Between a spookily resilient cat, and a new bunch of ghostbusters, there was a lot of (paranormal) activity in search this week:

“It’s a great day for a ball game…”
People across the country are gearing up for this weekend’s Super Bowl, starting with the basics: “When is the Super Bowl?” They’re also researching some of the major characters of Sunday’s face-off—namely Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch and Patriots coach Bill Belichick—and getting the jump on the ads on YouTube (you’ve already watched more than 100 million minutes’ worth!), including a controversial GoDaddy ad. Plus, no game day is complete without the food: top recipes searched this week include [easy chili], [fajitas], [baked chicken wings] and [barbacoa]. Don’t forget to tune in to @Google over the weekend for more trends!

With all the football hubbub, people still found time to search for other sports happenings. Last Friday, baseball fans mourned the death of Ernie Banks, a.k.a. Mr. Cub, a beloved shortstop and Hall of Famer. And that same night, Klay Thompson of the Golden State Warriors scored a record-breaking 37 points in one quarter.

Who you gonna call?
An all-female Ghostbusters, that’s who. Rumors about next year’s reboot of the 80’s classic have been looming over us like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man for a while now, but now it’s all but confirmed that the 2016 film will feature Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon. Searches for each of the actresses spiked faster than you could say “proton pack,” and Kate McKinnon was the #2 search overall on Tuesday. In other leading-lady casting news, Harry Potter alum Emma Watson announced that she’ll play Belle in Disney’s forthcoming live-action Beauty and the Beast.

Tempest in a teacup
Headed into this week, the weather was on everyone’s mind, at least on the East Coast. Searches for terms like [weather], [blizzard 2015], [juno], [National Weather Service] and [weather NYC] were all hot—or, cold, as the case may be. People were also looking for info on the [mta], [nj transit] and [school closings]. Though the storm in New York amounted to little more than an excuse for a snow day, it dumped up to three feet of snow in parts of New England. Definitely enough to merit all those pre-storm searches!

And moving from the blizzard to the desert, Michelle Obama made headlines when she appeared in Riyadh to mark the death of King Abdullah—without a veil or headscarf. Searches spiked as people tried to find out if the First Lady intended her attire as a political statement. Others noted that she’s certainly not the first to go bareheaded: Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel, Laura Bush and Condoleezza Rice have, too.

One down, eight to go
File under “stranger than fiction”: [zombie cat] was trending in search this week after a 23-month old kitten in Florida seemingly came back from the dead. After being hit by a car and buried, Bart proved the old “nine lives” adage true when he reappeared in a neighbor’s yard five days later. We’d say that after his trials, Bart deserves a cozy new bed at home, like a Serenity Cat Pod from Skymall, but, well…

Tip of the week
Don’t show up empty-handed on Sunday: say “Ok Google, remind me to pick up guacamole when I’m at Safeway” and the Google app will help you be a good guest.

Posted by Emily Wood, Managing Editor, who searched this week for [garden district walking tour new orleans] and [kitten ducklings]

Posted by Eduardo Vela Nava, Security Engineer 

Since 2010, our Security Reward Programs have been a cornerstone of our relationship with the security research community. These programs have been successful because of two core beliefs:

• Security researchers should be rewarded for helping us protect Google’s users. 
• Researchers help us understand how to make Google safer by discovering, disclosing, and helping fix vulnerabilities at a scale that’s difficult to replicate by any other means.

We’re grateful for the terrific work these researchers do to help keep users safe. And so, we wanted to take a look back at 2014 to celebrate their contributions to Google, and in turn, our contributions back to them.

Looking back on 2014

Our Security Reward Programs continue to grow at a rapid clip. We’ve now paid more than $4,000,000 in rewards to security researchers since 2010 across all of our reward programs, and we’re looking forward to more great years to come.

In 2014:

• We paid researchers more than $1,500,000.
• Our largest single reward was $150,000. The researcher then joined us for an internship.
• We rewarded more than 200 different researchers. 
• We rewarded more than 500 bugs. For Chrome, more than half of all rewarded reports for 2014 were in developer and beta versions. We were able to squash bugs before they could reach our main user population. 

The top three contributors to the VRP program in 2014 during a recent visit to Google Zurich: Adrian (Romania), Tomasz (Poland / UK), Nikolai (Ukraine)

What’s new for 2015

We are announcing two additions to our programs today.

First, researchers’ efforts through these programs, combined with our own internal security work, make it increasingly difficult to find bugs. Of course, that’s good news, but it can also be discouraging when researchers invest their time and struggle to find issues. With this in mind, today we’re rolling out a new, experimental program: Vulnerability Research Grants. These are up-front awards that we will provide to researchers before they ever submit a bug.

Here’s how the program works:

• We’ll publish different types of vulnerabilities, products and services for which we want to support research beyond our normal vulnerability rewards. 
• We’ll award grants immediately before research begins, with no strings attached. Researchers then pursue the research they applied for, as usual.
• There will be various tiers of grants, with a maximum of $3,133.70 USD.
• On top of the grant, researchers are still eligible for regular rewards for the bugs they discover. 

To learn more about the current grants, and review your eligibility, have a look at our rules page.

Second, also starting today, all mobile applications officially developed by Google on Google Play and iTunes will now be within the scope of the Vulnerability Reward Program.

We’re looking forward to continuing our close partnership with the security community and rewarding them for their time and efforts in 2015!

Back in November 2014, we announced that older spreadsheets (those created prior to Dec 2013, including any subsequent copies) would start being gradually migrated to the new version of Google Sheets for Google Apps domains on the Rapid release track, …

Project 1: Curve Rendering

Project 2: New Material Editor

We all do it – set lofty resolutions that never make it past January. That’s because meaningful resolutions can take time to embrace and implement. Many marketers have told us that in 2015, programmatic buying will be at the heart of their strategy. In fact, the majority of marketers are managing at least 20% of their ad spend programmatically, and almost two-thirds plan to spend twice that amount over the next 12 months. (Source)

To help make the transition easier and more actionable, we connected with Bob Arnold, a digital marketer who has worked at Procter and Gamble, Kellogg, and is now Google’s North American Digital Media and Strategy lead. Bob shared with us three resolutions for marketers as they implement programmatic in 2015.

Stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on Google+ and Twitter.

Posted by Kelly Cox, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

Posted by Gill Ward, Senior Quantitative UX Researcher

A little over three months ago, we introduced something new called Inbox, and it’s been exhilarating to see how people have embraced the experience. In fact, we’ve received over 100,000 pieces of feedback already. Thank you!

As we keep working to evolve Inbox based on your feedback, we thought it’d be fun to share how people are currently using the product to get things done, and focus on what really matters. Enjoy!

And one more thing. We’re opening up invites to Inbox for a 24 hour #InboxHappyHour! If you’re interested in trying Inbox, send an email to from an @gmail.com address before 9am Friday PST and you’ll get an invite shortly.

In September 2014, we announced that Google Apps Vault would be added to all Google Apps for Education accounts at no charge. As of yesterday, all new Google Apps for Education customers will receive Vault as part of their Google Apps for Educatio…

For those of you new to monetizing your site, welcome to the Inside AdSense blog. With AdSense, you can earn money from your website, be it a professional business or just a hobby.What is Google AdSense? AdSense is a free, simple way to earn money by p…

by Alex Eagle

This article was adapted from a Google Testing on the Toilet (TotT) episode. You can download a printer-friendly version of this TotT episode and post it in your office.

You have just finished refactoring some code without modifying its behavior. Then you run the tests before committing and… a bunch of unit tests are failing. While fixing the tests, you get a sense that you are wasting time by mechanically applying the same transformation to many tests. Maybe you introduced a parameter in a method, and now must update 100 callers of that method in tests to pass an empty string.

What does it look like to write tests mechanically? Here is an absurd but obvious way:

// Production code:
def abs(i: Int)
return (i 
// Test code:
for (line: String in File(prod_source).read_lines())
switch (line.number)
    1: assert line.content equals def abs(i: Int)
    2: assert line.content equals   return (i 
              
That test is clearly not useful: it contains an exact copy of the code under test and acts like a checksum. A correct or incorrect program is equally likely to pass a test that is a derivative of the code under test. No one is really writing tests like that, but how different is it from this next example?
              
// Production code:
def process(w: Work)
  firstPart.process(w)
  secondPart.process(w)

// Test code:
part1 = mock(FirstPart)
part2 = mock(SecondPart)
w = Work()
Processor(part1, part2).process(w)
verify_in_order
  was_called part1.process(w)
  was_called part2.process(w)
              
It is tempting to write a test like this because it requires little thought and will run quickly. This is a change-detector test—it is a transformation of the same information in the code under test—and it breaks in response to any change to the production code, without verifying correct behavior of either the original or modified production code.
              
Change detectors provide negative value, since the tests do not catch any defects, and the added maintenance cost slows down development. These tests should be re-written or deleted.
            

It’s been nearly five years since we offered to build a fiber-optic network in one U.S. city as an experiment — and were met with overwhelming enthusiasm. Now, Google Fiber is live in Kansas City, Provo and Austin, and we’ve started to see how gigabit Internet, with speeds up to 100 times faster than today’s basic broadband, can transform cities. It can give them new platforms for economic development and new ways of using technology to improve life for their citizens. And, around the country, it seems to be catching on.

Check out the Kansas City Startup Village and Provo learn-how-to-code hub DevMountain. Take a look at the work of a geneticist whose speedy connection could one day help newborns in intensive care, or how one city’s network is connecting a high school classroom to an underwater microscope so students can study oceanic life in the Pacific… from Chattanooga, Tenn. There are many more stories like this—stories about how people are using gigabit internet to spark innovation, inspire creativity, and collaborate in ways they simply couldn’t before. And we want to see even more.

So, today, we’re happy to announce that Google Fiber is coming to 18 cities across four new metro areas: Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, and Raleigh-Durham. We can’t wait to see what people and businesses across the Southeast U.S. do with gigabit speeds.

Bringing Google Fiber to these cities is a long-term investment. We’ve been working closely with city leaders over the past year on a joint planning process to get their communities ready for Google Fiber—and now the really hard work begins. Our next step is to work with cities to create a detailed map of where we can put our thousands of miles of fiber, using existing infrastructure such as utility poles and underground conduit, and making sure to avoid things like gas and water lines. Then a team of surveyors and engineers will hit the streets to fill in missing details. Once we’re done designing the network (which we expect to wrap up in a few months), we’ll start construction.

We’re also continuing to explore bringing fiber to five additional metro areas—Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Antonio and San Jose, and will have updates on these potential Fiber cities later this year.

Today, we aren’t the only ones talking about gigabit broadband. From the White House to main street, a chorus of new voices is standing up for speed. Just last week during the State of the Union, the President called for faster networks so that innovators and entrepreneurs can build the next big idea. New research from the Fiber to the Home Council shows gigabit networks are contributing billions of dollars in economic growth. Communities across America are demanding more speed for their own homes and businesses, and we’re going to keep doing our part to help.

Posted by Dennis Kish, Vice President, Google Fiber