This week in search 11/12/10

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

We’re always excited by the diversity of the search features and enhancements that we make in any given week. Each week we try to release a diverse set of search feature and enhancement to help you find what you’re looking for, faster. From getting sports information instantly, to making it even easier for you to find the right webpage, this week’s round up includes a slew of new changes.

NHL Live Result
Many of you are sports fans, and we’re always delighted to make improvements that help you find those scores, stats and recaps. We partnered with our friends at NHL.com to provide rich information in the snippets of the NHL.com results. These include real-time scores, schedules and team standings. They also include links for quick access to game previews, live streams, recaps and video highlights of completed games making it super-easy to keep up to date on the latest NHL action.

Example searches: [nhl], [rangers]


Help for those who need it
In times of crisis, it's especially important to find the crucial information you're looking for—and find it fast. After receiving positive feedback for poison control and suicide prevention special search features in the U.S., this week we launched one or more emergency search features in 13 countries: Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K. For certain queries, the feature displays the phone number to call for poison emergencies, suicide prevention or general emergency services.

Instant Previews
This week we were excited to take the speed of Google Instant even further with the launch of Instant Previews in almost all languages and domains. Instant Previews is a new, interactive feature that helps you select the right results by showing you a preview of each page and highlighting the most relevant sections for your query. You can activate the feature with a single click on the magnifying glass next to the result title. The tool is fast and interactive, with the average preview appearing in under a tenth of a second.

Learn more about Instant Previews here.

We hope you enjoyed this week’s updates. You can check out some of the top searches of the week on our latest edition of Google Beat—stay tuned for more!

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Search Product Management

Google Apps highlights – 11/12/2010

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.

In this installment, we’re bringing you a little more flair for your Gmail inbox and a video introduction to real-time co-editing in Google Docs. We also have some nice improvements for organizations using Google Apps to save money and achieve even bigger productivity gains by collaborating in Google’s cloud.

Five new themes available in Gmail
Some people are happy with the classic white and blue color scheme in Gmail, others like to spice things up and make their inbox feel a little more personal. Last week we added five more themes to choose from in Gmail, bringing the total to over 35 designs. Take a look, maybe you’re in the mood for a floral backdrop or something more playful like this new Marker theme.


Visualizing character-by-character document co-editing
From day one, Google Docs allowed multiple people to work on the same document together at the same time from different computers. But until you experience this for yourself, it’s hard to understand how much time this can save. Imagine being able to work together without the hassles of shuttling attachments back and forth, and reconciling people’s edits each time. If you’re a Google Docs newbie, we think this video we created last week helps bring the possibilities to life.



The business value of faster collaboration
We recently commissioned the help of Forrester Consulting to measure the “Total Economic Impact” of Google Apps that customers can expect over three years by moving from traditional technologies to the cloud. While we encourage you to assess the potential impact for yourself, Forrester’s analysis (PDF) found that with Google Apps, a typical large business of 18,000 employees experiences:

• Productivity gains even larger than cost savings
• Ove 300% return on investment
• Break-even under seven months
• Total economic impact over $10,000,000 (NPV)

Service activity graphs for administrators
To give administrators a window into how users in their organizations are collaborating in new ways, last Tuesday we added service activity graphs to the Google Apps control panel. These charts make it easy for organizations to quickly spot usage trends that they might not have anticipated and make adjustments accordingly, like scaling back technical support for legacy technologies.


App Tuesday: eight new applications to choose from in the Apps Marketplace
The Google Apps Marketplace is where third-party software developers list their applications that integrate seamlessly with Google Apps—and the number of offerings in the Marketplace continues to grow. On Tuesday, we added eight new applications ranging from personal relationship management and administrative tools to idea management and Google Site management solutions.



Who’s gone Google?
It’s been two weeks since the last update here, which means tens of thousands of businesses, schools and organizations have moved to the cloud with Google Apps. Small businesses around the world like Belle and Rollo and YETI Coolers turn to Google Apps, so they can focus on business instead of managing complex technology. Companies like National Geographic save money in a tough economy with Google Apps, while giving their most demanding mobile workers better tools to work efficiently. And universities like NYU are joining the Google Apps family to give students the modern, web-based tools that allow people to work together in more collaborative ways. To all, a warm welcome!

I hope these updates help you and your organization 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

What a feeling! Even better indexing of SWF content

Webmaster Level: All

We often get questions from webmasters about how we index content designed for Flash Player, so we wanted to take a moment to update you on some of our latest progress.

About two years ago we announced that through a collaboration with Adobe we had significantly improved Google’s capability to index Flash technology based content. Last year we followed up with an announcement that we had added external resource loading to our SWF indexing capabilities. This work has allowed us to index all kinds of textual content in SWF files, from Flash buttons and menus to self-contained Flash technology based websites. Currently almost any text a user can see as they interact with a SWF file on your site can be indexed by Googlebot and used to generate a snippet or match query terms in Google searches. Additionally, Googlebot can also discover URLs in SWF files and follow those links, so if your SWF content contains links to pages inside your website, Google may be able to crawl and index those pages as well.

Last month we expanded our SWF indexing capabilities thanks to our continued collaboration with Adobe and a new library that is more robust and compatible with features supported by Flash Player 10.1. Additionally, thanks to improvements in the way we handle JavaScript, we are also now significantly better at recognizing and indexing sites that use JavaScript to embed SWF content. Finally, we have made improvements in our video indexing technology, resulting in better detection of when a page has a video and better extraction of metadata such as alternate thumbnails from Flash technology based videos. All in all, our SWF indexing technology now allows us to see content from SWF files on hundreds of millions of pages across the web.

While we’ve made great progress indexing SWF content over the past few years, we’re not done yet. We are continuing to work on our ability to index deep linking (content within a Flash technology based application that is linked to from the same application) as well as further improving indexing of SWF files executed through JavaScript. You can help us improve these capabilities by creating unique links for each page that is linked from within a single Flash object and by submitting a Sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools.

We’re excited about the progress we’ve made so far and we look forward to keeping you updated about further progress.

Written by Jifeng Situ and Sverre Sundsdal, Software Engineers

Honoring Veterans Day 2010 at Google

Today is Veterans Day, the annual U.S. holiday honoring military veterans and the end of World War I, also celebrated as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day in other parts of the world. As we did last year, we want to recognize and thank these courageous men and women who willingly serve to defend the freedoms and rights of others.

For those of us who haven’t served, it’s also a day when we can seek to understand what it means to serve in the armed forces—in any country—and the burdens that military personnel and their families bear on our behalf.

This year, we celebrate the holiday with a special doodle on google.com—and YouTube is featuring content from veterans sharing their personal stories about life in combat and beyond. You’ll hear from Peter, who was awarded a Silver Star, the third-highest military decoration that can be awarded to a member of any branch of the U.S. armed forces for valor; Justin, a disabled veteran who is advocating for wounded warriors; and other brave men and women.

The Google Veterans Network, our employee group dedicated to veterans’ issues led 11 service projects in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia—bringing employees together with those who have served or are still serving. Nearly 200 Googlers volunteered approximately 500 hours in local communities like Ann Arbor, MI. and Seattle, WA. In Mountain View, we taught 510 students at Monta Loma Elementary School about the historic meaning of November 11 and service to one’s country. We also offered Veterans Day and Remembrance Day menus in our company cafes, including military paraphernalia displays and samples of MREs (meals ready to eat).

Through financial and in-kind support, the Google Veterans Network has worked closely with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), the Coming Home Project, Fisher House Foundation (Puget Sound), the Ann Arbor VA Hospital, The Royal British Legion and The Returned and Services League of Australia to make this November 11 a special one.

Posted by Carrie Laureno, Audience Evangelist, Creative Lab and Founder, Google VetNet

Helping you find emergency information when you need it

(Cross-posted from the google.org blog)

We know that in times of crisis, it's especially important for you to find the crucial information you're looking for—and find it fast. Today, in 13 countries, we’ll begin displaying some combination of special search results for searches around poison control, suicide and common emergency numbers that point to emergency information.

This effort started last year when I received an email from a mother in the U.S. who had trouble finding the phone number for the poison control hotline after her daughter accidentally ingested something potentially poisonous (fortunately, her daughter was fine). As a result, people in the U.S. performing various searches including "poison control" began to see a special result displaying the national phone number for the American Association of Poison Control Centers last fall.

Example of the poison control result in Spain

Soon after we added poison control information to search results, we heard from Googlers whose lives had been affected by suicide and who thought that suicide prevention could be another case for a special search result. In April we began prominently displaying the number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at the top of the results page for certain search queries in the U.S. Since then, our friends at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline have reported a 9 percent increase in legitimate calls to its hotline.

Example of the suicide prevention result in the U.K.

So, following positive feedback from consumers and our hotline partners, we decided to expand the poison control and suicide prevention special search results beyond the U.S. Each of these 13 countries will see one or more of these results: Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. We looked for hotlines that are available nationally and 24/7 and we hope to add additional countries in the future.

We're also introducing a new special search result for common emergencies, such as fire, medical and police emergencies. We want to make this information easier to find for residents as well as travelers, especially as some countries have different numbers for different emergencies.

Example of the emergency number result in France

An emergency is stressful enough. We hope this small step helps connect people with the information they need immediately.

Posted by Roni Zeiger, MD, Chief Health Strategist

A brand-new interface for AdSense

If you’re an online publisher running a website that relies on ad revenues—whether it’s a blog or an entertainment website—it can sometimes be complex to get started and to find new ways to make more money from your ads.

As I’ve previously written, we’re committed to helping online publishers—large and small—“find the advertising gold hidden within their sites,” so they can fund their websites and online content. At the core of these efforts—as it has been for more than seven years—is AdSense, which now has more than 2 million publishers in more than 200 countries who use it to fund great online businesses.

Over the last few years, we’ve invested significantly in improving AdSense so that it provides the best solution to help all publishers make the most money possible from online advertising. We’ve added a range of new ad formats (including video and rich media), improved our publisher filters, enabled better targeting that drives higher returns (like remarketing and above-the-fold targeting) and introduced increased competition for publishers’ ad space by bringing in additional advertisers and certified ad networks.

To continue helping our publishers, today we’re excited to be rolling out a completely new AdSense interface to all of our AdSense publishers, globally, in more than 30 languages and in each of the 200+ countries where AdSense is available. The AdSense interface is how publishers set up, manage, optimize and see reports on the ads on their sites.

With this new interface, AdSense is even easier to use, and we’re also providing publishers with all the tools they need to manage and increase their advertising revenue. We used lots of direct feedback from our publishers to make this overhaul. If you’re an online publisher, it helps you in three main ways:

• More insights. We’ve built in simple, graphical reporting and more options for you to easily slice and dice your data, so you can see at a glance what ads are working and which are not, and adjust your strategies accordingly.
• More control. We’ve made our ad controls richer and simpler to use, so you can better control which ads and advertisers you want to appear on your sites.
• More efficiency. It’s now much easier to quickly see earnings and payment information, to run reports, to find relevant features and help, and to make account changes. Our engineers have spent countless hours making sure that the interface is stable and blazing fast. We’ve also spent many hours in our usability labs with publishers, focused on making the interface easy to learn and use for all types of publishers.

Since we started trialling this new interface, many of our early testers have commented on the power of the reporting tools. They’ve been able to quickly analyze data and identify new trends that help them maximize their online ad revenues through AdSense.

The new interface is just the latest milestone in our efforts to help you make more money from all your online content. We look forward to hearing from as many publishers as possible, to learn what you like about this interface and where we can continue to improve.

To learn more, read our post on the Inside AdSense blog or visit google.com/ads/newadsense.

Posted by Jonathan Bellack, Director, Product Management

Voice Search in underrepresented languages

(Cross-posted from the Google Research Blog)

Welkom*!

Today we’re introducing Voice Search support for Zulu and Afrikaans, as well as South African-accented English. The addition of Zulu in particular represents our first effort in building Voice Search for underrepresented languages.

We define underrepresented languages as those which, while spoken by millions, have little presence in electronic and physical media, e.g., webpages, newspapers and magazines. Underrepresented languages have also often received little attention from the speech research community. Their phonetics, grammar, acoustics, etc., haven’t been extensively studied, making the development of ASR (automatic speech recognition) voice search systems challenging.

We believe that the speech research community needs to start working on many of these underrepresented languages to advance progress and build speech recognition, translation and other Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. The development of NLP technologies in these languages is critical for enabling information access for everybody. Indeed, these technologies have the potential to break language barriers.

We also think it’s important that researchers in these countries take a leading role in advancing the state of the art in their own languages. To this end, we’ve collaborated with the Multilingual Speech Technology group at South Africa’s North-West University led by Prof. Ettiene Barnard (also of the Meraka Research Institute), an authority in speech technology for South African languages. Our development effort was spearheaded by Charl van Heerden, a South African intern and a student of Prof. Barnard. With the help of Prof. Barnard’s team, we collected acoustic data in the three languages, developed lexicons and grammars, and Charl and others used those to develop the three Voice Search systems. A team of language specialists traveled to several cities collecting audio samples from hundreds of speakers in multiple acoustic conditions such as street noise, background speech, etc. Speakers were asked to read typical search queries into an Android app specifically designed for audio data collection.

For Zulu, we faced the additional challenge of few text sources on the web. We often analyze the search queries from local versions of Google to build our lexicons and language models. However, for Zulu there weren’t enough queries to build a useful language model. Furthermore, since it has few online data sources, native speakers have learned to use a mix of Zulu and English when searching for information on the web. So for our Zulu Voice Search product, we had to build a truly hybrid recognizer, allowing free mixture of both languages. Our phonetic inventory covers both English and Zulu and our grammars allow natural switching from Zulu to English, emulating speaker behavior.

This is our first release of Voice Search in a native African language, and we hope that it won’t be the last. We’ll continue to work on technology for languages that have until now received little attention from the speech recognition community.

Salani kahle!**

* “Welcome” in Afrikaans
** “Stay well” in Zulu

Posted by Pedro J. Moreno, Staff Research Scientist and Johan Schalkwyk, Senior Staff Engineer