If you’ve tuned into any kind of news in the past few weeks, you know Super Bowl 44 is coming this Sunday, when the Indianapolis Colts play the New Orleans Saints. As excitement builds before kickoff, we’ve seen search spikes by people looking for information on key Colts Peyton Manning and Dwight Freeney, Super Bowl [...]

As aid workers in Haiti settle into the anything-but-routine work of helping care for a devastated country, people continue to come to Yahoo! Search to find out how to help victims of the earthquake. Just this week, Haiti-related search spikes turned to “tents for Haiti,” which had 1,000 percent more searches than the previous week. [...]

You use Yahoo! Search to look for information on the Web, Yahoo! mail to keep up with friends, and Flickr to show off your pics. Show your love for your favorite tools by casting your vote for the Yahoo! products nominated for this year’s About.com Reader’s Choice Awards. Yahoo! has been received 15 nominations in 13 [...]

Yahoo! Search is now live on Maktoob, the leading online Arabic-language community. This first launch from the Yahoo!-Maktoob partnership combines Yahoo!’s popular product and services with Maktoob’s compelling local content, bringing users the best of both sites. We announced the acquisition of Maktoob in August, 2009, with plans to launch Arabic versions of Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, [...]

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. Thank you for the feedback, letting us know the community still finds these Weather Reports [...]

We’d like to welcome Shashi Seth as Senior Vice President of the Yahoo! Search Products team.  He’ll be joining us next week, leading all things Search.  As we’ve mentioned before, we’re doing lots of things to continue making Yahoo! Search better and incorporate it into all of our wonderful Yahoo! products, and we’re sure Shashi [...]

We just made it easier to search for local businesses. Starting today, you can see the Yahoo! local business shortcut when you search for a business, even if you don’t include your location in your query. You can also refine results by neighborhood or nearby city right on the search results page. We’ve seen in our [...]

When we launched a Yahoo! News shortcut with Twitter content integration earlier this month, we said more was coming. Starting today, you will see recent tweets directly integrated on the Web search result page when you search for buzzy topics. How is this different from what we launched earlier? You can still see relevant tweets [...]

Building on the great feedback we received after the launch of the Yahoo! Video Search music refiners last month, we are launching even more entertainment refiners today. These two new refiners will help you explore your favorite TV shows and movies. You can see that the left rail on our video search results page is becoming [...]

Earlier this year Yahoo! welcomed Yoelle Maarek as our new senior director of Yahoo! Research. Prior to joining Yahoo!, Yoelle was the Director of Google Haifa Engineering Center, which she opened in July 2006. For more than 20 years, Yoelle has been helping dig into search problems. She talks with the Yahoo! Search Blog about [...]

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

While 106 American football players sought yardage in the 2010 Super Bowl, millions of people sought information related to the big game from Google search. We looked at some game-day search trends and data* to see what football fans were searching for this year.

Most searched-for team
To the victor of this year's big game went the search spoils: The New Orleans Saints captured both the NFL championship and the lion's share of Super Bowl team searches in 2010.

Most searched-for player
For leading the New Orleans Saints to their 31–17 win over the Indianapolis Colts — with 288 yards, two touchdowns and 32 of 39 passes completed — quarterback Drew Brees won the Most Valuable Player award. But Peyton Manning earned the status of the Super Bowl's most searched-for player, beating out some tough competition and followed by Drew Brees, Reggie Bush, Hank Baskett and Scott Fujita.

Many fans of Reggie Bush also expressed interest in his girlfriend Kim Kardashian; searches for her name, both on its own and linked with Reggie Bush's, spiked significantly during the game. Additionally, search volume for football great Walter Payton — after whom the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award was named — was as high as that for some of the game's top five most searched-for players.

Most searched-for coach
Behind every team is a great coach, and behind every coach is an engaged online community. This year, Sean Payton, who has coached the New Orleans Saints since 2006, was the most searched-for team leader.

Most searched-for party planning terms
Die-hard football fans and casual shindig hosts alike look forward to game day for its party planning possibilities. This year, people went online to find all the information they needed to watch the game and to make sure they were well-fed during the same. Some top rising recipe searches on game day included buffalo chicken dip, guacamole, 7-layer dip and pigs in a blanket.

People were also looking for information on how and when to watch the game; searches related to the start time of the game and watch Super Bowl 2010 online were both notably high.

Most searched-for advertisers
In addition to spotlighting some of the finest football teams in the U.S., the Super Bowl is a showcase for some of the funniest, coolest and most interesting creative advertisements each year. This year, the prospect of "free" dominated the searched-for ads. The offer of free pants from Dockers garnered a spike of queries which continued throughout the game. Twice, Denny's advertised free grand slam breakfasts, leading to two bumps in searches for Denny's free breakfast, Denny's locations and Denny's.

Searchers also enjoyed ads featuring celebrities — including Betty White, who played football and ate Snickers bars, and Megan Fox, who used a Motorola smartphone.

We told the story of an American who finds love in Paris — using search queries. Google Super Bowl commercial led searchers to the love story of a man who dutifully searched for information on how to impress a French girl, long distance relationship advice and how to assemble a crib. (Full disclosure: We work for this advertiser.)

Stay tuned
Which advertiser won the position of Favorite 2010 Super Bowl Ad, according to fans? Check out YouTube's Ad Blitz results on February 17 to see which Super Bowl ad received the greatest number of positive votes from the YouTube community. Until then, you can use Google Trends to see more Super Bowl-related queries.

*We used internal tools to quickly gather this data. All of the search queries we looked at were anonymous — no personal information was used.

Posted by Jeffrey Oldham, Software Engineer

If you watched the Super Bowl this evening you'll have seen a video from Google called "Parisian Love". In fact you might have watched it before, because it's been on YouTube for over three months. We didn't set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search. Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact. But we liked this video so much, and it's had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience.

If you like it too, we hope you'll watch the others. Enjoy.

Posted by Eric Schmidt, CEO

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.

In addition to language improvements this week, we released several other new features:

Haitian Creole translation
We've now added Haitian Creole (kreyòl ayisyen) translation to Google Translate, so that you can translate between Creole and 51 other languages, and also hear spoken versions of Creole translations. While this translation system is still evolving (when translating to/from Creole, English performs better than other languages), we hope it will help relief volunteers communicate better with Haitian earthquake victims, and serve as a useful resource for people in Haiti and elsewhere. To learn more about ways you can help with Haiti relief efforts, please visit our Crisis Response page.

Example translations: [Kijan ou ye ?] and [How can I help you?]

Improvement for Arabic searches
Sometimes when people conduct a search, they forget to separate words with spaces or mistakenly repeat a letter within a word. These types of errors are much more common in languages like Arabic, where some letters are considered word breaks. In other words, if the last letter of one word is a word break, the following word may not be separated with a space. To address issues like this, we recently developed a search ranking improvement that targets certain Arabic queries. Our algorithm employs rules of Arabic spelling and grammar and signals from historical search data to indicate when to leave out spaces between words or when to remove unnecessarily repeated letters. Now, when you type a query leaving out spaces or repeating a letter, you'll see better results based not only on what you typed, but also on what our algorithm understands is the "correct" query.

Example search: [التربيةوالتعلييم] Incorrectly typed, this Arabic query may not produce a relevant search result. With our algorithm change, the query returns better results for the correct meaning: "Ministry of Education."

Doodle 4 Google
This week marks our third annual Doodle 4 Google contest in the U.S. The competition gives K-12 kids the opportunity to design their own Google logo and the winner appears on Google.com for a day so that hundreds of millions of searchers can enjoy it as well. In addition to the bragging rights, there are a number of great prizes including a college scholarship and computers for the winner's school. If you or your child are interested in getting involved, check out our announcement or visit the Doodle 4 Google contest page for entry rules.

Stars in Google News
A couple of months back, we launched the Custom Sections Directory feature in Google News, enabling you to setup and share sections on topics of interest. Now there's an even easier way to keep up to date with particular news stories. Mark a story cluster by clicking on the star next to it — just like you do with messages in Gmail and items in Google Reader. Once you've starred a story in Google News, when there are significant updates, we'll alert you by putting the headline in boldface. You can also follow your most recent starred stories in the Starred section of Google News. Learn more about this, and get starring!

Thanks for following news of our search enhancements, and stay tuned for more.

Posted by Ben Gomes, Distinguished Engineer

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label "Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

Developments over the last couple weeks really showcase how Google's other innovation focus areas — including Search, Mobile and Chrome — help make Google Apps even more useful.

Updates to Google Search in Gmail Labs
On Tuesday we made some helpful changes to the Google Search feature in Gmail Labs. The search gadget now runs some of Google's most popular search features, like dictionary definitions, spelling suggestions, calculations, local results, weather info and news. You don't even need to type your search query anymore; just highlight text in the compose area and click the multicolored "g" button to run a search on those terms.


Gmail Chrome extensions
Several convenient extensions for Gmail are now available to Chrome users. The "Google Mail" extension adds a small button next to Chrome's address bar that displays your unread mail count. "Send from Gmail" makes Gmail your default mail program, and opens a Gmail compose window when you click an email link on a web page. The button for this extension helps you quickly share the web page you're viewing over email.


Easier file location in Google Docs
Last week we introduced a pair of improvements to make finding files in Google Docs easier. First, we launched an option to show file thumbnails in your Documents List, which is great for quickly spotting what you're looking for. Just click the view option buttons in the toolbar to toggle between thumbnails and the standard text layout.

Each year, Vogue and the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) sponsor a Fashion Fund to support emerging designers. In 2009, each participating designer was asked to create a one-of-a-kind item inspired by Google in some way — whether through our logo's colors, technology or our commitment to equal access to information. Last October, we transformed 10 of the finalists’ designs into iGoogle Artists themes. While we loved seeing fashion meet iGoogle, we wanted to see these pieces in person — and wear them! Today, we’re debuting three of our favorite designs from this challenge. These three featured designers have customized their original designs for a broader audience, and we’re making them available to the public to purchase for a limited time. Check out this page to learn more about the items, the designers and how they were inspired by Google.


Posted by Michaela Prescott, Group Product Marketing Manager

Today, we're excited to announce our third annual Doodle 4 Google contest in the U.S. Google doodles, created by our talented team of doodlers, have helped us celebrate events and anniversaries from Van Gogh's birthday to Valentine's Day. And since 2008, Doodle 4 Google has given K-12 kids the opportunity to create their own logo and have it displayed on the Google homepage for hundreds of millions of users to enjoy for a day.

In addition to the winner's art appearing on Google.com on May 27, 2010, they'll also receive a $15,000 college scholarship, a laptop computer and a $25,000 technology grant for their school.

This year's theme is "If I Could Do Anything, I Would..." and it's all about pushing the limits, dreaming big, and seeing what you can accomplish in life. When coming up with inspiration for this year's contest, we turned to some of our very own Googlers, including Ed Lu, a former astronaut.

Ed typifies this year's theme in action, and shares an inspiring anecdote:

On my first mission STS-84, one of my crewmates and I were having dinner aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis. After all our work for the day was done, we decided to eat "upside down" on the ceiling, gazing out at the Earth moving by below our feet. As we flew around the Earth, watching the continents go by, my crewmate remarked how amazingly large the Earth really is. But at that same time, it also felt small to us. There we were, flying at 18,000 miles per hour around the Earth in a machine built by humans, with a crew made up of astronauts from all over the world. Both of our observations were true at the same time. The world is indeed a big place with many challenges. But by using science, technology and the power of people working together, nearly anything is possible.

So dream big! If you could do anything, what would you do?

For even more inspiration, you can see last year's winner, Christin Engelberth, a sixth grader at Bernard Harris Middle School in San Antonio, Texas. She titled her doodle "A New Beginning" to express her wish that "out of the current crisis, discoveries will be found to help the Earth prosper once more."

We're happy to let you know that this year, we've also assembled a panel of well-known "Expert Jurors," including creative directors, cartoonists and famous animators ranging from Sesame Workshop to Pixar Animation Studios. Our Expert Jurors will help us narrow down the cream of the crop to 40 regional finalists, who will come to the Google office in New York City on May 26, 2010. For the second year, we'll also be partnering with the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, where the top 40 regional finalists will get to have their artwork displayed in a national exhibit. And for the first time this year, we'll give out eight Technology Booster awards to schools that submit maximum number of doodles per school by March 10th and have students in our 400 State Finalists.

Please visit the official competition website for a full listing of all contest rules and requirements. Only students from registered schools can enter, so be sure your school is registered by March 17, 2010. All doodles must be submitted by March 31, 2010.

We hope you're as excited about this year's contest as we are. Good luck!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience and Ed Lu, Program Manager, Advanced Projects

This post is the latest in an ongoing series about how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users. - Ed.

We've learned that when performing a search on Google, people sometimes forget to separate words with spaces. Moreover, people often mistakenly repeat a letter within a single word. For instance, when writing the query [amazingly beautiful poem], you might write it as [amazingly beautiifullpoem].

These types of errors are much more common in languages like Arabic, where most of the letters are cursive. That means that the shapes of the letters change, based on the position of the letter in the word (initial, middle, final or isolated). Moreover, some Arabic letters are considered word breaks, meaning that the following letter must be in an "initial" shape. In other words, if the last letter of one word is a word break, the following word may not be separated with a space.

For example, the queries [وزارةالتعليم] and [وزارة التعليم] have an identical meaning (Ministry of Education) and they're both written in a common form for Arabic documents. But they have different, albeit correct, formats — the first query is written as a single word, while the second is written as two. Google needs to understand that while they're written differently, they mean the same thing and should yield the exact same search results. In this example, both queries were written correctly, just in different formats. But sometimes people just make errors — like repeating the same letter twice. For example, you might write [راائعة الجماال], repeating the letter "ا" twice in both query words. In this case the correct spelling should be [رائعة الجمال]. It's important that Google search recognizes your query — despite spelling errors.

To address issues like this, we recently developed a search ranking improvement that targets certain Arabic queries. Our algorithm employs rules of Arabic spelling and grammar along with signals from historical search data to decide when to leave out spaces between words or when to remove unnecessarily repeated letters. Now, when you type a query leaving out spaces or repeating a letter, we'll return better results based not only on what you typed, but also on what our algorithm understands is the "correct" query. For example, here's what happens when you type [قصيدة راائعةالجماال] ([amazingly beautiful poem] in Arabic) with repeated letters and dropped spaces between words.


As you can see, the Google results contain the corrected query, the terms قصيدة رائعة الجمال, in bold.

For most people, this might seem like a small enhancement. But for us, it’s a big change. Our tests show we've improved search for 10% of Arabic language queries. Which, when you think about it, is a lot of people.

Posted by Moustafa Hammad and Mohamed Elhawary, Software Engineers, Search Quality Team

It is said that Google is like a university — and not just because everyone eats their lunch off trays in the cafeteria. Like a university, we devote significant energy to research across a wide array of subjects — from semantics to help improve search, to ways we can improve the efficiency of our data centers. Along with our internal efforts, we've long invested in building a strong, mutually beneficial relationship with universities and the research community. We give approximately 150 research grants a year to fund projects across a variety of subjects, we host visiting faculty members here at Google on sabbatical, and last year we started the Google Fellowship Program to fund graduate students doing innovative research in several fields.

Today, we're announcing the first-ever round of Google Focused Research Awards — funding research in areas of study that are of key interest to Google as well as the research community. These awards, totaling $5.7 million, cover four areas: machine learning, the use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring, energy efficiency in computing, and privacy. These are all areas in which Google is already deeply invested, and yet there is a long way to go. We're excited to see what these projects contribute to the body of research in these important areas.

These unrestricted grants are for two to three years, and the recipients will have the advantage of access to Google tools, technologies and expertise. We've given awards to 12 projects led by 31 professors at 10 universities:

Machine Learning: William Cohen, Christos Faloutsos, Garth Gibson and Tom Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon University

Use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring: Gaetano Borriello, University of Washington and Deborah Estrin, UCLA

Energy efficiency in computing:

• Ricardo Bianchini, Rutgers, Fred Chong, UC Santa Barbara, Thomas F. Wenisch, University of Michigan and Sudhanva Gurumurthi, University of Virginia
• Christos Kozyrakis, Mark Horowitz, Benjamin Lee, Nick McKeown and Mendel Rosenblum, Stanford
• David G. Andersen and Mor. Harchol-Balter, Carnegie Mellon University
• Tajana Simunic Rosing, Steven Swanson and Amin Vahdat, UCSD
• Thomas F. Wenisch, Trevor Mudge, David Blaauw and Dennis Sylvester, University of Michigan
• Margaret Martonosi, Jennifer Rexford, Michael Freedman and Mung Chiang, Princeton

Privacy:

• Ed Felten, Princeton
• Lorrie Cranor, Alessandro Acquisti and Norman Sadeh, Carnegie Mellon University
• Ryan Calo, Stanford CIS
• Andy Hopper, Cambridge University Computing Laboratory

We look forward to working with these researchers over the coming years. And, as we continue to identify key areas of research that are of mutual interest to both university researchers and Google, we will provide awards to support these collaborations. For more information about all of our research programs, check out our University Relations site.

Update at 1:13 PM: Added Allesandro Acquisti and Norman Sadeh to the list of PIs on the CMU privacy project.

In November, we officially launched our Free Holiday WiFi gift. 54 airports, one airline and many millions of connected WiFi users later, our two-month Free Holiday WiFi sponsorship ended on January 15. We're happy to have made this year's holiday travel season just a bit easier for the millions of people who logged on and connected at our participating airports and on Virgin America flights.

Though some airports will no longer have free WiFi, we're excited that Burbank, Seattle and most recently, Boston airports have all decided to offer free WiFi all year.

In the spirit of the season, passengers connecting to the networks donated over $250,000 to Engineers Without Borders, One Economy Corporation and Climate Savers Computing Initiative. With Google's matching donation, the three charities received over $500,000 in total.

Finally, Edward Doan of Austin, Texas won the grand prize of ten Virgin America tickets, a Motorola Droid from Verizon Wireless and a Canon SX200 digital camera. You can view a complete list of winners on the contest site.

Posted by Jeff Aguero and Missy Krasner, Product Marketing Managers

About 18 months ago, we published a graph showing that Unicode on the web had just exceeded all other encodings of text on the web. The growth since then has been even more dramatic.

Web pages can use a variety of different character encodings, like ASCII, Latin-1, or Windows 1252 or Unicode. Most encodings can only represent a few languages, but Unicode can represent thousands: from Arabic to Chinese to Zulu. We have long used Unicode as the internal format for all the text we search: any other encoding is first converted to Unicode for processing.


This graph is from Google internal data, based on our indexing of web pages, and thus may vary somewhat from what other search engines find. However, the trends are pretty clear, and the continued rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the processing for the many languages that we cover.

Searching for "nancials"?
Unicode is growing both in usage and in character coverage. We recently upgraded to the latest version of Unicode, version 5.2 (via ICU and CLDR). This adds over 6,600 new characters: some of mostly academic interest, such as Egyptian Hieroglyphs, but many others for living languages.

We're constantly improving our handling of existing characters. For example, the characters "fi" can either be represented as two characters ("f" and "i"), or a special display form "fi". A Google search for [financials] or [office] used to not see these as equivalent — to the software they would just look like *nancials and of*ce. There are thousands of characters like this, and they occur in surprisingly many pages on the web, especially generated PDF documents.

But no longer — after extensive testing, we just recently turned on support for these and thousands of other characters; your searches will now also find these documents. Further steps in our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

And we're angling for a party when Unicode hits 50%!

Posted by Mark Davis, Senior International Software Architect

Over time, we've dedicated time, people, and financial resources to organizations, events and schools to help advance this mission — and we're excited to share that we rounded out 2009 with a donation of $8 million to a variety of organizations who share our dedication to this cause. Our efforts were focused in four key areas:

Starting in high school
STEM education at an elementary and high school level builds technical skills early and encourages interest in technology. To support the ongoing education of these subjects, we identified more than 600 high schools with significant populations of students from under-represented and economically disadvantaged backgrounds and are providing laptops to their computer science and math departments. We are also offering laptops to some of the most promising students in these schools. In a time when many of these schools are experiencing decreased funding, we wanted to support their continued commitment to learning and teaching these subjects, and recognize the exceptional work done by teachers in these communities. If you're interested in learning more about our efforts in this field, check out Google Code University (CS tutorials for students and teachers) as well as our tools, tips and lesson plans for K-12 educators.

Growing promising talent
We've worked with over 200 outstanding students as part of our FUSE, CSSI, BOLD and BOLD Practicum summer programs. To help the alumni of our 2009 summer programs pursue their studies, we awarded former program participants with school-based scholarships. We hope that this support for tuition will lessen the financial burden on these students and their families, reduce work-study commitments and free them up to explore other educational opportunities, like studying abroad.

Advancing technical knowledge through universities
We have close relationships with universities around the world — not only do we employ their alumni, but they are also a source of groundbreaking research and innovation. We awarded grants ranging in size from $20k to $100k to 50 U.S.-based universities with whom we already have relationships and directed these funds toward departments that are closely aligned with promoting under-represented minorities in technology. We hope to expand this effort both to more U.S.-based universities and to universities around the world in the future.

Partnerships with the organizations that make it happen
Our commitment to promote women and under-represented minorities in technology is shared by dozens of local and national organizations around the country. We awarded grants to 22 partner organizations, almost all of which we have worked with in the past. These organizations are on the front lines, making sure that under-represented groups have the support, resources and contacts they need. You'll find a list of these organizations with a quick overview of the work they focus on here.

This was a terrific way to close out 2009 and we look forward to attracting and encouraging more students from traditionally under-represented backgrounds to pursue studies and careers in science, technology, engineering and math. In the meantime, you can find news especially for students on the Students Blog and by following us on @googlestudents.

Today we're excited to introduce a new stable release of Google Chrome for Windows, which includes two of the browser's most frequently requested features: extensions and bookmark sync.

Extensions let you add new features and functions to your browser. Some provide one-click access to some of your favorite web applications like eBay and digg, or news and information sources such as NPR and Time.com. Others are useful tweaks for performing common online tasks such as browsing photos, getting directions or shopping.

We previously launched extensions on the beta channel, and many new extensions have since been contributed by developers from all over the world. Now you can browse over 1,500 in our extensions gallery and install them on the stable version of Google Chrome.


Bookmark sync is a handy feature for those of you who use several computers — say, a laptop at work and a desktop at home. You can enable bookmark sync to synchronize your bookmarks on all of your computers so that when you create a bookmark on one computer, it's automatically added across all your computers. This means that you won't need to manually recreate the bookmark each time you switch computers.

You can read more about today's stable release — including performance improvements — on the Google Chrome Blog. Or if you want a look under the hood at what this update means for web developers (including new HTML and Javascript APIs), check out the Chromium blog.

To those using Google Chrome on Linux, extensions are enabled on the beta channel. And for those using Google Chrome for Mac, hang tight — we're working on bringing extensions, bookmark sync and more to the beta soon. Those currently using the stable version for Windows will be automatically updated within the next week (or you can check for updates manually).

If you're on a PC and haven't tried Google Chrome yet, you can download Google Chrome and give all these new features a whirl.

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

The Google that you used today is actually better than the Google that you used yesterday. On a daily basis, we make a number of algorithmic enhancements and release other search features that ultimately make finding what you're looking for quick, easy and enjoyable. Here are a few of the exciting feature releases this week:

Hours and menu information in universal search
Want to know when your favorite museum is open? Interested in ordering in and need to quickly check the menu for that restaurant around the corner? This week we were excited to launch hours and menu information in local results for universal Google search. Now you can add the words "hours" or "menu" to your search to get back the information you want in a snap.

Example searches: [computer history museum mountain view hours], [sushi sakae burlingame menu]

Rich Snippets for events
What are Rich Snippets? They show brief annotations that webmasters make to summarize what's on the page so you can see it at a glance on your search results page. So far we've launched improved snippets for two formats: reviews and people. Today, we unveiled a new Rich Snippets format for events. The next time you're searching for events, you'll see how the new format lists them as search result snippets, along with dates, locations and links directly to pages about those specific events. And, as webmasters implement the new markup on their webpages, you'll begin to see these event results more frequently.

Example search: [concerts in san jose]

Answer highlighting
Earlier today, we were excited to release the answer highlighting feature, which helps you get to information more quickly by delivering the likely answer to your question in boldface type right in search results. If the pages returned for these searches contain a simple answer to a factual-based search, the snippet will more often include the relevant text in boldface for easy reference. Read more about answer highlighting here.

Example searches: [who is the author of 1984], [p.s. i love you release date], [terminator salvation director]

We hope that you enjoy the features we launched this week — and that they make your search experience even better than yesterday.

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search

During the past couple months, the Knol team has been steadily adding improved tools to help you create better knols. Most notably, we've greatly expanded the number of embeddable objects to help you make your knols more graphical and interactive. We've been excited by the many uses we're seeing, and today we have one more to add to the list: PicApp.

We think it's important for a publishing platform like knol to provide people with the best possible tools for expression, so we've quietly added a large number of new embeddable objects for maps, docs, spreadsheets, forms, slideshows, presentations, videos, gadgets and more. Embeddable objects help you make better knols. For example, our equation object helps you add richly formatted mathematical expressions right in your knols. We really liked the cleanly embedded equations in this knol from the Public Library of Science. Similarly, our calendar object enables you to easily share details about upcoming dates, like swing dance lessons in Oregon.

Even with all these embeddable objects, there's still more to do. For example, one frequent complaint is that it is still difficult today to find appropriately licensed, high-quality imagery to include in your articles. To help solve this problem, we've worked with PicApp to add 10 million high quality stock images via our improved picture picker. The new picker enables you to search for creative and editorial images from PicApp's comprehensive, high-quality stock imagery repositories such as Getty Images. The service and use of the images is free.

Below is a snapshot of a sample search using the PicApp search API.


The feature just launched last month, and several authors have already made use of this new capability to strengthen their writings. For example, this knol about Gary McKinnon uses images found via PicApp, along with embedded videos, and even a feedback form to get input from the audience.

We hope you enjoy the image picker and other new embeddable objects. As always, you can read our release notes for a full list of new features.

Posted by Cedric Dupont, Product Manager

It's sometimes easy to take the little things in life for granted: a haircut, a shower, shoes or even a phone number. Sometimes life doesn't turn out the way we planned, and those little luxuries become much harder to come by.

Project CARE is a program to provide free Google Voice phone numbers and voicemail accounts to homeless individuals. The Google Voice team has been offering this program in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than two years, and we're excited to bring Project CARE to a new city.

On Saturday, Google Voice will join dozens of other Washington, D.C. organizations at the Winterhaven Homeless Veterans Stand Down at the D.C. Veterans Affairs Medical Center to try and make life a little easier for hundreds of veterans in the Washington, D.C. area. We will be handing out Project CARE cards and helping attendees set up unique phone numbers and voicemail accounts, which they can use when applying for jobs or filling out medical forms, or share with family.

In today's connected world, many of us don't think twice about picking up the phone to place or receive a call. However, for a homeless individual, a phone number can be an important lifeline, connecting you with prospective employers, health care providers, family and friends. We hope these Project CARE phone numbers provide homeless veterans with a way to reconnect with those they've lost touch with over the years.

Posted by Vincent Paquet, Senior Product Manager, Google Voice

Last year at our second Searchology event, we announced Google Squared and Rich Snippets, two approaches to improve search by better understanding the web. Today, we're kicking off the new year with two improvements based on those technologies. First, we're applying the research behind Google Squared to add a new "answer-highlighting" feature to search, and second we're expanding Rich Snippets to include events.

Answer highlighting in search results

Most information on the web is unstructured. For example, blogs integrate paragraphs of text, videos and images in ways that don't follow simple rules. Product review sites each have their own formats, rating scales and categories. Unstructured data is difficult for a computer to interpret, which means that we humans still have to do a fair amount of work to synthesize and understand information on the web.

Google Squared is one of our early efforts to automatically identify and extract structured data from across the Internet. We've been making progress, and today the research behind Google Squared is, for the first time, making search better for everyone with a new feature called "answer highlighting."

Answer highlighting helps you get to information more quickly by seeking out and bolding the likely answer to your question right in search results. The feature is meant for searches with factual answers, such as [meet john doe director], [john lennon died], or [what was the political party of president ford]. If the pages returned for these queries contain a simple answer, the search snippet will more often include the relevant text and bold it for easy reference.

Consider the example, [empire state height]. The first search result used to look like this:

With today's improvements, the answer —1250 ft, or 381 m — is highlighted right in the search result:

This kind of quick answer only makes sense for certain kinds of searches. For example, the answer to [history of france] can't readily fit in a search snippet. However, for the kinds of information you can easily put in a table, we've been able to take what we've learned from Google Squared to make search better for a wide range of queries. Answer highlighting is rolling out during the next couple days on google.com in English.

Rich Snippets for events

Sometimes the easiest way to understand somebody is by having a conversation. The web is similar. As much as we're happy with the progress we're making with Google Squared, we also appreciate that a great way to understand web pages is to simply ask webmasters to teach us (and other search engines) about their content. To that end, we continue to make improvements to our search results with Rich Snippets, enabling webmasters to annotate pages with structured data in a standard format.

So far we've launched improved search result snippets for reviews and people. When your search results contain web pages with review information, you might see the number of user reviews on the page and the average rating in the search result. When your search contains a public profile page about a person from a social networking site, you may see the person's location and occupation, or a list of her friends.

Today, we're announcing support for a new Rich Snippets format for events. The new format improves search results by including links to specific event names, dates and locations. Here's an example of a new event result from livenation.com if you search for [irving plaza]:


The new result format provides a fast and convenient way to identify pages with events and click directly to the ones you find interesting. If you're into Hip Hop Karaoke, you can quickly find out when and where the next show is in Irving Plaza, and click for more info. We've been working with a few sites to ramp them up for our initial launch, but it will take time for other webmasters to start implementing the new markup. Check out our blog post on Webmaster Central for more details.

Posted by Kavi Goel and Noah Weiss, Product Managers

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label "Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

The Google Apps team has had another productive couple of weeks. We released a number of helpful new features, and were happy to welcome new customers to the future of computing.

Upload any file to Google Docs
Last Tuesday, we began rolling out the ability for you to upload any type of file to Google Docs, not just documents, spreadsheets, presentations and PDFs. This lets you access and share anything up to 250MB from the cloud. You get 1GB of storage for uploaded files for free, and you can purchase additional storage for file uploads. (Additional storage plans are coming soon for schools and businesses, too.)


Google Apps Premier Edition customers can also use the Google Documents List Data API to programatically add files to Google Docs, and purchase third-party applications so employees can sync files between their computers and Google Docs.

Default https access for Gmail
In the past, you had the option to always use https encryption in Gmail to help protect your data as it travels between your browser and our servers. After evaluating the trade-offs between security and latency, as of last week https encryption is now the default in Gmail.

If you trust your network's security and want to disable always-on https for performance reasons, you can change your preferences in Gmail settings. Employees and students whose admins have not already defaulted their entire organizations to https will also see this option. The Gmail sign-in page will still always use https to help keep your password safe.

Who's gone Google?
Sanmina-SCI is a leading Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) provider to many industries including the communications, medical, defense and aerospace, industrial and renewable energy sectors. Sanmina-SCI rigorously evaluated and smoothly deployed Google Apps to their multi-lingual, global workforce of 15,000 employees. Not only did Sanmina-SCI achieve significant cost savings over upgrading their outdated Microsoft Exchange environment, deploying Google Apps has resulted in better customer service, streamlined business processes and increased flexibility.

We also witnessed a flurry of schools going Google after winter break. A very warm welcome to North Carolina State University, the Byron School District, Griffith University, Seattle Central Community College and Macquarie University!

If your school or business is ready to go Google too, take a look at our tips and best practices for deploying Google Apps.

We hope these updates help you get even more from Google Apps. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

(Cross-posted with an update from the Google Lat Long Blog)

In the wake of the devastating Haiti earthquake, aid organizations have been hard at work on the ground and citizens around the world have pitched in to help in whatever way they can. On the Geo team, we've been looking for ways we can help relief efforts using our mapping tools. Last week, thanks to our partner GeoEye, we published updated satellite imagery of Haiti in Google Earth and Google Maps which illustrated the devastation and current conditions on the ground. This data was made available for public consumption and also to assist relief efforts including those by many UN organizations and the Center for Interdisciplinary Geospatial Information Technologies.

With the hope of furthering awareness and relief efforts, we arranged for a collection of the Port-au-Prince area at even higher resolution (approximately 15cm) to complement the existing imagery. Here are some examples of the kind of detail this new dataset can convey:

click to see full-size

These images were gathered on Sunday (January 17). You can currently view the imagery in Google Maps in Satellite mode. It will also be available via the Google Maps API and in Google Map Maker. As of this morning, this high-resolution imagery is now available as the base imagery in Google Earth (all previous imagery of Haiti will be included in the Historical Imagery feature) and has been published in the Haiti Earthquake KML layer. We're also making this imagery directly available to relief organizations.

We've also updated the Haiti Earthquake KML layer (download for Google Earth) with additional information, including more imagery from GeoEye, Digital Globe, and NOAA, as well as earthquake epicenters and other maps. Aid groups can also download Map Maker data as well.

Posted by Matt Manolides, Senior GIS Strategist

This post is the latest in an ongoing series about how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users. - Ed.

An irony of computer science is that tasks humans struggle with can be performed easily by computer programs, but tasks humans can perform effortlessly remain difficult for computers. We can write a computer program to beat the very best human chess players, but we can't write a program to identify objects in a photo or understand a sentence with anywhere near the precision of even a child.

Enabling computers to understand language remains one of the hardest problems in artificial intelligence. The goal of a search engine is to return the best results for your search, and understanding language is crucial to returning the best results. A key part of this is our system for understanding synonyms.

What is a synonym? An obvious example is that "pictures" and "photos" mean the same thing in most circumstances. If you search for [pictures developed with coffee] to see how to develop photographs using coffee grinds as a developing agent, Google must understand that even if a page says "photos" and not "pictures," it's still relevant to the search. While even a small child can identify synonyms like pictures/photos, getting a computer program to understand synonyms is enormously difficult, and we're very proud of the system we've developed at Google.

Our synonyms system is the result of more than five years of research within our web search ranking team. We constantly monitor the quality of the system, but recently we made a special effort to analyze synonyms impact and quality. Most of the time, you probably don't notice when your search involves synonyms, because it happens behind the scenes. However, our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports. We took a set of these queries and analyzed how precise the synonyms were, and were happy with the results: For every 50 queries where synonyms significantly improved the search results, we had only one truly bad synonym.

An example of a bad synonym from this analysis is in the search [dell system speaker driver precision 360], where Google thinks "pc" is a synonym for precision. Note that you can still see that on Google today, because while we know it's a bad synonym, we don't typically fix bad synonyms by hand. Instead, we try to discover general improvements to our algorithms to fix the problems. We hope it will be fixed automatically in some future changes.

We also recently made a change to how our synonyms are displayed. In our search result snippets, we bold the terms of your search. Historically, we have bolded synonyms such as stemming variants — like the word "picture" for a search with the word "pictures." Now, we've extended this to words that our algorithms very confidently think mean the same thing, even if they are spelled nothing like the original term. This helps you to understand why that result is shown, especially if it doesn't contain your original search term. In our [pictures developed with coffee] example, you can see that the first result has the word "photos" bolded in the title:


(Note that because our synonyms depend on the other words in your search and use many signals, you won't necessarily always see the word "photos" bolded for "pictures", only when our algorithms think it is useful and important to bold.)

We use many techniques to extract synonyms, that we've blogged about before. Our systems analyze petabytes of web documents and historical search data to build an intricate understanding of what words can mean in different contexts. In the above example "photos" was an obvious synonym for "pictures," but it's not always a good synonym. For example, it's important for us to recognize that in a search like [history of motion pictures], "motion pictures" means something special (movies), and "motion photos" doesn't make any sense. Another example is the term "GM." Most people know the most prominent meaning: "General Motors." For the search [gm cars], you can see that Google bolds the phrase "General Motors" in the search results. This is an indication that for that search we thought "General Motors" meant the same thing as "GM." Are there any other meanings? Many people can think of the second meaning, "genetically modified," which is bolded when GM is used in queries about crops and food, like in the search results for [gm wheat]. It turns out that there are more than 20 other possible meanings of the term "GM" that our synonyms system knows something about. GM can mean George Mason in [gm university], gamemaster in [gm screen star wars], Gangadhar Meher in [gm college], general manager in [nba gm] and even gunners mate in [navy gm].

Here are screenshots of those disambiguations of GM in action:

With relief efforts underway, many displaced Haitians and their friends and families around the world are deeply concerned about the safety and whereabouts of loved ones. In response to the Haitian earthquake, a team of Googlers worked with the U.S. Department of State to create an online People Finder gadget so that people can submit information about missing persons and to search the database.