Google Data

Celebrating entrepreneurship with Chrome business apps

Jane Smith — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:35:00 +0000

Posted by Bonny Lau, Product Manager, Chrome for Business and Education

Editor's note: As part of our series focused on celebrating National Small Business Week, we are featuring stories, tools and resources that can help small businesses grow and innovate.

American entrepreneurs have good reason to celebrate this week -- it’s National Small Business Week. Entrepreneurs all over the world, like you, have a knack for wearing many hats, being scrappy and spotting new opportunities. And the tools you use should be intuitive, scale quickly and easily, and offer ubiquitous accessibility.

Luckily, many business web apps today are perfect for small and growing businesses. Accounting apps are intuitive enough to be used by someone without a CPA. Managing customers comes with pricing that scales as your business grows. And your social media management and email campaign tools can work with each other via clever APIs. Best of all, you and your team can use these web apps anywhere, from any computer.

In honor of National Small Business Week, we’re featuring a curated list of some of our favorite business apps and extensions from the Chrome Web Store. The Gmail and Google Drive Chrome apps let you access your mail and documents even when you’re offline. And with Chrome extensions like HootSuite’s Hootlet and Zendesk Activity Stream, you can monitor your social media stream and your customer service issues at the same time, because -- well, that’s just what entrepreneurs do every day.

You need tools that work just as hard as you do. Thanks to the web, it’s easier than ever to discover the apps that fit your specific needs. If you’re on the lookout for new ways to simplify, manage, or grow your business, check out these business apps from the Chrome Web Store. And if your team isn’t on Chrome already, learn more about the security, speed and manageability of Chrome for Business.

18 New Languages for Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides

Jane Smith — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:05:00 +0000

Posted by Ian Hill, Project Manager, Google Localization

(Cross-posted on the Google Drive Blog.)

Google Drive lets you store and access your files anywhere -- on the web, your computer, your phone, or on the go. Whether you’re presenting slides in a boardroom in São Paulo or negotiating a Japanese contract in Tokyo, Google Drive speaks your language: 65 of them, to be exact, with the addition of 18 new ones today:

Afrikaans, Amharic, Basque, Chinese (Hong Kong), Estonian, French (Canada), Galician, Icelandic, Khmer, Lao, Malaysian, Nepali, Persian, Sinhalese, Spanish (Latin America), Swahili, Urdu, Zulu

You can switch back and forth as often as you like, and many of these languages are also supported by Drive’s spellchecker.

Love to collaborate? No matter which Drive app you’re using -- Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms -- you can work in real time in any language you choose while your fellow collaborators use another language.

To try Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides in another language, you can switch by:

Clicking the gear icon in the upper right, then select Settings.
Under General, select a language from the drop-down menu in the Language section.
Click Save. You’re done!

To change the language for Google Drive for mobile, go to your device’s language settings. If you don’t yet have Drive for mobile, you can visit the Google Play or Apple App Store to get the Google Drive app.

Give your sitelinks additional detail in enhanced campaigns

Katie Miller — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:00:00 +0000

Ads that provide detail and precision can help people make more informed decisions. Sitelinks help people find information deeper in your site so they can get to where they want to go faster. In February 2012, we improved sitelinks by using text from other ads in your account or My Client Center to create sitelinks with additional detail. Today, we’re going one step further by enabling you to nominate specific text for your sitelink descriptions from within your AdWords account. This will allow you to control the descriptions that display when this sitelink format shows.

Click here to enlarge

In our testing, users have reported that sitelinks with additional detail were more useful and relevant, and clickthrough rates were significantly higher than the same ad with traditional 2- and 3-line sitelinks.

The new sitelink format with additional detail is available only in enhanced campaigns. Enhanced campaigns enable you to reach people with the right ads in the right context - location, time of day and device type - without setting up and managing numerous campaigns. All campaigns will be upgraded to enhanced campaigns on July 22nd.

After upgrading to enhanced campaigns, you will have the option of adding extra text to your sitelinks - simply fill out both lines of the "Description" field when creating a new sitelink or editing an existing sitelink.

Click here to enlarge

Note that your ads won't always show sitelinks, and when they do, the format that appears could vary.

The core guidelines for sitelinks remain the same with these improvements:

Sitelinks cannot violate the duplicate sitelink URL policy
Sitelink text cannot use keyword insertion
Sitelink text cannot be the same as other sitelinks in the same ad group/campaign or the main ad that’s serving
In addition to this 4 sitelink view, there is also a 2 sitelink variation

To learn more about sitelinks with additional detail, check out the sitelinks article in the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Conrad Wai, Product Manager, Ad Formats

Today at 10AM PDT: Hangout with Susan Wojcicki to celebrate AdSense 10

Yamini Gupta — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:49:00 +0000

Join the live Hangout on Air with Susan Wojcicki, SVP of Advertising and Commerce, and three AdSense publishers to celebrate our 10th anniversary today, at 10 AM PDT/ 1 PM ET. We'll share stories from the early days of AdSense and discuss the future for publishers and online advertising.

You can watch the hangout live below and submit a question to Susan with the hashtag #adsense10onair on Google+. Please note that she won't be able to address individual account questions.

Posted by Ian Cohan-Shapiro, Product Marketing Team

AdSense: Celebrating 10 years of shared success

Katie Miller — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:01:00 +0000

Originally posted on the official Google blog

Ten years ago we launched AdSense to help publishers earn money by placing relevant ads on their websites. I can still remember the excitement and anticipation as AdSense went live that first day. Our small team huddled together in a cramped conference room, and right away we saw that publishers were as excited about AdSense as we were.

Fast-forward 10 years, and AdSense has become a core part of Google’s advertising business. The AdSense community has grown to include more than 2 million publishers, and last year alone, publishers earned more than $7 billion from AdSense. AdSense is a community that thrives because of all the content creators we are so fortunate to partner with. Their stories inspire us to do our part to make AdSense great.

On this occasion, it’s especially inspiring to hear the stories of partners who have been with us since the very beginning—like a retiree in New Zealand who was able to pursue her dream of writing about her garden, a tech support expert in Colorado who can spend more time with his kids, and a theme park reviewer who now sends employees around the world to test and review rides—all thanks to money earned from AdSense.

As part of our 10th anniversary celebration, we hope you’ll tune into our live Hangout on Air today at 10 a.m. PDT (5 p.m. GMT) on the AdSense Google+ page. I look forward to joining several of our partners to share stories from the early days of AdSense, talk about how we’ve all grown since then, and discuss the future for publishers and online advertising. And if you want even more 10th anniversary celebration, just visit our AdSense 10th anniversary page at any time.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, SVP, Ads and Commerce

Some Innovative MOOCs

Research @ Google — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:00:00 +0000

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

Last summer, we jumped into the world of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) with our own course on search skills, Power Searching. Soon after, we open sourced the platform that we developed to present the course -- Course Builder. A large number of courses have been hosted on Course Builder since, with many more coming soon. As can be seen from the list of courses, our goal is to provide the capability for anyone to create a MOOC. We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the variety of courses and the creativity of the instructors building on Course Builder.

For example, GivingWithPurpose is an innovative MOOC presented by Learning By Giving, one of Doris Buffett’s foundations for “giving it all away.” Instructor Rebecca Riccio, who teaches philanthropy at both Northeastern and Brandeis Universities, feels that reaching thousands of people in a discussion about how to allocate scarce resources to address the needs of our communities has huge potential. “For all the social, cultural, and economic value we derive from the nonprofit sector, we do shockingly little to educate people about why it is so important and what we can do to help it thrive. So while I believe GivingWithPurpose will be successful in its primary goal of teaching students how to give more effectively, in ways that both satisfy their own motivations for giving and support high-performing nonprofit organizations, my second, perhaps more ambitious goal is to promote more informed civic engagement.”

We’ve also hosted MOOCs on evaluating and selecting soccer players, how to search for a job, and how to develop digital learning opportunities for students in public schools. We have many university courses such as Game Theory from Stanford and Information Visualization from Indiana University.

Course Builder’s support of both traditional and non-traditional education opportunities is core to its mission. We’ll continue to build features that help university professors, K12 teachers and anyone else who has something important to teach.

Combating rogue online pharmacies

Google Public Policy Blog — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:13:00 +0000

Posted by Adam Barea, Legal Director

Editor’s note: Over the years, we have run a series of blogposts detailing our efforts to remove bad ads from our systems, and describing our approach to handling controversial content on our services. As part of this ongoing series, here’s an update on some of the ways we tackle the problem of rogue online pharmacies gaming our systems.

For the last several years, Google has worked closely with a number of organizations, government agencies, and businesses to combat rogue online pharmacies from all angles.

Collectively, we are making it increasingly difficult for these operators to effectively promote their rogue pharmacies online. A variety of websites and web services are refusing ads from suspected rogue pharmacies. Domain name registrars are removing suspect rogue pharmacies from their networks. Payment processors are blocking payments to these operators, and social networking sites are removing them from their systems too.

As a result, rogue pharmacies continually adapt their online marketing practices, meaning this is an ongoing battle. We wanted to share some of the steps Google takes to combat them.

Keeping ads safe

Making sure ads appearing on Google and our partner sites are safe continues to be a top priority. We have extremely stringent ads policies, and use sophisticated automated systems, along with some human review, to identify, block and remove ads suspected of linking to rogue pharmacies. We disrupt their marketing efforts by making it difficult for rogue pharmacies to abuse our services and evade our filters.

Since 2010, we’ve only permitted U.S.-based online pharmacies accredited under the National Association Boards of Pharmacy “VIPPS” program to run pharma ads in our AdWords program. We were the first online search provider to require this certification - there are less than 40 VIPPS certified pharmacies operating in the U.S.
We partner with LegitScript, an independent company with deep knowledge about online pharmacies, to conduct weekly “sweeps” of ads on Google to help ensure that we are keeping our ads safe.
According to LegitScript, the number of illegal drug and pharmacy ads on major search engines like Google and Bing has declined by 99.9% percent since 2010.
In the last two years alone, Google has blocked or removed from its systems more than 3 million ads by suspected rogue pharmacies.

Search results

Our stance on filtering our search results is well-publicized. We do not remove content from search results except in narrow circumstances (e.g., child sexual abuse imagery, certain links to copyrighted material; spam; malware).

Search results reflect the web and what’s online - the good and the bad. Filtering a website from search results won’t remove it from the web, or block other websites that link to that website. It's not Google's place to determine what content should be censored - that responsibility belongs with the courts and the lawmakers.

Google will abide by court decisions deciding which content on the web is and is not legal. We have always removed from our search results any page found by a legitimate court to be unlawful, whether an online rogue pharmacy or otherwise.

Rogue pharmacies are clearly a matter of public concern. This is why we work closely with the Center for Safe Internet Pharmacies (“CSIP”), a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to stopping rogue online pharmacies and keeping consumers safe on the web. If a user searches on Google for terms related to online pharmacies or buying pharmaceuticals, a prominent advertisement from CSIP will often appear on the search results page, urging caution and linking to the LegitScript pharmacy verification tool.

CSIP’s ad campaign on Google is funded by a Google Grant, which provides non-profits like CSIP with financial and technical assistance to promote their important missions online. Campaigns like these help users to better understand the risks involved with rogue pharmacies and fake drugs, at the moment they’re searching for them, and provides users with a simple way to check if any pharmacy they find online is legitimate.

Updating autocomplete predictions

Autocomplete helps our users search faster. While a user types, autocomplete predicts the user’s most likely search queries based on what the user has already typed. These predictions are an algorithmic reflection of the search terms that are popular with users and on the Internet. We occasionally tweak autocomplete to prevent shocking or offensive entries from being displayed, but don’t otherwise decide which entries appear in autocomplete.

Because the feature is algorithmic, some autocomplete entries may include phrases that potentially relate to rogue pharmacies. We’re evaluating how best to address this issue, have already started running tests on the subject, and always welcome feedback.

It is still important to understand that - whether or not a predicted query is shown in autocomplete - people can still search for objectionable content that might exist on the web.

Enforcing YouTube guidelines

YouTube has implemented robust community guidelines governing uploaded content and user activity on YouTube. These guidelines prohibit spam, which includes the posting of large amounts of untargeted, unwanted, and repetitive content. YouTube's guidelines also prohibit the sale of illegal goods or promotion of dangerous activities. Our teams respond around the clock when such content is reported to us. To make the notification process as effective as possible, YouTube provides a flagging tool under every video on the site that lets users and law enforcement easily alert us whenever a video contains content that violates YouTube’s policies regarding pharmaceuticals or illegal drugs.

Earlier this month, YouTube was notified of a number of videos promoting pharmaceuticals that violated its guidelines, and immediately removed them. YouTube will continue doing so when notified.

Working together with regulators and the industry

In 2010, following discussions with the White House, Google teamed-up with organizations across different industries — including GoDaddy, Microsoft, Visa, Yahoo! — and took the important step of founding the industry group CSIP. In addition to its public awareness campaigns (such as the one mentioned above), CSIP recently highlighted some industry initiatives by its member companies against rogue pharmacies, and specifically called out the efforts of companies like Google here.

Over the last few years, Google has made thousands of referrals to law enforcement concerning suspected rogue online pharmacies, and will continue to do so.

In October 2012, we participated in the successful Operation Pangea, in which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, in partnership with international regulatory and law enforcement agencies, took action against more than 4,100 Internet pharmacies worldwide. We also regularly keep officials up to date on our efforts - in writing and in person. For example, when the National Association of Attorneys General Intellectual Property Committee invited multiple search engines to participate in discussions with the Committee on November 28, 2012, Google was the only search engine to do so.

*****

The industry as a whole has made significant strides in the fight against rogue pharmacies. Working together, companies in the private sector, non-profit organizations, and law enforcement have made it increasingly difficult for rogue pharmacies to effectively market their illegal products online, and operators of these sites are being forced to turn to much less effective marketing techniques from the outskirts of the Internet.

This is great progress, and Google remains committed to working with others in this important fight to protect our users.

Sweetgreen keeps things fresh with Google Apps

Jane Smith — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:06:00 +0000

Posted by Nathaniel Ru, Co-Founder, Sweetgreen

Editor's note: In honor of National Small Business Week, we'll be sharing stories about small businesses that have gone Google. Today’s guest blogger is Nathaniel Ru, Co-Founder of Sweetgreen, a retail food chain focused on making healthy eating easier. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Sweetgreen started as an idea I had with two of my friends, now my co-founders, while we were studying business at Georgetown University. We were frustrated by the lack of healthy eateries in Washington, D.C. and wanted to make eating healthy an affordable and easy option, especially on our undergrad budgets. We decided to make it happen ourselves, and launched our first Sweetgreen restaurant shortly after graduating in 2007.

We sell local and organic food, but we stand for a lifestyle: being healthy and environmentally conscious while creating great experiences around food. All of our Sweetgreen restaurants are designed with reclaimed materials, use biodegradable utensils, and compost waste. Our wooden tables and seats are made from pre-1980s bowling alleys, and our bowls, cutlery and cups are all 100% plant-based.

Google Apps allows us to be more than a traditional brick and mortar restaurant. We’re constantly evolving, changing and growing, and we realized early on that we needed our technology to be as flexible as the ingredients on our menu. We’re growing quickly - we’re opening two new markets this year - and we need technology that can grow with us.

We change our menu every month to highlight seasonal ingredients and keep things fresh. Our customers are generally curious about what they’re eating and what farm the ingredients come from, so we send talking points to the store managers. Google Sheets and Docs make this all happen for us. We have a running spreadsheet with the local ingredients and plan out each month in advance. The spreadsheet is then turned into a newsletter, and the great thing about Google is throughout that process every group has a chance to jump in and contribute. Once it’s completed, we send the newsletter out to our stores.

We also use Google Drive, which allows us to collaborate between departments. Marketing, Finance and HR can all look at one document at the same time, add their thoughts, and keep track of the changes each person makes along the way with revision history. It makes transparent communication easy, especially when we’re moving really fast (which is always).

Five years after the first seed was planted for this idea, we have more than 400 employees and 17 restaurants in four cities. At Sweetgreen, we believe in creating experiences that go beyond the transaction, and Google Apps has helped make that possible.

Celebrating 10 years of shared success

A Googler — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:35:00 +0000

Ten years ago we launched AdSense to help publishers earn money by placing relevant ads on their websites. I can still remember the excitement and anticipation as AdSense went live that first day.

Our small team huddled together in a cramped conference room, and right away we saw that publishers were as excited about AdSense as we were.

Fast-forward 10 years, and AdSense has become a core part of Google’s advertising business. The AdSense community has grown to include more than 2 million publishers, and last year alone, publishers earned more than $7 billion from AdSense. AdSense is a community that thrives because of all the content creators we are so fortunate to partner with. Their stories inspire us to do our part to make AdSense great.

On this occasion, it’s especially inspiring to hear the stories of partners who have been with us since the very beginning—like a retiree in New Zealand who was able to pursue her dream of writing about her garden, a tech support expert in Colorado who can spend more time with his kids, and a theme park reviewer who now sends employees around the world to test and review rides—all thanks to money earned from AdSense.

As part of our 10th anniversary celebration, we hope you’ll tune into our live Hangout on Air today at 10 a.m. PDT (5 p.m. GMT) on the AdSense Google+ page. I look forward to joining several of our partners to share stories from the early days of AdSense, talk about how we’ve all grown since then, and discuss the future for publishers and online advertising. And if you want even more 10th anniversary celebration, just visit our AdSense 10th anniversary page at any time.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, SVP, Ads and Commerce

Celebrating 10 years of shared success

Emily Wood — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:01:00 +0000

Ten years ago we launched AdSense to help publishers earn money by placing relevant ads on their websites. I can still remember the excitement and anticipation as AdSense went live that first day. Our small team huddled together in a cramped conference room, and right away we saw that publishers were as excited about AdSense as we were.

Fast-forward 10 years, and AdSense has become a core part of Google’s advertising business. The AdSense community has grown to include more than 2 million publishers, and last year alone, publishers earned more than $7 billion from AdSense. AdSense is a community that thrives because of all the content creators we are so fortunate to partner with. Their stories inspire us to do our part to make AdSense great.

On this occasion, it’s especially inspiring to hear the stories of partners who have been with us since the very beginning—like a retiree in New Zealand who was able to pursue her dream of writing about her garden, a tech support expert in Colorado who can spend more time with his kids, and a theme park reviewer who now sends employees around the world to test and review rides—all thanks to money earned from AdSense.

As part of our 10th anniversary celebration, we hope you’ll tune into our live Hangout on Air today at 10 a.m. PDT (5 p.m. GMT) on the AdSense Google+ page. I look forward to joining several of our partners to share stories from the early days of AdSense, talk about how we’ve all grown since then, and discuss the future for publishers and online advertising. And if you want even more 10th anniversary celebration, just visit our AdSense 10th anniversary page at any time.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, SVP, Ads and Commerce

Celebrating 10 years of shared success

Inside AdSense Team — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:01:00 +0000

Ten years ago we launched AdSense to help publishers earn money by placing relevant ads on their websites. I can still remember the excitement and anticipation as AdSense went live that first day. Our small team huddled together in a cramped conference room, and right away we saw that publishers were as excited about AdSense as we were.

Fast-forward ten years, and AdSense has become a core part of Google’s advertising business. The AdSense community has grown to include over two million publishers, and last year alone, publishers earned over $7 billion from AdSense. AdSense is a community that thrives because of all the content creators we are so fortunate to partner with. So whether you’re a publisher that's been with us for ten years or ten days -- thank you!

Your stories inspire us to do our part to make AdSense great. On this occasion, it’s especially inspiring to hear the stories of partners who have been with us since the very beginning. Like a retiree in New Zealand who was able to pursue her dream of writing about her garden, a tech support expert in Colorado who can spend more time with his kids, and a a theme park reviewer who sends employees around the world to test and review rides -- all thanks to money earned from AdSense.

As part of our 10th anniversary celebration, we hope you’ll tune into our live Hangout on Air today at 10am PDT (5pm GMT) on the AdSense +page. I look forward to joining several of our partners to share stories from the early days of AdSense, talk about how we’ve all grown since then, and discuss the future for publishers and online advertising. And if you want even more 10th anniversary celebration, just visit our AdSense 10th anniversary page at any time.

Thank you again to the entire AdSense community. We look forward to partnering with you for many more years to come!

Posted by Susan Wojcicki - SVP, Ads and Commerce
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Official Google CPG Blog 2013-06-17 17:12:00

Sarah Neels, CPG Marketing — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 21:12:00 +0000

New Learn with Google Webinar: Growing your Business and Engaging your Audience with Google+

Join us Wednesday at 10 PT/1 ET for a Learn with Google webinar "Growing your Business and Engaging your Audience with Google+". In this webinar, we'll provide a step-by-step guide for getting started on Google+. Topics will include new features, business success stories and best practices. (http://goo.gl/tt5QJ).

Posted by Christopher Moore, Google SMB

Chromebooks: coming to more stores near you

Google Chrome Blog — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 19:09:00 +0000

[Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog]

In Northern California where I live, summer is here, which means family vacations, kids’ camps, BBQs and hopefully some relaxation. But it also means back-to-school shopping is just around the corner. So in case you’re on the hunt for a laptop in addition to pens, paper, and stylish new outfits, your search just got a whole lot easier. Chromebooks—a fast, simple, secure laptop that won't break the bank—will now be carried in over 3 times more stores than before, or more than 6,600 stores around the world.

In addition to Best Buy and Amazon.com, we’re excited to welcome several new retailers to the family. Starting today, Walmart will be making the newest Acer Chromebook, which has a 16GB Solid State Drive (SSD), available in approximately 2,800 stores across the U.S., for just $199. Look for Chromebooks coming to the laptop sections of a Walmart near you this summer.

And beginning this weekend, Staples will bring a mix of Chromebooks from Acer, HP and Samsung to every store in the U.S.—more than 1,500 in total. You can also purchase via Staples online, while businesses can purchase through the Staples Advantage B2B program. In the coming months select Office Depot, OfficeMax, and regional chains Fry’s and TigerDirect locations will begin selling Chromebooks.

In the 10 other markets worldwide where Chromebooks are sold, availability in national retailers continues to expand. In addition to Dixons in the UK, now 116 Tesco stores are selling Chromebooks, as well as all Media Markt and Saturn stores in the Netherlands, FNAC stores in France and Elgiganten stores in Sweden. In Australia, all JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman stores will be carrying Chromebooks for their customers as well. With our partners, we’re working hard to bring Chromebooks to even more countries later this year.

Chromebooks make great computers for everyone in the family—and now you shouldn’t have to look very far to find one. Happy summer!

Posted by David Shapiro, Director of Chromebook Marketing, long-time reader, first-time poster

Chromebooks: coming to more stores near you

Emily Wood — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 19:05:00 +0000

In Northern California where I live, summer is here, which means family vacations, kids’ camps, BBQs and hopefully some relaxation. But it also means back-to-school shopping is just around the corner. So in case you’re on the hunt for a laptop in addition to pens, paper, and stylish new outfits, your search just got a whole lot easier. Chromebooks—a fast, simple, secure laptop that won't break the bank—will now be carried in over 3 times more stores than before, or more than 6,600 stores around the world.

In addition to Best Buy and Amazon.com, we’re excited to welcome several new retailers to the family. Starting today, Walmart will be making the newest Acer Chromebook, which has a 16GB Solid State Drive (SSD), available in approximately 2,800 stores across the U.S., for just $199. Look for Chromebooks coming to the laptop sections of a Walmart near you this summer.

And beginning this weekend, Staples will bring a mix of Chromebooks from Acer, HP and Samsung to every store in the U.S.—more than 1,500 in total. You can also purchase via Staples online, while businesses can purchase through the Staples Advantage B2B program. In the coming months select Office Depot, OfficeMax, and regional chains Fry’s and TigerDirect locations will begin selling Chromebooks.

In the 10 other markets worldwide where Chromebooks are sold, availability in national retailers continues to expand. In addition to Dixons in the UK, now 116 Tesco stores are selling Chromebooks, as well as all Media Markt and Saturn stores in the Netherlands, FNAC stores in France and Elgiganten stores in Sweden. In Australia, all JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman stores will be carrying Chromebooks for their customers as well. We’re working hard to bring Chromebooks to even more countries later this year.

Chromebooks make great computers for everyone in the family—and now you shouldn’t have to look very far to find one. Happy summer!

Posted by David Shapiro, Director of Chromebook Marketing

Google Summer of Code coding starts today!

Stephanie Taylor — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Today is the first day of coding for our 9th year of the Google Summer of Code program. This year 1,192 students will spend the next 12 weeks writing code for 177 different open source organizations.

We are excited to see the contributions this year’s students will make to the open source community.

For more information on important dates for the program please visit our timeline. Stay tuned as we will highlight some of the new mentoring organizations over the next few months.

Have a great summer!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Programs

Happy Small Business Week.

Jane Smith — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:11:00 +0000

Posted by Lisa Gevelber, VP Marketing, Americas

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

Our first AdWords customer was a small business selling live mail-order lobsters. It's been a long time since then, but a majority of our customers are still small businesses, who play a vital role not only for Google, but for the American economy. More than 60 percent of new jobs each year come from small businesses.

This Small Business Week, we want to celebrate you. We're grateful to you for everything you do for us and our communities. Whether you fix people’s cars, offer music lessons to aspiring musicians, or make the world’s best homemade ice cream - when you do what you love, our lives get better.

As part of the celebration, we’ll be highlighting some amazing small businesses across the country, so keep an eye on the Google+ Your Business page. And in the meantime, check out some of the Google tools that are designed to help you take care of business.

Happy Small Business Week.

Happy Small Business Week.

Emily Wood — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:09:00 +0000

Our first AdWords customer was a small business selling live mail-order lobsters. It’s been a long time since then, but a majority of our customers are still small businesses, who play a vital role not only for Google, but for the American economy. More than 60 percent of new jobs each year come from small businesses.

This Small Business Week, we want to celebrate you. We’re grateful to you for everything you do for us and our communities. Whether you fix people’s cars, offer music lessons to aspiring musicians, or make the world’s best homemade ice cream—when you do what you love, our lives get better.

As part of the celebration, we’ll be highlighting some amazing small businesses across the country, so keep an eye on the Google+ Your Business page. And in the meantime, check out some of the Google tools that are designed to help you take care of business.

Happy Small Business Week.

Posted by Lisa Gevelber, VP Marketing, Americas

Celebrating 10 years of shared success

Becky C. — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:00:00 +0000

Fast-forward ten years, and AdSense has become a core part of Google’s advertising business. The AdSense community has grown to include over two million publishers, and last year alone, publishers earned over $7 billion from AdSense. AdSense is a community that thrives because of all the content creators we are so fortunate to partner with. Their stories inspire us to do our part to make AdSense great.

On this occasion, it’s especially inspiring to hear the stories of partners who have been with us since the very beginning. Like a retiree in New Zealand who was able to pursue her dream of writing about her garden, a tech support expert in Colorado who can spend more time with his kids, and a theme park reviewer who now sends employees around the world to test and review rides -- all thanks to money earned from AdSense.

As part of our 10th anniversary celebration, we hope you’ll tune into our live Hangout on Air today at 10am PDT (5pm GMT) on the AdSense +page. I look forward to joining several of our partners to share stories from the early days of AdSense, talk about how we’ve all grown since then, and discuss the future for publishers and online advertising. And if you want even more 10th anniversary celebration, just visit our AdSense 10th anniversary page at any time.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki

Our continued commitment to combating child exploitation online

Emily Wood — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 05:48:00 +0000

The Internet has been a tremendous force for good—increasing access to information, improving people’s ability to communicate and driving economic growth. But like the physical world, there are dark corners on the web where criminal behavior exists.

In 2011, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s (NCMEC’s) Cybertipline Child Victim Identification Program reviewed 17.3 million images and videos of suspected child sexual abuse. This is four times more than what their Exploited Children's Division (ECD) saw in 2007. And the number is still growing. Behind these images are real, vulnerable kids who are sexually victimized and victimized further through the distribution of their images.

It is critical that we take action as a community—as concerned parents, guardians, teachers and companies—to help combat this problem.

Child sexual exploitation is a global problem that needs a global solution. More than half of the images and videos sent to NCMEC for analysis are found to have been uploaded to U.S. servers from outside the country. With this in mind, we need to sustain and encourage borderless communication between organizations fighting this problem on the ground. For example, NCMEC’s CyberTipline is able to refer reports regarding online child sexual exploitation to 66 countries, helping local law enforcement agencies effectively execute their investigations.

Google has been working on fighting child exploitation since as early as 2006 when we joined the Technology Coalition, teaming up with other tech industry companies to develop technical solutions. Since then, we’ve been providing software and hardware to helping organizations all around the world to fight child abuse images on the web and help locate missing children.

There is much more that can be done, and Google is taking our commitment another step further through a $5 million effort to eradicate child abuse imagery online. Part of this commitment will go to global child protection partners like the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation. We’re providing additional support to similar heroic organizations in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia and Latin America.

Since 2008, we’ve used “hashing” technology to tag known child sexual abuse images, allowing us to identify duplicate images which may exist elsewhere. Each offending image in effect gets a unique ID that our computers can recognize without humans having to view them again. Recently, we’ve started working to incorporate encrypted “fingerprints” of child sexual abuse images into a cross-industry database. This will enable companies, law enforcement and charities to better collaborate on detecting and removing these images, and to take action against the criminals. Today we’ve also announced a $2 million Child Protection Technology Fund to encourage the development of ever more effective tools.

We’re in the business of making information widely available, but there’s certain “information” that should never be created or found. We can do a lot to ensure it’s not available online—and that when people try to share this disgusting content they are caught and prosecuted.

Update June 17: Clarified language around NCMEC's Child Victim Identification Program and CyberTipline.

Posted by Jacquelline Fuller, Director, Google Giving

Introducing Project Loon: Balloon-powered Internet access

Emily Wood — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 03:16:00 +0000

The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem.

There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity—jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month’s income.

Solving these problems isn’t simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we’re unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access.

We believe that it might actually be possible to build a ring of balloons, flying around the globe on the stratospheric winds, that provides Internet access to the earth below. It’s very early days, but we’ve built a system that uses balloons, carried by the wind at altitudes twice as high as commercial planes, to beam Internet access to the ground at speeds similar to today’s 3G networks or faster. As a result, we hope balloons could become an option for connecting rural, remote, and underserved areas, and for helping with communications after natural disasters. The idea may sound a bit crazy—and that’s part of the reason we’re calling it Project Loon—but there’s solid science behind it.

Balloons, with all their effortless elegance, present some challenges. Many projects have looked at high-altitude platforms to provide Internet access to fixed areas on the ground, but trying to stay in one place like this requires a system with major cost and complexity. So the idea we pursued was based on freeing the balloons and letting them sail freely on the winds. All we had to do was figure out how to control their path through the sky. We’ve now found a way to do that, using just wind and solar power: we can move the balloons up or down to catch the winds we want them to travel in. That solution then led us to a new problem: how to manage a fleet of balloons sailing around the world so that each balloon is in the area you want it right when you need it. We’re solving this with some complex algorithms and lots of computing power.

Now we need some help—this experiment is going to take way more than our team alone. This week we started a pilot program in the Canterbury area of New Zealand with 50 testers trying to connect to our balloons. This is the first time we’ve launched this many balloons (30 this week, in fact) and tried to connect to this many receivers on the ground, and we’re going to learn a lot that will help us improve our technology and balloon design.

Over time, we’d like to set up pilots in countries at the same latitude as New Zealand. We also want to find partners for the next phase of our project—we can’t wait to hear feedback and ideas from people who’ve been working for far longer than we have on this enormous problem of providing Internet access to rural and remote areas. We imagine someday you'll be able to use your cell phone with your existing service provider to connect to the balloons and get connectivity where there is none today.

This is still highly experimental technology and we have a long way to go—we’d love your support as we keep trying and keep flying! Follow our Google+ page to keep up with Project Loon’s progress.

Onward and upward.

Posted by Mike Cassidy, Project Lead

Darting around Fab Friday

Mano Marks — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 16:00:00 +0000

It’s Friday again, you made it through another week! OK, we made it through another week.

I’m actually pretty excited because next week I’m going to Israel. If you’re in Tel Aviv, I’ll be speaking at the GDG on Tuesday the 19th, come and say hi. Pieter Greyling and Kasia Derc-Fenske will be speaking with me, so you’ll get a three-in-one.

On Tuesday, I hosted another Google Maps Shortcut episode, this time on Tiling in the Google Maps SDK for iOS. Check it out.

Next week Brett Morgan will be hosting a Maps Shortcut on using Google Maps with Dart. Be sure to check that out.

That’s all I’ve got this week. Have a great weekend and, as always, happy mapping!

Posted by Mano Marks, Maps Developer Relations Team

Optimal Logging

Google Testing Bloggers — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 14:58:00 +0000

by Anthony Vallone

How long does it take to find the root cause of a failure in your system? Five minutes? Five days? If you answered close to five minutes, it’s very likely that your production system and tests have great logging. All too often, seemingly unessential features like logging, exception handling, and (dare I say it) testing are an implementation afterthought. Like exception handling and testing, you really need to have a strategy for logging in both your systems and your tests. Never underestimate the power of logging. With optimal logging, you can even eliminate the necessity for debuggers. Below are some guidelines that have been useful to me over the years.

Channeling Goldilocks

Never log too much. Massive, disk-quota burning logs are a clear indicator that little thought was put in to logging. If you log too much, you’ll need to devise complex approaches to minimize disk access, maintain log history, archive large quantities of data, and query these large sets of data. More importantly, you’ll make it very difficult to find valuable information in all the chatter.

The only thing worse than logging too much is logging too little. There are normally two main goals of logging: help with bug investigation and event confirmation. If your log can’t explain the cause of a bug or whether a certain transaction took place, you are logging too little.

Good things to log:

Important startup configuration
Errors
Warnings
Changes to persistent data
Requests and responses between major system components
Significant state changes
User interactions
Calls with a known risk of failure
Waits on conditions that could take measurable time to satisfy
Periodic progress during long-running tasks
Significant branch points of logic and conditions that led to the branch
Summaries of processing steps or events from high level functions - Avoid logging every step of a complex process in low-level functions.

Bad things to log:

Function entry - Don’t log a function entry unless it is significant or logged at the debug level.
Data within a loop - Avoid logging from many iterations of a loop. It is OK to log from iterations of small loops or to log periodically from large loops.
Content of large messages or files - Truncate or summarize the data in some way that will be useful to debugging.
Benign errors - Errors that are not really errors can confuse the log reader. This sometimes happens when exception handling is part of successful execution flow.
Repetitive errors - Do not repetitively log the same or similar error. This can quickly fill a log and hide the actual cause. Frequency of error types is best handled by monitoring. Logs only need to capture detail for some of those errors.

There is More Than One Level

Don't log everything at the same log level. Most logging libraries offer several log levels, and you can enable certain levels at system startup. This provides a convenient control for log verbosity.

The classic levels are:

Debug - verbose and only useful while developing and/or debugging.
Info - the most popular level.
Warning - strange or unexpected states that are acceptable.
Error - something went wrong, but the process can recover.
Critical - the process cannot recover, and it will shutdown or restart.

Practically speaking, only two log configurations are needed:

Production - Every level is enabled except debug. If something goes wrong in production, the logs should reveal the cause.
Development & Debug - While developing new code or trying to reproduce a production issue, enable all levels.

Test Logs Are Important Too

Log quality is equally important in test and production code. When a test fails, the log should clearly show whether the failure was a problem with the test or production system. If it doesn't, then test logging is broken.

Test logs should always contain:

Test execution environment
Initial state
Setup steps
Test case steps
Interactions with the system
Expected results
Actual results
Teardown steps

Conditional Verbosity With Temporary Log Queues

When errors occur, the log should contain a lot of detail. Unfortunately, detail that led to an error is often unavailable once the error is encountered. Also, if you’ve followed advice about not logging too much, your log records prior to the error record may not provide adequate detail. A good way to solve this problem is to create temporary, in-memory log queues. Throughout processing of a transaction, append verbose details about each step to the queue. If the transaction completes successfully, discard the queue and log a summary. If an error is encountered, log the content of the entire queue and the error. This technique is especially useful for test logging of system interactions.

Failures and Flakiness Are Opportunities

When production problems occur, you’ll obviously be focused on finding and correcting the problem, but you should also think about the logs. If you have a hard time determining the cause of an error, it's a great opportunity to improve your logging. Before fixing the problem, fix your logging so that the logs clearly show the cause. If this problem ever happens again, it’ll be much easier to identify.

If you cannot reproduce the problem, or you have a flaky test, enhance the logs so that the problem can be tracked down when it happens again.

Using failures to improve logging should be used throughout the development process. While writing new code, try to refrain from using debuggers and only use the logs. Do the logs describe what is going on? If not, the logging is insufficient.

Might As Well Log Performance Data

Logged timing data can help debug performance issues. For example, it can be very difficult to determine the cause of a timeout in a large system, unless you can trace the time spent on every significant processing step. This can be easily accomplished by logging the start and finish times of calls that can take measurable time:

Significant system calls
Network requests
CPU intensive operations
Connected device interactions
Transactions

Following the Trail Through Many Threads and Processes

You should create unique identifiers for transactions that involve processing across many threads and/or processes. The initiator of the transaction should create the ID, and it should be passed to every component that performs work for the transaction. This ID should be logged by each component when logging information about the transaction. This makes it much easier to trace a specific transaction when many transactions are being processed concurrently.

Monitoring and Logging Complement Each Other

A production service should have both logging and monitoring. Monitoring provides a real-time statistical summary of the system state. It can alert you if a percentage of certain request types are failing, it is experiencing unusual traffic patterns, performance is degrading, or other anomalies occur. In some cases, this information alone will clue you to the cause of a problem. However, in most cases, a monitoring alert is simply a trigger for you to start an investigation. Monitoring shows the symptoms of problems. Logs provide details and state on individual transactions, so you can fully understand the cause of problems.

Map of the Week: Citymapper Android App

Mano Marks — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 00:02:00 +0000

Map of the Week: Citymapper Android App

Why we like it: Citymapper is a great example of combining Google’s data and basemap with an app developer’s own data and making a slick, useful interface. Citymapper helps Londoners get around by showing them locations of tube stations, bus routes, taxi fares, the status of transit lines, and much more. It’s built on top of the Google Maps Android API v2 and our Directions and Geocoding services.

It all starts with figuring out what you want to do.

From there you can get walking, biking, transit, or taxi directions. It’ll even tell you how many calories you’ll burn, or how much the taxi should cost.

You can also get information on Tube closures.

And play with a rampaging Android.

You can save your favorite lines and stations in the app as well, allowing you to customize your experience. All around, this is a great combination of our maps with highly localized data.

Posted by Mano Marks, Maps Developer Relations Team

Retiring Chrome Frame

Jane Smith — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 18:02:00 +0000

Posted by Robert Shield, Google Chrome Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Chromium Blog)

The main goal of the Chromium project has always been to help unlock the potential of the open web. We work closely with the industry to standardize, implement and evangelize web technologies that help enable completely new types of experiences, and push the leading edge of the web platform forward.

But in 2009, many people were using browsers that lagged behind the leading edge. In order to reach the broadest base of users, developers often had to either build multiple versions of their applications or not use the new capabilities at all. We created Chrome Frame — a secure plug-in that brings a modern engine to old versions of Internet Explorer — to allow developers to bring better experiences to more users, even those who were unable to move to a more capable browser.

Today, most people are using modern browsers that support the majority of the latest web technologies. Better yet, the usage of legacy browsers is declining significantly and newer browsers stay up to date automatically, which means the leading edge has become mainstream.

Given these factors we’ve decided to retire Chrome Frame, and will cease support and updates for the product in January 2014. If you are a developer with an app that points users to Chrome Frame, please prompt visitors to upgrade to a modern browser. You can learn more about these changes in our FAQ.

If you’re an IT administrator you can give your employees the full capabilities of a modern browser today, even if you depend on older technology to run certain web apps. Check out Chrome for Business coupled with Legacy Browser Support, which allows employees to switch seamlessly between Chrome and another browser. Chrome is secure, stable and speedy, and runs on all major desktop and mobile OSs. IT admins can also configure 100+ policies to make Chrome fit their needs.

It’s unusual to build something and hope it eventually makes itself obsolete, but in this case we see the retirement of Chrome Frame as evidence of just how far the web has come.

Live at 10:30PT/ 1:30ET – Hangout with Mark Walker, SVP, Disney.com

Yamini Gupta — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:56:00 +0000

How is Disney.com leveraging online video to deliver engaging user experiences?

That's the question Xavier Kochhar, CEO, Structured Data Intelligence, is going to explore in our hangout on air with Mark Walker, SVP, Disney.com.

You can view the conversation right here at 10:30PT/ 1:30 ET. If you'd like to leave comments or questions for Mark, please look for the Hangout in the Think with Google +page stream.

Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Team

Experience 1,001 New Destinations with Street View

Lat Long — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:21:00 +0000

Today we’re adding more than 1,000 locations around the world to Google Maps, making it more comprehensive and useful for you. From historical landmarks to sports stadiums, these panoramic photos available via Street View can help you ease into vacation mode with just a few simple clicks. Below are highlights from Asia, Europe, Latin America, the U.S. and Canada that you can use to preview a vacation spot, to plot your next hiking route or just to become an armchair explorer from wherever you may be:

Go from city life to wildlife park in Singapore:

Planning on stopping by Singapore this summer? You can now explore more of the island’s diverse landscapes right from Google Maps. To get a taste of modern city life in Singapore, simply search for Marina Bay Waterfront Promenade and Fullerton Heritage Promenade and use Street View to explore the city’s popular bay front and bay skyline. If you’re planning to travel with family or are simply an animal lover at heart, you can also now go on a virtual adventure to the Singapore Zoo.

Fullerton Heritage Promenade (View Larger Map)

Discover some of Europe’s riches:
While you’re basking in Seville’s sun and sampling its famous oranges, check out the stunning Seville Cathedral against the bright blue Spanish sky. It’s the largest Gothic cathedral (and third largest church) in the world and served as a trading hub and bastion of the city’s wealth in the years following the Reconquista in the 13th century. Or maybe take a virtual sightseeing trip down the serene canals of Copenhagen, Denmark this summer. From the boat you can see cultural landmarks like the Royal Opera and Theater Houses and even the sculpture of The Little Mermaid from Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairytale.

The canals in Copenhagen (Vizualizare hartă mărită)

Take a pilgrimage to Latin America:
Take a virtual journey to Brazil’s Basilica of the National Shrine of Our Lady Aparecida, the most visited Marian shrine in the world. You can also visit Brazil’s Vila Belmiro stadium, home to Santos Soccer Club and of past and present phenoms, Pelé and Neymar. Experience Bosque de Chapultepec (Chapultepec Park), a natural oasis in the middle of Mexico City and one of the largest city parks in the Western Hemisphere. Or get ready for the slopes with a preview of Valle Nevada Resort, one Chile’s hottest ski resorts just a few miles outside of Santiago.

Basilica of the National Shrine of Our Lady Aparecida (View Larger Map)

Take a trip down memory lane in the US:
Visit some of the nation’s historic landmarks with a road trip down the East Coast. Stops include The Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, Connecticut where one of America’s greatest authors and his family lived from 1874 to 1891; the Isaac Bell House in Newport, Rhode Island built in 1883 for the famous cotton broker and investor; and the Cape Henry Lighthouse in Virginia, which has guarded the Chesapeake Bay since 1792. Finally, explore the historic Vermont State House where for over 150 years citizen legislators have gathered every winter to debate the laws of Vermont.

The Vermont State House (View Larger Map)

Canadian stages taking centre stage:
Just in time for summer theatre season, Street View users can virtually visit The Shaw Festival Theatre, Edmonton's Citadel Theatre, Manitoba Centennial Concert Hall, Roy Thomson Hall and the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, home of the Canadian Opera Company.

Roy Thomson Hall (View Larger Map)

Whether you’re hitting the slopes in South America or soaking up the summer sunshine north of the equator, we hope you enjoy exploring the world! To see this imagery and experience it through Street View, download the Google Maps app for Android or iPhone today.

Post content Posted by Deanna Yick, Street View Program Manager

Excellent Papers for 2012

Research @ Google — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:00:00 +0000

Posted by Corinna Cortes and Alfred Spector, Google Research

Googlers across the company actively engage with the scientific community by publishing technical papers, contributing open-source packages, working on standards, introducing new APIs and tools, giving talks and presentations, participating in ongoing technical debates, and much more. Our publications offer technical and algorithmic advances, feature aspects we learn as we develop novel products and services, and shed light on some of the technical challenges we face at Google.

In an effort to highlight some of our work, we periodically select a number of publications to be featured on this blog. We first posted a set of papers on this blog in mid-2010 and subsequently discussed them in more detail in the following blog postings. In a second round, we highlighted new noteworthy papers from the later half of 2010 and again in 2011. This time we honor the influential papers authored or co-authored by Googlers covering all of 2012 -- covering roughly 6% of our total publications. It’s tough choosing, so we may have left out some important papers. So, do see the publications list to review the complete group.

In the coming weeks we will be offering a more in-depth look at some of these publications, but here are the summaries:

Algorithms and Theory

Online Matching with Stochastic Rewards
Aranyak Mehta*, Debmalya Panigrahi [FOCS'12]
Online advertising is inherently stochastic: value is realized only if the user clicks on the ad, while the ad platform knows only the probability of the click. This paper is the first to introduce the stochastic nature of the rewards to the rich algorithmic field of online allocations. The core algorithmic problem it formulates is online bipartite matching with stochastic rewards, with known click probabilities. The main result is an online algorithm which obtains a large fraction of the optimal value. The paper also shows the difficulty introduced by the stochastic nature, by showing how it behaves very differently from the classic (non-stochastic) online matching problem.

Matching with our Eyes Closed
Gagan Goel*, Pushkar Tripathi* [FOCS'12]
In this paper we propose a simple randomized algorithm for finding a matching in a large graph. Unlike most solutions to this problem, our approach does not rely on building large combinatorial structures (like blossoms) but works completely locally. We analyze the performance of our algorithm and show that it does significantly better than the greedy algorithm. In doing so we improve a celebrated 18 year old result by Aronson et. al.

Simultaneous Approximations for Adversarial and Stochastic Online Budgeted Allocation
Vahab Mirrokni*, Shayan Oveis Gharan, Morteza Zadimoghaddam, [SODA'12]
In this paper, we study online algorithms that simultaneously perform well in worst-case and average-case instances, or equivalently algorithms that perform well in both stochastic and adversarial models at the same time. This is motivated by online allocation of queries to advertisers with budget constraints. Stochastic models are not robust enough to deal with traffic spikes and adversarial models are too pessimistic. While several algorithms have been proposed for these problems, each algorithm was known to perform well in one model and not both, and we present new results for a single algorithm that works well in both models.

Economics and EC

Polyhedral Clinching Auctions and the Adwords Polytope
Gagan Goel*, Vahab Mirrokni*, Renato Paes Leme [STOC'12]
Budgets play a major role in ad auctions where advertisers explicitly declare budget constraints. Very little is known in auctions about satisfying such budget constraints while keeping incentive compatibility and efficiency. The problem becomes even harder in the presence of complex combinatorial constraints over the set of feasible allocations. We present a class of ascending-price auctions addressing this problem for a very general class of (polymatroid) allocation constraints including the AdWords problem with multiple keywords and multiple slots.

HCI

Backtracking Events as Indicators of Usability Problems in Creation-Oriented Applications
David Akers*, Robin Jeffries*, Matthew Simpson*, Terry Winograd [TOCHI '12]
Backtracking events such as undo can be useful automatic indicators of usability problems for creation-oriented applications such as word processors and photo editors. Our paper presents a new cost-effective usability evaluation method based on this insight.

Talking in Circles: Selective Sharing in Google+
Sanjay Kairam, Michael J. Brzozowski*, David Huffaker*, Ed H. Chi*, [CHI'12]
This paper explores why so many people share selectively on Google+: to protect their privacy but also to focus and target their audience. People use Circles to support these goals, organizing contacts by life facet, tie strength, and interest.

Information Retrieval

Online selection of diverse results
Debmalya Panigrahi, Atish Das Sarma, Gagan Aggarwal*, and Andrew Tomkins*, [WSDM'12]
We consider the problem of selecting subsets of items that are simultaneously diverse in multiple dimensions, which arises in the context of recommending interesting content to users. We formally model this optimization problem, identify its key structural characteristics, and use these observations to design an extremely scalable and efﬁcient algorithm. We prove that the algorithm always produces a nearly optimal solution and also perform experiments on real-world data that indicate that the algorithm performs even better in practice than the analytical guarantees.

Machine Learning

Large Scale Distributed Deep Networks
Jeffrey Dean, Greg S. Corrado*, Rajat Monga, Kai Chen, Matthieu Devin, Quoc V. Le, Mark Z. Mao, Marc’Aurelio Ranzato, Andrew Senior, Paul Tucker, Ke Yang, Andrew Y. Ng, NIPS 2012;
In this paper, we examine several techniques to improve the time to convergence for neural networks and other models trained by gradient-based methods. The paper describes a system we have built that exploits both model-level parallelism (by partitioning the nodes of a large model across multiple machines) and data-level parallelism (by having multiple replicas of a model process different training data and coordinating the application of updates to the model state through a centralized-but-partitioned parameter server system). Our results show that very large neural networks can be trained effectively and quickly on large clusters of machines.

Open Problem: Better Bounds for Online Logistic Regression
Brendan McMahan* and Matthew Streeter*, COLT/ICML'12 Joint Open Problem Session, JMLR: Workshop and Conference Proceedings.
One of the goals of research at Google is to help point out important open problems--precise questions that are interesting academically but also have important practical ramifications. This open problem is about logistic regression, a widely used algorithm for predicting probabilities (what is the probability an email message is spam, or that a search ad will be clicked). We show that in the simple one-dimensional case, much better results are possible than current theoretical analysis suggests, and we ask whether our results can be generalized to arbitrary logistic regression problems.

Spectral Learning of General Weighted Automata via Constrained Matrix Completion
Borja Balle and Mehryar Mohri*, NIPS 2012.
Learning weighted automata from finite samples drawn from an unknown distribution is a central problem in machine learning and computer science in general, with a variety of applications in text and speech processing, bioinformatics, and other areas. This paper presents a new family of algorithms for tackling this problem for which it proves learning guarantees. The algorithms introduced combine ideas from two different domains: matrix completion and spectral methods.

Machine Translation

Improved Domain Adaptation for Statistical Machine Translation
Wei Wang*, Klaus Macherey*, Wolfgang Macherey*, Franz Och* and Peng Xu*, [AMTA'12]
Research in domain adaptation for machine translation has been mostly focusing on one domain. We present a simple and effective domain adaptation infrastructure that makes an MT system with a single translation model capable of providing adapted, close-to-upper-bound domain-specific accuracy while preserving the generic translation accuracy. Large-scale experiments on 20 language pairs for patent and generic domains show the viability of our approach.

Multimedia and Computer Vision

Reconstructing the World's Museums
Jianxiong Xiao and Yasutaka Furukawa*, [ECCV '12]
Virtual navigation and exploration of large indoor environments (e.g., museums) have been so far limited to either blueprint-style 2D maps that lack photo-realistic views of scenes, or ground-level image-to-image transitions, which are immersive but ill-suited for navigation. This paper presents a novel vision-based 3D reconstruction and visualization system to automatically produce clean and well-regularized texture-mapped 3D models for large indoor scenes, from ground-level photographs and 3D laser points. For the first time, we enable users to easily browse a large scale indoor environment from a bird's-eye view, locate specific room interiors, fly into a place of interest, view immersive ground-level panoramas, and zoom out again, all with seamless 3D transitions.

The intervalgram: An audio feature for large-scale melody recognition
Thomas C. Walters*, David Ross*, Richard F. Lyon*, [CMMR'12]
Intervalgrams are small images that summarize the structure of short segments of music by looking at the musical intervals between the notes present in the music. We use them for finding cover songs - different pieces of music that share the same underlying composition. Wedo this by comparing 'heatmaps' which look at the similarity between intervalgrams from different pieces of music over time. If we see a strong diagonal line in the heatmap, it's good evidence that the songs are musically similar.

General and Nested Wiberg Minimization
Dennis Strelow*, [CVPR'12]
Eriksson and van den Hengel’s CVPR 2010 paper showed that Wiberg’s least squares matrix factorization, which effectively eliminates one matrix from the factorization problem, could be applied to the harder case of L1 factorization. Our paper generalizes their approach beyond factorization to general nonlinear problems in two sets of variables, like perspective structure-from-motion. We also show that with our generalized method, one Wiberg minimization can also be nested inside another, effectively eliminating two of three sets of unknowns, and we demonstrated this idea using projective struture-from-motion

Calibration-Free Rolling Shutter Removal
Matthias Grundmann*, Vivek Kwatra*, Daniel Castro, Irfan Essa*, International Conference on Computational Photography '12. Best paper.
Mobile phones and current generation DSLR’s, contain an electronic rolling shutter, capturing each frame one row of pixels at a time. Consequently, if the camera moves during capture, it will cause image distortions ranging from shear to wobbly distortions. We propose a calibration-free solution based on a novel parametric mixture model to correct these rolling shutter distortions in videos that enables real-time rolling shutter rectification as part of YouTube’s video stabilizer.

Natural Language Processing

Vine Pruning for Efficient Multi-Pass Dependency Parsing
Alexander Rush, Slav Petrov*, The 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL '12), Best Paper Award.
Being able to accurately analyze the grammatical structure of sentences is crucial for language understanding applications such as machine translation or question answering. In this paper we present a method that is up to 200 times faster than existing methods and enables the grammatical analysis of text in large-scale applications. The key idea is to perform the analysis in multiple coarse-to-fine passes, resolving easy ambiguities first and tackling the harder ones later on.

Cross-lingual Word Clusters for Direct Transfer of Linguistic Structure
Oscar Tackstrom, Ryan McDonald*, Jakob Uszkoreit*, North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL '12), Best Student Paper Award.
This paper studies how to build meaningful cross-lingual word clusters, i.e., clusters containing lexical items from two languages that are coherent along some abstract dimension. This is done by coupling distributional statistics learned from huge amounts of language specific data coupled with constraints generated from parallel corpora. The resulting clusters are used to improve the accuracy of multi-lingual syntactic parsing for languages without any training resources.

Networks

How to Split a Flow
Tzvika Hartman*, Avinatan Hassidim*, Haim Kaplan*, Danny Raz*, Michal Segalov*, [INFOCOM '12]
Decomposing a ﬂow into a small number of paths is a very important task arises in various network optimization mechanisms. In this paper we develop an an approximation algorithm for this problem that has both provable worst case performance grantees as well as good practical behavior.

Deadline-Aware Datacenter TCP (D2TCP)
Balajee Vamanan, Jahangir Hasan*, T. N. Vijaykumar, [SIGCOMM '12]
Some of our most important products like search and ads operate under soft-real-time constraints. They are architected and fine-tuned to return results to users within a few hundred milliseconds. Deadline-Aware Datacenter TCP is a research effort into making the datacenter networks deadline aware, thus improving the performance of such key applications.

Trickle: Rate Limiting YouTube Video Streaming
Monia Ghobadi, Yuchung Cheng*, Ankur Jain*, Matt Mathis* [USENIX '12]
Trickle is a server-side mechanism to stream YouTube video smoothly to reduce burst and buffer-bloat. It paces the video stream by placing an upper bound on TCP’s congestion window based on the streaming rate and the round-trip time. In initial evaluation Trickle reduces the TCP loss rate by up to 43% and the RTT by up to 28%. Given the promising results we are deploying Trickle to all YouTube servers.

Social Systems

Look Who I Found: Understanding the Effects of Sharing Curated Friend Groups
Lujun Fang*, Alex Fabrikant*, Kristen LeFevre*, [Web Science '12]. Best Student Paper award.
In this paper, we studied the impact of the Google+ circle-sharing feature, which allows individual users to share (publicly and privately) pre-curated groups of friends and contacts. We specifically investigated the impact on the growth and structure of the Google+ social network. In the course of the analysis, we identified two natural categories of shared circles ("communities" and "celebrities"). We also observed that the circle-sharing feature is associated with the accelerated densification of community-type circles.

Software Engineering

AddressSanitizer: A Fast Address Sanity Checker
Konstantin Serebryany*, Derek Bruening*, Alexander Potapenko*, Dmitry Vyukov*, [USENIX ATC '12].
The paper “AddressSanitizer: A Fast Address Sanity Checker” describes a dynamic tool that finds memory corruption bugs in C or C++ programs with only a 2x slowdown. The major feature of AddressSanitizer is simplicity -- this is why the tool is very fast.

Speech

Japanese and Korean Voice Search
Mike Schuster*, Kaisuke Nakajima*, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing [ICASSP'12].
"Japanese and Korean voice search" explains in detail how the Android voice search systems for these difficult languages were developed. We describe how to segment statistically to be able to handle infinite vocabularies without out-of-vocabulary words, how to handle the lack of spaces between words for language modeling and dictionary generation, and how to deal best with multiple ambiguities during evaluation scoring of reference transcriptions against hypotheses. The combination of techniques presented led to high quality speech recognition systems--as of 6/2013 Japanese and Korean are #2 and #3 in terms of traffic after the US.

Google's Cross-Dialect Arabic Voice Search
Fadi Biadsy*, Pedro J. Moreno*, Martin Jansche*, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing [ICASSP 2012].
This paper describes Google’s automatic speech recognition systems for recognizing several Arabic dialects spoken in the Middle East, with the potential to reach more than 125 million users. We suggest solutions for challenges specific to Arabic, such as the diacritization problem, where short vowels are not written in Arabic text. We conduct experiments to identify the optimal manner in which acoustic data should be clustered among dialects.

Deep Neural Networks for Acoustic Modeling in Speech Recognition
Geoffrey Hinton*, Li Deng, Dong Yu, George Dahl, Abdel-rahman Mohamed, Navdeep Jaitly, Andrew W. Senior*, Vincent Vanhoucke*, Patrick Nguyen, Tara Sainath, Brian Kingsbury, Signal Processing Magazine (2012)"
Survey paper on the DNN breakthrough in automatic speech recognition accuracy.

Statistics

Empowering Online Advertisements by Empowering Viewers with the Right to Choose
Max Pashkevich*, Sundar Dorai-Raj*, Melanie Kellar*, Dan Zigmond*, Journal of Advertising Research, vol. 52 (2012).
YouTube’s TrueView in-stream video advertising format (a form of skippable in-stream ads) can improve the online video viewing experience for users without sacrificing advertising value for advertisers or content owners.

Structured Data

Efficient Spatial Sampling of Large Geographical Tables
Anish Das Sarma*, Hongrae Lee*, Hector Gonzalez*, Jayant Madhavan*, Alon Halevy*, [SIGMOD '12].
This paper presents fundamental results for the "thinning problem": determining appropriate samples of data to be shown on specific geographical regions and zoom levels. This problem is widely applicable for a number of cloud-based geographic visualization systems such as Google Maps, Fusion Tables, and the developed algorithms are part of the Fusion Tables backend. The SIGMOD 2012 paper was selected among the best papers of the conference, and invited to a special best-papers issue of TODS.

Systems

Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database
James C. Corbett*, Jeffrey Dean*, Michael Epstein*, Andrew Fikes*, Christopher Frost*, JJ Furman*, Sanjay Ghemawat*, Andrey Gubarev*, Christopher Heiser*, Peter Hochschild*, Wilson Hsieh*, Sebastian Kanthak*, Eugene Kogan*, Hongyi Li*, Alexander Lloyd*, Sergey Melnik*, David Mwaura*, David Nagle*, Sean Quinlan*, Rajesh Rao*, Lindsay Rolig*, Dale Woodford*, Yasushi Saito*, Christopher Taylor*, Michal Szymaniak*, Ruth Wang*, [OSDI '12]
This paper shows how a new time API and its implementation can provide the abstraction of tightly synchronized clocks, even on a global scale. We describe how we used this technology to build a globally-distributed database that supports a variety of powerful features: non-blocking reads in the past, lock-free snapshot transactions, and atomic schema changes.

Getting healthy just got a little easier

Emily Wood — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 15:28:00 +0000

We’re all looking for ways to get a little healthier and smarter about the choices we make. Having tools and information at your fingertips might help bring a bit of motivation to your routine, and of course good tunes and a strong community doesn’t hurt either.

What’s in that cupcake?
Want to know how many calories are in a cupcake, or how much potassium is in a banana? You can now find nutrition information for over 1,000 foods in search - helping you stay informed about what you eat more quickly and easily. While using voice search, on desktop, your iPhone, or Android device you can ask, “how many calories are in a cupcake?” and you can follow-up and ask, “how about a cookie?” without needing to repeat parts of your question. Fruits and vegetables don’t have labels, and it’s often hard to track down the nutritional info for wine or more complex dishes like a burrito, so type or tap the microphone and easily ask your question for these foods and more.

Explore what’s around you, on two wheels
If you want a change of scenery from the gym, use Google Maps on your Android device to find nearby biking routes. Mount your device on your handlebars to see the turn-by-turn directions and navigation, or use speaker-mode to hear voice-guided directions for more than 330,000 miles of trails and paths around the world. Dark green lines on the map show dedicated bike trails and paths without cars, light green lines show streets with dedicated bike lanes, and dashed green lines show other streets recommended for cycling.

Team up to get fit
Looking to get healthy with a friend? Join a Google+ Community and connect with others that share your diet and exercise goals. Check out Communities such as Eating Right and Fitness & Weight Loss for motivation, tips and inspiration to keep you on track. Use Hangouts On Air to learn what experts like The Biggest Loser are saying about nutrition or jump into a yoga class.

Don’t stop the music
A good beat will keep you moving and motivated. Sign up for All Access, our new music subscription service, and you can listen to millions of songs from Google Play Music. Build an awesome workout mix or start a radio station from your favorite pop song like “We Can’t Stop!” Miley Cyrus says it best.

Keep track—no matter which device you’re on
Counting calories? Apps such as Diet Diary can be easily accessed through Chrome or on your mobile device—that way it’s with you when it‘s on your mind. If spreadsheets are more your style, try one of several Google Docs templates, like this weekly meal planner.

Get inspired by the pros
Need a little more motivation? Why not watch fitness gurus do their thing on YouTube: you can watch Sadie Nardini and her amazing yoga classes, or Cassey Ho will get you in top shape for summer - all in the comfort of your own living room.

Posted by Roya Soleimani, Google Search team

Iranian phishing on the rise as elections approach

Google Public Policy Blog — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 22:09:00 +0000

Posted by Eric Grosse, VP Security Engineering

Cross-posted from the Google Online Security Blog

For almost three weeks, we have detected and disrupted multiple email-based phishing campaigns aimed at compromising the accounts owned by tens of thousands of Iranian users. These campaigns, which originate from within Iran, represent a significant jump in the overall volume of phishing activity in the region. The timing and targeting of the campaigns suggest that the attacks are politically motivated in connection with the Iranian presidential election on Friday.

Our Chrome browser previously helped detect what appears to be the same group using SSL certificates to conduct attacks that targeted users within Iran. In this case, the phishing technique we detected is more routine: users receive an email containing a link to a web page that purports to provide a way to perform account maintenance. If the user clicks the link, they see a fake Google sign-in page that will steal their username and password.

Protecting our users’ accounts is one of our top priorities, so we notify targets of state-sponsored attacks and other suspicious activity, and we take other appropriate actions to limit the impact of these attacks on our users. Especially if you are in Iran, we encourage you to take extra steps to protect your account. Watching out for phishing, using a modern browser like Chrome and enabling 2-step verification can make you significantly more secure against these and many other types of attacks. Also, before typing your Google password, always verify that the URL in the address bar of your browser begins with https://accounts.google.com/. If the website's address does not match this text, please don’t enter your Google password.

Iranian phishing on the rise as elections approach

Jay — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 22:00:00 +0000

Posted by Eric Grosse, VP Security Engineering

[Update June 13: This post is available in Farsi on the Google Persian Blog.]

For almost three weeks, we have detected and disrupted multiple email-based phishing campaigns aimed at compromising the accounts owned by tens of thousands of Iranian users. These campaigns, which originate from within Iran, represent a significant jump in the overall volume of phishing activity in the region. The timing and targeting of the campaigns suggest that the attacks are politically motivated in connection with the Iranian presidential election on Friday.

Streamlining Google Analytics Administration Experience

Adam Singer — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 18:45:00 +0000

We’re proud to announce the launch of a dramatically streamlined user experience for managing Google Analytics administrative settings! When visiting the Analytics Admin tab, you will now find all major settings readily accessible from this new landing page. As we launch over the coming weeks, here’s what you’ll see:

Google Store admin shown as a sample (click above image for full-size)

Settings are organized into columns corresponding to the most prominent objects in Analytics: accounts, properties, and views (formerly called profiles). A single account, property, and view will be selected, and you may change these via the drop downs atop each column. We are also renaming profiles to views to most closely match the present and future meaning of what this object represents: a view of the data Analytics collected for your property.

We’ve made a number of additional enhancements. To create a new account, property, or view, click the appropriate menu in the column heading and you’ll see an option to create a new object. You can load any settings page by clicking the appropriate name or icon. You'll notice animations that simplify the display of information, and you'll see new headers along with new navigational links on the left.

Help content has moved to the “Help” tab near the top right corner of the page. We’ve also refreshed the help content to make account administration easy to understand.

This is a large change over the old administrative user experience. For example, getting to property settings now takes just one click but used to take three. Simply compare the new look and feel above to the old:

Experience simplified navigation, faster account configuration, and the power of having all settings at your fingertips.

Posted by Scott Bailey and Matt Matyas, Google Analytics Team

Enhanced campaigns: What happens on July 22, 2013

Katie Miller — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 18:00:00 +0000

This week, we published some of the reasons advertisers have already upgraded more than 3 million legacy campaigns to enhanced campaigns. If you have already upgraded all of your campaigns, then you are all set! If you still have some legacy campaigns in your account, this post will cover what will happen to campaigns that are auto upgraded starting on July 22, 2013.

Default upgrade path
We strongly encourage everyone to upgrade before July 22, 2013 so your campaigns are set up as you'd like. If you don't, then the AdWords system will upgrade them using the following default settings.

Campaigns will be configured, like all new AdWords campaigns, to reach customers across all devices. Upgraded campaigns require a mobile bid adjustment setting, which influences your bids, ad position, and click volume on mobile devices. The table below shows how the mobile bid adjustment will be set depending on the devices targeted by a legacy campaign. Of course, you're free to change your default mobile bid adjustment and all other campaign settings after a campaign is automatically upgraded.

Legacy campaign device targeting	Default mobile bid adjustment
Any campaign that targets computers	Set based on bids from similar advertisers
Campaigns targeting tablets only	Set based on bids from similar advertisers
Campaigns targeting mobile devices only	+0% (same bids across all devices)
Campaigns targeting tablets and mobile devices only	+0% (same bids across all devices)

Special cases
What we've described above covers the vast majority of legacy campaigns. But there are some special cases with different default upgrade settings, like a legacy campaign that runs ads on the Google Display Network and uses device-specific targeting. Details on these special cases are in the AdWords Help Center.

Upgrade quickly and easily today
If you're upgrading one or multiple campaigns, we recommend that you use the AdWords upgrade center. It's quick and takes you step-by-step through the process. Learn more or visit the upgrade center now.

We're here to help
We want you to be successful with AdWords, so please contact us if you’d like any assistance with the upgrade to enhanced campaigns. For more details, tips and resources on succeeding with enhanced campaigns, please check out our help center articles and enhanced campaigns website.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President of Engineering

Play Cube Slam face-to-face against your friends

Emily Wood — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:07:00 +0000

My friends and I used to play videogames all the time, squashed together on the couch, engaged in structured intellectual discourse about exactly how badly we were going to destroy each other. Now that we live spread out around the world, it’s a bit harder to dance in each other’s faces and yell “booyah!” every time we win a game. Enter: Cube Slam.

Cube Slam is a video game that you can play face-to-face against your friends. It’s a Chrome Experiment built using WebRTC, an open web technology that lets you video chat right in the browser without installing any plug-ins. That means you can quickly and easily play Cube Slam with your friends, no matter where they are in the world, just by sharing a link.

To win Cube Slam, hit the cube against your friend’s screen three times until the screen explodes. Shields, obstacles, and gravity fields change with every new level, and you can unlock power-ups including fireballs, lasers, multi-balls, mirrored controls, bulletproof shields, fog, ghost balls, time bombs, resized paddles, extra lives and death balls––though you might want to avoid the death balls. If none of your friends are online, you can always play against Bob the Bear and see what level you can reach. If you install the Cube Slam app, you can even play Bob when you’re offline.

Cube Slam’s graphics are rendered in WebGL and CSS 3D, and its custom soundtrack is delivered dynamically through Web Audio. WebRTC, which enables the two-person game, is available on desktop Chrome and Chrome OS, and will be available on mobile later this year. In the meantime, you can play Cube Slam against Bob the Bear on your phone or tablet. To learn more about what’s going on under the hood, see our technology page and Chromium blog post.

Play a friend. Play a bear. Have fun!

Posted by Clem Wright, Google Creative Lab, Ursine Diversion Division

Play Cube Slam face-to-face against your friends

Google Chrome Blog — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:00:00 +0000

My friends and I used to play video games all the time, squashed together on the couch, engaged in structured intellectual discourse about exactly how badly we were going to destroy each other. Now that we live spread out around the world, it’s a bit harder to dance in each other’s faces and yell “booyah!” every time we win a game. Enter: Cube Slam.

To win Cube Slam, hit the cube against your friend’s screen three times until the screen explodes. Shields, obstacles, and gravity fields change with every new level, and you can unlock power-ups including fireballs, lasers, multi-balls, mirrored controls, bulletproof shields, fog, ghost balls, time bombs, resized paddles, extra lives, and death balls––though you might want to avoid the death balls. If none of your friends are online, you can always play against Bob the Bear and see what level you can reach. If you install the Cube Slam app, you can even play Bob when you’re offline.

Improving Photo Search: A Step Across the Semantic Gap

Research @ Google — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Posted by Chuck Rosenberg, Image Search Team

Last month at Google I/O, we showed a major upgrade to the photos experience: you can now easily search your own photos without having to manually label each and every one of them. This is powered by computer vision and machine learning technology, which uses the visual content of an image to generate searchable tags for photos combined with other sources like text tags and EXIF metadata to enable search across thousands of concepts like a flower, food, car, jet ski, or turtle.

For many years Google has offered Image Search over web images; however, searching across photos represents a difficult new challenge. In Image Search there are many pieces of information which can be used for ranking images, for example text from the web or the image filename. However, in the case of photos, there is typically little or no information beyond the pixels in the images themselves. This makes it harder for a computer to identify and categorize what is in a photo. There are some things a computer can do well, like recognize rigid objects and handwritten digits. For other classes of objects, this is a daunting task, because the average toddler is better at understanding what is in a photo than the world’s most powerful computers running state of the art algorithms.

This past October the state of the art seemed to move things a bit closer to toddler performance. A system which used deep learning and convolutional neural networks easily beat out more traditional approaches in the ImageNet computer vision competition designed to test image understanding. The winning team was from Professor Geoffrey Hinton’s group at the University of Toronto.

We built and trained models similar to those from the winning team using software infrastructure for training large-scale neural networks developed at Google in a group started by Jeff Dean and Andrew Ng. When we evaluated these models, we were impressed; on our test set we saw double the average precision when compared to other approaches we had tried. We knew we had found what we needed to make photo searching easier for people using Google. We acquired the rights to the technology and went full speed ahead adapting it to run at large scale on Google’s computers. We took cutting edge research straight out of an academic research lab and launched it, in just a little over six months. You can try it out at photos.google.com.

Why the success now? What is new? Some things are unchanged: we still use convolutional neural networks -- originally developed in the late 1990s by Professor Yann LeCun in the context of software for reading handwritten letters and digits. What is different is that both computers and algorithms have improved significantly. First, bigger and faster computers have made it feasible to train larger neural networks with much larger data. Ten years ago, running neural networks of this complexity would have been a momentous task even on a single image -- now we are able to run them on billions of images. Second, new training techniques have made it possible to train the large deep neural networks necessary for successful image recognition.

We feel it would be interesting to the research community to discuss some of the unique aspects of the system we built and some qualitative observations we had while testing the system.

The first is our label and training set and how it compares to that used in the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition competition. Since we were working on search across photos, we needed an appropriate label set. We came up with a set of about 2000 visual classes based on the most popular labels on Google+ Photos and which also seemed to have a visual component, that a human could recognize visually. In contrast, the ImageNet competition has 1000 classes. As in ImageNet, the classes were not text strings, but are entities, in our case we use Freebase entities which form the basis of the Knowledge Graph used in Google search. An entity is a way to uniquely identify something in a language-independent way. In English when we encounter the word “jaguar”, it is hard to determine if it represents the animal or the car manufacturer. Entities assign a unique ID to each, removing that ambiguity, in this case “/m/0449p” for the former and “/m/012x34” for the latter. In order to train better classifiers we used more training images per class than ImageNet, 5000 versus 1000. Since we wanted to provide only high precision labels, we also refined the classes from our initial set of 2000 to the most precise 1100 classes for our launch.

During our development process we had many more qualitative observations we felt are worth mentioning:

1) Generalization performance. Even though there was a significant difference in visual appearance between the training and test sets, the network appeared to generalize quite well. To train the system, we used images mined from the web which did not match the typical appearance of personal photos. Images on the web are often used to illustrate a single concept and are carefully composed, so an image of a flower might only be a close up of a single flower. But personal photos are unstaged and impromptu, a photo of a flower might contain many other things in it and may not be very carefully composed. So our training set image distribution was not necessarily a good match for the distribution of images we wanted to run the system on, as the examples below illustrate. However, we found that our system trained on web images was able to generalize and perform well on photos.

A typical photo of a flower found on the web.

A typical photo of a flower found in an impromptu photo.

2) Handling of classes with multi-modal appearance. The network seemed to be able to handle classes with multimodal appearance quite well, for example the “car” class contains both exterior and interior views of the car. This was surprising because the final layer is effectively a linear classifier which creates a single dividing plane in a high dimensional space. Since it is a single plane, this type of classifier is often not very good at representing multiple very different concepts.

3) Handling abstract and generic visual concepts. The system was able to do reasonably well on classes that one would think are somewhat abstract and generic. These include "dance", "kiss", and "meal", to name a few. This was interesting because for each of these classes it did not seem that there would be any simple visual clues in the image that would make it easy to recognize this class. It would be difficult to describe them in terms of simple basic visual features like color, texture, and shape.

Photos recognized as containing a meal.

4) Reasonable errors. Unlike other systems we experimented with, the errors which we observed often seemed quite reasonable to people. The mistakes were the type that a person might make - confusing things that look similar. Some people have already noticed this, for example, mistaking a goat for a dog or a millipede for a snake. This is in contrast to other systems which often make errors which seem nonsensical to people, like mistaking a tree for a dog.

Photo of a banana slug mistaken for a snake.

Photo of a donkey mistaken for a dog.

5) Handling very specific visual classes. Some of the classes we have are very specific, like specific types of flowers, for example “hibiscus” or “dhalia”. We were surprised that the system could do well on those. To recognize specific subclasses very fine detail is often needed to differentiate between the classes. So it was surprising that a system that could do well on a full image concept like “sunsets” could also do well on very specific classes.

Photo recognized as containing a hibiscus flower.

Photo recognized as containing a dahlia flower.

Photo recognized as containing a polar bear.

Photo recognized as containing a grizzly bear.

The resulting computer vision system worked well enough to launch to people as a useful tool to help improve personal photo search, which was a big step forward. So, is computer vision solved? Not by a long shot. Have we gotten computers to see the world as well as people do? The answer is not yet, there’s still a lot of work to do, but we’re closer.

This ain’t our first rodeo

SketchUp Team — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:00:00 +0000

It’s always been a SketchUp tradition to include a member of our team as the default component. Functionally, we include these 2D figures to lend a sense of scale and perspective when you first open SketchUp. Without a scale figure, it would be impossible to tell if you were looking at the origin from 10 feet away or from 10,000.

But our scale figures are also subtle nods to the friendly folks on our team. Bryce, Sang, Susan; these people have all played an important role in the development of SketchUp. They’re also great friends. So, who is the scale figure for SketchUp 2013?

Introducing Derrick, the scale figure for SketchUp 2013

It has been about one year since we were acquired by Trimble. It has also been one year since we lost the person who made it all happen. Derrick Darby was Trimble's champion for our acquisition, and was very excited to move to Boulder, Colorado and continue his career with us. Sadly, he passed away just as the deal was closing, leaving behind a beautiful wife and three talented sons.

Derrick had the kind of rare, infectious personality that made us feel like we’d known him for a lifetime, even if we’d just met him. He was a true southern gentlemen. And although he wasn't with us as we unpacked on our first day at Trimble, we wouldn't be where we are today without his leadership and thoughtfulness. Derrick was a visionary and an innovator who previously sold two of his own companies to Trimble. He had been around the block with technology creation, acquisition, integration and strategy -- creating jobs and opportunity for many along the way. Derrick liked to say that the SketchUp acquisition wasn’t Trimble’s first rodeo. We hope it's one that continues kicking up dust for generations.

A few past and present members of the SketchUp team

So, picking a scale figure for SketchUp 2013 was an easy decision. Derrick remains an integral part of our team and family, and we couldn't think of a better way to remember him than to share a bit of Derrick’s personality with world of SketchUp users. The next time you open SketchUp, take a moment to interact with Derrick's component (Tools > Interact) and send some good vibes to guy who was largely responsible for SketchUp’s third act.

Posted by Chris Keating, on behalf of the SketchUp team

Synergyse Training for Google Apps

Jane Smith — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:00:00 +0000

Posted by Majid Manzarpour, Founder & CTO, Synergyse

Editor's note: Our guest blogger today is Majid Manzarpour, Founder and CTO of Synergyse, a company that provides training solutions for Google Apps. See what other customers that have Gone Google have to say. And learn more about Synergyse on our Cloud Platform Blog.

Synergyse is on a mission to teach the world how to use Google Apps. We built Synergyse Training for Google Apps, a fully interactive, measurable and scalable training solution that has been deployed throughout organizations and educational institutions globally.

There are new features introduced to Google Apps on a regular basis, and we take extra care to keep our customers educated whenever any product updates happen. Our solution provides in-application training that delivers lessons with audio and visual guides in your existing Google Apps account, allowing you to remain in your applications, learning how to use them simultaneously.

We aimed to build a solution that could deliver the same level of scalability, security and reliability that more than 5 million businesses have known to expect from Google Apps. In order to make sure our training software could run seamlessly, we chose Google Cloud Platform to support our backend.

We run on Google App Engine, and can automatically scale up to accommodate organizations of any size, anywhere in the world. Google Cloud Storage and Google Cloud SQL handle all of our data needs and provide cost-effective integration with App Engine. We can rely on the 99.95% uptime delivered by App Engine to ensure our customers have training available when they need it. When we deliver automatic training updates for new applications and features to our clients, they can trust us to provide the same level of security that they find with Google Apps. The Google Cloud Platform is powered by the same Google data centers that power Google Apps; it takes care of our backend infrastructure and enables us to focus on our product.

We chose to develop our solution as a Chrome Extension because we can deeply integrate with Google Apps through the browser, as well as provide IT administrators with rapid software deployment options. This allows us to layer our interactive training on top of real Google Apps and provide automatic software updates. With the Chrome Management console, the extension can be deployed to an entire fleet of Chrome browsers and Chromebooks with a few simple clicks.

When we went live with our first enterprise client, we were both impressed with how effortlessly our software deployed to the entire organization and scaled up to support them. By choosing Google Cloud Platform and Chrome, we can focus on providing scalability, security and reliability to our clients who have chosen to run their organizations on Google Apps.

Announcing the 2013 Generation Google Scholars!

Google Students — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 13:03:00 +0000

The Generation Google Scholarship was established in 2012 to encourage aspiring computer scientists to excel in technology and become active role models and leaders in the field. Every year, high school seniors with financial need who have demonstrated a passion for computer science, technical aptitude, academic achievements, and leadership amongst their peers will be selected as recipients of this scholarship.

We are pleased to announce the 2013 Generation Google Scholars, along with the universities they will be attending this Fall:

Yasmin Adams, Pomona College
Ikechi Akujobi, Stanford University
Megan Gebhard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Diana Hernandez, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Descartes Holland, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Aneesha Kommineni, University of Texas at Austin
Setareh Lotfi, University of Utah
Daniel Mariselli, Amherst College
Karolina Pyszkiewicz, University of Washington, Seattle
Stephanie Yu, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Generation Google Scholars will receive a $10,000 academic scholarship and are attending Google’s Computer Science Summer Institute this summer, in Mountain View, CA or Cambridge, MA.

If you're interested in learning more about our scholarship programs and timelines, please visit our Google Scholarships page.

Posted by Azusa Liu, Student Development Programs

Art, Copy & Code: sending kisses around the world

Emily Wood — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Thanks to modern technology you can connect with your loved ones by sending a quick note, a photo of your cat, even a smile :) around the world in seconds. But one of humanity’s most iconic forms of communication—the kiss—has been left out in the cold. Now, though, you can send a kiss to anyone, anywhere in the world, through Burberry Kisses, a new campaign from Burberry and Google. And not just any kiss, but your kiss.

To get started, simply visit kisses.burberry.com and pucker up in front of your webcam (this works best on Chrome). Using unique kiss-detection technology, the site will detect the outline of your actual lips, which you can choose to dress up with a Burberry lipstick color. If you’re using your touch screen mobile or tablet, you can actually kiss your screen (you might want to wipe it off first) and your lip outline will be taken from there. After that, write a short message and send it to someone from your Google+ friends list or via email. Then sit back and see the envelope with your message fly from your city to the receiver’s destination across a 3D landscape. The receiver gets an email, from which they can see the same journey, read your message and hopefully respond with a kiss of their own.

For an example, see this message I sent to my mom this morning. All the kisses being sent around the world can be seen in a real-time interactive map, capturing the story of the world’s love. You don’t have to kiss and tell: all kisses are private unless you choose to share.

Burberry Kisses is the latest campaign in our Art, Copy & Code project, an ongoing series of brand partnerships to re-imagine how brands tell stories in a connected world. With this project, we’ve tried to create a beautiful experience that comes to life across all screens, and helps connect you to the people who are important to you, wherever they are. For more details on the campaign, see our agency blog or visit our website.

Posted by Aman Govil, Art, Copy & Code Project Lead

Video in the Future: Hang out with Mark Walker, Senior Vice President, Disney.com

Yamini Gupta — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 19:18:00 +0000

How can large publishers create digital video content strategies that drive user engagement? That's the question Xavier Kochhar, CEO , Structured Data Intelligence, will ask of Mark Walker, Senior Vice President, Disney.com, in the next edition of our Video in the Future hangouts on air series.

Join the conversation live on Thursday, June 13th, 10:30 AM PT/ 1:30 PM ET. Questions and comments welcome!

Did you miss our last couple of conversations featuring AOL's SVP of Video, Ran Harnevo, Silver Chalice's EVP Rich Routman and TubeMogul's Chief Strategy Officer Jason Lopatecki? Watch them now.

Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Team

Google Summer of Code 2013 Full of Stats: Part 1

Stephanie Taylor — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:00:00 +0000

It’s time for our annual two part post where we share the breakdown of students accepted into this year’s Google Summer of Code program.

For our 9th year of Google Summer of Code, we decreased the number of applications that each student could submit to 5 (in previous years it was 20). We wanted to encourage students to focus on each application and to spend quality time talking to the organizations that they were interested in to find the best match for their skills and interests. While this did result in a lower total number of applications, the mentoring organizations reported that the overall quality of applications was better than in years past. We were very pleased to have 5,999 applications submitted by 4,151 students from 94 countries for Google Summer of Code 2013.

With so many great applications, the 177 mentoring organizations had a tough time deciding, but ultimately 1192 students from 70 countries were accepted into Google Summer of Code 2013.

The 10 countries with the largest number of accepted students are:

Country	# of 2013 Accepted Students
India	271
United States	143
Germany	68
China	65
Sri Lanka	56
Romania	42
Russian Federation	37
France	35
Spain	35
United Kingdom	35

We are excited to have three students accepted from two African countries that have never been represented in Google Summer of Code before, Cameroon and Tunisia.

This year we set a record for the highest percentage of women accepted into the program: 9.5% compared to our previous high last year of 8.3%. Each year the percentage of women accepted in Google Summer of Code has continued to rise since 2006.

Students are currently in the middle of the community bonding period of the program where they become familiar with the projects, mentors, and community practices before they start coding on Monday, June 17th. Good luck everyone!

You can visit our program site and timeline for more information and look for part 2 of the “Google Summer of Code 2013 Full of Stats” post in the coming weeks detailing the universities represented in this year’s program.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Unleashing the Combined Power of Google Analytics and AdWords: Webinar Next Tuesday, 6/18

Katie Miller — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 17:45:00 +0000

In many ways, Google Analytics and AdWords were made for each other. AdWords helps advertisers reach an audience and reports on advertising performance, and Google Analytics can tell you what actions your users take when they actually get to your site. You may have a high clickthrough rate (CTR) in AdWords, but what if you could see that 70% of those users left immediately after arriving on your landing page? While understanding the conversion rate of AdWords ads is critical, it’s also important to understand what happened to the users that did not convert or complete the action you wanted them to. For example, did users ‘bounce’ after landing on your site or did they view a few other pages and then leave? How much time did they spend on your site? Which keywords drive the majority of your Ecommerce revenue?

Thanks to built-in Google product integrations that provide unique insights into your data, you can view reporting and data in Google Analytics that directly relates back to your advertising in AdWords. Understanding how to use both of them together will help you refine your AdWords campaigns and improve the performance of your business.

Next Tuesday, join Rachel Witalec and Simon Rosen, Global Sales Strategy Leads, for a detailed look at how to use Google Analytics and AdWords together. In this webinar, we'll show you why it's important to link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, how to see both Google Analytics data in AdWords and AdWords data in Google Analytics, and walk through a live demo of the reports and how to use them. You'll learn how to make your marketing more effective by analyzing Google Analytics data, such as bounce rate, pages per visit, conversion rate, and Ecommerce revenue in conjunction with AdWords factors, such as keyword performance, ad copy, ad groups, and more. The webinar will also include a live Q&A section.

Date: Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Time: 10am PDT / 1pm EDT/ 6pm GMT
Duration: 1 hr
Level: 101 / Beginner
Register: Register here

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Google Analytics team

Asking the U.S. government to allow Google to publish more national security request data

Google Public Policy Blog — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 17:39:00 +0000

This morning we sent the following letter to the offices of the Attorney General and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Read the full text below. -Ed.

Dear Attorney General Holder and Director Mueller

Google has worked tremendously hard over the past fifteen years to earn our users’ trust. For example, we offer encryption across our services; we have hired some of the best security engineers in the world; and we have consistently pushed back on overly broad government requests for our users’ data.

We have always made clear that we comply with valid legal requests. And last week, the Director of National Intelligence acknowledged that service providers have received Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requests.

Assertions in the press that our compliance with these requests gives the U.S. government unfettered access to our users’ data are simply untrue. However, government nondisclosure obligations regarding the number of FISA national security requests that Google receives, as well as the number of accounts covered by those requests, fuel that speculation.

We therefore ask you to help make it possible for Google to publish in our Transparency Report aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures—in terms of both the number we receive and their scope. Google’s numbers would clearly show that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made. Google has nothing to hide.

Google appreciates that you authorized the recent disclosure of general numbers for national security letters. There have been no adverse consequences arising from their publication, and in fact more companies are receiving your approval to do so as a result of Google’s initiative. Transparency here will likewise serve the public interest without harming national security.

We will be making this letter public and await your response.

David Drummond
Chief Legal Officer

Asking the U.S. government to allow Google to publish more national security request data

Emily Wood — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 17:32:00 +0000

90 Ideas to Change the World: Announcing Google Science Fair Festival Finalists

Emily Wood — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 16:30:00 +0000

Many great scientists developed their curiosity for science at an early age and in January we called on the brightest young minds from around the world to send us their ideas to change the world. Our 2013 Google Science Fair attracted an exciting and diverse range of entries, with thousands of submissions from more than 120 countries.

After a busy few months for the judges, we’re ready to reveal our 90 regional finalists for the 2013 Google Science Fair. It was no easy task selecting these projects, but in the end their creativity, scientific merit and global relevance shined through. This year’s finalists projects range from using banana peels to produce bioplastics to research into a green treatment for contaminated water. Other projects include a study on the effects of video gaming on the cognitive function of the brain and the evaluation of wireless transmission of electricity.

The 90 Regional Finalists come from all over the world.

For the second year, we’ll also be recognizing the Scientific American Science in Action Award. This award honors a project that makes a practical difference by addressing an environmental, health or resources challenge. From the 90 finalists’ projects, 15 were nominated for this year’s award.

On June 27 we’ll announce the 15 global finalists and the winner of the Science in Action Award. These young scientists will then be flown to Google’s California headquarters for the last round of judging and a celebratory event on September 23.

Thank you to everyone who submitted a project—we really appreciate all your hard work. Congratulations to our 90 regional finalists!

Posted by Sam Peter, Google Science Fair team

How green is the Internet?

Jane Smith — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 16:04:00 +0000

Posted by Michael Terrell, Senior Policy Counsel, Energy & Sustainability

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

More than ever, people are using the Internet to shop, read, listen to music and learn. And businesses rely on Internet-based tools to operate and deliver their services efficiently. The Internet has created all kinds of new opportunities for society and the economy—but what does it mean for the environment?

We’ve been working to answer that question and enlisted the help of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to gather more data. Their study (PDF), released today, shows that migrating all U.S. office workers to the cloud could save up to 87 percent of IT energy use—about 23 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, or enough to power the city of Los Angeles for a year. The savings are associated with shifting people in the workforce to Internet-based applications like email, word processing and customer relationship software.

These results indicate that the Internet offers huge potential for energy savings. We’re especially excited that Berkeley Lab has made its model publicly available so other researchers and experts can plug in their own assumptions and help refine and improve the results.

Of course, understanding the impact of shifting office applications to the cloud is only part of the story, which is why last week we hosted a summit called “How Green is the Internet?” to explore these questions in greater detail. At the summit, experts presented data on how the growth of Internet infrastructure, including devices like phones and tablets, can impact the environment. We also saw great excitement about the potential for entirely new Internet-enabled tools in areas like transportation, e-commerce and digital content to deliver huge energy and carbon savings. We’ve posted the videos from those sessions and invite you to take a look.

One of our goals in hosting the summit and supporting the Berkeley Lab study was to identify and encourage new research on this topic. We’ll continue to work to answer some of these questions, and we hope others will too.

How green is the Internet?

Emily Wood — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 16:00:00 +0000

More than ever, people are using the Internet to shop, read, listen to music and learn. And businesses rely on Internet-based tools to operate and deliver their services efficiently. The Internet has created all kinds of new opportunities for society and the economy—but what does it mean for the environment?

We’ve been working to answer that question and enlisted the help of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to gather more data. Their study (PDF), released today, shows that migrating all U.S. office workers to the cloud could save up to 87 percent of IT energy use—about 23 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, or enough to power the city of Los Angeles for a year. The savings are associated with shifting people in the workforce to Internet-based applications like email, word processing and customer relationship software.

2013 Google PhD Fellowships: 5 Years of Supporting the Future of Computer Science

Research @ Google — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 16:00:00 +0000

Posted by Michael Rennaker, Google University Relations

We are extremely excited to announce the 2013 Global Google PhD Fellows. From all around the globe, these 39 PhD students represent the fifth class in the program’s history, a select group recognized by Google researchers and their institutions as some of the most promising young academics in the world. As we welcome the newest class of PhD Fellows, we take a look back at the program’s roots and hear from two past recipients.

In 2009, Google launched its PhD Fellowship Program, created to recognize and support outstanding graduate students pursuing work in computer science, related disciplines or promising research areas. In its inaugural year, 13 United States PhD students were awarded fellowships, drawn from an extremely competitive pool of applicants. The global program now covers Europe, China, India and Australia and continues to draw some of the best young researchers, reflecting Google’s commitment to building strong relations with the academic community.

Among those first recipients of the fellowship award are 2009 PhD Fellow Roxana Geambasu, Visiting Professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University, and 2010 European Doctoral Fellow Roland Angst, Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University and affiliated with the Max Planck Center for Visual Computing and Communication. As early recipients of the award, Roxana and Roland reflect on the impact that the Google Fellowship program had on their careers.

For Roxana, the fellowship provided the tools and connections that helped lay the foundation for her academic career. She believes industrial fellowship programs are very important, as they give students an opportunity to interact more closely with industry.

“Beyond the financial support, I think that the fellowship impacted my career in many important ways. First, the Google fellowships are regarded as highly competitive, so receiving the award was probably a big plus on my resume when I was interviewing for faculty positions.”

“Second, the award yielded a mentor within Google, Brad Chen, with whom I've kept in touch ever since, as well as opportunities to visit the campus, deliver talks and meet Google engineers. Brad and I continue to meet at conferences and discuss my work, his work and (of late) the work of my students; it’s through that relationship I’m exposed to new people from Google and gain valuable advice about faculty award opportunities.”

Roland Angst credits the award with the ability to lighten his teaching load and instead focus on his research, which ultimately prepared him for his future academic career. Like Roxanna, Roland states that the fellowship also gave him the opportunity to establish connections with people working in related topics in industry.

“In my view, programs such as the Google Fellowship Awards represent an important and integral link between industry and universities. Firstly, such programs increase the awareness in the academic world for relevant problems in industry. Secondly, these programs allow the IT industry to express their gratitude to the educational services provided by the universities on which the IT industry heavily relies on."

We welcome the latest recipients of the Global Google PhD Fellowships for 2013 with great excitement and high expectations. Recognized for their incredible innovation, creativity and leadership, we are very happy to support these excellent PhD students and offer our sincere congratulations.

10 for 10 publisher stories: Papilles et Pupilles finds a recipe for success

Inside AdSense Team — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 15:50:00 +0000

This week marks the last post of our ‘10 for 10’ success story series, which we’ve been sharing in the weeks leading up to AdSense’s 10th anniversary. Thanks for following along and submitting your own stories. Read on to meet this week’s featured publisher, and be sure to check back next week when we’ll be celebrating AdSense’s official 10th anniversary!

Eight years ago, Bordeaux resident Anne Lataillade launched French culinary blog PapillesetPupilles.fr, a site where she shares classic recipes and also recipes for people with food allergies. As the mother of two children with food allergies, Anne had already been conducting culinary research and creating her own recipes for some time. Papilles et Pupilles has grown significantly, and today generates an average of over one and a half million page views per month.

(To enable captions in a number of languages, click on the ‘Captions’ link in the bottom right corner of the YouTube player once the video starts playing.)

Earlier this year, Anne attended a Learn with Google event in Paris to learn more about optimization. After trying out the 336x280 Large Rectangle format and changing her ad units to allow both text and image ads, Anne saw an increase in her revenue. AdSense now generates 20% of the revenue from the site, which Anne uses to cover the cost of maintenance, hosting, and development.

What’s next? Anne’s goal is to continue building traffic to the site by developing new content. She’s also growing awareness of her content through her Google+ page, where she engages with over 34,000 followers.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

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Webinar Next Tuesday 6/18: Unleashing the Combined Power of Google Analytics and AdWords

Adam Singer — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 15:36:00 +0000

Register for next week’s webinar: Register here

In many ways, Google Analytics and AdWords were made for each other. AdWords helps advertisers reach an audience and reports on advertising performance, and Google Analytics can tell you what actions your users take when they actually get to your site. You may have a high clickthrough rate (CTR) in AdWords, but what if you could see that 70% of those users left immediately after arriving on your landing page? While understanding the conversion rate of AdWords ads is critical, it’s also important to understand what happened to the users that did not convert or complete the action you wanted them to. For example, did users ‘bounce’ after landing on your site or did they view a few other pages and then leave? How much time did they spend on your site? Which keywords drive the majority of your Ecommerce revenue?

Thanks to built-in Google product integrations that provide unique insights into your data, you can view reporting and data in Google Analytics that directly relates back to your advertising in AdWords. Understanding how to use both of them together will help you refine your AdWords campaigns and improve the performance of your business.

Next Tuesday, join Rachel Witalec and Simon Rosen, Global Sales Strategy Leads, for a detailed look at how to use Google Analytics and AdWords together. In this webinar, we'll show you why it's important to link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, how to see both Google Analytics data in AdWords and AdWords data in Google Analytics, and walk through a live demo of the reports and how to use them. You'll learn how to make your marketing more effective by analyzing Google Analytics data, such as bounce rate, pages per visit, conversion rate, and Ecommerce revenue in conjunction with AdWords factors, such as keyword performance, ad copy, ad groups, and more. The webinar will also include a live Q&A section.

Date: Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Time: 10am PDT / 1pm EDT/ 6pm GMT
Duration: 1 hr
Level: 101 / Beginner
Register: Register here

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Google Analytics team

Google Maps and Waze, outsmarting traffic together

Emily Wood — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 15:30:00 +0000

We’ve all been there: stuck in traffic, frustrated that you chose the wrong route on the drive to work. But imagine if you could see real-time traffic updates from friends and fellow travelers ahead of you, calling out “fender bender...totally stuck in left lane!” and showing faster routes that others are taking.

To help you outsmart traffic, today we’re excited to announce we’ve closed the acquisition of Waze. This fast-growing community of traffic-obsessed drivers is working together to find the best routes from home to work, every day.

The Waze product development team will remain in Israel and operate separately for now. We’re excited about the prospect of enhancing Google Maps with some of the traffic update features provided by Waze and enhancing Waze with Google’s search capabilities.

We’ll also work closely with the vibrant Waze community, who are the DNA of this app, to ensure they have what’s needed to grow and prosper.

The Waze community and its dedicated team have created a great source of timely road corrections and updates. We welcome them to Google and look forward to working with them in our ongoing effort to make a comprehensive, accurate and useful map of the world.

Posted by Brian McClendon, Vice President, Geo

DoubleClick Search industry perspectives video series: Search marketing is now smarter

Kim — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 15:30:00 +0000

Last week, we heard leaders from top agencies talk about the need for their search teams to streamline workflows using fast, responsive tools that allow more time for strategy in a constantly evolving search landscape. But as digital marketing increasingly becomes multi-channel, multi-screen, and multi-faceted, marketers today have more opportunities to connect with their audiences across a variety of digital touchpoints, beyond search.

In addition to fast tools, we heard that marketers also need integrated technologies to help make smarter decisions across the breadth of their digital marketing. Our next video, Search marketing is now smarter, explores how unified platforms can help surface deeper insights through a holistic view of online marketing activity -- within search and beyond -- and how DoubleClick fits in.

As Jeremy Hull, Associate Director of Paid Search at iProspect notes: “Paid search doesn’t live in a vacuum. It interacts with every other channel that you work with, online and offline...understanding those interactions is going to allow you to optimize it, and see how it fits in with your overall marketing efforts.” With this in mind, we built DoubleClick Search to natively integrate with our display ad server, demand-side platform, and our rich media and analytics platforms -- all a part of DoubleClick Digital Marketing -- to help marketers drive deeper insights from one, unified view of their customer:

Holistic view: DoubleClick’s proprietary conversion tracking pixel, Floodlight, lets marketers measure and report on deduplicated conversions across search and display for more accurate reporting.
Powerful attribution: DFA attribution tools allow marketers to create and apply custom attribution models to better understand how their marketing efforts are working together to drive conversions.
Offline conversions: Because online advertising often fuels offline conversions, marketers can also connect the dots with the DoubleClick Search Conversions API, factoring in conversions that occurred offline (through in-store transactions and other offline activities) for transactions that started from interactions with online search ads.

Having a single view of the consumer allows marketers to better understand the interplay between channels, without the mashing up and reconciling of different data sources -- but beyond just having access to data, what seamless opportunities do marketers have to take action on those insights and drive results for their business? Join us next week in the final post of our series, where we’ll discuss how top agencies use platforms to improve performance from untapped cross-channel opportunities in our video: Search marketing is now better.

To learn more about DoubleClick Search, visit our YouTube channel and stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog.

Google BigQuery gets smarter with large results, productivity improvements, and updated pricing

Jane Smith — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 15:00:00 +0000

Posted by Ju-kay Kwek, BigQuery Product Manager

We know that today, more than ever, businesses need ways to store and rapidly analyze vast amounts of data and are looking for ways to accomplish this without huge infrastructure investments. To help make this possible, recent BigQuery features include the ability to join across multi-terabyte tables, and the ability to connect popular analysis tools such as Tableau®, BIME® and Excel®. In the past few months we’ve seen several interesting use cases enabled -- Shutterfly improving their customers’ experience, Gamesys understanding complex user behaviors, tracking and mapping the world’s ships, and monitoring Google I/O 2013 using a real-time sensor network.

Today we’re announcing another update to BigQuery packed with new capabilities.

Large results: run queries that return arbitrarily large numbers of rows and save them as a new table for follow-up analysis.
Window functions: take advantage of built-in functions like Rank and Partition to create sophisticated statistical analyses with far simpler SQL than before.
Query caching: now recent queries that are re-run return a cached result when the underlying table is unchanged, providing more cost-effective analysis.

Gamesys, who previewed these features, was able to efficiently identify different cohorts of gaming customers and understand how to create a better in-game experience for distinct groups of users. "Rank and Partition are our 'go to' functions for examining player behaviour over time”, said Tom Newton, Director of Social Gaming at Gamesys. “These new functions combined with large results sets and query caching, help us efficiently and cost effectively improve and scale our analysis to create actionable intelligence that drives product enhancement.”

We’ve also rolled out a host of UI improvements, including the ability to validate a query and estimate its cost prior to running it, and to save frequently used queries. And thanks to recent operational improvements, we’ve been able to double existing query quotas.

Finally, BigQuery customers will have new pricing options starting in July. Data storage costs in BigQuery are becoming even more affordable for everyone, going from $0.12/GB/month to $0.08/GB/month effective July 1st. Furthermore, in addition to the existing on-demand rate for interactive queries, customers with higher-volume usage will soon be able to opt in for tiered query pricing. This provides more economical and predictable cost for interactive queries. Customers who are interested are encouraged to contact a sales representative.

You can get details about these new capabilities and more in our Developer Blog and in our updated product documentation. Got an inspiring use case? Share it in the blog comments or with our community using the #BigQuery tag on Google+.

Display Insights Series: Insight #3 – Lights, Camera, ACTION for Video Advertising

Becky C. — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 13:02:00 +0000

[cross-posted from the DoubleClick Publishers Blog.]

Last Thursday we walked through our second display insight, around selecting the right creative formats to match your campaign goals. Our “Display Insights” Series continues today, where we’ll begin to explore the opportunities in video advertising.

We took a look at video ads across DoubleClick’s advertising platforms to identify areas of opportunity for advertisers and publishers, and shared these areas of growth in a three-part research collection: “Video Advertising Momentum”. We exclusively analyzed in-stream video ads that played against video content, and focused on ads served on sites globally, excluding Google owned and operated sites like YouTube. We’re going to unpack the findings over the next two weeks, kicking it off with this infographic:

Digital video advertising is essential for brand campaigns.

Advertisers are getting into digital video in a big way: two out of five video ads on the DoubleClick advertising platforms came from advertisers new to digital video in 2013 - and many of them were large brand advertisers.
68% of video ads in the last 12 months came from four advertiser categories dominated by large brand advertisers. The top video advertiser categories were Automotive and Retail, with Consumer Packaged Goods and Technology advertisers rounding out the top four.

Publishers are growing audiences and revenue with more video.

News publishers are redefining the way they deliver the news. As they increase their focus on video news content, they’re running 3 times more video ads this year than last.
Video content is coming from all across the web - not just from TV or entertainment publishers. Sites that have benefit from increased video spending include Automotive & Vehicle, Sports, Computers & Electronics, and Shopping sites.

For video, the opportunity is clear: brand advertisers are using video to reach their audiences across the web, and publishers are powering their content strategy with more video. We can’t wait to see how video rockets digital advertising to new heights.

Stay tuned for next week’s edition of Display Insights, as we dive into how programmatic video has hit its prime-time. And if you can’t wait that long, check out the full Video Advertising Momentum collection to explore them on your own.

Posted by Mel Ann Chan, Product Marketing

Lights, camera, ACTION for video advertising

Mel Ann Chan — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 13:01:00 +0000

[Cross-posted on the DoubleClick Advertisers blog]

When we think about the multi-billion dollar future of digital advertising, we believe that much of that growth will be driven by video. Video advertising is a very compelling way to connect and grow an audience, especially when we layer on technology’s creative possibilities. What’s driving its astronomic growth?

We took a look at video ads across DoubleClick’s advertising platforms to identify areas of opportunity for advertisers and publishers, and shared these areas of growth in a three-part research collection: “Video Advertising Momentum”. We exclusively analyzed in-stream video ads that played against video content, and focused on ads served on sites globally, excluding Google owned and operated sites like YouTube. We're going to unpack the findings over the next two weeks, kicking it off with this infographic.

Digital video advertising is essential for brand campaigns.

Advertisers are getting into digital video in a big way: two out of five video ads on the DoubleClick advertising platforms came from advertisers new to digital video in 2013 - and many of them were large brand advertisers.
68% of video ads in the last 12 months came from four advertiser categories dominated by large brand advertisers. The top video advertiser categories were Automotive and Retail, with Consumer Packaged Goods and Technology advertisers rounding out the top four.

Publishers are growing audiences and revenue with more video.

News publishers are redefining the way they deliver the news. As they increase their focus on video news content, they're running 3 times more video ads this year than last.
Video content is coming from all across the web - not just from TV or entertainment publishers. Sites that have benefit from increased video spending include Automotive & Vehicle, Sports, Computers & Electronics, and Shopping sites.

For video, the opportunity is clear: brand advertisers are using video to reach their audiences across the web, and publishers are powering their content strategy with more video. We can't wait to see how video rockets digital advertising to new heights.
Stay tuned for next week’s post as we dive into how programmatic video has hit its prime-time. And if you can’t wait that long, check out the full Video Advertising Momentum collection to explore them on your own.

Posted by Mel Ann Chan, Product Marketing

ILCEA Education makes global learning easier with Google Apps

Jane Smith — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 23:16:00 +0000

Posted by Jean Charles Bully, Chairman of ILCEA Education

Editor's note: Our guest blogger today is Jean Charles Bully, chairman of ILCEA Education, a leading provider of educational programs and services around the world. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

With today's technology, the world can seem pretty small. However, language barriers can still form a big obstacle for global communication. At ILCEA Education, our goal is to bring the world together by teaching people new languages. Founded in 2001, we serve 1.5 million students in 50 countries around the world. We help our students learn about new cultures and languages with diverse in-country work programs, student exchanges, internship opportunities, online training, and even coordinate vacations to help people learn new languages. We get to work with all types of students, but we find that it’s not so easy to coordinate our work globally.

To help our students learn, we partner with more than 500 international schools around the world to teach and coordinate our programs. This requires a standard platform for communication, so we’re switching to Google Apps with help from Cloudreach, a Google Apps reseller. Before Apps, our education affiliates sent out emails from various addresses, making tons of phone calls and in some cases even mailing printed letters or printed forms to communicate with us. By bringing everyone in our network onto Google Apps under a single ILCEA Education domain, we’re creating a unified internal communication strategy, ensuring that all of our partners can participate in every conversation. It gives our partners access to Google+ Hangouts, Gmail, and shared Google Docs to foster easy communication no matter where they are or what device they’re on.

Google Apps will upgrade our student’s educational experience. Learning a new language and living in a new place can be overwhelming, so we want to make sure all of our students have a smooth start. All of our students will have an ILCEA Education branded Google Apps account, providing easy access to the resources, communication and social tools they need. Students will be able to interact with course materials from anywhere with an internet connection in an intuitive way using Google Drive. Google Hangouts will also provide an important opportunity for students to practice their language skills from anywhere with an internet connection, transforming the learning experience with active participation.

Because teaching is at the heart of what we do, our learning resources will get a major digital makeover with Google Apps. Sharing lesson plans, curriculums, and other resources on Drive allows our educators have access to the materials they need, without having to worry about cumbersome downloads or printed manuals. Drive allows our teachers and partners to simultaneously edit materials with ease, so our lessons will always be current, including the latest information as well as any updates based on student feedback.

Learning requires consistency and practice. By providing easy-to-use collaboration tools and access to educational resources, ILCEA Education is helping our affiliates provide a better education to millions of students worldwide. With Google Apps, we can work toward breaking down obstacles in communicating and obstacles for learning.

New ways to see how you stack up against the competition with Auction insights

Katie Miller — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 23:13:00 +0000

The Auction insights report gives you valuable insight into how your ad performance compares with that of other advertisers. For example, based on the impressions you’re eligible for, you can see how often your competitors’ ads are appearing above yours or whether one of your competitors has a higher impression share than you on an important keyword.

Before today, you could only get this data one keyword at a time - making it hard to see the bigger picture of where you stand relative to your top competitors. Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve added some exciting new functionality to the Auction insights report that will make it easier for you to get a bird’s eye view of your competitive landscape.

Click here to enlarge

Now, in addition to running an Auction insights report on a single keyword you can also run a report on any of the following scenarios:

Groups of keywords. For example, you may want to run a report on all keywords that contain a certain brand term, or that have the same label. Simply filter your keyword list, select the keywords you want to include, and run an Auction insights report on the selected terms to see how your performance on those terms compares to that of your top competitors.
Individual or multiple ad groups. You’ve probably already arranged your keywords into meaningful groupings within ad groups. For example, if you sell men’s wear, you may have an ad group for “Father’s Day gifts” with keywords all about Father’s Day. Now, from the ad groups tab, you can select one or more ad groups to run an Auction insights report. This will show you how your performance on all eligible keywords within those ad groups compares to advertisers who most commonly compete with you on those terms.
Individual or multiple campaigns. Sometimes you may be interested in a high level picture of who’s competing with you across a wide range of topics. In those instances, you can select one or more campaigns from the campaigns tab, and run an Auction insights report there to see how the competitive landscape looks at that high level.

We hope that these new features provide you additional insights to help you optimize your campaigns more efficiently. We are rolling this feature out today and you should expect to see it in your account within the next few hours.

For more information on how to run an Auction insights report, how to interpret your data, or create a filter, visit the AdWords Help Center. You can also join us for our Hangout on Air Tuesday, June 25th at 10:00 AM PST/1:00 PM EST where we will cover a few of the great things you can do with the new functionality in this report.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Product Manager, AdWords

Get a Head Start with Enhanced Campaigns: Why to Upgrade Now

Katie Miller — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 19:57:00 +0000

Enhanced campaigns offer an array of new features to drive better performance and efficiency. With more than three million campaigns already upgraded, we’ve heard many great examples of advertisers finding new pockets of revenue and reaching new customers with enhanced campaigns – all while saving time. As the the auto-upgrade approaches on July 22, we’re introducing some new features in the Upgrade Center today to make the process of upgrading even easier. Upgrade today to start realizing the benefits right away.

5 reasons to upgrade now
By upgrading now and becoming a pro with the new features before the auto-upgrade, you can get a head start on driving better performance – and a jump start on the competition. Here are some of our advertisers’ top reasons for upgrading:

Discover local opportunities: Use the location bid adjustment to easily and effectively engage with users based on location and proximity. This allows you to find and optimize for pockets of revenue you may not have even known existed.

After upgrading to enhanced campaigns and leveraging geo bid adjustments, Peter Hughes, Manager of SEM at Constant Contact stated, “Suddenly, we realized that California has a great cluster of small and medium sized businesses. Cool - we’ve already geo-targeted that. But guess what? Who knew that North Dakota had such a great ROI. In the old, legacy world, I never would have figured it out because it did not fit into my selective scaling model.”

Expose the true power of mobile: Implement a mobile bid adjustment to make sure you’re driving the right value for on-the-go consumers while gaining better insight into the results mobile can drive for you.

American Apparel upgraded early to reach customers across all screens. They started by setting mobile bid adjustments at 100% and saw impressive results. Since the upgrade, mobile conversions have grown 2X and aggregate click-through-rate has increased 7%. Sean Singleton, Marketing Manager, stated, “We are going from trial to fine-tuning the way we execute our multi-device marketing strategy. With enhanced campaigns, it’s very easy to test and iterate so we are quickly establishing internal best practices in terms of how to best run enhanced campaigns.”

Drive more leads through calls: Use call extensions and measure calls as conversions to drive cost-efficient leads while providing a better ad experience for your customers.

Woodbridge, a financial investment firm, took advantage of upgraded call extensions and new reporting features, increasing the volume of calls from smartphones from 20% to 57%, with overall smartphone leads almost doubling. In addition, conversion rates from both desktop and mobile devices increased by 6%.

Reach new audiences on the Google Display Network with powerful bidding: Drive impression share to a specific audience using custom display bids across characteristics like demographics, interest categories or topics.

Stathis Konstantinidis, who runs Global Marketing at Westwing, said, “With the upgrade to enhanced campaigns we have greater insight into how our converting audience looks on adgroup level. This is very important to us as we have quite a distinct idea of our target group. We can use this information in order to push the impression share of our ads within the converting audience and decrease the impressions within the less performing audience for driving conversions & decreasing the CPLs.”

Manage campaigns in less time: Dive into enhanced campaigns to see how the powerful features work together to streamline your workflow and get you to happy hour sooner.

Dutch shoe retailer, Schuurman Schoenen, reduced its total number of campaigns by 60% and dramatically cut its marketing team’s workload. “I used to spend twice as much time to maintain and fine-tune campaigns,” says Kayo Klein Obbink, Schuurman Schoenen’s online marketer.

Improvements to the upgrade center
In April, we announced the enhanced campaigns upgrade center to help you transition from legacy campaigns to enhanced campaigns. We’re introducing some additional features, rolling out over the next week, that will make upgrading even easier and give you greater control over the merging process:

Increased flexibility when copying keywords: When merging campaigns, have increased control over how keywords are copied (or not copied) from the mobile to the desktop campaign.
Automatic labelling of newly copied keywords: When keywords, ads, or ad groups are copied or merged, they will be labelled as having been modified by the upgrade center.
Uninterrupted keyword level tracking: When you have two matching campaigns with different mobile and desktop keyword-level destination URLs, they will be merged automatically. The mobile URL will show on mobile phones and the desktop URL will show on non-mobile.
... and coming soon: Bulk upload functionality: Ad extensions and ad groups will soon be exportable to AdWords Editor.

We hope that the Upgrade Center and other resources we’ve shared will give you the tools you need to ease the transition to enhanced campaigns.

Don’t wait to upgrade
We will begin automatically upgrading all legacy campaigns on July 22nd, 2013. Please continue to share your feedback with us as you are going through the upgrade process.

Posted by Andy Miller, Head of Mobile Search Solutions

Making custom patterns for LayOut

SketchUp Team — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 18:01:00 +0000

The major new feature in the newest version of LayOut in SketchUp Pro 2013 is Pattern Fill. It lets you fill any shape in your document with a pattern. LayOut ships with a library of patterns to get you started, but creating and adding your own is possible, too. This post is a tutorial on how to do just that.

The Basics

Patterns are made up of image tiles. When you assign a pattern to a shape, LayOut fills that shape with image tiles to create the pattern you want to see. The following picture shows this concept in action:

A sampling of patterns that ship with LayOut. Each is made up of image tiles which repeat to form the pattern.

There’s nothing magical about image tiles in LayOut; they’re just JPG, TIF, GIF or PNG images. All of the pattern tiles we’ve included with LayOut happen to be PNGs because that format supports non-lossy compression (which makes them look good) and alpha transparency (which makes parts of them see-through). If you can, you should make your pattern tiles PNGs, too.

To add a pattern to LayOut, all you have to do is choose Import Custom Pattern... from the drop-down menu in the Pattern Fill panel. You can choose any image you like; LayOut will automatically turn it into a pattern by tiling it (copying it in a grid).

How does LayOut decide how big to draw each individual tile in the pattern? It looks at the source image’s resolution (pixel density) and uses that. Every PNG, JPG, TIF, and other raster image is saved with a resolution when it’s created. This is expressed in pixels per inch, or ppi.

Consider an image which is 1200 pixels wide by 600 pixels high. If this image is saved at 300 ppi, its physical size would be 4 inches (1200 pixels ÷ 300 pixels per inch = 4 inches) by 2 inches . If it were saved at only 100 ppi, its physical size would be 12 inches (1200 px ÷ 100 ppi = 12 in) by 6 inches. The higher the resolution, the smaller the physical size.

Example: A simple geometric pattern

A pattern composed of parallelograms, or hexagons, or cubes, depending on how you look at it.

Let's make a pattern that looks like the one in the image above. This pattern is relatively simple to create for three reasons:

1) It has only one basic unit.
The “cube” is repeated over and over; there is no other shape.

2) It isn’t trying to look “random”.
Patterns that are supposed to look like a random distribution of elements are much trickier to create. I’ll cover them in a separate article.

3) It has no horizontal or vertical lines at its edges.
The following procedure isn't ideal for making pattern tiles that are made up of horizontal and vertical lines (like bricks and other rectilinear units). Those patterns, while common, are actually special cases that require a completely different technique to make sure they look right when they're tiled together. You can see three examples of these in this article’s first image, above. I'll outline that different technique in a separate article.

The technique that follows uses LayOut and Photoshop. While it’s possible to create pattern tiles using only LayOut (or even SketchUp, for that matter), Photoshop (or another image editor like GIMP) makes it much easier by providing pixel-level editing and tools for resizing raster images precisely.

Step 1: Use LayOut to manually draw a sample of the pattern.

LayOut is an obvious way to create simple pattern tiles like this one. The addition of SketchUp's Copy Array feature to LayOut in SketchUp Pro 2013 makes tasks like this one a lot easier.

Step 1: Start by manually creating an area of pattern. For something this simple, LayOut works well.

Step 2: Outline a single tile with a rectangle.

Drawing this rectangle on a new layer makes it easier to turn on and off later on. Giving it a thick and brightly colored outline makes it easier to see what you're doing.

Step 2: Use the Rectangle tool to outline a single tile.

Step 3: Fill the "tile outline" rectangle with a bright color and turn off its stroke.

This step makes it easy to crop away everything you don't need once you're in Photoshop. Choose a fill color that doesn't appear anywhere in your pattern tile.

Step 3: Convert the outlined rectangle into a filled shape with no stroke.

Step 4: Duplicate the page and delete only the rectangle.

Step 4: Duplicate the page and remove the rectangle on the copy.

Step 5: Export a PDF.

In your exported PDF, include both the page with the rectangle and the one without.

Step 5: Export both pages as a PDF file.

Step 6: Open the PDF in Photoshop.

In Photoshop, choose to open both pages of the PDF as separate image files. Set the image size to something quite large, like 5000 pixels wide. You'll downsample (make them smaller) later on.

Step 6: Open the pages of the PDF as separate Photoshop files

Step 7: Copy / Paste one file into the other.

In the open file with the colored rectangle, choose Select > All from the menu bar, then choose Edit > Copy. Move to the other open file, then choose Edit > Paste Special > Paste in Place to create a new layer.

Step 7: Copy/Paste in Place the contents of one file into the other, creating a new layer in the second file.

Step 8: Select the colored rectangle.

Choose the layer containing the colored rectangle, then activate the Magic Wand tool and click once on the rectangle to create a selection from it.

Step 8: Use the Magic Wand tool to select only the colored rectangle

Step 9: Crop the image based on the rectangular selection.

Choose Image > Crop from the menu bar to crop the file based on the selection rectangle. Choose Select > Deselect when you're done.

Step 9: Crop the image, leaving only a single pattern tile

Step 10: Hide the layer containing the colored rectangle.

When you hide the layer with the colored rectangle on it, you should be left with only a single pattern tile in your Photoshop file. Save the layered image as a PSD file.

Step 10: Hide the layer containing the colored rectangle.

Step 11: Resize the file.

Choose Image > Image Size... to open the Image Size dialog box. Make sure the Resample Image checkbox is checked, and the drop-down menu below it is set to Bilinear. Type in a new width, in pixels, for your pattern tile, then click OK.

Note 1: If you create a very large pattern tile, you won't ever have to worry about blurriness or visible pixels when your pattern appears in LayOut—it'll be sharp as a tack. On the other hand, making your tile too large could bog down your computer; it all depends on how large each tile will appear, how many tiles LayOut will end up drawing, and how zippy your computer is.

Note 2: When it comes to digital images, there are some "magic" numbers to be aware of. They're the powers of two (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, etc), and using them makes it easier for your computer to resample an image when it needs to be displayed bigger or smaller than its native size. Making your pattern tile image width one of these numbers says to the world, "I know what I'm doing."

Step 11: Resize the image using the Image Size dialog box.

Step 12: Change the image resolution.

Choose Image > Image Size... to open the Image Size dialog box again. This time, make sure the Resample Image checkbox is unchecked. The fields in the Pixel Dimensions area of the window should be uneditable.

Here, you're setting the physical size of the pattern tile on your page in LayOut. The value you type into the Width field is the physical width your tile will appear in LayOut when the pattern is set to 1x scale in the Pattern Fill panel. If you want an individual tile to be 0.5 inches wide in LayOut, enter that measurement into the Width field, and click OK.

Step 12: Change the image resolution (the pixel density) so that the pattern appears the correct size on your page in LayOut.

Step 13: Save your image as a PNG file.

As I explained at the top of this article, PNG is the image file format that offers both lossless file compression and support for areas of transparency. Both are desirable qualities in a pattern tile, so PNG's almost always the way to go.

Step 13: Save the image tile as a PNG file. Giving it a meaningful name will save time in the long run.

Step 14: Import your custom pattern into LayOut.

Back in LayOut, open the Pattern Fill panel (Window > Pattern Fill) and choose Import Custom Pattern... from the drop-down menu at the top. Find the PNG file you created in Step 13 and open it.

To make your custom patterns available in every new LayOut document you create, put them in folders on your system and use the Add Custom Collection... option from the drop-down menu in the Pattern FIll panel.

Step 14: Use the Pattern Fill panel to import your custom pattern into LayOut.

In my next couple posts, I’ll outline techniques for creating pattern tiles that are rectilinear, ones that incorporate transparency, and ones that are supposed to look like a random distribution of elements. Stay tuned, and good luck.

Posted by Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Evangelist

Introducing the AdSense 10 Challenge

Inside AdSense Team — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 17:38:00 +0000

In celebration of AdSense’s upcoming 10th anniversary, we’re hosting a free 10-week masterclass to help you become an AdSense expert and grow your revenue. This upcoming Learn with Google for Publishers series, the AdSense 10 Challenge, starts on June 25th and we’d love for you to join us!

What is the AdSense 10 Challenge?
Over the course of 10 weeks, we’ll equip you with the tools and insights you need to make the most out of your online business with AdSense. We’ll cover a range of topics and show you ways to increase your revenue, uncover new information in your reports, and set up experiments to determine the best layouts for your site. You’ll meet members of the AdSense community like optimization specialists and experienced AdSense publishers. In addition, we’ll host office hours each week on Google+ to answer your questions on the topic of the week.

At the end of each week, let us know how you’re doing by filling out a short check-in survey. Check-in all 10 weeks and you could be featured on our Google+ page as a Challenge Finisher and receive a limited edition AdSense 10 t-shirt.

When is the Challenge and what topics will it cover?
The AdSense 10 Challenge will take place online from June 25th - August 30th. We’ll cover a wide range of topics designed to encourage AdSense success. For more information, check out the schedule below and add it to your Google Calendar.

Week 1, 6/25 - 7/1 - Welcome to the AdSense 10 Challenge
Week 2, 7/2 - 7/8 - Understanding Your Performance Reports
Week 3, 7/9 - 7/15 - Optimization Opportunities
Week 4, 7/16 - 7/22 - Make Better Decisions with Google Analytics - part 1
Week 5, 7/23 - 7/29 - Make Better Decisions with Google Analytics - part 2
Week 6, 7/30 - 8/5 - User Experience: Understanding Your Users
Week 7, 8/6 - 8/12 - User Experience: Engaging Your Users
Week 8, 8/13 - 8/19 - User Experience: Testing What Works Best
Week 9, 8/20 - 8/26 - Mobile: The Time is Now
Week 10, 8/27 - 8/30 - Grow and Engage with Google+

Where do I sign up?

Click here to register

As we get closer to June 25th, we’ll share more information about the Challenge on our Learn with Google for Publishers community on Google+. So be sure to join the community and check back soon for updates.

See you at the Challenge!

Posted by Laurie Shiau - Inside AdSense team
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