Google Data

• HPX: a distributed C++ runtime system which comes with a standards-compliant API and allows users to scale their applications across thousands of machines
• LibGeoDecomp: an auto-parallelizing library for petascale computer simulations which is able to take advantage of HPX to better adapt fluctuating workloads to the system
• LibFlatArray: a highly efficient multidimensional array library which provides an object-oriented interface but stores data in a vectorization-friendly Struct-of-Arrays format.

Posted by Javier Bargas-Avila, User Experience Research at Google

Worldwide, there are about 200 languages that are spoken by at least 3 million people. In this global context, software developers are required to translate their user interfaces into many languages. While graphical user interfaces have evolved substantially when compared to text-based user interfaces, they still rely heavily on textual information. The perceived language quality of translated user interfaces (UIs) can have a significant impact on the overall quality and usability of a product. But how can software developers and product managers learn more about the quality of a translation when they don’t speak the language themselves?

Key information in interaction elements and content are mostly conveyed through text. This aspect can be illustrated by removing text elements from a UI, as shown in the the figure below.

Three versions of the YouTube UI: (a) the original, (b) YouTube without text elements, and (c) YouTube without graphic elements. It gets apparent how the textless version is stripped of the most useful information: it is almost impossible to choose a video to watch and navigating the site is impossible.

In “Measuring user rated language quality: Development and validation of the user interface Language Quality Survey (LQS)“, recently published in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, we describe the development and validation of a survey that enables users to provide feedback about the language quality of the user interface.

UIs are generally developed in one source language and translated afterwards string by string. The process of translation is prone to errors and might introduce problems that are not present in the source. These problems are most often due to difficulties in the translation process. For example, the word “auto” can be translated to French as automatique (automatic) or automobile (car), which obviously has a different meaning. Translators might chose the wrong term if context is missing during the process. Another problem arises from words that behave as a verb when placed in a button or as a noun if part of a label. For example, “access” can stand for “you have access” (as a label) or “you can request access” (as a button).

Further pitfalls are gender, prepositions without context or other characteristics of the source text that might influence translation. These problems sometimes even get aggravated by the fact that translations are made by different linguists at different points in time. Such mistranslations might not only negatively affect trustworthiness and brand perception, but also the acceptance of the product and its perceived usefulness.

This work was motivated by the fact that in 2012, the YouTube internationalization team had anecdotal evidence which suggested that some language versions of YouTube might benefit from improvement efforts. While expert evaluations led to significant improvements of text quality, these evaluations were expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, it was decided to develop a survey that enables users to provide feedback about the language quality of the user interface to allow a scalable way of gathering quantitative data about language quality.

The Language Quality Survey (LQS) contains 10 questions about language quality. The first five questions form the factor “Readability”, which describes how natural and smooth to read the used text is. For instance, one question targets ease of understanding (“How easy or difficult to understand is the text used in the [product name] interface?”). Questions 6 to 9 summarize the frequency of (in)consistencies in the text, called “Linguistic Correctness”. The full survey can be found in the publication.

Case study: applying the LQS in the field

As the LQS was developed to discover problematic translations of the YouTube interface and allow focused quality improvement efforts, it was made available in over 60 languages and data were gathered for all these versions of the YouTube interface. To understand the quality of each UI version, we compared the results for the translated versions to the source language (here: US-English). We inspected first the global item, in combination with Linguistic Correctness and Readability. Second, we inspected each item separately, to understand which notion of Linguistic Correctness or Readability showed worse (or better) values. Here are some results:

• The data revealed that about one third of the languages showed subpar language quality levels, when compared to the source language.
• To understand the source of these problems and fix them, we analyzed the qualitative feedback users had provided (every time someone selected the lower two end scale points, pointing at a problem in the language, a text box was surfaced, asking them to provide examples or links to illustrate the issues).
• The analysis of these comments provided linguists with valuable feedback of various kinds. For instance, users pointed to confusing terminology, untranslated words that were missed during translation, typographical or grammatical problems, words that were translated but are commonly used in English, or screenshots in help pages that were in English but needed to be localized. Some users also pointed to readability aspects such as sections with old fashioned or too formal tone as well as too informal translations, complex technical or legal wordings, unnatural translations or rather lengthy sections of text. In some languages users also pointed to text that was too small or criticized the readability of the font that was used.
• In parallel, in-depth expert reviews (so-called “language find-its”) were organized. In these sessions, a group of experts for each language met and screened all of YouTube to discover aspects of the language that could be improved and decided on concrete actions to fix them. By using the LQS data to select target languages, it was possible to reduce the number of language find-its to about one third of the original estimation (if all languages had been screened).

LQS has since been successfully adapted and used for various Google products such as Docs, Analytics, or AdWords. We have found the LQS to be a reliable, valid and useful tool to approach language quality evaluation and improvement. The LQS can be regarded as a small piece in the puzzle of understanding and improving localization quality. Google is making this survey broadly available, so that everyone can start improving their products for everyone around the world.

Posted by Josh Gordon, Developer Advocate

Go where your users are: the living room! Google Cast lets users stream their favorite apps from Android, iOS and the Web right onto their TV. Android TV turns a TV into an Android device, only bigger!

We’ve partnered with Udacity to launch a new online course – Google Cast and Android TV Development. This course teaches you how to extend your existing Android app to work with these technologies. It’s packed with practical advice, code snippets, and deep dives into sample code.

You can take advantage of both, without having to rewrite your app. Android TV is just Android on a new form factor, and the Leanback library makes it easy to add a big screen and cinematic UI to your app. Google Cast comes with great samples and guides to help you get started. Google also provides the Cast Companion Library, which makes it faster and easier to add cast to your Android app.

This class is part of our larger series on Ubiquitous Computing across other Google platforms, including Android Wear, and Android Auto. Designed as short, standalone courses, you can take any on its own, or take them all!

Get started now and try it out at no cost, your users are waiting!

“How many days until Halloween?”
“What should I be for Halloween?”

In the weeks leading up to All Hallows’ Eve you turn to Google Search to ask these two crucial questions. So with just days left to perfect a costume for yourself, your kid, your pooch or your partner, here’s a look at some of the top Halloween costume trends across the United States. For more, see Frightgeist, our Google Trends Halloween hub.

Hair-raising
If your costume involves a certain familiar ‘do, prepare to have company. Get-ups based on the bombastic GOP candidate for President are spiking, with the top-related search being “Donald Trump wig.” And don’t go looking for blue or purple hair-dye at the last minute on Saturday: chances are it will already have been bought up by kids dressing up as Disney’s “Descendants” characters Mal and Evie.

And if you’re aiming for a unique costume, you might want to avoid buns on the side of your head too. “Star Wars” is the second most searched costume nationwide, and within that Princess Leia reigns supreme above Dark Side standbys Stormtrooper and Darth Vader.

Superhero Squad
“Suicide Squad” may not hit box offices until next summer, but one character from the film is already making a killing in costume searches. “Harley Quinn” takes the top search spot nationwide (rival Batman is in fifth place). But Harley and Bruce Wayne are just a few of the superheroes (and super villains) you can look for this weekend: People are also donning their cuffs for Wonder Woman, their creepy facepaint for Joker, their bodysuits for Catwoman, and their half shell as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (T-U-R-T-L-E Power!). Even lesser-known characters like Scarlet Witch, Vision, Wasp are getting a boost from film franchises like “The Avengers” and “Ant-Man.”

Frightful Fidos
“Dog costume” is always a top search around Halloween—but not because you’re dressing up as Snoopy or Scooby. No, you’re searching for the cutest costume for your four-legged friend. In addition to being adorable, the top dog costumes are just as “Star Wars”-filled as the top human costumes. We assume that’s because they’ve already got the fur and/or ears to make it work.

If dressing your pooch as Chewy feels like asking for trouble, other popular canine costumes include “lion,” “dinosaur,” “shark” and … Olaf. Because—ahem—you still can’t let “Frozen” go.

Better together
When you want a partner in crime or just want insurance against looking silly solo, couples costumes are the way to go. This year, you’re dressing up as famous pop culture pairs like Bonnie and Clyde (the top couples costume overall), Jasmine and Aladdin, Woody and Jessie from “Toy Story,” Danny and Sandy from “Grease,” and Barbie and Ken. You’re keeping that Halloween realness with searches for Gomez and Morticia Addams and Beetlejuice (#2 on the list, and based on Google Images subject to lots of interpretation). And you’re bringing new meaning to the phrase “I’m dressing up with my boo” with searches for a “Boo and Sully” costume from “Monsters, Inc.”

The treat in “trick or treat”
Even for adults, Halloween is an excuse to eat junk food. In the past month you’ve searched for candy corn, candy apples and Halloween variations on all of your favorite sweets, from donuts to pudding cups to Kit Kats. But one candy reigns supreme: marshmallows (no, not that marshmallow) are the top searched candy over the past month.

Posted by Emily Wood, Managing Editor, who, despite the above, is still taking recommendations for this year’s costume

As consumers spend more and more time on their mobile phones, providing ad experiences that respect their context is more important than ever before. Accordingly, publishers are increasingly embracing native ads — highly customized advertising units that seamlessly integrate in a user’s content experience without being disruptive. However, creating and delivering these ads can be a challenge. That is why earlier this year we launched Native Ads on DoubleClick, and publishers like Trovit are beginning to see the results.

European publisher Trovit, a classified search engine for property, jobs, cars, products and holiday rentals, had over 50% of its total traffic in some countries coming from mobile devices. To grow mobile revenue while delivering better ad experiences to users, Trovit tested native ads on their apps, powered by DoubleClick, in two of their markets. Based on the promising tests, they expanded their native ads strategy to six more markets. The results: net revenue grew significantly with CPM growth up to 120% in certain markets.

Learn more about Trovit’s strategy and how DoubleClick helped here.

Posted by Nataliya Kozak
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

Posted by Susan Cadrecha, Google Maps Zombie Bride

Chrome is one of the world’s most popular ways to watch video, with around 3,000 hours of video watched every second. Whether you’re singing along with Taylor Swift, binge-watching Breaking Bad or learning about NASA’s Pluto mission—no matter what you watch, we make sure that your videos look great and load fast when you’re using Chrome.

Faster, leaner, crisper

Videos today have higher resolution, richer color and more frames per second. That’s great news for you, but as video quality increases, it’s harder to stream and play it without interruption. So we’ve been working on keeping Chrome lean so you can watch eye-poppingly high-definition videos. When you use Chrome to watch video on sites like YouTube, your videos load faster and look better than ever before. That’s because Chrome supports the VP9 video format, which uses up to 40% less data and higher quality videos.

View: H.264 on 3GH.264 on WiFiVP9 on 3GVP9 on WiFi

We optimize for your data plan, battery life and processing power without sacrificing quality and with support for the latest high-definition formats. We’ve also worked with partners like YouTube and Amazon to reduce power consumption up to 25% by transitioning away from Flash.

Keep your videos buttery smooth

Videos really are moving pictures—each picture is called a “frame”. Those frames are recorded by a video camera, and then displayed at regular intervals by your screen so you can see it as a smooth video. A typical video is recorded at 30 frames per second, and a typical screen displays at 60 times a second—so ideally, one frame is on the screen for two refreshes, and you see smooth video. Often that doesn’t happen—many videos aren’t recorded at exactly 30 frames per second, and many screens don’t display at exactly 60 times per second—which leads to inconsistent or jerky video. We’ve been working to take account of these variations in Chrome, so we can more consistently hit two frames per refresh. That means your video looks smoother.

In this example, 32% of video frames are displayed for the wrong length of time and 5 frames never display.  

Now almost all frames are shown at regular intervals, and every frame is displayed.

Your connection may not always be perfect, so we helped build a new open standard that your video provider uses to intelligently adjust video settings—and if your Internet connection speed dips, video quality will adjust without your input. That means you get up to 50% fewer video interruptions.

Keeping you secure

Watching videos on the web used to require downloading and installing a plugin. Plugins are separate programs from the browser and can cause problems, including malware and tracking of your browsing habits across websites.

To combat this, we’ve been working with our partners to create new web standards to support premium content through HTML5. Many leading video providers like YouTube, Amazon and Play Movies now use these standards to deliver video in Chrome, so you don’t have to worry about nasty surprises.

With Chrome, you get the fastest, safest experience while you watch. So you can explore all the great video on the web—to learn, play or get inspired!

Posted by Renganathan Ramamoorthy, Product Manager and Patron of Playbacks

Video images: Blender Foundation | www.blender.org

Starting next year, the top three mobile network operators in Indonesia will begin testing Project Loon balloon-powered Internet. Over the next few years, we’re hoping that Loon will help put high-speed LTE Internet connections within reach of more than 100 million Indonesians, giving them access to the limitless educational, cultural, and economic opportunities of the Internet.

In Indonesia today, only about 1 out of every 3 people are connected to the web, and most of their connections are painfully slow. Many people live in areas without existing Internet infrastructure; on an archipelago of over 17,000 islands, with mountains and jungles, it’s difficult to run fiber optic cable or install mobile phone towers. That’s where Loon comes in. Loon balloons act like floating cell phone towers in the sky. Flying on the winds at altitudes twice as high as commercial planes, each one beams a connection down to the ground; as one balloon drifts out of range, another moves in to take its place. We hope this could help local operators extend the coverage of their existing networks, and reach further into rural and remote areas.

These tests with Indosat, Telkomsel, and XL Axiata are an important step toward bringing all of Indonesia online, and a key milestone for the Loon team as we continue to test, learn and expand the project.

Of course, to make the Internet not just accessible but useful, there’s more to do, and we have a wide variety of efforts underway in Indonesia and elsewhere to help achieve that goal. For example, Android One phones are helping to make affordable high-quality smartphones more accessible in places where most people first access the Internet on a mobile device. We’ve also built features for when connections are slow or nonexistent, such as Search Lite and offline videos on YouTube. And Google Translate for Bahasa and Sundanese can help knock down the language barrier between Indonesia and the rest of the web.

The Internet is still out of reach for too many people, but we’re making progress. If all goes well, soon many more millions of people in Indonesia will be able to bring their ideas, culture and businesses online. At that point, the sky’s the limit.

Posted by Mike Cassidy, Vice President, Project Loon

Posted by Ryan Sleevi, Software Engineer

This post updates our previous notification of a misissued certificate for google.com

Following our notification, Symantec published a report in response to our inquiries and disclosed that 23 test certificates had been issued without the domain owner’s knowledge covering five organizations, including Google and Opera.

However, we were still able to find several more questionable certificates using only the Certificate Transparency logs and a few minutes of work. We shared these results with other root store operators on October 6th, to allow them to independently assess and verify our research.

Symantec performed another audit and, on October 12th, announced that they had found an additional 164 certificates over 76 domains and 2,458 certificates issued for domains that were never registered.

It’s obviously concerning that a CA would have such a long-running issue and that they would be unable to assess its scope after being alerted to it and conducting an audit. Therefore we are firstly going to require that as of June 1st, 2016, all certificates issued by Symantec itself will be required to support Certificate Transparency. In this case, logging of non-EV certificates would have provided significantly greater insight into the problem and may have allowed the problem to be detected sooner.

After this date, certificates newly issued by Symantec that do not conform to the Chromium Certificate Transparency policy may result in interstitials or other problems when used in Google products.

More immediately, we are requesting of Symantec that they further update their public incident report with:

1. A post-mortem analysis that details why they did not detect the additional certificates that we found.
2. Details of each of the failures to uphold the relevant Baseline Requirements and EV Guidelines and what they believe the individual root cause was for each failure.

We are also requesting that Symantec provide us with a detailed set of steps they will take to correct and prevent each of the identified failures, as well as a timeline for when they expect to complete such work. Symantec may consider this latter information to be confidential and so we are not requesting that this be made public.

Posted by Lily Sheringham, Developer Marketing at Google Play

Editor’s note: This is another post in our series featuring tips from developers finding success on Google Play. We recently spoke to games developer Kongregate, to find out how they use Store Listing Experiments successfully. – Ed.

With Store Listing Experiments in the Google Play Developer Console, you can conduct A/B tests on the content of your store listing pages. Test versions of the text and graphics to see which ones perform best, based on install data.

Kongregate increases installs by 45 percent with Store Listing Experiments

Founded in 2006 by brother and sister Jim and Emily Greer, Kongregate is a leading mobile games publisher specializing in free to play games. Kongregate used Store Listing Experiments to test new content for the Global Assault listing page on Google Play. By testing with different audience sizes, they found a new icon that drove 92 percent more installs, while variant screenshots achieved an impressive 14 percent improvement. By picking the icons, screenshots, and text descriptions that were the most sticky with users, Kongregate saw installs increase by 45 percent on the improved page.

Kongregate’s Mike Gordon, VP of Publishing; Peter Eykemans, Senior Producer; and Tammy Levy, Director of Product for Mobile Games, talk about how to successfully optimise mobile game listings with Store Listing Experiments.

Kongregate’s tips for success with Store Listing Experiments

Jeff Gurian, Sr. Director of Marketing at Kongregate also shares his do’s and don’ts on how to use experiments to convert more of your visitors, thereby increasing installs. Check them out below:

Learn more about how Kongregate optimized their Play Store listing with Store Listing Experiments. Learn more about Google Play products and best practices to help you grow your business globally.

This is the fifth and final post of the DoubleClick Search Holiday Series. Today, we cover planning ahead, the last of five steps outlined in our new DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays. Your performance in 2015 should propel your performance next year. Here’s how to get ready for 2016.

• Use executive reports: A DoubleClick Search executive report displays your metrics for revenue, costs, trends, and other high-level concepts, all presented in understandable charts and tables. Create your report once, or schedule a daily update throughout the holiday season.
• Review your purchase details. For holiday planning, you want to be strategic about which items you highlight from your sales. So, look at your purchase detail reports to see which similar items were top sellers this year, and use that as a guide for where to put your effort in 2016.
• Leave bid strategies running, but adjust for any changes to your goals: If your return on ad spend or cost-per-action requirements change, adjust your bid strategy goals and DoubleClick Search will bring your bids back into line.
• Save your budget pacing reports: You can go back and see how you paced to get ready for 2016.

That’s it, the last of the five steps to holiday campaign success. We hope these posts will help you during the busy 2015 holiday period. To recap, here are all the steps again:

1. Prepare: Unify your data for insights and action, add more data to maximize conversions, use labels to track your promotions, and integrate offline data.
2. Automate: Use bulksheets, automated rules, and inventory-aware campaigns to make your life easier.
3. Measure: Gain valuable insights by setting up scheduled reports, budget pacing reports, formula columns, and Floodlight activity columns, then analyze and monitor your performance.
4. Optimize: Use real-time data to make adjustments with the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite, Adaptive Shopping campaigns, and remarketing.
5. Plan ahead: Create executive reports, review purchase details to see how well you did this year, and save your budget pacing reports.

Be sure to read the entire DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays.

Don’t forget to register now for tomorrow’s webinar on October 29th at 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT to learn tips and tools to maximize performance and profits during the holiday period from Henry Tappen, Product Manager at DoubleClick Search.

Happy Holidays!

Posted by Nick Macrae Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search