Google Data » KVOX https://googledata.org Everything Google: News, Products, Services, Content, Culture Fri, 03 Apr 2015 21:58:02 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1 The Google Bus goes "App to School" https://googledata.org/google-apps/the-google-bus-goes-app-to-school/ https://googledata.org/google-apps/the-google-bus-goes-app-to-school/#comments Tue, 09 Sep 2008 23:32:00 +0000 announced a milestone of 1 million active users on Google Apps for Education and our plans for the first-ever "App to School" cross-country road trip. Today, we hit the road in the Google Bus to visit 10 universities across the U.S.


To kick the trip off, we're announcing we've reached 2 million active users, and 17 new customers to add to the thousands of universities already on Google Apps. To make it really interesting, we also made Video for Google Apps available for educational institutions.

New customers include:
  • Austin Community College
  • Clark College
  • Clovis Community College
  • Delaware County Community College
  • Illinois Central College
  • Lewis Clark State College
  • Maine Township High School District 207
  • Oberlin College
  • Old Dominion University
  • Ottawa University
  • Pierce College District
  • Saint Ignatius High School
  • San Mateo County Community College District
  • Southeastern Community College
  • St. Olaf College
  • Universidad Cesar Vallejo Lima Norte
  • University of Alaska
For the entire month of September, the bio-diesel fueled bus (see photo) will be visiting campuses to give students, professors and faculty a chance to play with our latest technology, talk with Google product experts and share how they're using Google Apps with our team.

We will post some of our stories from the road, so be sure to follow us across the country and visit us on our new student blog.

Posted by Jeff Keltner, Business Development Manager, Google Apps
]]> https://googledata.org/google-apps/the-google-bus-goes-app-to-school/feed/ 0 Information avalanche – keep it coming https://googledata.org/google-enterprise/information-avalanche-keep-it-coming/ https://googledata.org/google-enterprise/information-avalanche-keep-it-coming/#comments Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:09:00 +0000 business activity within the reach of this post, it's likely that your plate of assignments, projects, to-do lists, and the number and variety of data you'll need to complete them ahead of time and under budget, is also overflowing.

According to most estimates, the amount of information employees will have to navigate with -- file shares, databases, document systems -- isn't going to shrink any time soon.* That's why today, in addition to going through our inboxes we're announcing a new Google Search Appliance that can index 10 million documents in a single box.

We're hoping this will be a great help to IT departments burdened with typical enterprise search implementations -- many of which require dozens of servers and multiple administrators to search content at this scale. Now organizations will be able to offer their staff secure search across the largest enterprise content sources —Documentum, Filenet, LiveLink, and Sharepoint—all from one easy-to-maintain appliance.

While we can't promise that the avalanche of information will decrease, administrative features with the new appliance, such as the ability to adjust search results for user groups based on department or function, results-biasing based on metadata, (in addition to source, URL, or date), enhanced search analytics, localized interfaces, and the rapid stream of innovation from Enterprise Labs should help employees spend less time searching for information, and more time using what they find to be as productive as possible -- no matter how much is on their to-do list.

*Likely in response to this information explosion, total software revenue for the enterprise search market is forecast to grow to $1.5 billion worldwide by 2012 ("Market Trends: Enterprise Application Software, Worldwide, 2007-2012," Gartner Inc., 2008.)

Posted by Shamim Alpha, Enterprise Search Engineer
]]> https://googledata.org/google-enterprise/information-avalanche-keep-it-coming/feed/ 0 Support relief efforts in Myanmar (Burma) https://googledata.org/google-checkout/support-relief-efforts-in-myanmar-burma/ https://googledata.org/google-checkout/support-relief-efforts-in-myanmar-burma/#comments Thu, 08 May 2008 20:58:00 +0000 Posted by Nay Aung, Checkout team

The situation in Myanmar (Burma) continues to deteriorate in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis. It is estimated that more than 22,000 lives have perished and 41,000 people are missing. One million people are left without shelter, electricity, and clean water. Some reports suggest that the death toll could rise even higher if help does not arrive in a timely manner.

As a Googler and a citizen of Myanmar, I'd like to bring your attention to a way that you can help: this donations page. Even small donations will help, so please consider making a donation to support the relief efforts in Myanmar.
]]> https://googledata.org/google-checkout/support-relief-efforts-in-myanmar-burma/feed/ 0 Introducing Google App Engine + our new blog https://googledata.org/google-app-engine/introducing-google-app-engine-our-new-blog/ https://googledata.org/google-app-engine/introducing-google-app-engine-our-new-blog/#comments Tue, 08 Apr 2008 04:17:00 +0000 Posted by Paul McDonald, Product Manager

At tonight's Campfire One we launched a preview release of Google App Engine -- a developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. The goal is to make it easy to get started with a new web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it's receiving significant traffic and has millions of users.

Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. The development environment includes the following features:

  • Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
  • Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)
  • Automatic scaling and load balancing
  • Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
  • Fully featured local development environment

Google App Engine packages these building blocks and takes care of the infrastructure stack, leaving you more time to focus on writing code and improving your application.

Today's launch is a preview release -- we're by no means feature-complete, and we're giving you early access because we really want your feedback. This preview of Google App Engine is available for the first 10,000 developers who sign up, and we plan to increase that number in near future.

During this preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. We expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million pageviews per month. In the future, these limited quotas will remain free, and developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed.

If you'd like to try it out, sign up for access to the preview release and then download the SDK to get started. The best place to give us feedback is in the discussion group. Future announcements from us will appear there and/or this blog.

]]> https://googledata.org/google-app-engine/introducing-google-app-engine-our-new-blog/feed/ 0 A brave new world (or, our answer to FUD) https://googledata.org/google-enterprise/a-brave-new-world-or-our-answer-to-fud/ https://googledata.org/google-enterprise/a-brave-new-world-or-our-answer-to-fud/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:13:00 +0000 Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Enterprise Search

A flurry of media and market interest in enterprise search makes us glad we're instead focused on the user experience in search. On Monday, January 21, 2008, Microsoft offered to buy FAST Search & Transfer, for $1.2 billion. Coupled with recent multimillion-dollar investments by Intel and SAP in the enterprise search vendor Endeca, these moves suggest the extent to which many are scrambling to fill out their existing enterprise search offering.

Others have taken a different approach. In a moment of deja vu, we discovered that another enterprise search player, Autonomy, has recently circulated a white paper about the Google Search Appliance called "Google in the Enterprise." This new document competes with Autonomy's earlier effort to portray us as something we are not.

Before we clarify some of the significant inaccuracies of this white paper, we'd like to point out that all the market movement in enterprise search hints at what we've known since launching the Google Search Appliance five years ago: The key to coming out ahead lies not in any FUD-fueled sales strategy or multimillion-dollar investment in traditional technology, but in the realization that there's a revolution afoot.

This revolution is making information easier to find, share, and deliver to everyday workers. This brave new world means responding to business demands with products that deploy quickly and update simply, so users can access the information they need to be productive -- all without having to spend a fortune. Low upfront and deployment costs are the name of the game. And searching for information behind the firewall can be as easy and powerful as searching for information on Google.com.

Now on to the fine print. Here are a few corrections to the Autonomy white paper we'd like to make:

1. Comprehensiveness: Autonomy states that the Google Search Appliance "does not index all your critical content." On the contrary, the Google Search Appliance was designed to search all critical content in the enterprise, including file shares, intranets, databases, and real-time business data - all from one simple search box. The Google Search Appliance also comes equipped with on-board content connectors, such as those for SharePoint and Documentum, and the content connector framework, which is a published, open source framework that provides flexibility for anyone -- customers, SIs, ISVs -- to rapidly extend the reach of the Google Search Appliance.

2. Security: The paper states that the Google Search Appliance's "security features are not sufficient for enterprise use." In actuality, the Google Search Appliance provides two levels of security; first, the Google Search Appliance provides out-of-the-box support for multiple security access control systems (such as SAML standards, SSO, NTLM, etc.). Secondly, the Google Search Appliance supports document-level security with all content sources, which ensures that end-users see only those documents in the results list to which they have access.

3. Relevancy: According to hundreds of search relevancy and judgment tests that anyone (competitors or prospects) can run from the National Institute of Standards & Technology, Google's enterprise search precision and relevancy are the highest in the industry. Our relevancy has been put to the test in thousands of enterprise deployments around the world and more than 50% of our customers switched to Google because of our higher relevancy.

4. User Experience: While we couldn't find the words "user experience" anywhere in the Autonomy paper, Autonomy claims that the Google Search Appliance "does not offer the advanced retrieval or automatic information operations required by the enterprise." The Google Search Appliance does offer advanced operations; however, we've made sure to keep interfaces fast and easy to use. According to usability expert Jakob Nielsen, "the search front end should make searching the intranet effortless" and "a company with poor intranet usability would save $3 million per year if it improved its intranet usability to an average level. And a company with average intranet usability would save $2.4 million per year if it improved its intranet to the usability level found in the best 25%." We think he's on to something.

Finally, Autonomy mentions that the Google Search Appliance "capabilities are still being honed." This is certainly true: We are constantly working to improve the appliance, to make sure it offers ever increasing relevancy out of the box. The fact is that we employ thousands of engineers focused on search relevancy and quality. In addition, we are the fastest innovator in the industry. In the last three months alone, seven new Google Enterprise Labs experiments have been launched (by Google, not third parties as Autonomy claimed) to enhance the enterprise search experience.

Although the above list is by no means thorough, we feel it's important to clarify misinformation about enterprise search. Ultimately, it might be better to let our products and our customers from all industries do the talking. It's a brave new world in enterprise search, and we're already deeply engaged in it. How about you?
]]> https://googledata.org/google-enterprise/a-brave-new-world-or-our-answer-to-fud/feed/ 0 Introducing our initiatives https://googledata.org/google-org/introducing-our-initiatives/ https://googledata.org/google-org/introducing-our-initiatives/#comments Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:04:00 +0000 Posted by Dr. Larry Brilliant, Executive Director, Google.org

Today Google.org announced five initiatives that we will focus on in the coming years. Predict and Prevent will seek to identify hot spots and enable rapid response to emerging threats, beginning in the area of infectious diseases. The other two efforts, Fuel the Growth of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) and Inform and Empower to Improve Public Services focus on building jobs and improving the delivery of basic services, such as education and clean water, in the developing world.

These efforts join our climate change-related initiatives announced in 2007: to Develop Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal (RE-C) and Accelerate the Commercialization of Plug-In Vehicles (RechargeIT).

There is so much good work to be done around the world, we've had to make some tough choices about our strategy and our focus. We spent more than a year building a diverse team, researching, and learning from others in the field. With Google's skills in information and technology in mind, we looked for areas where we could make the biggest potential impact by helping find scalable solutions. We are relative newcomers to these efforts and are enormously grateful for the guidance we've received from experienced partners as we've considered where we could best lean our shoulder against these global challenges side by side with local communities and the broader philanthropic community.

And now it is time to dive deep! Please visit the initiative pages for more specific information about the approaches we're taking.
]]> https://googledata.org/google-org/introducing-our-initiatives/feed/ 0 Google Desktop update for Leopard https://googledata.org/google-mac-blog/google-desktop-update-for-leopard/ https://googledata.org/google-mac-blog/google-desktop-update-for-leopard/#comments Wed, 24 Oct 2007 18:31:00 +0000 By Mark Sabec, Associate Product Marketing Manager, and Mike Pinkerton, Software Engineer

This Friday is a big day in the Mac world: Apple is releasing Leopard, its new operating system. And that means we've been working hard to ensure that all Google products for the Mac work seamlessly with Leopard as well as Tiger. So we want to let you know about an update for Google Desktop for the Mac that adds Leopard compatibility. You should install this Desktop update before upgrading from Tiger to Leopard to ensure that Desktop works properly on Leopard. If after you upgrade to Leopard, your Google Desktop appears to be functioning incorrectly, please look at the release notes for troubleshooting information.

To install the Google Desktop update, please visit the Desktop for the Mac home page.

All our other products for the Mac (Google Notifier, Picasa Web Albums Uploader, SketchUp, and Earth) will smoothly transition from Tiger to Leopard. We've also made sure that our Dashboard widgets for Gmail and Blogger are compatible with Leopard, too.
]]> https://googledata.org/google-mac-blog/google-desktop-update-for-leopard/feed/ 0 Five years of evolution in enterprise search https://googledata.org/google-enterprise/five-years-of-evolution-in-enterprise-search/ https://googledata.org/google-enterprise/five-years-of-evolution-in-enterprise-search/#comments Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:01:00 +0000 Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager for Search, Google Enterprise

Today we announced the release of Google Search Appliance version 5.0. We're not often big on version numbers, but for us and our customers who need to find information throughout their enterprise, that "5.0" means something. Among other things, it represents five years of experience tackling the challenges of search for businesses. With the Google Search Appliance we've taken much of what we've learned about serving results efficiently and at scale to millions of users worldwide and brought it to the enterprise.

And we went further. We added enterprise-grade security to ensure users only see the content to which they have access. We also gave more control over system set-up and administration without sacrificing the relevance and ease of use you expect from Google. Along with more control, we extended the reach even deeper into the enterprise. Users will now be able to search for data residing across the numerous siloed content repositories that have become commonplace in large businesses, including EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet, OpenText Livelink, and Microsoft Sharepoint, through the same easy to use interface, in the same intuitive way.

Version 5.0 also represents a wealth of innovation potential. So we've also launched Google Enterprise Labs as a way to share some of what we're continuing to explore. With Do-it-Yourself KeyMatch, for example, users can promote results they feel should appear at the top of the page. We recognize that institutional knowledge not only resides in documents, but in people. We use Do-it-Yourself KeyMatch inside Google -- an experiment that's both social and technical. And the results, so to speak, have been great.

Finally, 5.0 represents what we hope for the future in enterprise search, which means both more (in terms of reach and relevance) and less (in terms cost, administrative overhead and wasted time). It's a perfect balance we will continue to pursue.
]]> https://googledata.org/google-enterprise/five-years-of-evolution-in-enterprise-search/feed/ 0 Contributing to an all-star CAST https://googledata.org/google-testing/contributing-to-an-all-star-cast/ https://googledata.org/google-testing/contributing-to-an-all-star-cast/#comments Thu, 26 Jul 2007 16:27:00 +0000
Lydia Ash and I, both Seattle Googlers, recently gave presentations at the second annual Conference of the Association for Software Testing (CAST) held in Bellevue, Washington, on July 9-11.

CAST is an informative and challenging conference run entirely by volunteers from the testing community. We felt palpable enthusiasm for software testing throughout the event. In fact, if you had stopped by Quardev the evening before the conference, you would have seen a dozen testers from around the country preparing attendee packets, burning CDs, and having a great time arguing about boundary values.

Lydia's presentation (Data Set Analysis: Approaches to Testing when the Build is the Data) featured innovative heuristics used by the Google Maps team to detect subtle anomalies in large data sets.

My talk on The Bionic Tester showed how agile test automation can extend an exploratory tester's reach into complex features like Google Talk's Multi-User Chat.

On the second evening, we sponsored the first-ever Tester Exhibition in which several CAST presenters were asked to tell how they would use their expertise to test the CAST 2007 Registration page. The experts came at the problem from every direction and raised enough issues that the CAST organizers decided to disable the page prior to the Exhibition. :-)

Slides and follow-up material from all CAST presentations are available through the CAST 2007 wiki.

]]> https://googledata.org/google-testing/contributing-to-an-all-star-cast/feed/ 0 Scheduled maintenance on July 5 https://googledata.org/google-checkout/scheduled-maintenance-on-july-5/ https://googledata.org/google-checkout/scheduled-maintenance-on-july-5/#comments Tue, 03 Jul 2007 19:39:00 +0000 Posted by Don Faul, Manager, Google Checkout Operations

On Thursday, July 5 at 9:00 pm PDT, Google Checkout will be unavailable for approximately 60-90 minutes as we conduct server maintenance. During this time, the Google Checkout button will not appear on merchant websites, and merchants will be unable to process orders or log in to their Google Checkout account. Please note that any orders received prior to this scheduled maintenance won't be affected. If you have any questions, please contact the support team.
]]> https://googledata.org/google-checkout/scheduled-maintenance-on-july-5/feed/ 0 Save 5% on gifts for dads and grads https://googledata.org/google-checkout/save-5-on-gifts-for-dads-and-grads/ https://googledata.org/google-checkout/save-5-on-gifts-for-dads-and-grads/#comments Tue, 12 Jun 2007 16:26:00 +0000 Posted by Susan Taing, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Father's Day is less than a week away, and graduation season is in full swing. To help you find gifts for your dads and grads, RitzCamera.com and BoatersWorld.com are offering 5% off Google Checkout orders until Sunday, June 17th (that's Father's Day). Just enter coupon code 'dad' after you click on the Google Checkout button.
]]> https://googledata.org/google-checkout/save-5-on-gifts-for-dads-and-grads/feed/ 0