Google Data

Our interns have the opportunity to work on some of Google’s most cutting edge and innovative projects – not only in engineering, but across sales and other business functions, bringing a fresh perspective to the work done at Google. To show you just how much of an impact interns make and to highlight their unique experiences, we’re bringing you a special blog series: Google Intern Insights. For today’s post, meet Sonali Mehta, an intern on the Content and partner Operations Team at YouTube in San Bruno, CA.

Tell us one fun, outlandish fact about you!
I have a YouTube channel where I upload videos of myself singing and playing the piano. One of my covers was once featured on a TV show in Brazil!

What inspired you to apply for this internship, and what made Google appealing to you as a potential intern?
Google is one of the most innovative and exciting companies to work for. My passions lie in the intersection between entertainment, tech, and business, so I really couldn’t have dreamt up a more perfect job for myself than here at YouTube!

What team are you working on at Google? Can you provide us with a high-level description of your summer project?
I’m on the Content & Partner Operations Team at YouTube in San Bruno, CA. I’m working with my manager to develop some of our partner communities and connect creators with each other. I’m also working on some programs and initiatives for our biggest superusers.

What’s the best part about working with your manager? What about your team?
My manager and team members are all really inspiring and enthusiastic! They were so welcoming to me when I first started my internship, and I’ve loved learning from them and getting to know them all.

We all know Googlers and interns love the food and the other benefits. Outside of some of the well-known perks, what’s your favorite part about working at Google?
I’m doing exactly what I always wanted to do when I started my own YouTube channel five years ago. I feel like I’m helping creators like myself move our platform forward. In addition, Google does an outstanding job of valuing their interns; I’m encouraged to participate in meetings and share my projects all the time. I even had the opportunity to attend the YouTube Global Content Summit in San Francisco during the first week of my internship, as well as VidCon down in Southern California a few weeks later!

What’s something you’ve accomplished during your internship (thus far) that you’re most proud of? Or something you’re looking forward to working on?
I became YouTube Certified at the beginning of the summer. I’ve also completed projects that will benefit YouTube partners of all kinds, but particularly those belonging to US Emerging Markets.

Outside of being a Google intern, what are some fun things you do outside the classroom/office throughout the year?
I’ve been singing and playing the piano my whole life! I started uploading to YouTube years ago, and though I’m just a casual creator, I really love making videos.

What does “being Googley” mean to you?
To me, being Googley means being professional, creative, confident, and respectful.

Dream Google office to visit?
YouTube Space Tokyo!

If you could give one piece of advice to potential student applicants, what would it be?
This is a cheesy answer, but be authentic! Google has so many departments and organizations, so express what your genuine passions are in your application, and you’ll thank yourself later.

Want to learn more about internships at Google? Check out our Student Careers Site. Additionally, follow Google Students on Google+ and use the hashtag #googleinterns to keep up with Intern Insights this summer.


Posted by Maggie Hohlfeld, University Programs Team

Check out this month’s “What’s New in Google Apps” newsletter for a roundup of all Apps launches from July 2014.Newsletter Archive & Localized Versions (coming soon for July issue)Note: all launches are applicable to all Google Apps editions unless…

Posted by Eric Weigle, Software Engineer

UPDATE: And even more good news as the Publisher Center is now up and running in all countries where Google News has an edition. (Dec 16 2014)

UPDATE: The Publisher Center is now available for publishers in France, Italy, Germany and Spain as well as in all 21 countries where a Google News edition is available in English. (October 27 2014)

If you are a news publisher, your website has probably evolved and changed over time.  Until now, when you made changes to the structure of your site, we might not have discovered them unless you told us.  And that meant they might not have shown up in Google News, which in turn could have resulted in readers not seeing your great content.  To prevent this from happening, we are letting you make changes to our record of your news site using the just-launched Google News Publisher Center.

With the Publisher Center, you can benefit from better discovery and classification of your content and you can directly make the following changes:

• Update your news site details, including changing your site name and labeling your publication with any relevant source labels (e.g., “Blog”, “Satire” or “Opinion”)
• Update your section URLs when you change your site structure (e.g., when you add a new section such as http://example.com/2014commonwealthgames or http://example.com/elections2014)
• Label your sections with a specific topic (e.g., “Technology” or “Politics”)

Try it out, or learn more about how to get started.

At the moment the tool is only available to publishers in the U.S. but we plan to introduce it in other countries soon and add more features.  In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you about what works well and what doesn’t.  Ultimately, our goal is to make this a platform where news publishers and Google News can work together to provide readers with the best, most diverse news on the web.

The dog days of summer are upon us (just look at the last time we posted on this here blog), but there’s still plenty of excitement to keep search buzzing. From big baseball news to blockbusters, here’s a look at the last seven days in search:

Baseball bombshells
This season’s MLB trade deadline was yesterday, and as news of surprise trades emerged, people were quick to catch the latest via search. More than half of the day’s hot trends were baseball-related, and searches for the blogs [mlb trade rumors] reached their highest volume all year. From the three-way trade that landed David Price in Detroit and Austin Jackson in Seattle to the A’s-Red Sox swap of Jon Lester and Yoenis Céspedes, it was quite the active Deadline Day.

Searchnado
Thanks in large part to nerdfest Comic-Con, it was a week of sneak peeks for movie fans. First up: the reboot of Mad Max. The long-awaited remake of the Australian classic premiered its trailer at the conference last weekend, and fans got their first real glimpse of Bane Tom Hardy as Max. Meanwhile, a sneak peek of Israeli actress Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman in the forthcoming Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice made waves. And a new teaser trailer for Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 gave us a new glimpse at Katniss as the face of the rebellion.

Though neither film will be in theaters for some time, fans are keeping busy in the meantime: searches for new releases Guardians of the Galaxy, Lucy and Hercules were all high on the charts. And those who prefer their movies with a hefty serving of camp to go with their popcorn had more than enough to satisfy them with Sharknado 2: The Second One. Searches for [sharknado 2 trailer] were up 95 percent over the past month, and the movie was one of the top topics Wednesday when it premiered on Syfy. Simply stunning. Finally, the trailer for the movie version of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods had musical theater lovers ready for more.

Searching for symptoms
An ebola outbreak in West Africa has people concerned about the spread of the deadly epidemic. Searches for [ebola] are at their highest ever, up 2,000%, and related searches like [ebola in nigeria], [ebola symptoms] and [what is ebola] grew too. Worldwide, Liberia had the highest search volume of any country.

Tip of the week
Next time you’re invited to a summer barbecue, let Google help you remember to pick up a snack or six-pack to contribute to the fiesta. On your Android or iPhone, just say “Ok Google, remind me to buy a watermelon when I’m at Safeway.” Next time you’re near the store, you’ll get a prompt. No more showing up with empty hands!

Posted by Emily Wood, Google Blog Editor, who searched this week for [beyonce surfboard] and [arcade fire tour costumes]

We have two additional Google Summer of Code organizations to spotlight this week, LabLua and Code Combat.  Both are new to the program in 2014. Read below for more information about the exciting projects their students have taken on this summer.

LabLua is a lab at PUC-Rio dedicated to research on programming languages with an emphasis on the Lua language. Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language that has been used in many industrial applications, and on many embedded systems and games.

It is our first year in Google Summer of Code (GSoC). We had eight mentors create a pool of 15 projects to help students to submit proposals. We received a total of 20 proposals, from which four have been accepted. We are quite an international group — two of the accepted students are from Brazil, one is from Romania and one is from India.

The projects our students are currently working on include:

• Adding flow typing and evolution of table types to typed Lua
• Adding multi-CPU support to VLC
• Creating a library to help ‘memory leak’ detection in Lua
• Porting Gameduino demos to the programming language Céu (another language currently under development at our lab)

By Ana Lúcia de Moura and Francisco Sant’Anna, Researchers at LabLua

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CodeCombat is a game that teaches people to code. It runs completely in HTML5 and supports playing in JavaScript, Coffeescript, Python, Lua, Clojure, Io, and more to come. Since open sourcing the site in January, we’ve been very happy with the huge response from people who provide code improvements, experimental game levels and extensive translations to the site. Almost every aspect of the game is available for contributors to work on, and GSoC has been terrific in bringing not only attention to our project but also many dedicated volunteers as well.

Alexandru Caciulescu is building new game levels throughout the summer. His campaign focuses on teaching intermediate-to-advanced concepts and algorithms, such as sorting, recursion and data structures. He has already built the Gold Rush level which requires efficient pathfinding, and which we based our own Greed Tournament level on.

Jayant Jain is working on improving our level editor. Building new levels is currently quite hard, arguably the most difficult thing for any contributor to do. Jayant is running UX tests and working with Alexandru and other level builders to remove pain points, fix bugs, add key features and create helpful documentation.

Dominik Kundel is doing a series of projects on the game interface which will improve gameplay in general and mobile gameplay in particular. Projects include auto-complete, separation of coding and game views and interfaces for manipulating code easily on mobile.

Ruben Vereecken is building the site’s achievement system from top to bottom. It uses an experimental, highly decoupled and flexible foundation that is largely independent from the client logic. He’s also digging into several other parts of the site, such as the testing systems and making server-side improvements.

By Scott Erikson, Organization Administrator for Code Combat