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Description: Blogs from all the top 4 search engines.
Tags: search, search engine, searchengine, yahoo, ask.com, ask, msn, google
| Search Out Your Own Entertainment Experiences with Yahoo! At Yahoo! Search, we pay attention to what’s popular on the Web and what matters most to you. We know that celebrities rank near the top of the buzziest searches on Yahoo!, so this is one area in search that we’ve been working on to make even better. As we’ve already started to do with [...] Reference: Administrator - 2010/3/12
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| Crush on Texas. We has it. It’s been a little over 9 months since Bing launched back in June 09. In interweb years, that puts us at about 15, a raging teenager. And do we have a crush on As such (in our usual calm, collected voice), the Bing team is excitedly packing for Austin to join in the annual tech pilgrimage that’s SXSW Interactive. Our mission is simple – connect with you the community. We want to chat you up all you cool interesting people doing cool interesting things, get the scoop from you on all the bubbling tech hotness, and maybe even drop a Milli Vanilli number with you (you will be Milli) at TechKaraoke. Where it’s at is where we’ll be at. But come to us too! Bing is hosting a number of cool & fun experiences throughout Interactive. Here’s a snapshot of Bing activities.
Also, be sure to catch out friends at Foursquare who will be joining us at the Demo Booth and Bing Photo for Good to hand out killer stickers. See you there! Aya Zook, Product Manager, Bing Reference: Bing - 2010/3/11
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| Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Update The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days. To share your thoughts on this latest update, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board. Dan [...] Reference: Administrator - 2010/3/10
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| Search Trends for Oscar 2010 at Yahoo! Last week, we introduced you to some great search features to keep up with the 82nd Academy Awards. The coveted statuettes have been distributed and the post-show analysis is in full swing! The buzziest acceptance speeches of the evening: Sandra Bullock and Mo’Nique – although the story behind Elinor Burkett and her so-called “hijacked” acceptance speech [...] Reference: Administrator - 2010/3/09
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| Bing’s Earth Day Photo Contest for Students On Friday at NCCE Seattle we announced that our next homepage photo contest will kickoff on March 29 and this time there’s a twist. We’re asking students in the United States to submit photos to help celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day and the winning photo will be displayed on the Bing homepage on April 22, Earth Day itself!
In addition to the grand prize winner seeing their photo on Bing.com, we’ve pulled together some great prizes for both students and their schools. Winners across the four age groups (ages 5-10, 11-13, 14-17 and 18+) will win a trip for two to the Microsoft Campus to take part in a Bing editorial team meeting where we pick images for future homepages. Additionally, each winner will receive equipment from HP and Canon to help build digital photo resources at their school. Prizes for individual winners and their schools across the four age groups will total over $70,000. · 1st place prizes: Individuals receive an HP Pavilion desktop and monitor and a “Digital Photo Lab” for their school. · 2nd place prizes: Individuals receive an HP Pavilion desktop and monitor and a “Digital Photo Kit” for their school. · 3rd place prizes: Individuals receive an HP Pavilion desktop and monitor and a “Digital Photo Starter Set” for their school. And here’s the “everyone wins” part. There’s a great opportunity to help other classrooms in need during the voting stage from April 13th to the 19th. Bing will give a $5.00 GivingCard for DonorsChoose.org to the first 20,000 people who vote each day. Voters can then decide what classroom projects (like math, science, art, reading) will benefit from Bing’s donation. If you do the math, we’re talking up to $100,000 a day to help schools across the country. Each day you can return to the site to cast another vote and have an opportunity to pick up another GivingCard. Bing helps students explore the world with our rich homepage imagery every day, so we’re excited to see what the country’s students think we might all want to discover. To find out more about the contest, including the submission and voting process and prizes for the finalists, visit http://earthdayphotocontest.com/. Teachers will be able to order free posters for their classrooms in the coming days, as well as take advantage of other contest resources on the site. Liz Tassey Gerber, Bing
Home Sweet Home Page Winning Photo The Eye of the Storm – Jeremy Somers Reference: Bing - 2010/3/08
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| Yahoo! at SMX West and Real-Time Search We had a great time at the SMX West conference this past week in Santa Clara, CA. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer kicked things off with his keynote speech, where he addressed several questions on the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. Yahoo! participated in several different panels throughout the week, including Thursday’s keynote “The State off [...] Reference: Administrator - 2010/3/06
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| Your Academy Award Information Instantly On Sunday night, I like many others will be glued to the television for those few hours to watch Hollywood honor the best of the best in the 82nd Annual Academy Awards show. Some people watch for the awards, some for the fashion, and other watch for the pure entertainment of the presenters, and this year, with Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin hosting we are sure to have a very entertaining show. As we have done in years past we are offering up instant answers in order to make it easier to navigate all the important information you might need to know about the show. Currently, you can get the Academy Award instant answer for the show itself, which includes information on the show, nominees and links to images and past show information. For those of you that miss the festivities, there will be a post-show instant answer with links to images and videos so be sure and check back for a quick look at the winners and other highlights from the show.
With ten nominees for best picture, I have a lot of catching up to do before Sunday. So while researching the picks, I found a few places very helpful. The first is www.bing.com/twitter where you can see all of the chatter on twitter that has to do with the Academy Awards, nominees, and the event parties. It is pretty interesting to see feedback and opinions about the show from people around the country in real time. The second is the Oscar Winning Actors Visual Search gallery. In this gallery, you can find information about who won in 2009 and who won the most awards overall. You should also visit MSN Award Buzz which pulls information from blogs, twitter and forums to create a fun graphic on each nominee and predicts the winner of each category based on public buzz. It is a must for those Oscar enthusiasts! Check out the MSN blog for all the details. Since Stefan is off rubbing elbows in L.A. with the Hollywood elite for the Oscars and I am left here again to fend for myself, there will be no video or Fridays With Stefan. But we’ll still have Free T-shirt Friday and the theme for this week is “The Academy Awards” and all things related. To mix it up a little we want the entries to be RT’s (retweets) that you find on www.bing.com/twitter that have to do with the Academy Awards, add in your own commentary and tweet us at @bing make sure to include @bing and #FTF. We will be looking at all of the entries at the beginning of next week so tweet us all weekend and through the show. Have a great weekend and Stefan I hope you are having a GREAT time in La La land! Kristin Meldahl – Bing Reference: Bing - 2010/3/05
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| Bing Goes Farming O.K. - pop quiz: which social media game boasts an active fan-base of roughly 31 million players every day? Here’s a hint: it’s a happy place where you can plant virtual crops that can be harvested, or ask your neighbor to chase away raccoons. If you guessed Farmville, then you’re correct! Earlier this week, we began an advertising pilot with Zynga, the folks who brought you Farmville. For a short time, we invited some people who were playing Farmville to join Bing’s Facebook community by becoming a fan of Bing. We also encouraged them to tell their friends about it. In exchange, we provided some farm dollars, which is the virtual currency used to buy things to build and maintain a farm. Here is what the ad looked like, once a Farmville user clicked on it:
In a 24 hour promotion, we added 400,000 new fans to http://www.facebook.com/bing. We were amazed by the response (and by how fast it went viral). But we always have room for more folks in the Bing community, so stop on by and join the fun. We are excited to have the opportunity to work with Zynga on this advertising promotion, as an interesting way of getting more people to experience Bing’s unique ability to help make decisions, whether in Farmville or outside in the real world. We look forward to engaging more deeply with these users and helping them learn more about Bing. Liz Tassey Gerber - Bing Reference: Bing - 2010/3/05
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| Countdown to the Oscars with Yahoo! Search Continuing our celebration of the Academy Awards, we are rolling out a series of features that make it easier for you to follow coverage of the Oscars on Yahoo! Search. On Yahoo! Image Search, just search for “Oscars 2010” and you’ll see our Oscars image carousel, with the latest image search results of the nominees and [...] Reference: Administrator - 2010/3/03
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| SMX West 2010, Steve Ballmer Edition Starting tomorrow, Bing will be participating in full force at what’s shaping up to be another stellar SMX West (March 2-4, Santa Clara CA). Every SMX show is a special one for Bing. But this one is super-duper special for one reason – we’re bringing Steve Ballmer! This will be Steve’s first ever conversation with the search community at an industry event. Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land and co-chair of SMX, sits down with Steve to discuss Microsoft’s commitment to search and how Bing is working to evolve the search experience. In addition to Steve’s keynote chat, you’ll find Bing and Microsoft Advertising engaged with the community all across SMX in a number of ways. Here’s a quick summary of where you can find us. March 2nd (TUE) · 9:00am – 9:45am Keynote Conversation with Microsoft CES Steve Ballmer · 10:45am – Noon Real Time Search & The Major Search Engines Sean Suchter, GM of Search Technology Center · 10:45am – Noon Mobile Paid Search Ads: Real Opportunities Raj Kapoor, Global Director, Mobile Advertising · 1:15pm – 2:30pm Bing: What’s Happening? Stefan Weitz, Director of Search, Bing; Q&A - Eric Gilmore, Group Product Manager, Bing · Noon – 1:15pm Lunch Topic Table “Meet Microsoft Advertising” Aaron Lauper, AdCenter Search Account Manager · 4:30pm – 5:45pm Ask The Local Search Engines Mikko Ollila, Senior Product Manager, Bing Local March 3rd (WED) · 10:00am – 10:20am Simplify your Campaign Management! (in EXPO THEATRE) Aaron Lauper, AdCenter Search Account Manager · 10:45am – Noon Bring In The Bling Via Bing Cashback Meagan Rochelle, Search Solutions Specialist · Noon – 1:30pm Lunch Topic Table “Exploring Bing Captions” Mark Johnson, Senior Program Manager Lead, Bing · 4:45pm – 6:00pm Ask The Paid Search Reps Aaron Lauper, AdCenter Search Account Manager March 4th (THU) · 11:30am – 12:30pm Ask The Search Engines Sasi Parthasarathy, Program Manager, Bing · 12:30pm – 1:30pm Lunch Topic Table “Talk to a Bing Engineer” Steve Macbeth, Principal Group Program Manager, Bing Bing is also sponsoring the legendary SMX community event SMX After Dark on the night of March 2nd starting at 9pm in the Santa Clara Hyatt pool side (better not rain!) And if these weren’t enough, Ignite is coming to SMX West as part of Global Ignite Week! Ignite is the fun, high-energy evening of a dozen or so “speed presentations” where each speaker has 5 minutes and 20 slides to talk about a topic. The speaker lineup is an impressive who’s who from around the search industry. If you’re in the area, come check it out by registering for FREE (an SMX badge will get you in too). Free drinks and light food provided. And if you can’t join us in person, be sure to catch the live stream. Ignite SMX West is March 2nd. Doors open at 7:30 and presentations start at 8:00pm. Full details: http://searchmarketingexpo.com/west/2010/ignite. Aya Zook, Product Manager, Bing *Matt McGee from Search Engine Land live blogged Steve Ballmer's discussion with Danny Sullivan. Reference: Bing - 2010/3/01
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| A New Decade of SMX West The 2010 SMX West conference kicks off this week in Santa Clara, Calif., and we’re excited to be there! Yahoos will be sitting on a handful of panels, so stop by and learn what we’re up to. Tuesday, March 2, 2010 Time: 10:45 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. Panel: Real Time Search & The Major Search Engines Speaker: [...] Reference: Administrator - 2010/3/01
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| Bing Autosuggest – History Repeats Itself – and That is a Good Thing We’ve been working hard to help your complete your search tasks more quickly. We’re happy to announce support for query history in Autosuggest today to help make that vision a reality. Autosuggest now supports suggestions from your query history. Many users search for a set of topics again and again. It could be you searching on your favorite hobbies, doing online research, looking up local attractions or directions – the particular query subjects are very specific to you. To make searching easier and reduce all those wasted clicks, many people found our history feature very useful to get them to where they’re going faster. So we experimented with providing your prior searches in Autosuggest and found it’s even more useful in to helping find what you’re looking for faster! Search history in Autosuggest can help you in other ways too. Many search tasks span multiple search sessions even days or weeks. In fact, 44% of non-navigational search sessions last longer than 1 week! Perhaps you need to research the purchase of a new automobile. You might use Bing to find a retail location and to further research online – over many days – to make the best decisions on your big ticket purchase. With history support in Autosuggest, you can restart a previous search session by typing a few characters to see your previous queries and start researching right where you left off. We know from our testing that this makes you more effective at your longer search tasks. Previous search queries in Autosuggest show in a special color, purple, the same color your browser uses to display visited links.
You are in full control of your query history. We know your privacy is very important to you. You can turn History on or off at any time or selectively remove any portion of your search history using the Manage History option. You will see both of these choices every time you use Autosuggest. We hope you enjoy Autosuggest with History and that it saves you time and improves your search effectiveness. Use it and tell us what you think! Thank you! Robert Williams and Todd Schwartz Reference: Bing - 2010/3/01
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| And now back to our regularly scheduled program… It’s been an exciting 17 days! By the end of the day on Monday, we will have featured 50 homepage images, 200 hotspots, and athletes from all over the globe. You can relive the past 7 images (including hotspots) using the image viewer. Just click the arrows in the lower right side of the image:
If you want to see more, check out our Bing Photo Sharing app on Facebook. And now that the games are officially done, we’re shifting back to our ‘normal’ programming. Starting Tuesday, we’ll bring you a different intriguing image each day to help you explore the world around you. Look for the hotspots to find out more about each image if you’ve got time; otherwise you can cheat and check the image caption. If you’re new to the page and want a guided tour, see Welcome Home. Got an idea for an interesting Bing homepage? Send us a note in the comments – we’d love to hear from you! Enjoy! Stephanie Horstmanshof Editorial lead
Reference: Bing - 2010/2/28
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| Friday’s with Stefan and his UK Friends Stefan has been in the UK this week talking with the Bing UK team and he has sent us this week’s theme and video from across the water. The Bing UK team is doing some great work trying to raise money for Sport Relief, for more information and you are in the UK go to www.givewithbing.com for more information. So take a look and make sure you catch the theme for this week’s Free t-Shirt Friday at the end. Tweet us back at @bing with the #FTF for your chance to win a Bing t-shirt. (Please visit the site to view this media) The strange cut outs in the back are of a British Pop Group called The Saturday’s (just in case you were wondering) Happy Friday! Kristin Meldahl Reference: Bing - 2010/2/26
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| Discovering the World with Bing Where would we be if people like Columbus or Einstein hadn’t taken a risk on an idea or notion or if people like Jane Goodall or even Dr. Bing hadn’t followed their passions? As a global community, we have benefited from discoveries in science and technology, exploration and the arts in ways we don’t always recognize day to day. But without these advances and explorations, our lives would be dramatically different. Since the launch of Bing we have partnered on projects that we believe support this idea. Through projects like 10,000 Rockets and our work with the Pacific Science Center on the Facing Mars exhibit we try to encourage kids of all ages to learn and discover through science and technology. Our latest partnership with explorer Eric Larsen is something that we hope will keep that interest and importance top of mind. Eric leaves today from Ottawa on his journey for the North Pole which begins the second leg of his Save the Poles Expedition in an effort to raise awareness and tell his story about the climate change in these areas. He recently returned from his first leg to the South Pole and will be attempting to summit Mount Everest in the fall reaching what Eric calls the “Three Poles”. Accomplishing all three of these adventures in one year is something that has never been done before. Ever.
You can find information on Eric and his quest at www.ericlarsenexplore.com, read the latest news and discussions about his expeditions on Newsvine, engage with the community on Bing and even track his progress through Twitter. We hope that like Eric, you are encouraged to learn, explore and follow your passion. Kristin Meldahl – Bing Reference: Bing - 2010/2/25
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| A Little Bird Just Told Us About a Yahoo! and Twitter Partnership The little bird is right. Yahoo! is partnering with Twitter, making it possible to integrate real-time content into social experiences on Yahoo! Starting today, you’ll be able to see more fascinating and news-worthy tweets when you search on Yahoo! Last year we integrated Twitter results in the Yahoo! News Shortcut and for other buzzing topics. With [...] Reference: Administrator - 2010/2/24
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| Use Zhuyin in Search Suggestions in Yahoo! Taiwan We’ve just added a new search suggestion feature in Web search for Yahoo! Taiwan (Yahoo! Kimo). This feature helps users easily enter queries in traditional Chinese in the search box using the Zhuyin (Bopomofo) system. Zhuyin is a phonetic system widely used in Taiwan. When Taiwan users type their queries, they often need to switch the [...] Reference: Administrator - 2010/2/23
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| Bing is Going Big in Dallas OK…so maybe it is a bit of an overstatement but isn’t everything bigger in Texas? I’m packing my bags today to join some members of the Bing team in Dallas where we’ll talk to some local bloggers, SEO experts and local media to get feedback, suggestions and to just find out how Bing can be better for them. We really value your feedback and are always looking for ways we can be better. If our paths don’t cross this time, we are always following the comments in Twitter @bing as well as in the Bing Community Forums so keep them coming. If you are in Dallas this week and would like to join us in a great SEO discussion, Duane Forester will be hosting a SEO meet up on Wednesday night at Central 214 so make sure you grab a spot and register at EventBrite. Following that we will be going out on the town so follow us at @bing on twitter for all the updates…we would love to see you. In preparation for the trip, I am checking the weather down in Dallas with Bing’s enhanced weather results…have you had a chance to check it out yet? Go to www.Bing.com and enter your desired location and ‘weather’ or you can type in “weather in Dallas” and you get a more comprehensive weather result right there in the results page. We are now pulling information from three different weather sources, giving you the ability to compare sources, and dive into the 10 day and hourly forecast. If you want to dig in deeper you can click “Weather in Dallas, TX” for more details including the monthly averages. Personally this is super helpful especially as I am packing for my trip tomorrow.
This is my first trip to the Dallas area and I hear the team is taking suggestions on things that I should do while I am there. If you haven’t already, you can cast your vote on our Facebook page. And why do I have a feeling it will be something extremely embarrassing? Dallas…here we come! Kristin Meldahl - Bing Reference: Bing - 2010/2/22
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| Learn About Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Program What can search data tell you about people? How can you use search data to project the commercial success of movies, video games, and other products? These are just a few of the challenges from the microeconomics and social systems area of the 2010 Key Scientific Challenges Program that we announced on Jan. 27 this [...] Reference: Administrator - 2010/2/20
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| Burrrr it's cold outside…win a free t-shirt It’s that time again…it’s Friday which means we have to listen to Stefan again and get a chance to win a free Bing t-shirt. So, make sure you watch the video for this week’s theme and tweet us back your answer at @bing with #FTF in your tweet for a chance to win a Free t-shirt. This is a great example of a winning tweet from a few weeks back: @zafeuer @bing Miami Freedom Tower http://www.bing.com/search?q=miami+freedom+tower&go=&form=QBRE&qs=n #FTF (Please visit the site to view this media) Happy Friday! Kristin Meldahl – Bing Reference: Bing - 2010/2/19
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| A Chat with Shashi Seth, Our New SVP of Yahoo! Search Products It has been a busy month since Shashi Seth joined Yahoo! as our new Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search Products. Shashi brings with him a wealth of experience from Google, eBay, Cooliris, and AOL. As the head of Search, Shashi has emphasized his commitment to Yahoo!’s stake in the search market. In this video, [...] Reference: Administrator - 2010/2/19
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| Keeping you in the know for the Olympic Games Did you catch the opening ceremony for the Winter Olympics last Friday to kick off the games? To access that and all the latest videos from the games and for a snap shot into all the Olympic excitement visit www.msn.com to view the Winter Olympics module at the top of the page.
There has been a lot of buzz in the hallways about favorite events and favorite athletes. So we thought we'd look at what people are searching for on Bing to see which events people are most interested in online. According to our search trends it looks like leading up to the games snowboarding is at the top of the As the games continue, we wanted to remind everyone of the many ways you can take advantage of Bing and MSN and our partnership with NBC Olympics to keep up to date on all the happenings at the winter games. Use Bing to find answers to your quick questions about the games. You can use the Sports Events Schedule Instant Answer to get the schedule for each sport at the Olympics. For example search for: figure skating schedule, bobsled schedule, etc.
And when you search for terms like “Winter Olympics”, “NBC Winter Olympics”, etc. you'll see the Winter Olympics Instant Answer with information from the official Olympics site at nbcolympics.com, an immersive and high definition slideshow experience, a “Today’s Events” section with links to sports with events, and the medal count for the top three countries.
Now if you are on the go, MSN Mobile has quick access to the top news stories for the Olympics, pictures and links to the most recent Olympic video on NBC’s site, and a summary of the US medal count and link to all see all other countries. Just visit mobile.msn.com from your phone.
We hope that for whatever you are looking for regarding the Winter Olympics whether at home or on the go, that Bing and MSN can provide it to you. Kristin Meldahl - Bing
Other posts of interest:
NBC Universal partners with MSN and Microsoft to deliver NBCOlympics.com on MSN Bing and MSN your Olympics Hub
Reference: Bing - 2010/2/17
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| Spatial Search: The Next Frontier Have you ever thought about all the content and media out there on the Web? Information that we use daily to help make decisions, like reviews of the best restaurant for chicken parmesan or the t-shirt shop perfect for a vintage G&R t-shirt? We all know that you can find nearly anything on the web in the form of blogs, websites, user reviews, tweets, etc. But the Web is changing. In the past we have been forced to ‘disassociate’ all this content from its physical context. Sure, you can write a review of that great B&B. But once you do that, it escapes into the ether and loses its connection to the real world - the place that gave you the idea to write it in the first place. We thought there was probably a better way to reconnect all this data with its home, to provide greater context, and to ultimately help you use it to make a better decisions about things you’re trying to get done in real life, not just on a search engine. We began talking about this idea of Spatial Search a bit back in December when we launched our new version of Bing Maps and today at TED, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Bing Maps architect will be unveiling some more work that demonstrates how we’re reuniting data with context. Some of what we’re showing is in research stage, some you can use today, and some you’ll be able to use shortly. But before we geek out on the features, it might be helpful to frame in a context. So, let’s do that… The idea behind Spatial Search came from looking at human psychology and trying to understand how we as humans make decisions. We use all our senses: sight, touch, smell, sound, and taste. Today’s blue-link model doesn’t do a good job in tapping any of those senses and instead made you visually recreate models in your head to get through complex tasks. In other words, when you read a review of that French bistro, you had to manufacture everything: the street location, the ambience, where exactly in the city it was, and more. While we’re not working on smell-o-search (yet!), we do think we can do a better job with the ‘sight’ and ‘touch’ senses you rely on every day. So when we think about Spatial Search, we think about the modes you all go through when you’re out and about, interacting with people and places rather than machines. First, you Explore: you orient yourself. You get a feel for what’s around and figure out your environment. Next, you Discover. Using your senses and visual cues you try and make sense of your surroundings. You look at storefront signage, street signs, and other clues to let you know where you might want to go to get your task done. Finally, you Decide: you take in and process all of the input around you to try and make the best decision for the task at hand. Maybe it’s the opening hours of the dry cleaners (oops – its closed) that tells you that you need to go to the bakery you can smell around the corner until it opens, and hop on their wi-fi network to get some work done while you wait. The challenge for Spatial Search is how we use technology to augment all those tasks, bring context to you so that information transforms into knowledge, which leads to actions taken to make your life easier and more informed. For Exploring, we’ve made a number of updates to the Bing Maps platform to bring this idea to life through high resolution imagery from outer space all the way down to the front door of the bakery. Today at TED, we’re announcing a next step in this evolution of making this imagery more useful and interactive with the release of the technology preview of the Streetside Photos application. This tech preview mines geo-tagged photos from Flickr, and relates them to our Streetside imagery to show images matched to its original spatial context. Why is this cool? You’re now able to see what that club looks like at night (is it really THAT scary?), see if you’re really going to get a good sunset at that B&B you’re looking to book, or check out the crowds on a Saturday morning at Pike Place Market in Seattle or get a view of the same market from decades prior. As more people share imagery, our challenge is to reunite those photos with where they were taken – again, provide context to the data in the ether. Watch Blaise’s demo to see Streetside Photos in action. (Please visit the site to view this media) But we’re not just stopping at the street. Today, we’re also excited to demonstrate integration with the WorldWide Telescope, a project out of Microsoft Research. Once launched, you will be able to walk outside in Streetside mode, look up, and see what’s above – way above – right now where you’re standing. Constellations come to life as you pan – you can even set the time of day so you can see what you’ll see at 9pm – great for exploring with your daughter to get her ready for what she’ll see when the sun goes down. At the same time as we’re getting more “universal” with World Wide Telescope, we’re also getting more intimate. At TED, Blaise showed the first results of our indoor panoramas work. This will provide an experience identical to Streetside, but won’t be limited to places you can take a vehicle. Whether you’re exploring Seattle’s Pike Place Market, or your favorite theme park, Bing Maps will give you the most immersive experience of the place. We’ve already given you a taste of this with the integration of Photosynths into Bing Maps (18,000 of them and counting), and you can expect Photosynth and Streetside to converge in a way that allows all of us to document the important places in the world – indoor or outdoor – and explore them in a completely natural way. When it comes to Discovering, we launched our “Map Apps” gallery to bring that disconnected data home. From our Local Lens to Twitter, we’re bringing data back to where it can help you discover what’s in a physical area. And sometimes, there’s no substitute for absolute real-time. At TED we also demonstrated live Webcam feeds perfectly which enables real-time video to be overlaid seamlessly on street-level imagery, adding another dimension to the mapping experience. Imagine – you can see how long the line is at Five Guys before you head over for a burger. In the coming year, we think you will be pleasantly surprised with how far Bing takes this new technology. Stay tuned. Finally when it comes to Deciding, we’ve just scratched the surface with Bing maps. We introduced innovations around our Opinion Index which lets you see just how good that Vietnamese Pho restaurant is based on what the community is saying. Our next step is to continue to augment the Spatial Search experience with these types of data. The potential for ‘augmenting’ your physical world with data pulled from everywhere, in real-time, and in context is exciting. The chance of getting lost diminishes greatly. You may never have to enter a fabric store only to realize you should have gone somewhere else to get your remnant. The ability to re-route before hitting a road closure due to construction will be right at your fingertips. The technology to enable the Deciding pillar of our Spatial Search strategy is daunting – but this is a key element in our quest to better understand how we naturally process information to make a decision. So that’s where we’re headed. It’s going to take a little while to get there. But we believe our focus on your needs as searchers and more importantly as people will ultimately help us build technology to reconnect the wandering data to where it wants to be – the real world. The Bing Maps team Other posts of interest: New Bing Maps Application: Streetside Photos
Reference: Bing - 2010/2/11
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| Calling All Valentine’s Day Procrastinators If you haven’t bought your gift yet, whether for a relative, your favorite pet or your significant other you might be classified as a “Valentine’s Procrastinator.” Not to fear you are not out of time yet. Today is the day (Feb. 10) to shop with Bing cashback to take advantage of some of the last minute insane savings (as long as the shipping is fast enough). Now if you are “still” trying to figure out what to get that loved one you can check out the Bing Valentine’s Day gift guide or tune into Bing video 7 a.m. PST, today (Wednesday February 10) to get advice from the Victoria’s Secret Bombshells. Candance Swanepoel and Erin Heatherton will be giving hot tips on how to impress that special someone on Valentine’s Day and will be answering questions from the MSN and Bing fans in an exclusive webcast. If you are a Valentine’s Day Procrastinator or not we hope Bing cashback can help you find that perfect gift just in time for the big day. Kristin Meldahl – Bing Reference: Bing - 2010/2/10
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| Almost like being there I first started working on the homepage during the Summer Olympics in Beijing. We had just launched the image on the homepage and 10 days later jumped to updating the picture twice a day. It was a chaotic time, but truly some of the most fun I’ve ever had at a job! With the Vancouver Olympics fast approaching, the homepage team decided to change up our regular programming a bit to bring the excitement of the Olympics to you. Starting this weekend, we’ll update the homepage with images from the events three times a day. And while we’ll show some winners, this won’t be the standard parade of medalists. We’re out to show the great moments from the games: the alpine skier from Ghana, the debut of Ski Cross as an Olympic event, anything to do with curling—all with the stunning imagery that you’ve come to expect on the Bing homepage. As always, we’ll have the hotspots giving you lots of fun facts about the images. And if you just want to see the caption for a photo, point your mouse on the copyright symbol. For more info about fully exploring the homepage, see Welcome Home. And for a full recap of all the Olympics features Bing has to offer, see Bing and MSN: your Olympics hub. Enjoy! Stephanie Horstmanshof Editorial lead
Reference: Bing - 2010/2/09
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| The Next Frontier in Search: Questions & Answers A few months ago at SemTech 2009 we announced that our questions and answers database –launched almost a year ago – had grown to more than 300 million high-quality Q&A pairs. “High-quality” means that we use our semantic and extraction... Reference: Ask.com Blog - 2009/11/13
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| Ask Is 'Dancing on Air': “Who Wants a Deal? We Do, We Do!” We know the economy has been down, and that’s getting folks a little ‘down’ about finding savings in these tough times. Well, with Ask Deals, we’re convinced you’ll soon be celebrating, and getting ‘down’ in a different way… What do... Reference: Ask.com Blog - 2009/10/20
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| Get Smarter on the Go with Dictionary.com’s Free Dictionary & Thesaurus Application for BlackBerry It’s been six months since we launched our iPhone app and three million+ downloads later, we’re excited to take the next major step towards offering our unique experience to even more Smartphone users. With our new application for BlackBerry® we... Reference: Ask.com Blog - 2009/10/13
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| Ask Deals: Your One-Click, One-Stop Shop for Savings is Here! Consider this: a tough economy with new, record job losses. Families gathered around kitchen tables with a pencil and calculator trying to make ends meet – every week. The fact that ‘coupons’ was the sixth most searched for term on... Reference: Ask.com Blog - 2009/10/06
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| Ask.com Celebrates the 25th National Breast Cancer Awareness Month Today, commemorating the first day of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Ask invites people everywhere to honor loved ones affected by breast cancer by posting a tributes on our homepage. Our special, one-day homepage memorial is part of the Ask.com... Reference: Ask.com Blog - 2009/10/01
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| Searching for a Cure: Ask.com and Susan G. Komen for the Cure® Partner in the Fight to End Breast Cancer Today we are excited to unveil our Ask.com Search for the Cure® campaign, a first-of-its-kind donation to Susan G. Komen for the Cure® – the world's largest and most progressive grassroots network of breast cancer survivors and activists fighting to... Reference: Ask.com Blog - 2009/9/14
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| SES San Jose is here! August 10-14, 2009 It’s one of our favorite events each year, and Ask is proud to support SES San Jose as a premier sponsor. We’re also joining our industry colleagues on several panel discussions that will explore the industry’s most pressing topics, and... Reference: Ask.com Blog - 2009/8/05
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| What makes a search engine “semantic”? Recently I took part in a panel discussion at SemTech 2009 on the timely topic of “semanticity” of search engines. In the last few years, many "semantic” search engines have been launched, and the term “semantic” has become open to... Reference: Ask.com Blog - 2009/7/15
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| Thanks, iPhoners! Dictionary.com Makes Apple’s List of 30 Favorite Apps The Apple® App Store just turned one year old and Dictionary.com is joining the party! We’re humbled and happy to make the list of Apple’s 30 Favorite Apps, compiled in a special iTunes section to celebrate their first birthday milestone.... Reference: Ask.com Blog - 2009/7/14
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| Harvesting the Best Answers from Ask.com’s AnswerFarms! Earlier this year we blogged about Ask.com’s AnswerFarm™ technology – our proprietary method of crawling and extracting question/answer pairs from hundreds of thousands of sources, including user generated content, FAQ pages, news/blog articles, and structured/semi-structured data. Our Q&A database has... Reference: Ask.com Blog - 2009/6/17
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| Indian Premier League bowls wicked googly* to the world on YouTube (Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)  Named by Forbes as the "hottest sports league in the world" with revenues comparable to the world’s most popular leagues, the IPL season is a 60-match, 43-day tournament that features some of the best talent in cricket today. You can come to YouTube and keep up with the action any time, anywhere and connect with fans across the globe. Watch as the match happens, or if you missed a match, tune in later to see what happened. The entire season will be streamed around the world on YouTube, except in the US, where matches will be time-delayed and made available 15 minutes after the match ends. On the IPL Channel, you’ll see three tabs:
We'll be watching the donkey drops, the five-fers, the flippers and floaters, the half-yorkers and slow sweeps — and cheering alongside you! * A googly is a kind of pitch similar to a baseball pitch or a bowling throw in the game cricket; a wicked googly would be a really good pitch.   
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| Recognizing courage, securing online freedom More than ever, governments around the world are threatening online free expression. Forty countries have taken measures to limit this freedom, up from only a handful a few years ago. Google and YouTube services are or have been blocked in 25 of those nations. On Thursday night in Paris, we took an important step to highlight this crucial issue by sponsoring the first Netizen Prize (or more elegantly, “Le Prix de Net Citoyen”) awarded by the Paris-based advocacy group Reporters Without Borders. And on Friday, March 12, we’ll be helping highlight the fight for Internet freedom by marking the group’s World Day Against Cyber Censorship on YouTube. Fittingly, Reporters Without Borders chose to give the first Netizen Prize to the Iranian creators of the website Change for Equality, first established in 2006 to fight for changes in laws in Tehran that discriminate against women. That site has since become a well-known source of information on women’s rights in Iran, documenting arrests of women activists and becoming a rallying point for opponents of the regime. Over the past year those leaders in Tehran have distinguished themselves — and earned the opprobrium of people all over the world — for their brutal crackdown on the rights of its critics to question their rule. Last year's killing of unarmed Neda Agha-Soltan during post-election protests in Tehran, seen around the world on amateur video, has become a symbol of the regime's ferocity — and the power of the Internet to reveal what governments do not want the world to see. At the award ceremony in our Paris office, our Senior Vice President David Drummond said that we are at a critical point in the future of the Internet: "All of us have a choice. We can allow repressive policies to take flight and spread across the globe, or we can work together against such challenges and uphold the fundamental human right to free expression.” David went on to praise the role of NGOs like Reporters Without Borders, the Obama Administration’s commitment to the promotion of Internet freedom and the efforts of all groups that have joined the Global Network Initiative. Under the initiative, major U.S. Internet companies, human rights group, socially responsive investors and academic institutions agreed to guidelines promoting free expression and protecting the privacy of their users around the world. “In the spirit of the undiplomatic American come to European shores," he said, "let me make a plea for European governments, companies and groups to rise to the occasion. Any effort that is limited to the United States is bound to fall far short of its global potential.”  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| Googleâs coming to Austin for SXSW Like many of you out there, we’re gearing up for the SXSW Interactive Festival, which starts tomorrow, March 12 in Austin, TX. In just a few short hours, dozens of Googlers and YouTubers will be descending on Austin for a packed weekend of panels, demos and parties. Of course, we’ve also got a few fun things up our sleeve:
You can read more about all of the Google happenings on our SXSW website, and follow @googlesxsw on Twitter for last-minute updates and news from Austin. We can’t wait to hit the ground running (or biking), and we look forward to seeing you there!  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| Express yourself with the Blogger Template Designer In Blogger’s more than 10 years, we’ve learned that blogging is a powerful way for people to express themselves. More than 350,000 words are written on Blogger every minute of every day and over the years we’ve added a bunch of features to ensure that writing those words is as easy, fun and rewarding as possible. Today, we’re happy to announce the launch of the Blogger Template Designer on Blogger in Draft, our experimental playground where you can try out the latest features Blogger has to offer. Instead of creating a lot of new templates that will grow stale over time, we decided to go beyond static templates and reinvent the whole process of designing your blog, making it even easier to express yourself online. The Blogger Template Designer is our big first step in improving not just our template designs, but all the ways that you can customize the look and layout of your blog. If you try out the Blogger Template Designer, you’ll find:
For more info, check out our post on the Blogger in draft blog. Give the Blogger Template Designer a test drive, and then let us know what you think!  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| Now playing: Apps Script for Google Docs The Google Apps team here in New York City is a hotbed of movie fanatics. But while planning a recent movie night, we realized we spend too much time organizing our events and not enough time discussing, debating and watching movies. To take the hard work out of planning, we turned to Google Apps Script, which lets you write short programs that automatically perform simple actions within a spreadsheet. For example, our Movie Night script figures out which movies are playing close by and invites everyone to vote on what they’d most like to see.  Google Apps Script has been available to Google Apps customers since January, and today we’re excited to bring it to everyone who uses Google spreadsheets. Apps Script can be helpful for all kinds of things, from customized party invites to sending out holiday letters — in fact Apps Script can be especially helpful for those repetitive, time consuming tasks. To help you find useful scripts, we’ve also launched a public gallery where you can check out our Movie Night script and browse other available scripts. If you’re feeling adventurous, try your hand at writing your own script and submit it to the gallery for others to use. To see the gallery or install a script in your spreadsheet, click on “Insert” and select “Script.” Check out the Google Docs blog for more information about Apps Script, and to learn about writing your own scripts, visit the Google Apps Developer Blog.  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| Finding awesome stuff online with Google Reader Play I use Google Reader a lot — not only to stay on top of the news, but also to find interesting blog posts and articles. I’m always telling my friends about Google Reader, and while some of them love it, others don’t want to take the time to set it up. For those of you who fall into this second category, we’re announcing Google Reader Play, a new product that makes the best stuff in Reader more accessible for everyone. Reader Play is a new way to browse interesting stuff on the web, customized to the topics you’re interested in, with no setup required.  Items in Reader Play are presented one at a time, and images and videos are automatically enlarged to maximize the viewing experience. We use the technology behind Recommended Items in Reader to populate Reader Play with the most interesting content on the web. While you don’t need a Google account to use Reader Play, your experience will be personalized if you sign in. As you browse, you can let us know which items you enjoy by clicking the "like" button, and we'll use that info to show you other content we think you’ll enjoy. We think Reader Play is a fun way to browse interesting items online that you wouldn’t find otherwise. We designed it especially for people who don’t want to spend time curating their own set of feeds — but folks who already use Reader can easily use it to read their feeds as well. Just click the feed settings menu on any feed in Reader and select “View in Reader Play.” We’re launching Reader Play as an experiment in Google Labs so that we can test it out, get feedback from you and then improve it as quickly as possible. Visit google.com/reader/play to give it a try, and let us know what you think!  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| The Internet in America: A YouTube Interview with the FCC (Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog) After this plan is announced, you have the opportunity to interview FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in the second of a series of in-person YouTube interviews with government leaders. (Our first, with U.S. President Barack Obama, took place last month.) Go to CitizenTube today to submit your video or text question via Google Moderator, and vote on your favorites; we'll bring a selection of the top-voted questions to Chairman Genachowski in our interview next Tuesday, March 16. The deadline for submission is Sunday night, March 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT. To help structure our conversation with the Chairman, we've broken the interview down into seven topics. To learn more about what the FCC is doing in each area, click on the links for each topic below. Then submit your question on CitizenTube under one of the topic headings.
 
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| YouTube calling: Now serving ads on the YouTube mobile site (Cross-posted with the YouTube Biz Blog) Mobile phones are rapidly becoming essential tools for surfing the web, connecting with friends, and sharing and watching video online, and we're seeing these effects at YouTube. The YouTube mobile site is more popular than ever: site traffic grew by over 160% in 2009, and now millions of people all over the world are streaming tens of millions of videos every day on their mobile phones. The mobile space moves fast, so we've been working hard to roll out new features and functionality quickly, especially as more and more people adopt YouTube-capable phones. The increased usage of high-end devices like the iPhone and Android is also making mobile advertising easier and more effective for advertisers. So today, we're launching ads on the home, search and browse pages of the American and Japanese YouTube mobile websites (m.youtube.com from your mobile browser). This is a great way for advertisers to reach YouTube viewers across multiple platforms. In fact, at launch YouTube will immediately provide one of the largest audiences for a mobile ad campaign anywhere on the mobile web. And because YouTube mobile attracts early adopters, the site can deliver to advertisers a coveted demographic of tech savvy trendsetters. We've already seen some early campaigns run on YouTube's mobile site by advertisers like Sony (for the DVD release of "District 9") and Kia, both of whom were able to easily reach their target audience, no matter where they were looking for video.  Our first tests of YouTube mobile ads — with brands ranging from L'Oreal to Land Rover — showed strong results related to click-throughs, user experience and brand awareness, and we've learned a lot in the months since then. As a result, ads on the YouTube mobile website will be banner ads sold on a full-day basis (like with the YouTube homepage on the web), making a mobile buy an easy and valuable addition to any YouTube campaign. For example, today Mazda is running a homepage ad on YouTube.com, and extended their campaign to run ads on our mobile site as well. If you're interested in learning more, reach out to your YouTube or Google sales rep, or visit youtube.com/advertise.  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| Biking directions added to Google Maps Whenever I meet someone who finds out that I work on the directions team for Google Maps, the first question I'm asked is often "So when's Google Maps going to add biking directions?" We're big biking fans too, so we've been itching to give you a concrete answer. I don't want to keep the good news a secret any longer, so the answer is: right now! Today we've added biking directions and extensive bike trail data to Google Maps for the U.S. My team has been keeping close tabs on all the public support for biking directions that’s been steadily coming in, but we knew that when we added the feature, we wanted to do it right: we wanted to include as much bike trail data as possible, provide efficient routes, allow riders to customize their trip, make use of bike lanes, calculate rider-friendly routes that avoid big hills and customize the look of the map for cycling to encourage folks to hop on their bikes. So that's exactly what we've done. Let's say you want to bike to work, or maybe you want to drive less and spend more time outdoors. Biking directions can help you find a convenient and efficient route that makes use of dedicated bike trails or lanes and avoids hills whenever possible. To find biking directions, select "Bicycling" from the drop-down menu when you do a directions search:  So, how does it work? Well, I'm based in Seattle, along with the rest of the biking directions team. The city is notoriously hilly, but also has some great trails and a strong cycling community. Let's say I'm trying to get from Golden Gardens to a friend's house in Montlake:  This route avoids hills (phew!) and puts me on the Burke-Gilman trail for most of the journey. When I need to get off the trail to cross town, biking directions makes sure to keep me on bike-friendly roads and avoid some of the city's busiest intersections. The time estimate for the route is based on a complex set of variables accounting for the type of road, terrain and turns over the course of my ride. If I decide that I want to stop at Woodland Park Zoo along the way, I can click on the blue path and drag it to my desired route — just like with driving directions — and we'll still customize the journey for cycling suitability. Over on the Lat Long Blog, you can read more about all the unique tweaks and calculations factored into our routing algorithm. We've also added information about bike trails, lanes and recommended roads directly onto the map. This can help you get a better sense of your route, or let you find trails nearby for a recreational ride. When you're zoomed into a city, click on the "More" button at the top of the map to turn on the "Bicycling” layer. You'll see three types of lines appear on the map:
 Thanks primarily to our partnership with the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, we now have more than 12,000 miles of trails included in biking directions and outlined directly on the map. We also have data on bike lanes and recommended streets for 150 cities across the country. We'll continue to add new trail information and encourage riders to send feedback (biking directions is in beta, after all) and route information for inclusion via the “Report a Problem” tool. When Map Maker is available in the U.S., all riders will be able to directly contribute their local knowledge about trails, bike lanes and suggested routes. We know that many of you have been anxiously awaiting this feature, so head over to http://maps.google.com/biking to try it for yourself and then hop on your bike!  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| A digital renaissance: partnering with the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage The Renaissance, Europe's period of cultural, political and scientific rebirth, began in Florence around 600 years ago. At Google we're interested in a (small “r”) renaissance of a different kind — a digital one. Since the launch of Google Books, we’ve been working with libraries and publishers around the globe to bring more of the world's books to more readers around the globe. Any school child should be able to access the works of Petrarch, Dante or Vico (or, if they're so inclined, Machiavelli). In the case of these more famous authors, this is already largely possible, but what about the work of Guglielmo il Giuggiola or Coluccio Salutati? We want all of the great literature and writings of Italy to be accessible to the general public. Today we’re announcing an agreement with the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage that will push this vision forward. Working with the National Libraries of Florence and Rome, we’ll digitize up to a million out-of-copyright works. The libraries will select the works to be digitized from their collections, which include a wealth of rare historical books, including scientific works, literature from the period of the founding of Italy and the works of Italy's most famous poets and writers. It marks the first time we’ve ever joined forces with Italian libraries, and the first time we've worked with a ministry of culture. Around Europe and the rest of the world, we are effectively witnessing a digital renaissance, with an increasing number of organizations running ambitious and promising book digitization projects. We're not the only ones who have seen the need to bring the world's books into digital form. Digitization of books is a tremendous undertaking, requiring the joint effort of a great number of public and private stakeholders. For this reason, we’re supportive of many other efforts at digitization, such as the European Commission's Europeana. We want to see these books have the broadest reach possible — the books we scan are available for inclusion in Europeana, of which the Florence Library is a contributing member, and other digital libraries. The more of the world's historical, cultural treasures we can bring online, the more we can unlock our shared heritage. We believe today’s announcement is an important step, and we look forward to working with more libraries and other partners. We envision a future in which people will be able to search and access the world's books anywhere, anytime. After all, Antonio Beccadelli and Anastasius Germonius — like Shakespeare and Cervantes — are part of our human cultural history.  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| Open for business: the Google Apps Marketplace Every day, thousands of businesses choose the cloud. More than 2 million businesses have adopted Google Apps over the last three years, eliminating the hassles associated with purchasing, installing and maintaining hardware and software themselves. We've found that when businesses begin to experience the benefits of cloud computing, they want more. We're often asked when we'll offer a wider variety of business applications — from accounting and project management to travel planning and human resources management. But we certainly can't and won't do it all, and there are hundreds of business applications for which we have no particular expertise. In recent years, many talented software providers have embraced the cloud and delivered a diverse set of features capable of powering almost any business. But too often, customers who adopt applications from multiple vendors end up with a fractured experience, where each particular application exists in its own silo. Users are often forced to create and remember multiple passwords, cut and paste data between applications, and jump between multiple interfaces just to complete a simple task. Today, we're making it easier for these users and software providers to do business in the cloud with a new online store for integrated business applications. The Google Apps Marketplace allows Google Apps customers to easily discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps. More than 50 companies are now selling applications across a range of businesses, including:
For more information on the benefits of the Google Apps Marketplace to businesses, check out our Enterprise Blog post. Developers interested in learning how to integrate with Google Apps can check out our post on the Google Code Blog. Or, you can explore the Google Apps Marketplace directly at http://google.com/appsmarketplace. Finally, we'll be diving deeper into application development for the enterprise at Google I/O on May 19-20. We hope to see you there!  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| Ode to AdWords [From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest, and are very pleased to have Allison Schwam, Senior Search Analyst at Backcountry, join us here. -Ed.] When you don’t have to sacrifice your love of the outdoors for your career or vice versa, it’s something special. In fact, my love of both skiing and marketing has grown dramatically since I took my job at Backcountry. Getting to work with Google, specifically managing our AdWords account, is an online marketing geek’s dream come true. Combine that with every skier’s dream of Utah powder, and life is good. Day traders wake up every morning to check their portfolio — I get up and check my AdWords accounts. Backcountry sells gear and equipment for the outdoor enthusiast from ski boots to tents, and we sell all of it online. My job is to drive valuable, qualified traffic 365 days a year to Backcountry using AdWords. The AdWords platform lets me manage hundreds of campaigns and hundreds of thousands of keywords with relative ease. I have access to huge amounts of data that are revealed as daily ebbs and flows in impressions, clicks and bids. If you do a Google search for [telemark ski gear], you’ll see our ad:  Backcountry was founded in 1996 by two self-proclaimed ski bums, John Bresee and Jim Holland. Since then, the company has grown to hundreds of employees. I’ve been working here for over two years. Ultimately, our goal is to “crush it,” as some ski town folk say: work hard, play hard. A typical powder day for me is like this one last Friday when Park City got 12 inches of new snow overnight. Here’s how AdWords helps me manage both work and fun. 7 – 7:45am Roll out of bed. Get the coffee going. Fry eggs and bacon. Check snow totals. If it looks like a good ski morning, I first check my email and glance over our AdWords campaigns. All I need to do is my daily reporting to see that I’m on target for my revenue and cost goals. As long as things are okay, I email my boss to say I’ll be out slaying the white dragon. Just as I have the ideal tools to maximize our online campaign performance, I have the tools avid skiers covet for deep days: fat, rockered skis, stiff ski boots, Gore-Tex jacket and pants, helmet, goggles, merino wool layers, etc. After I grab my gear, I’m off. 7:45am – 12noon My commute to The Canyons Ski Resort takes 10 minutes. My friends and I know how to get the most out of our time on the mountain, balancing chair lift time, snow quality and vertical. Does that sound a bit like cost-per-click, conversion rate and top-line revenue? Take this lift to that lift, ski the trees while we wait for that chair to open, get after our favorite steep lines. Next thing you know:  Photo by Jim Harris Face shots are invigorating. Hard to explain, best to experience! After a few glances at the time and collecting my thoughts, I make my way off the mountain. 12pm – 5pm I head a few miles down the road to the office. As the afternoon goes by, co-workers will emerge from their cubicles; sometimes because legs are cramping up but also to share stories about how the morning was. Where did you ski? How was the snow? Smiles all around. I settle into work knowing what I need to succeed at my job is at my fingertips. AdWords gives me visibility into my programs to prioritize and understand trends. It also makes it easy to add and edit my account without getting bogged down in manual work. I regularly use Keyword Performance Reports to monitor both head terms and tail terms to stay on top of revenue opportunities. I’ll take into account the average order value and also the percentage of clicks that turn into sales (rate of conversion) in order to manage our keyword bids. As I do bid updates, I also check the AdWords Preview Tool to see how our ads are ranked and what is going on with our competition. We don’t really focus on “cost-per-click” but instead on “cost as percentage of revenue,” which means the more people purchase, the more ads we can run. So the higher the return on advertising spend, the more room we have to grow our paid search presence. 5 pm – 8 pm I like this afternoon time in particular because it’s quiet and I can really focus on data-crunching. Uninterrupted time and a strong cup of coffee are essential for doing long-term analysis. Campaign Performance Reports are great for identifying long- and short-term trends as seasons shift or for changes in demand by brand. We just wrapped up our winter sale, so this is a great time for me to run an Ad Performance Report to analyze which versions of ad copy had the strongest clickthrough rates for future reference. Finally, Google Insights for Search is a fun tool. It’s a great way to connect with our buyers by discussing big-picture trends with the brands we carry. We can look at AdWords Campaign performance and try to tie it back to general search volume in the marketplace and identify product searches on the rise. In short, given our metrics focus, AdWords gives me the information I need to make decisions about specific keywords, bids, and our overall spend. There are typically the same few folks hanging out at the office this late. We’ll exchange some pleasantries, and as the lights get turned off I’ll shut down my computer. When I earned an undergraduate degree in marketing and cultural anthropology, I had only a vague idea how I was going to create a career with behavioral and analytical activities. It turns out online marketing is an exciting mix of real-time data and customer service. AdWords lets me manage campaigns very efficiently, so I have time to dig deeper and do the strategic analysis that makes this job about much more than just meeting revenue goals. Finally, I picked Park City because it’s more than a ski town. Here fanatical skiers, trail runners, bikers, snowboarders and climbers can live year round and still have a meaningful career. I’ll always be grateful to companies like Backcountry and Google for making this possible: Backcountry for fostering the passions of the outdoor enthusiast, and Google for innovation in creating the forums and tools that really work for us.  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| And the searches go to... The Oscars®: glitz, glamor, gossip, gold statuettes, much fanfare — and for many fans, Google search is increasingly a part of watching this live TV experience. Before and during the Academy Awards® broadcast in the U.S., we saw related queries on Google dominating the hot searches list on Google Trends. People searched for the TV schedule, printable ballots for voting on favorites, streaming video sites, nominee and film information, celebrity chatter and whatever else caught your attention. Here's a snapshot: Fashion Everyone knows the red carpet is all about the gowns. So which actresses made the best (or worst!) dressed list in search? Zoe Saldana's purple Givenchy haute couture gown won the day in searches, with just a few more queries than runner up Miley Cyrus, who walked down the carpet in one of Jenny Packham's finest. Both beat searches for Sandra Bullock's dress (Marchesa) by large margins. Sarah Jessica Parker, always the fashionista, ranked a distant fourth in Chanel. Certain designers were also popular in search, thanks to the stars who wore (and name-dropped) them. Elie Saab (worn by Anna Kendrick), Armani Prive (Amanda Seyfried, Jennifer Lopez) and Marchesa (Sandra Bullock, Vera Farmiga) were all rising trends. Winners Throughout the night Oscar®-related searches rose and fell as nominations were introduced and winners announced. Avatar had the most searches before the ceremony, but as The Hurt Locker received more awards, searches for that film exceeded all others and peaked when it won Best Picture. Precious also had a good run throughout the night. Its peak matched that of "Avatar" during the ceremony:  The awards for best actor, best actress and best director are some of the most-anticipated in the program. There was a considerable amount of buzz about Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock and Kathryn Bigelow before last night, and considerable spikes in search volume when they each won. Here's a look at a few of the star searches last night:  Finally, the evening wasn't all about big wins. The awards help expose more obscure films — shorts, documentaries and foreign-language — to a much larger audience. Searches for these titles typically went up tenfold during the evening, and if they took home a gold statue, search volume spiked as much as 100 times higher. Music by Prudence, Logorama, Food, Inc., The Cove and The Secrets in their Eyes all experienced an exponential explosion of queries. Gossip and memorable moments People are always eager for more information about the Hollywood stars — personal stats like age, height, family and dating status. During this year’s Oscar® ceremonies, Kathryn Bigelow's height and Miley Cyrus's mother's tattoos were hot topics. Whose girlfriend was most searched for? Easy. George Clooney's (Elisabetta Canalis). So what were the most memorable moments of the broadcast? When George Clooney wandered off the red carpet to greet the crowd, queries on [clooney] shot through the roof. Ben Stiller’s appearance as a Na'vi was another draw, and queries on him were high during his spoof. Molly Ringwald and Matthew Broderick’s John Hughes tribute triggered a flood of nostalgia; Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Home Alone all saw huge query spikes as well. During the memorial portion of the show, queries surged for those in the industry who passed away in the last year, including Ron Silver, Natasha Richardson, Patrick Swayze and Brittany Murphy. On a lighter note, Sandra Bullock set off a frenetic amount of searches when she mentioned a Meryl Streep kiss in her acceptance speech. As we've seen in presidential debates, unusual words also generate great interest. The Oscars led to spikes in searches for [catharsis] (from Robert Downey Jr.'s presentation with Tina Fey) and [spooning] (Colin Farrell talking about Jeremy Renner). We hope you enjoyed the evening, and want to thank everyone for turning to Google search to see the latest. And our parents deserve huge thanks, and our agent... oh, they're telling me to wrap it up...!  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| An update on Google.org and philanthropy @ Google (Cross-posted from the Google.org Blog) While they are all part of the wide-ranging work of Google.org over the last year, they also show what our technical teams can accomplish in critical areas that don't always get the attention they need and deserve. A year ago we outlined our goals for the next chapter for Google.org. We talked about our vision to use strengths of Google in information and technology to build products and advocate for critical policies that address global challenges. Ideas for projects continue to pour in from Googlers and partners around the globe, and we're incubating several new projects in the areas of economic development, clean energy and access to technology. This past year, we:
Overall, our philanthropic mission at Google includes our Google.org projects and a range of other initiatives — from grants, scholarships and other charitable giving programs to in-kind product support for non-profits. Our founders have set a goal of devoting approximately 1% of Google's equity and yearly profits to philanthropy. In 2009, we devoted around $100 million plus in-kind giving to a broad range of philanthropic efforts. Here are some highlights:
In addition, our Google for Non-Profits site provides information and links to free tools to help charitable groups promote their cause, raise money, collaborate with others and operate more efficiently. Google Grants, for example, offers in-kind AdWords advertising to non-profit organizations. Since the program began, we've donated over $625 million worth of AdWords advertising to all kinds of charitable organizations. To keep up with our activities, check out the Google.org blog.  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| Statistics for a changing world: Google Public Data Explorer in Labs Last year, we released a public data search feature that enables people to quickly find useful statistics in search. More recently, we expanded this service to include information from the World Bank, such as population data for every region in the world. More and more public agencies, non-profits and other organizations are looking for ways to open up their data and expand global access to this kind of information. We want to help keep that momentum going, so today we're sharing a snapshot of some of the most popular public data search topics on Google. We're also launching the Google Public Data Explorer, an experimental visualization tool in Google Labs. Popular public data topics on Google We know people want to be able to find reliable data and statistics on a variety of subjects. But what kind of statistics are they looking for most? To help us better prioritize which data sets to include in our public data search feature, we've analyzed anonymous search logs to find patterns in the kinds of searches people are doing, similar to the patterns you can find on Google Trends and Insights for Search. Some public data providers have asked us to share what we've learned, so we decided to put together an approximate list of the 80 most popular data and statistics search topics. You can read the complete list at this link (PDF), but here's the top 20 to get you started:
You'll notice some interesting entries in the list. For example, we were surprised by how many people search for data about popular first and last names. Perhaps people are trying to decide what to name a new baby boy or girl? As it turns out, people are interested in a wide range of statistical information. To build the list, we looked at the aggregation of billions of queries people typed into Google search, using data from multiple sources, including Insights for Search, Google Trends and internal data tools — similar to what we do for our annual Zeitgeist. We combined search terms into groups, filtering out spam and repeats, to prepare a list reflecting the most popular public data topics. As a statistician, it's important for me to note that the data only covers one week's worth of searches in the U.S., so there could be seasonal and other confounding factors (perhaps there was an election that week). In addition, preparing a study like this requires a fair amount of manual grouping of similar queries into topics, which is fairly subjective and prone to human error. While imperfect, we still think the list is helpful to consider. The Public Data Explorer As you can see, people are interested in a wide variety of data and statistics, but this information is only useful if it's easy to access, understand and communicate. That's why today we're also releasing the Google Public Data Explorer in Labs, a new experimental product designed to help people comprehend data and statistics through rich visualizations. With the Data Explorer, you can mash up data using line graphs, bar graphs, maps and bubble charts. The visualizations are dynamic, so you can watch them move over time, change topics, highlight different entries and change the scale. Once you have a chart ready, you can easily share it with friends or even embed it on your own website or blog. We've embedded the following chart using the new feature as an example: This chart compares life expectancy and the number of births per woman over the last 47 years for most economies of the world. The bubble sizes show population, and colors represent different geographic regions. Press the play button to see the dramatic changes over time. Click "explore data" to dig deeper. Animated charts can bring data to life. Click the play button in the chart to watch life expectancy increase while fertility rates fall around the world. The bubble colors make it quick and easy to see clusters of countries along these variables (e.g., in 1960 the European and Central Asian countries were in the lower right and Sub-Saharan Africa in the upper left). The bubble sizes help you follow the most populous countries, such as India and China. These charts are based on the Trendalyzer technology we acquired from the Gapminder Foundation, which we've previously made available in the Motion Chart in Google Spreadsheets and the Visualization API. With a handful of data providers, there are already billions of possible charts to explore. We currently provide data from the same three providers currently available in our search feature: the World Bank, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, we've added five new data providers: the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), the California Department of Education, Eurostat, the U.S. Center for Disease Control, and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. We're excited that all around the world new data providers are deciding to make their information freely available on the Internet, enabling innovators to create interesting applications, mash up the data in new ways and discover profound meaning behind the numbers. We hope our list and new tool help demonstrate both the public demand for more data and the potential for new applications to enlighten it. We want to hear from you, so please share your feedback in our discussion forum. If you're a data provider interested in becoming a part of the Public Data Explorer, contact us.  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| This week in search 3/7/10 This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed. This week's enhancements include: Stars in search Every day, we work to improve the four key components of search: comprehensiveness, latency, user experience and relevance. Of these, relevance is dramatically enhanced by more personalized results. This week, we announced a new feature that makes it much easier to mark and rediscover your favorite content. Stars in search are just like the stars you see in Google Toolbar or in Maps — they act like bookmarks. When you star a search result, and it happens to appear again in future results, you'll see that you already found that particular result. Starred items will appear at the top of your results. Stars in search has been rolling out this week, and will be available globally for all users who are signed in to their Google account. Auto-spell for images This week, we unveiled automatic spell correction for images. In cases where we're highly confident you had intended to type something else, we'll replace results from the typo query with those from the spell-corrected version — just like when you misspell a query in Google search. Ultimately, this change will reduce the time it takes to get you the result you're looking for (and that's a good thing). Example searches: [butterflys], [roman architecture] and [apollo ohno] Sidewiki page owner entry In September, we launched Sidewiki, which lets you contribute helpful information to any webpage using a sidebar in Google Toolbar or a Chrome extension. Afterward, webmasters asked, "How can I quickly put Sidewiki on all pages of my site?" Now webmasters can create a special entry, called a page owner entry, that appears above all entries written by users. Webmaster tool improvements ultimately create a better web experience for us all, so we're pleased about this. Let us know what you think about our webmaster enhancements.  Stay tuned for next week's news on more search launches.  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| Over 4,000 developers at Google I/O 2010 As of today, this year's Google I/O conference has sold out and registration is closed. That means more than 4,000 developers will be joining us on May 19-20 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Like years past, I/O will feature over 90 in-depth sessions and the opportunity to meet and learn from other developers, including those from the more than 160 companies that will demo in the Developer Sandbox. For those unable to attend, video recordings of technical sessions will be available on YouTube following the conference. From now until May, we'll continue to list new speakers, new sessions, and new Sandbox participants on the Google I/O website. To keep up with the latest event info and details, follow us on Twitter.  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| Stars make search more personal We've long believed that personalization makes search more relevant and fun. For nearly five years, we've been tailoring results with personalized search. Today we're announcing a new feature in search that makes it easier for you to mark and rediscover your favorite web content — stars. With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant. That means if you star the official websites for your favorite football teams, you might see those results right at the top of your next search for [nfl]. Here's what the new "Starred results" feature looks like:  The great thing about stars is that you don't have to keep track of them. You don't even have to remember whether or not you starred something. Simply perform a search and you'll rediscover your starred items right when you need them. Stars sync with your Google Bookmarks and the Google Toolbar, so you can always see your list of starred items in one place and easily organize them. Even beyond the results page, while browsing the web you can quickly click the star icon in Toolbar to create a bookmark, and those pages will start showing up in the new stars feature. Stars in search replace SearchWiki. In our testing, we learned that people really liked the idea of marking a website for future reference, but they didn't like changing the order of Google's organic search results. With stars, we've created a lightweight and flexible way for people to mark and rediscover web content. For people who like annotations, we have Sidewiki, a more powerful way for people to contribute and discover helpful information next to pages across the Internet. All your existing SearchWiki edits will be preserved with your Google Account. You can learn more on our help center. Stars in search are rolling out in the next couple days and will be available globally for all signed-in users.  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| Searching for gold during the Games During the past two weeks, athletes from around the world competed at the Games in Vancouver. While these thousands strove for gold, millions around the world searched for 2010 Winter Olympics, 밴쿠버 동계올림픽 (Korean for "Vancouver Winter Olympics"), and Juegos Olimpicos de Invierno 2010 (Spanish for "2010 Olympic Winter Games") using Google search. Now that the medals have been handed out, we thought we'd take a moment to share how some people from around the world searched for information about the Games. Norway Norway won 23 medals, including nine gold, and became the first region to win 300 medals at winter events and to win 100 golds. The timeline shows approximate Olympics-related queries from Norway. Although interest was slow to start, it built and repeatedly peaked as Norwegians won in cross-country skiing events: individual (February 17), team (February 22), and men's 50km (February 28); and biathlon events: individual (February 18) and men's team (February 26).  (Click on any image to enlarge) Japan Japanese athletes won silver and bronze medals in speed skating and figure skating — correspondingly, interest peaked on the days when those competitions took place. And although they ended the Games ranked eighth in the world, チーム青森 ("Team Aomori") generated a lot of queries for カーリング ("curling"), カーリング チーム青森 ("Curling Team Aomori"), and team member 本橋麻里 (Mari Motohashi). Queries also peaked when snowboarder Kazuhiro Kokubo, who had previously caused controversy by wearing sloppy attire, competed in the men's halfpipe event. The timeline also clearly shows the effect of television, with each day's first peak representing the actual time of the event and the second, larger peak occurring in the evening.  Korea Korean athletes won medals in speed skating, short-track speed skating — and one gold medal in Ladies' Figure Skating by Kim Yu-Na. Queries such as 김연아 세계신기록 ("Yu world record"), 김연아 007 ("Yu 007"), and just plain 김연아 ("Kim Yu-Na") increased an order of magnitude as Kim won the Ladies' Short Program on February 23 and ended the Ladies' Free Skating on February 25 with a new world record score of 228.56.  United States Americans were interested in both the opening ceremonies and the unfortunate death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili. The men's free skating program on February 18, when Evan Lysacek won gold, drew many more searchers than the women's skating program on February 25, in which there was no American medalist. Interest in the unexpectedly good performance of the USA men's hockey team versus Canada (February 21) and against Switzerland (February 24) was exceeded by the exciting Canada v. USA final (February 28), which ended with a Canadian win in overtime. (Incidentally, the success of the men's hockey team also led searchers to look for information about a historic USA win. Searches for Miracle on Ice peaked the day after the USA team beat the Canadian team in the preliminary rounds.) Much of the television coverage in the U.S. was tape-delayed; queries arrived during the events but typically peaked during the evening TV broadcasts.  Canada Canada was not only the host — it also won the most gold medals of any region during any such games. Like the U.S., interest began with the opening ceremonies, and was dominated by men's hockey queries, causing a huge spike during the gold-medal game on February 28 as well as smaller spikes for games against USA (February 21) and Russia (February 24). The final women's hockey game against the U.S. on February 25 also caused a small bump in searches.  Canada took home the most gold medals, while the U.S. won the most medals overall. But where did Games-related searches dominate? To find out, we looked at the regions which had the highest percentage of Games-related searches out of all queries. Perhaps not surprisingly, Canadians were more than twice as likely to search for "Vancouver 2010", "medal count," or their favorite athletes as their southern neighbors, which were the second most likely to make Games-related queries. And although the Netherlands was not a leader in the medals count, its citizens' Games-related query proportion was the third highest in the world. And finally, the Games wouldn't be the same without the stars — the athletes. The most searched-for individual gold medal-winning athletes were: 1. Shaun White (U.S. men's halfpipe) 2. 김연아 (Kim Yu-Na; Korea ladies' figure skating) 3. Lindsey Vonn (U.S. ladies' downhill Alpine skiing) 4. Sven Kramer (Netherlands men's 5000m speed skating) 5. Evan Lysacek (U.S. men's figure skating) We hope you had a great time watching — and searching for info about — the Games. We'll see you again in a few years!  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| Google welcomes Picnik (Cross-posted from the Google Photos Blog) More than ever before, people are sharing and storing their photos online. But until recently, you had to edit your photos using client software on your computer. Today, we're excited to announce that Google has acquired Picnik, one of the first sites to bring photo editing to the cloud. Using Picnik, you can crop, do touch-ups and add cool effects to your photos, all without leaving your web browser.  We're not announcing any significant changes to Picnik today, though we'll be working hard on integration and new features. As well, we'd like to continue supporting all existing Picnik partners so that users will continue to be able to add their photos from other photo sharing sites, make edits in the cloud and then save and share to all relevant networks. We're very impressed with the Picnik team and the product they've created, and we're excited to welcome them to Google. We're looking forward to collaborating closely with them to improve the online photo editing experience on the web. In the meantime, we encourage you to head to Picnik, import some of your photos from Picasa Web Albums, Flickr or Facebook and try your hand at photo editing in the cloud!  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| Announcing the winners of the Street View trike contest The polls have closed, the votes have been tallied and the people have spoken: it’s time to announce the winners of our Street View trike suggestions contest. Last October, we gave Street View fans the opportunity to vote for the special attractions around the United States that they most want to see featured on Google Maps. In the first round, we received more than 25,000 suggestions, which we narrowed down to the 24 finalists that were put up to a public vote. All in all, nearly a quarter million votes were cast.
We’re now working directly with each of the winning organizations to arrange a visit from our trike in the coming months, so don’t be surprised if you see this quirky contraption at your favorite destination sometime soon: Because so many of you – 238,000, to be exact – expressed a desire to have the trike visit your favorite place, also be working with many of the other finalists, so stay tuned for more exciting special collections from our trike. And if you happen to manage or work at another attraction that you think absolutely needs to be featured in Street View, please let us know!  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| Update from the Google Health Team As we exhibit at the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) trade show this year in Atlanta, we want to share with you some of our latest thinking. Google Health has been on the market for a little over two years, and in that time we have seen a growing understanding of the value of consumers being able to own, use, manage and share their medical data online with whomever they choose. While companies like ours work to build technologies like Google Health to make this a reality, we've also seen growing support from the U.S. Government. President Obama has included incentives for doctors to adopt electronic health records (EHRs) in the the American Recovery and Re-Investment Act of 2009 (AARA), and in recent months there have also been a series of Health IT provisions around "Meaningful Use" and EHR Certification all of which should help empower consumers with access to their own information. (Read our recent op-ed for more info about this topic.) At Google, we understand that changes in the health care industry take time and persistence, including health IT. We have been steadily analyzing feedback from our user surveys and field studies to help make Google Health more useful and relevant to a broad set of consumers on a daily basis. People have been telling us they want more tools to personalize, customize and track their own medical information. These are directions we're certainly exploring, and if you stop by our booth this week at HIMSS you can see a demo of what we're working on. While we work to refine the Google Health product, we also continue to pursue integration agreements with providers to make it even easier for people to access their own medical information. We've learned over these past two years that getting a current and past medication history assembled and ready in case of emergencies is one of the strongest value propositions for using an online Personal Health Record (PHR). So today at HIMSS, we're announcing an integration with Surescripts, the leading electronic prescribing network in the United States, to help accelerate the availability of prescription drug history to our users. The Surescripts network connects doctors who prescribe medication to all of the nation’s major pharmacy chains, leading health insurance plans and pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs), as well as more than 10,000 independent pharmacies nationwide. Surescripts provides access to prescription benefit and history information on behalf of health insurance plans representing 65 percent of patients in the U.S. Recognizing that hospital and ambulatory data is critical to our consumers, we're also announcing a future integration with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) that will give patients the ability to add health information to an EHR maintained by doctors using their own Google Health PHR. UPMC is working on this integration with Google Health, Carnegie Mellon University and their technology partner dbMotion. Finally, we're announcing the launch of three more integration partners: Citizen Memorial Healthcare (CMH), a rural healthcare network providing care to residents in southwest Missouri, Iatric Systems, an integration consultant, which can facilitate Google Health integrations for hospitals and healthcare systems, and the Withings WiFi Body Scale, which allows Google Health users to seamlessly update their weight and other data to their online profiles. We hope to see you this week at HIMSS. Come by our booth, see our demo and say hello.  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| This week in search 2/28/10 This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed. Refine your searches by location Location can tremendously aid the way you search, so we were pleased to add the ability to refine your searches by location to the Search Options panel. Say you're big on the outdoors and want to find bike rental information, bicycling blogs or the closest sporting goods store. There's a good chance you're looking for information that's relevant to your region, city or even a city you're visiting on vacation. That's where this tool can help. One of the really useful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don't have to worry about adding a city name (e.g., "Berkeley") to your query and missing webpages that are in a similar region (e.g., "East Bay", "Oakland") but might not specifically mention the city in your search. Example search: [bike stores] - Click on "Show options" to adjust the location. You can narrow the location down to near you, the city you're in, the region or state. You can also select "Custom Location" and enter it directly. Fetch as Googlebot Mobile added to Webmaster Tools Labs Last October, we launched Webmaster Tools Labs, and it has been a huge success. Malware Details have helped thousands of users identify pages on their site that may be infected with malicious code, and Fetch as Googlebot has given users more insight into our crawler. Today, we're happy to introduce an additional Labs feature to our line-up: the ability to fetch pages as Googlebot-Mobile. This was a common request from users with mobile-specific sites, and we thought it was a great idea. We have two mobile options: cHTML (primarily used for Japanese sites) and XHTML/WML. We're excited to bring you this feature based on your feedback, and we look forward to launching more of them in future. Let us know what you think!  Facebook in real-time search Starting this week we added Facebook content to real-time search in the U.S. Real-time search, which we launched in December, helps you tap into the most relevant, freshest search results on the web, many of which are just seconds old. With this latest addition, you can access the news, photos and blog posts that Facebook fan pages publish to the world. You can find the Facebook Pages updates in our real-time mode by clicking on "Show Options" and then "Latest" or "Updates." Example search: [facebook] Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more next week!  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| Refine your searches by location Location has become an important part of the way we search. If you're a foodie looking for restaurant details, food blogs or the closest farmer's market, location can be vital to helping you find the right information. Starting today, we've added the ability to refine your searches with the "Nearby" tool in the Search Options panel. One of the really helpful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don't have to worry about adding "Minneapolis" to your query and missing webpages that only say "St. Paul" or "Twin Cities." Check it out by doing a search, clicking on "show options" and selecting "Nearby."  You can choose to see results nearby either your default location or a custom location, and you can narrow down to results at the city, region or state level. Try these examples: [things to do on st. patrick's day] - In the Minneapolis region [food blogs] - Near you [farmers market] - Near the city of Ithaca [dmv] - In the same state as Tucson The new "Nearby" search option is available now on the google.com domain in English.  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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| A meeting of the minds: Google's 2010 EMEA Faculty Summit As the world's premier athletes assembled in Vancouver for the Winter Games, Googlers in the equally snowy Zurich, Switzerland were preparing for a prestigious event of a different sort. On February 8, 100 top academics from 62 leading universities throughout EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) descended upon our Zurich engineering headquarters for our third annual Faculty Summit — three days of in-depth technical presentations, discussions and networking sessions, all targeted at strengthening partnerships with EMEA's foremost computer science thinkers. Like their athletic counterparts in Vancouver, Faculty Summit attendees face big challenges. EMEA is a huge and very diverse region where companies and universities alike have huge mountains to climb. By sharing information about our projects, plans and initiatives, we hope to foster mutually beneficial relationships with our academic colleagues and their universities — working together to solve the big problems and drive technology forward.  We designed the Summit to allow maximum potential for debate, networking and reflection. Attendees participated in day-long "stream" discussions on themes ranging from privacy and security — with the participation of leading researchers such as Ross Anderson (University of Cambridge) — to natural language technologies, featuring NLP expert Fred Jelinek (Johns Hopkins University). Academics selected from a range of opt-in "teach the teacher"-style workshops on Google tech (including mobile platforms, MapReduce and web technologies). Additional events included a Google Wave demo geared towards educational use and special sessions for guests from Africa and the Middle East, showcasing Google's ongoing work in these regions. This year, we added extra time for 1-1 break-out sessions, in which academics and Google engineers met, chatted and developed ideas in an intimate, face-to-face setting. The Summit also gave us a chance to see long-term relationships maturing and generating concrete outcomes inside and outside academic settings. Notable guests included keynote speaker Professor Andy Hopper, Head of the Cambridge Computer Lab, whose research initiative Computing for the Future of the Planet (CFTFP) received a Google Focused Research Award earlier this month. Andy's project promises major results in the areas of privacy and green computing research. We were also happy to welcome back former Google Visiting Faculty member Professor Hannah Bast (University of Freiburg). Hannah recently completed a year-long sabbatical with our Zurich development team for Transit in Google Maps, contributing major improvements to an application that started out as a 20 percent project and is now available in over 400 cities around the world. Privacy and security expert Dr. Frank Stajano (University of Cambridge) — our newest Visiting Faculty member — and Sara Adams, Anita Borg Scholar, former Google intern and current software engineer, joined us from the Munich office where they're working on privacy-related projects. We also had several Faculty Research Award winners in attendance, including Dr. Simon Harper (University of Manchester), Dr. Miles Osborne (University of Edinburgh), Lawrence Muchemi (University of Nairobi) and former Visiting Faculty member Dr. Hinrich Schuetze (University of Stuttgart). The Faculty Research Award supports academics working within universities on areas of mutual interest; for instance, Lawrence's Award-funded project creates a new mobile application development course for Kenyan students, while Hinrich and his Stuttgart team are improving search engine results by investigating the structure of queries. Hinrich, Lawrence and our other awardees offer examples of how partnerships can lead to amazing results, on local to global scales. We hope their stories inspired both academic and Googler attendees to take advantage of existing programs and help build new opportunities for all tech users. Our engineering teams in EMEA and our academic partners have lots of work to do in 2010. This year's Faculty Summit offered an opportunity to explore new solutions, kick-start collaboration and prove, yet again, that our combined efforts always yield results far greater than the sum of their parts! For more information about how Google supports university programs and partnerships, check out our Google Research site and stay tuned for news of the North America Faculty Summit — planned for late July.  
 Reference: The Official Google Blog - 1900/1/
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