex setup necessary.
2. Custom reports allow you to easily view complex information in one view. It dramatically reduces the time to summarize multiple reports, document it, and share it within the organisation.
3. Google Analytics gives them access to timely information, which allows for better decision making.