Google Developer Day 2010 Agenda: Android, Chrome & HTML5 and Cloud Platform
We are now ready to share the Google Developer Day agendas for Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Munich, Moscow and Prague. We have so much technical content to share but alas, Developer Day is a one-day event. There may still be changes to the agenda, but here is a sneak peek at where we are.
Globally, we will feature three major tracks:
- Android - With the continued momentum and growth of the platform, we would like to continue the conversation with you at Developer Day. We will feature sessions on Android performance, mobile user experience and best practices on building apps, and we will also deep dive on a new feature, Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM).
- Chrome & HTML5 - We will discuss how to build an app for the Chrome Web Store and how to improve its development and performance. We’ll show which aspects of HTML5, Chrome Developer Tools and Native Client can be most useful to you. Finally, we will cover everything auth-related to show you when and where to use various authentication tools and how they integrate with our APIs and products.
- Cloud Platform - Building off of our series of announcements at Google I/O, we will feature sessions on App Engine, App Engine for Business, Spring integration, Google Web Toolkit, Google Storage for Developers, BigQuery and Prediction API. Be prepared for code samples, how to optimize performance and a glimpse into what else is on our roadmap.
- Sao Paulo, Brazil - Mario Queiroz, VP Product Management
- Munich, Germany - Dr. Wieland Holfelder, Engineering Director
- Moscow, Russia - Dr. Gene Sokolov, Head of Moscow Engineering
The Sao Paulo and Moscow keynote presentations will have live translation, and for sessions, check the FAQ section of your Developer Day site. We will have savvy gurus available to answer your questions during Office Hours, and you will have a chance to meet Googlers and each other over Happy Hour.
Registration will open on September 15th for Sao Paulo and on September 22nd for Munich, Moscow and Prague. Tokyo’s registration is now closed.
In the meanwhile, please follow us on this blog and on Twitter to keep up-to-date with the latest news on Google Developer Day and other development topics: @googledevjp (Japan), @googledevbr (Brazil) and @gddru (Russia).
Hashtags: #gdd2010jp, #gddbr, #gddde, #gddru, #gddcz
By Susan Taing, Google Developer Team
Categories: Google
Drupal 7 - faster than ever
This is a guest post by Owen Barton, partner and director of engineering at CivicActions. Owen has been working with Google's “Make the Web Faster” project team and the Drupal community to make improvements in Drupal 7 front-end performance. This is a condensed version of a more in-depth post over at the CivicActions blog.
Drupal is a popular free and open source publishing platform, powering high profile sites such as The White House, The New York Observer and Amnesty International. The Drupal community has long understood the importance of good front-end performance to successful web sites, being ahead of the game in many ways. This post highlights some of the improvements developed for the upcoming Drupal 7 release, several of which can save an additional second or more of page load times.
Drupal 7 has made its caching system more easily pluggable - to allow for easier memcache integration, for example. It has also enabled caching HTTP headers to be set so that logged out users can cache entire pages locally as well as improve compatibility with reverse proxies and content distribution networks (CDNs). There is also a patch waiting which reduces both the response size and the time taken to generate 404 responses for inlined page assets. Depending on the type of 404 (CSS have a larger effect than images, for example) the slower 404s were adding 0.5 to 1 second to the calling page load times.
Drupal currently has the ability to aggregate multiple CSS and JavaScript files by concatenating them into a smaller number of files to reduce the number of HTTP requests. There is a patch in the queue for Drupal 7 that could allow aggregation to be enabled by default, which is great because the large number of individual files can add anything from 0-1.5 seconds to page loads.
One issue that has become apparent with the Drupal 6 aggregation system is that users can end up downloading aggregate files that include a large amount of duplicate code. On one page the aggregate may contain files a, b and c, whilst on a second page the aggregate may contain files a, b and d - the “c” and “d” files being added conditionally on specific pages. This breaks the benefits of browser caching and slows down subsequent page loads. Benchmarking on core alone shows that avoiding duplicate aggregates can save over a second across 5 page loads. A patch has already been committed that means files need to be explicitly added to the aggregate, and fix Drupal core to add appropriate files to the aggregate unconditionally.
Drupal has supported gzip compression of HTML output for a long time, however for CSS and JavaScript, the files are delivered directly by the webserver, so Drupal has less control. There are webserver based compressors such as Apache’s mod_deflate, but these are not always available. A patch is in the queue that stores compressed versions of aggregated files on write and uses rewrite and header directives in .htaccess that allow these files to be served correctly. Benchmarks show that this patch can make initial page views 20-60% faster, saving anything from 0.3 to 3 seconds total.
The Drupal 7 release promises some real improvements from a front-end performance point of view. Other performance optimizations will no doubt continue to appear and be refined in contributed modules and themes, as well as in site building best practices and documentation. In Drupal 8 we will hopefully see further improvements in the CSS/JS file aggregation system, increased high-level caching effectiveness and hopefully more tools to help site builders reduce file sizes. If you have yet to try Drupal, download it now and give it a try and tell us in the comments if your site performance improves!
By Owen Barton of CivicActions
Categories: Google
Eclipse Day at the Googleplex 2010
Here at Google, we have engineers using Eclipse every day to build our external and internal products, as well as engineers building and releasing Eclipse tools. Earlier this year, we announced Eclipse Labs, which is “a single place where anyone can start and maintain their open source projects based on the Eclipse platform with just a few clicks.” Since we use Eclipse so much here at Google, hosting Eclipse Day at the Googleplex is one way of giving back to the community and providing an environment for Eclipse contributors and users to network and share ideas. We hosted Eclipse Day before in 2009 and 2008, and last week we hosted our third year where we tried out some new ideas: a brief lunchtime unconference and post-conference Ignite talks.
Ian Skerrett of the Eclipse Foundation wrote on his blog,
Wrap-up of Eclipse Day at the Googleplex
...Over 150 people attended the day long event that included 12 sessions related to Eclipse and Google technology. The presentations are now available online. There was lots of great information presented, like upcoming improvements to the Android SDK (based on Eclipse), Git support in Eclipse, a review of the Instantiations tools that Google just purchased and an introduction to the new Tools for Mobile Web project.Most important, all of us at Google would like to thank Ian Skerrett and everyone at the Eclipse Foundation for assembling three of these great events. We were happy to welcome the Eclipse community to our campus, and we are happy to continue to support Eclipse. Don’t forget that we’re always looking to make this conference better, so give us your ideas! Tell us what you would like to see at future events in the comments, or if you were able to attend, tell us what you thought about this year’s program.
By Robert Konigsberg, Software Build Tools Team
Ian Skerrett of the Eclipse Foundation wrote on his blog,
Wrap-up of Eclipse Day at the Googleplex
...Over 150 people attended the day long event that included 12 sessions related to Eclipse and Google technology. The presentations are now available online. There was lots of great information presented, like upcoming improvements to the Android SDK (based on Eclipse), Git support in Eclipse, a review of the Instantiations tools that Google just purchased and an introduction to the new Tools for Mobile Web project.Most important, all of us at Google would like to thank Ian Skerrett and everyone at the Eclipse Foundation for assembling three of these great events. We were happy to welcome the Eclipse community to our campus, and we are happy to continue to support Eclipse. Don’t forget that we’re always looking to make this conference better, so give us your ideas! Tell us what you would like to see at future events in the comments, or if you were able to attend, tell us what you thought about this year’s program.
By Robert Konigsberg, Software Build Tools Team
Categories: Google
SVG documents searchable on Google
Just a heads up that it should now be easier for users to find SVG files when searching on Google. That’s right, we’ve expanded our indexing capabilities to include SVG. Feel free to check out our Webmaster Help Center for the complete list of file types we support, and our Webmaster Blog for more information on our SVG announcement.
By Maile Ohye, Google Developer Relations
By Maile Ohye, Google Developer Relations
Categories: Google
Back to the future: two years of Google Chrome
(Cross-posted from the Google Chrome Blog)
Watching the 1985 classic Back to the Future last night, I was struck by how much things can change with time. The main character Marty McFly travels 30 years back in time, only to find that his house hadn’t been built yet, skateboards hadn’t been invented and nobody had ever heard rock ‘n roll.
Looking back today on Chrome’s second anniversary, it’s amazing to see how much has changed in just a short time. In August 2008, JavaScript was 10 times slower, HTML5 support wasn’t yet an essential feature in modern browsers, and the idea of a sandboxed, multi-process browser was only a research project. All browsers have come a long way in the last two years and the web has become much more fun and useful.
Happy 2nd birthday, Google Chrome!
(Illustration: Mike Lemanski, click image to expand)
Since Chrome’s first beta launch for Windows, we’ve brought our Mac and Linux versions up to speed, and continued to make the browser faster, simpler, and safer across all three platforms. We’ve also introduced a boatload of features, including a more customizable New Tab page, browser themes, side-by-side view, password manager, better privacy controls, built-in Adobe Flash Player, Autofill, automatic translation, HTML5 capabilities and synchronization of various settings such as bookmarks, themes, extensions and browser preferences—just to name a few. Finally, there are now more than 6,000 extensions in our gallery to enhance your browsing experience.
Behind the scenes, we continue to extend the security features that help you browse the web more safely. This includes Chrome’s Safe Browsing technology—which serves as a warning system if you’re about to visit a site suspected of phishing or hosting malware; Chrome’s auto-update mechanism—which helps ensure that the browser is always up-to-date with the latest security updates; and the browser’s “sandbox”—an added layer of protection which prevents malicious code on an exploited website from infecting your computer.
The old Chrome: our very first beta!
Chrome now: Our brand new release today
Today, we’re releasing a new stable version of Chrome that is even faster and more streamlined. Chrome is now three times faster than it was two years ago on JavaScript performance. We’ve also been working on simplifying the “chrome” of Chrome. As you can see, we took the already minimalist user interface and stripped it down a bit more to make it easier to use. We combined Chrome’s two menus into one, revisited the location of the buttons, cleaned up the treatment of the URL and the Omnibox, and adjusted the color scheme of the browser to be easier on the eyes.
Sliding back into Doc Brown’s DeLorean and setting the dial ahead by a few months, we have more in store for Chrome. As always, we’re hard at work on making Chrome even faster, and working on ways to improve graphics performance in the browser through hardware acceleration. With the Chrome Web Store, we hope to make it much easier to find and use great applications on the web. We also ratcheted up the pace of our releases so that we can get new features and improvements to everyone more quickly.
If you haven’t tried Chrome recently, we invite you to download our new stable version today at google.com/chrome. For those of you who have been using Chrome, thanks for a great second year! We hope that Chrome has made your life on the web even better, and look forward to the next year.
Life on the web, in the browser.
(Illustration: Jack Hudson, click image to expand)
Posted by Brian Rakowski, Product Manager
Watching the 1985 classic Back to the Future last night, I was struck by how much things can change with time. The main character Marty McFly travels 30 years back in time, only to find that his house hadn’t been built yet, skateboards hadn’t been invented and nobody had ever heard rock ‘n roll.
Looking back today on Chrome’s second anniversary, it’s amazing to see how much has changed in just a short time. In August 2008, JavaScript was 10 times slower, HTML5 support wasn’t yet an essential feature in modern browsers, and the idea of a sandboxed, multi-process browser was only a research project. All browsers have come a long way in the last two years and the web has become much more fun and useful.
Happy 2nd birthday, Google Chrome!
(Illustration: Mike Lemanski, click image to expand)
Since Chrome’s first beta launch for Windows, we’ve brought our Mac and Linux versions up to speed, and continued to make the browser faster, simpler, and safer across all three platforms. We’ve also introduced a boatload of features, including a more customizable New Tab page, browser themes, side-by-side view, password manager, better privacy controls, built-in Adobe Flash Player, Autofill, automatic translation, HTML5 capabilities and synchronization of various settings such as bookmarks, themes, extensions and browser preferences—just to name a few. Finally, there are now more than 6,000 extensions in our gallery to enhance your browsing experience.
Behind the scenes, we continue to extend the security features that help you browse the web more safely. This includes Chrome’s Safe Browsing technology—which serves as a warning system if you’re about to visit a site suspected of phishing or hosting malware; Chrome’s auto-update mechanism—which helps ensure that the browser is always up-to-date with the latest security updates; and the browser’s “sandbox”—an added layer of protection which prevents malicious code on an exploited website from infecting your computer.
The old Chrome: our very first beta!
Chrome now: Our brand new release today
Today, we’re releasing a new stable version of Chrome that is even faster and more streamlined. Chrome is now three times faster than it was two years ago on JavaScript performance. We’ve also been working on simplifying the “chrome” of Chrome. As you can see, we took the already minimalist user interface and stripped it down a bit more to make it easier to use. We combined Chrome’s two menus into one, revisited the location of the buttons, cleaned up the treatment of the URL and the Omnibox, and adjusted the color scheme of the browser to be easier on the eyes.
Sliding back into Doc Brown’s DeLorean and setting the dial ahead by a few months, we have more in store for Chrome. As always, we’re hard at work on making Chrome even faster, and working on ways to improve graphics performance in the browser through hardware acceleration. With the Chrome Web Store, we hope to make it much easier to find and use great applications on the web. We also ratcheted up the pace of our releases so that we can get new features and improvements to everyone more quickly.
If you haven’t tried Chrome recently, we invite you to download our new stable version today at google.com/chrome. For those of you who have been using Chrome, thanks for a great second year! We hope that Chrome has made your life on the web even better, and look forward to the next year.
Life on the web, in the browser.
(Illustration: Jack Hudson, click image to expand)
Posted by Brian Rakowski, Product Manager
Categories: Google
Towards Energy-Proportional Datacenters
Posted by Dennis Abts, Michael R. Marty, Philip M. Wells, Peter Klausler, and Hong Liu
This is part of the series highlighting some notable publications by Googlers.
At Google, we operate large datacenters containing clusters of servers, networking switches, and more. While this gear costs a lot of money, an increasingly important cost -- both in terms of dollars and environmental impact -- is the electricity that drives the computing clusters and the cooling infrastructure. Since our clusters often do not run at full utilization, Google recently put forth a call to industry and researchers to develop energy proportional computer systems. With such systems, the power consumed by our clusters would be directly proportional to utilization. Servers consume the most electricity, and therefore researchers have responded to Google’s call by focusing their attention towards servers. As the servers become increasingly energy proportional, however, the “always on” network fabric that connects servers together will consume an increasing fraction of datacenter power unless it too becomes energy proportional.
In a paper recently published at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), we push further towards the goal of energy-proportional computing by focusing on the energy usage of high-bandwidth, highly-scalable cluster networking fabrics. This research considers a broad set of architectural and technological solutions to optimize energy usage without sacrificing performance. First, we show how the Flattened Butterfly network topology uses less power since it uses less switching chips and fewer links than a comparable-performance network built using the more conventional Fat Tree topology. Second, our approach takes advantage of the observation that when network demand is low, we can reduce the speed at which links transmit data. We show via simulation, that by tuning the speeds of the links very rapidly, we can reduce power consumption with little impact on performance. Finally, our research is a further call to action for the academic and industry research communities to make energy efficiency, and energy proportionality in particular, a first-class citizen in networking research. Put together, our proposed techniques can reduce energy cost for typical Google workloads seen in our production datacenters by millions of dollars!
This is part of the series highlighting some notable publications by Googlers.
At Google, we operate large datacenters containing clusters of servers, networking switches, and more. While this gear costs a lot of money, an increasingly important cost -- both in terms of dollars and environmental impact -- is the electricity that drives the computing clusters and the cooling infrastructure. Since our clusters often do not run at full utilization, Google recently put forth a call to industry and researchers to develop energy proportional computer systems. With such systems, the power consumed by our clusters would be directly proportional to utilization. Servers consume the most electricity, and therefore researchers have responded to Google’s call by focusing their attention towards servers. As the servers become increasingly energy proportional, however, the “always on” network fabric that connects servers together will consume an increasing fraction of datacenter power unless it too becomes energy proportional.
In a paper recently published at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), we push further towards the goal of energy-proportional computing by focusing on the energy usage of high-bandwidth, highly-scalable cluster networking fabrics. This research considers a broad set of architectural and technological solutions to optimize energy usage without sacrificing performance. First, we show how the Flattened Butterfly network topology uses less power since it uses less switching chips and fewer links than a comparable-performance network built using the more conventional Fat Tree topology. Second, our approach takes advantage of the observation that when network demand is low, we can reduce the speed at which links transmit data. We show via simulation, that by tuning the speeds of the links very rapidly, we can reduce power consumption with little impact on performance. Finally, our research is a further call to action for the academic and industry research communities to make energy efficiency, and energy proportionality in particular, a first-class citizen in networking research. Put together, our proposed techniques can reduce energy cost for typical Google workloads seen in our production datacenters by millions of dollars!
Categories: Google
Diary of a Summer Intern - Europe Edition!
Jerrica and Atima have gone back to school but our internship season isn't over just yet! Meenakshi, another intern from our Wroclaw office, agreed to help us continue our summer series with another European edition of Diary of a Summer Intern. Take it away, Meenakshi...
Hi Everyone,
Quite some time has passed already since I started my internship here at Google Wroclaw in Poland. The first weeks were strongly focused on getting to know the environment, the work and the team. So this did not only relate to working hours but also spending time with Wrooglers - that’s how the Wroclaw Googlers call themselves - while the Soccer World Cup was still on. Unfortunately, the tournament is over but there are again new activities happening in this lovely Polish city - a film festival! :) Plus I have picked up my tennis racket again and enjoy the evenings playing against someone in the local Google League. You can see, it never gets boring! Plus everybody loves to go out and party - this week another few birthdays, next week a boating trip with the office - yay!
Enough about that though, or else you get the impression I don’t do any work here... and I sure do! I am starting to get deeper insights into how processes function here. Everything is very intertwined and the fact that everybody here is eager to contribute in one way or another yields many projects! I am immediately involved with those interconnections as I am working on identifying needs for internal support here - and in order to make such a recommendation I need to fully understand who can contribute what and in what way. The fascinating thing is, I am in touch with everyone here and my day-to-day work is quite the contrary of monotonous! I have the liberties of talking to everyone who I consider important, yet have the guidance of my mentor whenever I need help. I really appreciate this kind of attitude towards everyone in the organization. No matter how long you have been with Google, you always have the right to speak up and you are encouraged to think for yourself!
As a member of the Global Advertiser Operations DACH team - the team responsible working with German (D), Austrian (A) and Swiss (CH) AdWords clients - I am also reviewing ads. Hence, I need to check if the advertiser complies with Google’s advertising policies. It’s great to see the effects of a learning curve here! :) It took me quite a bit to figure out what and where to look when working with ad approvals, but routine started to kick in and its a great feeling to be faster, approve more ads in less time...
... Enough for now, I have a meeting with my fellow interns coming up as we want to organize something fun for our office at one of the upcoming TGIFs (Thank Google It’s Friday (Parties)). You see, work @ Google is more than just WORK! :)
Post by Meenakshi - Google Summer Intern in Wroclaw, Poland
Hi Everyone,
Quite some time has passed already since I started my internship here at Google Wroclaw in Poland. The first weeks were strongly focused on getting to know the environment, the work and the team. So this did not only relate to working hours but also spending time with Wrooglers - that’s how the Wroclaw Googlers call themselves - while the Soccer World Cup was still on. Unfortunately, the tournament is over but there are again new activities happening in this lovely Polish city - a film festival! :) Plus I have picked up my tennis racket again and enjoy the evenings playing against someone in the local Google League. You can see, it never gets boring! Plus everybody loves to go out and party - this week another few birthdays, next week a boating trip with the office - yay!
Enough about that though, or else you get the impression I don’t do any work here... and I sure do! I am starting to get deeper insights into how processes function here. Everything is very intertwined and the fact that everybody here is eager to contribute in one way or another yields many projects! I am immediately involved with those interconnections as I am working on identifying needs for internal support here - and in order to make such a recommendation I need to fully understand who can contribute what and in what way. The fascinating thing is, I am in touch with everyone here and my day-to-day work is quite the contrary of monotonous! I have the liberties of talking to everyone who I consider important, yet have the guidance of my mentor whenever I need help. I really appreciate this kind of attitude towards everyone in the organization. No matter how long you have been with Google, you always have the right to speak up and you are encouraged to think for yourself!
As a member of the Global Advertiser Operations DACH team - the team responsible working with German (D), Austrian (A) and Swiss (CH) AdWords clients - I am also reviewing ads. Hence, I need to check if the advertiser complies with Google’s advertising policies. It’s great to see the effects of a learning curve here! :) It took me quite a bit to figure out what and where to look when working with ad approvals, but routine started to kick in and its a great feeling to be faster, approve more ads in less time...
... Enough for now, I have a meeting with my fellow interns coming up as we want to organize something fun for our office at one of the upcoming TGIFs (Thank Google It’s Friday (Parties)). You see, work @ Google is more than just WORK! :)
Post by Meenakshi - Google Summer Intern in Wroclaw, Poland
Categories: Google
Model the world with Google SketchUp 8
It’s been 10 years since the first version of Google SketchUp was released, and there are more people modeling in SketchUp now that we ever could have imagined—over a million of you a week, in fact. That’s a pretty humbling number of 3D model makers.
People around the world are modeling everything—from a new design for their kitchen to entire cities in Google Earth. For our small part in this global phenomenon, I’m proud to announce that SketchUp 8, the next major version of our 3D modeling tool, is available for download today. We’ve added significant new geo-modeling capabilities that leverage Google’s vast collection of geo-spatial data to make it quicker, easier and more fun than ever to build models of the world around us.
Head on over to our website for the whole story, or just grab yourself a new build and get back to modeling.
Posted by Posted by John Bacus, Product Manager
People around the world are modeling everything—from a new design for their kitchen to entire cities in Google Earth. For our small part in this global phenomenon, I’m proud to announce that SketchUp 8, the next major version of our 3D modeling tool, is available for download today. We’ve added significant new geo-modeling capabilities that leverage Google’s vast collection of geo-spatial data to make it quicker, easier and more fun than ever to build models of the world around us.
Head on over to our website for the whole story, or just grab yourself a new build and get back to modeling.
Posted by Posted by John Bacus, Product Manager
Categories: Google
Overwhelmed with email? Try Priority Inbox
Going back to school can be overwhelming with new classes, more books, difficult professors, and oh yeah – an avalanche of emails. Keeping up with it all can be challenging, especially when you don’t have much time on your hands to sort through all of your messages to find the ones that are most important.
Well, this year might be different since we just launched Priority Inbox (in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail. When you use the Priority Inbox view, your Gmail inbox will be split into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”. Messages are tagged as they come in so that it can help you focus on the messages that matter.
Learn more by reading the post on the Gmail Blog or watching this video:
As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you. You can help it get better by clicking the or buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important.
To get started, just click on the "New! Priority Inbox" link in the top right corner of your Gmail account once it appears. And if your school uses Google Apps (and if they’re opted in to pre-release features), you should see the Priority Inbox view in your school email account in the next week or so.
Posted by Annie Chen, Software Engineer
Well, this year might be different since we just launched Priority Inbox (in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail. When you use the Priority Inbox view, your Gmail inbox will be split into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”. Messages are tagged as they come in so that it can help you focus on the messages that matter.
Learn more by reading the post on the Gmail Blog or watching this video:
As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you. You can help it get better by clicking the or buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important.
To get started, just click on the "New! Priority Inbox" link in the top right corner of your Gmail account once it appears. And if your school uses Google Apps (and if they’re opted in to pre-release features), you should see the Priority Inbox view in your school email account in the next week or so.
Posted by Annie Chen, Software Engineer
Categories: Google
Email overload? Try Priority Inbox
(Cross-posted from the Gmail Blog)
People tell us all the time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we’re happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail.
Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn't outright junk but isn't very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we've evolved Gmail's filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this "bologna" from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.
Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”:
As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you. You can help it get better by clicking the or buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important. (You can even set up filters to always mark certain things important or unimportant, or rearrange and customize the three inbox sections.)
After lots of internal testing here at Google, as well as with Gmail and Google Apps users at home and at work, we’re ready for more people to try it out. Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users, including those of you who use Google Apps, over the next week or so. Once you see the "New! Priority Inbox" link in the top right corner of your Gmail account (or the new Priority Inbox tab in Gmail Settings), take a look.
Posted by Doug Aberdeen, Software Engineer
People tell us all the time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we’re happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail.
Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn't outright junk but isn't very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we've evolved Gmail's filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this "bologna" from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.
Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”:
As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you. You can help it get better by clicking the or buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important. (You can even set up filters to always mark certain things important or unimportant, or rearrange and customize the three inbox sections.)
After lots of internal testing here at Google, as well as with Gmail and Google Apps users at home and at work, we’re ready for more people to try it out. Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users, including those of you who use Google Apps, over the next week or so. Once you see the "New! Priority Inbox" link in the top right corner of your Gmail account (or the new Priority Inbox tab in Gmail Settings), take a look.
Posted by Doug Aberdeen, Software Engineer
Categories: Google
Google Scholarship program kicks off in China
In August, we hosted more than 130 Google Scholarship recipients in our Beijing office. These outstanding undergraduates and graduate students in computer science and software engineering from more than 20 universities across China were the recipients of the Google Excellence Scholarship and the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship — our first scholarships in China. The students participated in an awards ceremony, toured the Google office and communicated with Google Engineers and PMs during breakout sessions.
The Google Excellence Scholarship aims to award the outstanding undergraduates and master degree students from both computer science and software engineering disciplines. It has been set up at 20 top universities in China, with five awardees for each university—three undergraduates and two graduates.
The Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship supports outstanding female students in computer science discipline, including undergraduates, master degree students and PhD students, at five top universities, including Fudan University, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Sun Yat-sen University and Tsinghua University. There are six awardees for each university (three undergrad and three grad), as well as three awardees from Taiwan.
Congratulations to all the Google Scholarship recipients! Check out our video below to hear from professors and scholars in their own words:
And if you read Chinese, check out our corresponding post on the Google China Blog, here.
A full list of universities for Google Scholarship Program for 2010:
(20 in total, in alphabetical sequence)
Beihang University Beijing Normal University Fudan University*
Huazhong University of Science and Technology Nanjing University
Nankai University Peking University* Renmin University of China
Shanghai Jiao Tong University* Shandong University
South China Univ. of Technology Southeastern University
Sun Yat-sen University* Tianjin University Tongji University
Tsinghua University* University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
University of Science and Technology of China
Xi’an Jiao Tong University Wuhan University
*: Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship Program universities
Posted by Kathy Deng, Google University Relations Team
The Google Excellence Scholarship aims to award the outstanding undergraduates and master degree students from both computer science and software engineering disciplines. It has been set up at 20 top universities in China, with five awardees for each university—three undergraduates and two graduates.
The Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship supports outstanding female students in computer science discipline, including undergraduates, master degree students and PhD students, at five top universities, including Fudan University, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Sun Yat-sen University and Tsinghua University. There are six awardees for each university (three undergrad and three grad), as well as three awardees from Taiwan.
Congratulations to all the Google Scholarship recipients! Check out our video below to hear from professors and scholars in their own words:
And if you read Chinese, check out our corresponding post on the Google China Blog, here.
A full list of universities for Google Scholarship Program for 2010:
(20 in total, in alphabetical sequence)
Beihang University Beijing Normal University Fudan University*
Huazhong University of Science and Technology Nanjing University
Nankai University Peking University* Renmin University of China
Shanghai Jiao Tong University* Shandong University
South China Univ. of Technology Southeastern University
Sun Yat-sen University* Tianjin University Tongji University
Tsinghua University* University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
University of Science and Technology of China
Xi’an Jiao Tong University Wuhan University
*: Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship Program universities
Posted by Kathy Deng, Google University Relations Team
Categories: Google
Online publishers: growing the display advertising pie
This is the latest post in our series on the future of display advertising. Today, director of product management Jonathan Bellack looks at our efforts to help online publishers generate more advertising revenue - Ed.
For millions of online publishers—from the smallest blogger to the largest entertainment, news, e-commerce and information sites—online advertising revenue is vital. When publishers can maximize their returns, everyone benefits from more vibrant online content and websites. But the pace of change in the industry can be intimidating—how can a publisher keep up with what’s new, let alone grow their business?
We believe that the new technology we’re developing to make display advertising work better will help to grow the display advertising pie for all publishers, by orders of magnitude. We shouldn’t be asking how publishers can eke another 5 or 10 percent out of display advertising in the next few years. We should be looking at how the industry can double or triple in size.
We’ve previously described our three core display ad products for publishers:
1. Making life more efficient
For most large publishers, directly sold ads (ads sold by their own sales force) comprise the vast majority of their ad revenues. But today, selling and managing these ads is frustrating, expensive and often involves tedious manual processes.
Imagine a TV network that receives TV commercials in 100 different formats, languages, lengths and video dimensions, and then has to manually convert, translate and edit them all, then manually count the number of TV sets on which the ad appeared before sending a bill. Sounds crazy, right? Well, that scenario is far less challenging than what most large online publishers face today with display advertising. Today, across the industry, for every dollar spent on display advertising, 28 cents is eaten up in administrative costs. If we can reduce that proportion, it would mean a lot more money going to publishers.
Things like new standards for video ad serving and systems that connect buyers and sellers are helping publishers support the most engaging and creative ads across their sites. But there are quantum leaps to come in this area, for small and large publishers. Think of a political candidate who is seeking donations on his or her website—the candidate can receive money in seconds. Imagine if publishers—even the smallest website—had tools that enabled advertisers to click a button on their site to upload an ad, let them pay for it with a credit card, and then deliver this ad—through the publisher’s ad server—within minutes. This sort of “immediate ad” will become possible as ad serving technology continues to simplify the process of buying and selling ad space.
2. Total revenue management
AdSense selects the most valuable ad for publishers from a large number of ad networks, to maximize ad revenues every time a page loads.
New ad serving and “dynamic allocation” technology, like the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, is emerging that enables ad revenues to be maximized across both directly and indirectly sold ad space, ad impression by ad impression, using real-time prices. Second by second, across millions of ad impressions, this can meaningfully boost major publishers’ revenues. Using this technology, the average price that a publisher receives for ad space sold through the Ad Exchange is more than 130 percent higher than the average price of ad space sold directly to ad networks. In fact, without this type of dynamic allocation across sales channels, a publisher’s revenues can never truly be maximized.
In years to come, this true revenue maximization can get even smarter. There’s no question that delivering the right ad to the right user at the right time delivers better results. We have years of experience in doing this with search and text ads; we’re now bringing that experience to the world of display. This means investing in a smarter ad server that can automatically learn where and when a given ad will get the best response, as well as manage delivery to deliver those improved results for publishers. This new ad server can even anticipate a publisher’s future events and adjust delivery accordingly—for example, if traffic drops off every weekend, the ad server can automatically speed up during the week to keep everything moving smoothly.
3. More insight and control
Our vision is to provide all publishers the smartest possible advertising system that can give them knowledge and control of everything going on with their ad business. The vision is already becoming a reality: the upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers platform offers publishers 4,000 times more data than its predecessor. And in recent years, we’ve been constantly adding new reporting options for our AdSense partners.
By putting publishers in firm control and empowering them with more data, reports and controls (for example, over what advertisers and ad networks they allow), they’ll be able to make fully informed decisions about ad space forecasting, segmentation, targeting, allocation and pricing. This helps them to extract the maximum value from their sites and uncover new advertising opportunities—the gold that’s buried under their own sites.
4. Betting on openness
An open ecosystem drives meaningful results for publishers. When a wide range of buyers can bid for a publisher’s ad space, through an advertising exchange or network, this creates more competition for that ad space, while giving publishers choice over whose ads they want to appear. On the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, an enormous number of advertisers, belonging to over 50 ad networks, compete for publishers’ ad space. Of course, at the same time, we’re also providing publishers robust technologies and controls that can block any unwanted ads or networks.
Similarly, we believe that one of the best ways to encourage innovation is to open code to the web developer community. Look at the incredible mashups that have been created through the Google Maps API, or the range of mobile devices that have been created from our open source Android code.
This same approach can generate significant advantages for publishers. When we rolled out the upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers, we launched a new public API. This gives publishers and developers the tools to drive innovation and deliver value-adding “advertising apps” for publishers—like inventory analysis, sales workflow tools and more—without having to build an ad server from scratch. This will help drive the next generation of better, more valuable ad innovations.
5. Everything is going to be “display”
Display advertising is about much more than ads in web browsers. People are watching video, reading newspapers, magazines, books and listening to digital music at an ever-increasing rate. They’re turning to a plethora of new devices—smartphones, tablets, e-readers and even video game consoles. We’ve designed our platform, and are continuing to invest in it, to give publishers a single base that can deliver ads into this expanding world—including streaming video, mobile ad delivery and more.
Looking forward, what we call “display” today will just be “advertising”—a single platform that can coordinate an advertiser’s campaign across streaming audio ads in car stereos, interactive mobile experiences on smartphones, and HD video ads on set-top boxes. Imagine if that single platform could optimize the campaign, automatically delivering the best-performing ads, best returns and best mix, across all those platforms. That’s the future we envisage.
An exciting time ahead
We’re unapologetically optimistic about the future of display advertising for online publishers. There’s great innovation taking place in this area that will make the current landscape look primitive within a few years. We’ll keep working hard to help all publishers take advantage of these opportunities.
Posted by Jonathan Bellack, Director of Product Management
For millions of online publishers—from the smallest blogger to the largest entertainment, news, e-commerce and information sites—online advertising revenue is vital. When publishers can maximize their returns, everyone benefits from more vibrant online content and websites. But the pace of change in the industry can be intimidating—how can a publisher keep up with what’s new, let alone grow their business?
We believe that the new technology we’re developing to make display advertising work better will help to grow the display advertising pie for all publishers, by orders of magnitude. We shouldn’t be asking how publishers can eke another 5 or 10 percent out of display advertising in the next few years. We should be looking at how the industry can double or triple in size.
We’ve previously described our three core display ad products for publishers:
- AdSense, which places the most valuable, relevant ads on our partners’ websites, without the publishers having to sell the ad space themselves;
- DoubleClick for Publishers, our ad serving platform, which maximizes the value of ad space that publishers have directly sold themselves;
- DoubleClick Ad Exchange, a real-time auction marketplace, which maximizes large publishers’ overall returns, by "dynamically allocating" the highest value ad, whether directly sold, or indirectly sold through an ad network.
1. Making life more efficient
For most large publishers, directly sold ads (ads sold by their own sales force) comprise the vast majority of their ad revenues. But today, selling and managing these ads is frustrating, expensive and often involves tedious manual processes.
Imagine a TV network that receives TV commercials in 100 different formats, languages, lengths and video dimensions, and then has to manually convert, translate and edit them all, then manually count the number of TV sets on which the ad appeared before sending a bill. Sounds crazy, right? Well, that scenario is far less challenging than what most large online publishers face today with display advertising. Today, across the industry, for every dollar spent on display advertising, 28 cents is eaten up in administrative costs. If we can reduce that proportion, it would mean a lot more money going to publishers.
Things like new standards for video ad serving and systems that connect buyers and sellers are helping publishers support the most engaging and creative ads across their sites. But there are quantum leaps to come in this area, for small and large publishers. Think of a political candidate who is seeking donations on his or her website—the candidate can receive money in seconds. Imagine if publishers—even the smallest website—had tools that enabled advertisers to click a button on their site to upload an ad, let them pay for it with a credit card, and then deliver this ad—through the publisher’s ad server—within minutes. This sort of “immediate ad” will become possible as ad serving technology continues to simplify the process of buying and selling ad space.
2. Total revenue management
AdSense selects the most valuable ad for publishers from a large number of ad networks, to maximize ad revenues every time a page loads.
New ad serving and “dynamic allocation” technology, like the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, is emerging that enables ad revenues to be maximized across both directly and indirectly sold ad space, ad impression by ad impression, using real-time prices. Second by second, across millions of ad impressions, this can meaningfully boost major publishers’ revenues. Using this technology, the average price that a publisher receives for ad space sold through the Ad Exchange is more than 130 percent higher than the average price of ad space sold directly to ad networks. In fact, without this type of dynamic allocation across sales channels, a publisher’s revenues can never truly be maximized.
In years to come, this true revenue maximization can get even smarter. There’s no question that delivering the right ad to the right user at the right time delivers better results. We have years of experience in doing this with search and text ads; we’re now bringing that experience to the world of display. This means investing in a smarter ad server that can automatically learn where and when a given ad will get the best response, as well as manage delivery to deliver those improved results for publishers. This new ad server can even anticipate a publisher’s future events and adjust delivery accordingly—for example, if traffic drops off every weekend, the ad server can automatically speed up during the week to keep everything moving smoothly.
3. More insight and control
Our vision is to provide all publishers the smartest possible advertising system that can give them knowledge and control of everything going on with their ad business. The vision is already becoming a reality: the upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers platform offers publishers 4,000 times more data than its predecessor. And in recent years, we’ve been constantly adding new reporting options for our AdSense partners.
By putting publishers in firm control and empowering them with more data, reports and controls (for example, over what advertisers and ad networks they allow), they’ll be able to make fully informed decisions about ad space forecasting, segmentation, targeting, allocation and pricing. This helps them to extract the maximum value from their sites and uncover new advertising opportunities—the gold that’s buried under their own sites.
4. Betting on openness
An open ecosystem drives meaningful results for publishers. When a wide range of buyers can bid for a publisher’s ad space, through an advertising exchange or network, this creates more competition for that ad space, while giving publishers choice over whose ads they want to appear. On the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, an enormous number of advertisers, belonging to over 50 ad networks, compete for publishers’ ad space. Of course, at the same time, we’re also providing publishers robust technologies and controls that can block any unwanted ads or networks.
Similarly, we believe that one of the best ways to encourage innovation is to open code to the web developer community. Look at the incredible mashups that have been created through the Google Maps API, or the range of mobile devices that have been created from our open source Android code.
This same approach can generate significant advantages for publishers. When we rolled out the upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers, we launched a new public API. This gives publishers and developers the tools to drive innovation and deliver value-adding “advertising apps” for publishers—like inventory analysis, sales workflow tools and more—without having to build an ad server from scratch. This will help drive the next generation of better, more valuable ad innovations.
5. Everything is going to be “display”
Display advertising is about much more than ads in web browsers. People are watching video, reading newspapers, magazines, books and listening to digital music at an ever-increasing rate. They’re turning to a plethora of new devices—smartphones, tablets, e-readers and even video game consoles. We’ve designed our platform, and are continuing to invest in it, to give publishers a single base that can deliver ads into this expanding world—including streaming video, mobile ad delivery and more.
Looking forward, what we call “display” today will just be “advertising”—a single platform that can coordinate an advertiser’s campaign across streaming audio ads in car stereos, interactive mobile experiences on smartphones, and HD video ads on set-top boxes. Imagine if that single platform could optimize the campaign, automatically delivering the best-performing ads, best returns and best mix, across all those platforms. That’s the future we envisage.
An exciting time ahead
We’re unapologetically optimistic about the future of display advertising for online publishers. There’s great innovation taking place in this area that will make the current landscape look primitive within a few years. We’ll keep working hard to help all publishers take advantage of these opportunities.
Posted by Jonathan Bellack, Director of Product Management
Categories: Google
23 walls of Googley
A couple months ago while visiting our London office, I noticed a really cool Google logo on the wall. It was a mosaic of photos of London that had been created by a product manager named Clay Bavor and a team of Googlers (in fact, Clay wrote about it). As a few of us admired the wall, we thought there must be other Googlers who could create something equally cool and fun. So we cooked up a little contest for the product management team: create your own version of a “Googley Art Wall” and the team with the best entry wins a nice dinner out and a donation to the charity of its choice.
When we announced the contest, we weren’t sure if we’d get enough entries to make it interesting. Within minutes of seeing the announcement, however, Lorraine Twohill (head of marketing) and Claire Hughes Johnson (head of online sales) both asked if it was OK for their teams to enter too. Soon Googlers from offices and teams around the world were doing their best to create beautiful, creative and Googley “art walls,” on small budgets and their own time.
Seven weeks later, 23 teams from 12 offices across eight countries submitted videos and photographs of their work. The entries were so universally good that the judges couldn’t limit themselves to picking just one winner. The grand prize went to “Rubik’s Cubes Galore!”, a giant Google doodle meticulously composed of 850 Rubik’s Cubes, created by practically the entire Taipei office. We also named four runners-up: from Mountain View, a “Periodic Table of Google Elements,” a colorful collection of facts and stats about Google and the Internet arranged as a giant periodic table; the “Google Paris Metro Station,” a Metro stop built right inside the Paris office; the “Shanghai Interactive Wall,” a magnetic wall with 63 moveable tiles; and in Dublin, the “Google FoosWall,” a super-sized foosball table with handmade players that spell Google. Watch the video to see the making of these winning walls, along with the finished products.
People sometimes ask me to define “Googley.” Now I can just tell them to walk by any of the newly decorated walls (you should too, if you happen to visit a Google office). This is what happens when you give Googlers a little space—and paint guns, a wood shop, litter scraps from micro-kitchens, stained glass, LEDs, dried beans, colorful plastic balls, antique furniture—or just about anything else they can get their hands on, apparently. They create incredible things.
Posted by Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management
When we announced the contest, we weren’t sure if we’d get enough entries to make it interesting. Within minutes of seeing the announcement, however, Lorraine Twohill (head of marketing) and Claire Hughes Johnson (head of online sales) both asked if it was OK for their teams to enter too. Soon Googlers from offices and teams around the world were doing their best to create beautiful, creative and Googley “art walls,” on small budgets and their own time.
Seven weeks later, 23 teams from 12 offices across eight countries submitted videos and photographs of their work. The entries were so universally good that the judges couldn’t limit themselves to picking just one winner. The grand prize went to “Rubik’s Cubes Galore!”, a giant Google doodle meticulously composed of 850 Rubik’s Cubes, created by practically the entire Taipei office. We also named four runners-up: from Mountain View, a “Periodic Table of Google Elements,” a colorful collection of facts and stats about Google and the Internet arranged as a giant periodic table; the “Google Paris Metro Station,” a Metro stop built right inside the Paris office; the “Shanghai Interactive Wall,” a magnetic wall with 63 moveable tiles; and in Dublin, the “Google FoosWall,” a super-sized foosball table with handmade players that spell Google. Watch the video to see the making of these winning walls, along with the finished products.
People sometimes ask me to define “Googley.” Now I can just tell them to walk by any of the newly decorated walls (you should too, if you happen to visit a Google office). This is what happens when you give Googlers a little space—and paint guns, a wood shop, litter scraps from micro-kitchens, stained glass, LEDs, dried beans, colorful plastic balls, antique furniture—or just about anything else they can get their hands on, apparently. They create incredible things.
Posted by Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management
Categories: Google
Vulnerability trends: how are companies really doing?
Posted by Adam Mein, Google Security Team
Quite a few security companies and organizations produce vulnerability databases, cataloguing bugs and reporting trends across the industry based on the data they compile. There is value in this exercise; specifically, getting a look at examples across a range of companies and industries gives us information about the most common types of threats, as well as how they are distributed.
Unfortunately, the data behind these reports is commonly inaccurate or outdated to some degree. The truth is that maintaining an accurate and reliable database of this type of information is a significant challenge. We most recently saw this reality play out last week after the appearance of the IBM X-Force® 2010 Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report. We questioned a number of surprising findings concerning Google’s vulnerability rate and response record, and after discussions with IBM, we discovered a number of errors that had important implications for the report’s conclusions. IBM worked together with us and promptly issued a correction to address the inaccuracies.
Google maintains a Product Security Response Team that prioritizes bug reports and coordinates their handling across relevant engineering groups. Unsurprisingly, particular attention is paid to high-risk and critical vulnerabilities. For this reason, we were confused by a claim that 33% of critical and high-risk bugs uncovered in our services in the first half of 2010 were left unpatched. We learned after investigating that the 33% figure referred to a single unpatched vulnerability out of a total of three — and importantly, the one item that was considered unpatched was only mistakenly considered a security vulnerability due to a terminology mix-up. As a result, the true unpatched rate for these high-risk bugs is 0 out of 2, or 0%.
How do these types of errors occur? Maintainers of vulnerability databases have a number of factors working against them:
Quite a few security companies and organizations produce vulnerability databases, cataloguing bugs and reporting trends across the industry based on the data they compile. There is value in this exercise; specifically, getting a look at examples across a range of companies and industries gives us information about the most common types of threats, as well as how they are distributed.
Unfortunately, the data behind these reports is commonly inaccurate or outdated to some degree. The truth is that maintaining an accurate and reliable database of this type of information is a significant challenge. We most recently saw this reality play out last week after the appearance of the IBM X-Force® 2010 Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report. We questioned a number of surprising findings concerning Google’s vulnerability rate and response record, and after discussions with IBM, we discovered a number of errors that had important implications for the report’s conclusions. IBM worked together with us and promptly issued a correction to address the inaccuracies.
Google maintains a Product Security Response Team that prioritizes bug reports and coordinates their handling across relevant engineering groups. Unsurprisingly, particular attention is paid to high-risk and critical vulnerabilities. For this reason, we were confused by a claim that 33% of critical and high-risk bugs uncovered in our services in the first half of 2010 were left unpatched. We learned after investigating that the 33% figure referred to a single unpatched vulnerability out of a total of three — and importantly, the one item that was considered unpatched was only mistakenly considered a security vulnerability due to a terminology mix-up. As a result, the true unpatched rate for these high-risk bugs is 0 out of 2, or 0%.
How do these types of errors occur? Maintainers of vulnerability databases have a number of factors working against them:
- Vendors disclose their vulnerabilities in inconsistent formats, using different severity classifications. This makes the process of measuring the number of total vulnerabilities assigned to a given vendor much more difficult.
- Assessing the severity, scope, and nature of a bug sometimes requires intimate knowledge of a product or technology, and this can lead to errors and misinterpretation.
- Keeping the fix status updated for thousands of entries is no small task, and we’ve consistently seen long-fixed errors marked as unfixed in a number of databases.
- Not all compilers of vulnerability databases perform their own independent verification of bugs they find reported from other sources. As a result, errors in one source can be replicated to others.
Categories: Google
Share your story with the new Google Translate
(Cross-posted from the Google Translate blog)
Today, you may have noticed a brighter looking Google Translate. We’re currently rolling out several changes globally to our look and feel that should make translating text, webpages and documents on Google Translate even easier. These changes will be available globally within a couple of days.
Google Translate’s shiny new coat of paint
With today’s functional and visual changes we wanted to make it simpler for you to discover and make the most of Google Translate’s many features and integrations. For example, did you know that you can search across languages on Google using Google Translate? Or that you can translate incoming email in Gmail or take Google Translate with you on your phone? We’ve added all these tips on the new Do more with Google Translate page. You can also see some of these tips rotating on the new homepage.
We’ve also created an Inside Google Translate page, where you can learn how we create our translations. Is it the work of magic elves or learned linguists? Here Anton Andryeyev, an engineer on our team, gives you the inside scoop:
It’s always inspiring for us to learn how Google Translate enables people to break down communication barriers around the world. Lisa J. recently shared with us how she uses Google Translate to stay in touch with her grandparents. “I moved to the U.S. from China when I was six,” Lisa told us, “so I speak both English and Chinese fluently but I’m not very good at reading the complex Chinese alphabet.” When she gets an email from her grandparents in China, Google Translate helps her understand the sentences she can’t quite read. She also uses Google Translate when she’s writing her response. “I use Google Translate to make sure I’m using the right character in the right place,” she explained.
Do you use Google Translate to stay in touch with distant relatives? Read foreign news? Or make the most of your vacation? We’d love to hear from you, and invite you to share your story with us. Who knows, we might feature your story on the Google Translate blog!
Posted by Awaneesh Verma, Product Manager
Today, you may have noticed a brighter looking Google Translate. We’re currently rolling out several changes globally to our look and feel that should make translating text, webpages and documents on Google Translate even easier. These changes will be available globally within a couple of days.
Google Translate’s shiny new coat of paint
With today’s functional and visual changes we wanted to make it simpler for you to discover and make the most of Google Translate’s many features and integrations. For example, did you know that you can search across languages on Google using Google Translate? Or that you can translate incoming email in Gmail or take Google Translate with you on your phone? We’ve added all these tips on the new Do more with Google Translate page. You can also see some of these tips rotating on the new homepage.
We’ve also created an Inside Google Translate page, where you can learn how we create our translations. Is it the work of magic elves or learned linguists? Here Anton Andryeyev, an engineer on our team, gives you the inside scoop:
It’s always inspiring for us to learn how Google Translate enables people to break down communication barriers around the world. Lisa J. recently shared with us how she uses Google Translate to stay in touch with her grandparents. “I moved to the U.S. from China when I was six,” Lisa told us, “so I speak both English and Chinese fluently but I’m not very good at reading the complex Chinese alphabet.” When she gets an email from her grandparents in China, Google Translate helps her understand the sentences she can’t quite read. She also uses Google Translate when she’s writing her response. “I use Google Translate to make sure I’m using the right character in the right place,” she explained.
Do you use Google Translate to stay in touch with distant relatives? Read foreign news? Or make the most of your vacation? We’d love to hear from you, and invite you to share your story with us. Who knows, we might feature your story on the Google Translate blog!
Posted by Awaneesh Verma, Product Manager
Categories: Google
Arcade Fire meets HTML5
What would a music experience designed specifically for the modern web look like? This is a question we've been playing around with for the last few months. Browsers and web technologies have advanced so rapidly in the last few years that powerful experiences tailored to each unique person in real-time are now a reality.
Today we’re excited to launch a musical experience made specifically for the browser. Called “The Wilderness Downtown”, the project was created by writer/director Chris Milk with the band Arcade Fire and Google. Building this project on the web and for the browser allowed us to craft an experience that is not only personalized, but also deeply personal for each viewer. “The Wilderness Downtown” takes you down memory lane through the streets you grew up in. It’s set to Arcade Fire’s new song “We Used to Wait” off their newly released album The Suburbs (which you may be familiar with, especially if you were one of 3.7 million viewers who live-streamed Arcade Fire's concert on YouTube earlier this month). The project was built with the latest web technologies and includes HTML5, Google Maps, an integrated drawing tool, as well as multiple browser windows that move around the screen.
“The Wilderness Downtown” was inspired by recent developments in modern browsers and was built with Google Chrome in mind. As such, it’s best experienced in Chrome or an up-to-date HTML5-compliant browser. You can launch the project and learn more about it on our Chrome Experiments site at www.chromeexperiments.com/arcadefire.
We hope you enjoy it.
Posted by Aaron Koblin, Google Creative Lab
Today we’re excited to launch a musical experience made specifically for the browser. Called “The Wilderness Downtown”, the project was created by writer/director Chris Milk with the band Arcade Fire and Google. Building this project on the web and for the browser allowed us to craft an experience that is not only personalized, but also deeply personal for each viewer. “The Wilderness Downtown” takes you down memory lane through the streets you grew up in. It’s set to Arcade Fire’s new song “We Used to Wait” off their newly released album The Suburbs (which you may be familiar with, especially if you were one of 3.7 million viewers who live-streamed Arcade Fire's concert on YouTube earlier this month). The project was built with the latest web technologies and includes HTML5, Google Maps, an integrated drawing tool, as well as multiple browser windows that move around the screen.
“The Wilderness Downtown” was inspired by recent developments in modern browsers and was built with Google Chrome in mind. As such, it’s best experienced in Chrome or an up-to-date HTML5-compliant browser. You can launch the project and learn more about it on our Chrome Experiments site at www.chromeexperiments.com/arcadefire.
We hope you enjoy it.
Posted by Aaron Koblin, Google Creative Lab
Categories: Google
What do Arcade Fire and HTML5 have in common?
This week, a lot.
Today we’re excited to announce the band Arcade Fire’s new project “The Wilderness Downtown,” an interactive HTML5 music experience that is being showcased on Google’s Chrome Experiments site. The project was created by writer/director Chris Milk with Arcade Fire and Google.
We put everything except the proverbial kitchen sink into this project: It features HTML5 audio, video, and canvas, animated windows with JavaScript controllers, mash-ups with Google Maps and Street View APIs, and an interactive drawing tool. You can take a look at how all this works by viewing the source code.
Check out the project or learn more about the techniques used to make it happen at www.chromeexperiments.com/arcadefire.
We hope you enjoy it.
By George Michael Brower, Google Creative Lab
Categories: Google
This week in search 8/27/10
This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.
Searches come in many flavors, but it's our job to determine what type of search you're doing once you've clicked your way out of the search box. Whether you're looking for a blog or a business, our goal is to get you the most relevant type of result back to you—fast. Ultimately, it's that combination of relevance and speed that we think will give you the best experience. Here are some of our newest search enhancements:
Improved Blog Search
With the proliferation of specialized blogs all across the web, you'll often find great content on blogs—whether you're planning a trip to Florida, looking to bring home a new golden retriever or learning how to make a delicious Italian dinner. Recently, our blog search team made it much easier to find full blogs about your query, rather than single posts on the topic. This is especially useful if you're looking for bloggers that post on an ongoing basis about the subject of your query. Try it with one of your search queries by clicking "Blogs," then "Homepages," in the left-hand panel of your search results.
Example searches: [tesla car], [google], [android]
A new home for Realtime Search
When we think about relevancy, often what you're looking for may have just happened. It's been more than nine months since we first announced our real-time search features, and this week we gave it a new home at www.google.com/realtime as well as some great new tools to you refine and understand your results. You can use geographic refinements to find updates and news that's happening right near you or in the area of your choice. We also added conversations view, so you can follow a discussion more easily by browsing a full timeline of tweets and seeing how the conversation evolved. And in Google Alerts, you can now create an alert specifically for "updates" to get an email the moment a topic of interest shows up on Twitter or other short-form services.
Realtime Search and updates in Google Alerts are available globally in 40 languages, and the geographic refinements and conversations views are available in English, Japanese, Russian and Spanish.
Example search: [egg recall]
More local results in maps and clickable markers
We made some changes to local results in web search that will help you learn more about the results and save you time by saving you clicks. Starting this week, when you search for places we'll show you all of the results that match your query on the map. Results after the first seven will be shown with small circle markers. This can be very useful in identifying the density of stores and helping you find the right neighborhood to visit. For example, when you search for [fabric stores nyc], you can now easily identify the Garment District:
When you see a result on the map that you like, you can now click directly on the marker (the pin or the circle) and go to Google Maps with that place selected and the "Info" window open. The other results will still be there if you want to explore more places.
Example searches: [fabric stores nyc], [coffee in seattle], [resort near ko samui, thailand]
We hope you find these updates useful. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.
Posted by Johanna Wright, Director, Search Product Management
Searches come in many flavors, but it's our job to determine what type of search you're doing once you've clicked your way out of the search box. Whether you're looking for a blog or a business, our goal is to get you the most relevant type of result back to you—fast. Ultimately, it's that combination of relevance and speed that we think will give you the best experience. Here are some of our newest search enhancements:
Improved Blog Search
With the proliferation of specialized blogs all across the web, you'll often find great content on blogs—whether you're planning a trip to Florida, looking to bring home a new golden retriever or learning how to make a delicious Italian dinner. Recently, our blog search team made it much easier to find full blogs about your query, rather than single posts on the topic. This is especially useful if you're looking for bloggers that post on an ongoing basis about the subject of your query. Try it with one of your search queries by clicking "Blogs," then "Homepages," in the left-hand panel of your search results.
Example searches: [tesla car], [google], [android]
A new home for Realtime Search
When we think about relevancy, often what you're looking for may have just happened. It's been more than nine months since we first announced our real-time search features, and this week we gave it a new home at www.google.com/realtime as well as some great new tools to you refine and understand your results. You can use geographic refinements to find updates and news that's happening right near you or in the area of your choice. We also added conversations view, so you can follow a discussion more easily by browsing a full timeline of tweets and seeing how the conversation evolved. And in Google Alerts, you can now create an alert specifically for "updates" to get an email the moment a topic of interest shows up on Twitter or other short-form services.
Realtime Search and updates in Google Alerts are available globally in 40 languages, and the geographic refinements and conversations views are available in English, Japanese, Russian and Spanish.
Example search: [egg recall]
More local results in maps and clickable markers
We made some changes to local results in web search that will help you learn more about the results and save you time by saving you clicks. Starting this week, when you search for places we'll show you all of the results that match your query on the map. Results after the first seven will be shown with small circle markers. This can be very useful in identifying the density of stores and helping you find the right neighborhood to visit. For example, when you search for [fabric stores nyc], you can now easily identify the Garment District:
When you see a result on the map that you like, you can now click directly on the marker (the pin or the circle) and go to Google Maps with that place selected and the "Info" window open. The other results will still be there if you want to explore more places.
Example searches: [fabric stores nyc], [coffee in seattle], [resort near ko samui, thailand]
We hope you find these updates useful. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.
Posted by Johanna Wright, Director, Search Product Management
Categories: Google
An Ingredients List for Testing - Part Two
By James Whittaker
When are you finished testing? It’s the age old quality question and one that has never been adequately answered (other than the unhelpful answer of never). I argue it never will be answered until we have a definition of the size of the testing problem. How can you know you are finished if you don’t fully understand the task at hand?
Answers that deal with coverage of inputs or coverage of code are unhelpful. Testers can apply every input and cover every line of code in test cases and still the software can have very serious bugs. In fact, it’s actually likely to have serious bugs because inputs and code cannot be easily associated with what’s important in the software. What we need is a way to identify what parts of the product can be tested, a bill of materials if you will, and then map our actual testing back to each part so that we can measure progress against the overall testing goal.
This bill of materials represents everything that can be tested. We need it in a format that can be compared with actual testing so we know which parts have received enough testing and which parts are suspect.
We have a candidate format for this bill of materials we are experimenting with at Google and will be unveiling at GTAC this year.
When are you finished testing? It’s the age old quality question and one that has never been adequately answered (other than the unhelpful answer of never). I argue it never will be answered until we have a definition of the size of the testing problem. How can you know you are finished if you don’t fully understand the task at hand?
Answers that deal with coverage of inputs or coverage of code are unhelpful. Testers can apply every input and cover every line of code in test cases and still the software can have very serious bugs. In fact, it’s actually likely to have serious bugs because inputs and code cannot be easily associated with what’s important in the software. What we need is a way to identify what parts of the product can be tested, a bill of materials if you will, and then map our actual testing back to each part so that we can measure progress against the overall testing goal.
This bill of materials represents everything that can be tested. We need it in a format that can be compared with actual testing so we know which parts have received enough testing and which parts are suspect.
We have a candidate format for this bill of materials we are experimenting with at Google and will be unveiling at GTAC this year.
Categories: Google
An update on JavaOne
(Cross-posted from the Google Code Blog)
Like many of you, every year we look forward to the workshops, conferences and events related to open source software. In our view, these are among the best ways we can engage the community, by sharing our experiences and learning from yours. So we’re sad to announce that we won't be able to present at JavaOne this year. We wish that we could, but Oracle’s recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally. This is a painful realization for us, as we've participated in every JavaOne since 2004, and I personally have spoken at all but the first in 1996.
We understand that this may disappoint and inconvenience many of you, but we look forward to presenting at other venues soon. We’re proud to participate in the open source Java community, and look forward to finding additional ways to engage and contribute.
By
Joshua Bloch, Google Open Source Programs Office
Like many of you, every year we look forward to the workshops, conferences and events related to open source software. In our view, these are among the best ways we can engage the community, by sharing our experiences and learning from yours. So we’re sad to announce that we won't be able to present at JavaOne this year. We wish that we could, but Oracle’s recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally. This is a painful realization for us, as we've participated in every JavaOne since 2004, and I personally have spoken at all but the first in 1996.
We understand that this may disappoint and inconvenience many of you, but we look forward to presenting at other venues soon. We’re proud to participate in the open source Java community, and look forward to finding additional ways to engage and contribute.
By
Joshua Bloch, Google Open Source Programs Office
Categories: Google
