Ever since we assembled a 1.6 MW solar panel installation at our headquarters in Mountain View in 2007, we’ve been wondering, “Does cleaning the solar panels make them more effective?” We thought it might, but we needed to be sure. So we analyzed the mountains of data that we collect about the energy that these panels produce — after rain, after cleaning and at different times of the year.
We have two different sets of solar panels on our campus — completely flat ones installed on carports, and rooftop ones that are tilted.
Since the carport solar panels have no tilt, rain doesn’t do a good job of rinsing off the dirt they collect. (Also, our carports are situated across from a sand field, which doesn’t help the situation.) We cleaned these panels for the first time after they had been in operation for 15 months, and their energy output doubled overnight. When we cleaned them again eight months later, their output instantly increased by 36 percent. In fact, we found that cleaning these panels is the #1 way to maximize the energy they produce. As a result, we’ve added the carport solar panels to our spring cleaning checklist.
The rooftop solar panels are a different story. Our data indicates that rain does a sufficient job of cleaning the tilted solar panels. Some dirt does accumulate in the corners, but the resulting reduction in energy output is fairly small — and cleaning tilted panels does not significantly increase their energy production. So for now, we’ll let Mother Nature take care of cleaning our rooftop panels.
Accumulated dirt in the corners of a rooftop solar panel
We’ve also been crunching numbers on dollars-and-cents; the more energy our panels produce, the sooner we’ll be paid back by our solar investment. Our analysis now predicts that Google’s system will pay for itself in about six and a half years, which is even better than we initially expected.
If you want to learn more about our solar study, check out these slides showing the effects that seasonality, tilt, dirt, particulate matter, rain and cleaning have on Google’s solar energy output. We hope you solar panel owners out there can tailor our analysis to the specifics of your own installation to produce some extra energy of your own!
A few months ago when we announced the Search Options panel, we promised that you would soon see similar functionality across our other search properties. Today we are rolling out Search Options for Google Images.
This new feature offers quick access to existing tools, including search by color and image type. Color search will find images that are only in color or only in black and white, or even images that contain a specific color, such as red, pink, or green. Type search is a great way to narrow down your results if you are looking for a specific kind of image, such as a photo, clip art, line drawing or face.
We’ve also revamped our size search. In addition to choosing from commonly searched-for sizes, now you can search for an exact image size or any image larger than a certain size. You can find images of practically any size, including 70 megapixels or more.
The new layout makes it faster and easier to combine and toggle between options. It also makes it easier for us to add additional image search options in the future, so keep your eyes peeled. Just click “Show options…” in the blue bar on the search results page to try out any of these tools.
Posted by Ken Dauber, Software Engineer, and Nate Smith, Associate Product Manager
The aim of this map is to give scientists, decision-makers, media and the general public a new way to navigate data collected since 1990. We hope that this can provide a valuable tool for understanding climate change leading into the upcoming negotiation of a new climate change agreement in Copenhagen at the end of this year.
The greenhouse gas map allows you to gradually move from a very high-level view (e.g. the changes in emissions between 1990-2006 in the screenshot above) to a detailed analysis down to country level. You can also visualize any combination of emission categories (e.g. energy, industrial processes etc.), greenhouse gas type (e.g. CO2, CH4, etc.), and year (or the change from base year to 2006), via drop-down menus.
For instance, a visualisation of the aggregate greenhouse gas emissions from energy sources of European countries in 2006 looks like this:
Hovering your mouse over a country marker shows total emission values for that country, and clicking on the country itself brings up a detailed analysis based on the settings for the global map (see example below for Germany).
You can notice some interesting trends from this data. As time goes by, emissions for each sector can go up or down for many reasons – for example, changes in efficiency, or use of different energy sources. One of the sectors, LULUCF (“land use, land-use changes, and forestry”), is not like the others – it can have negative emissions or, as they say, can act as a ’sink’. LULUCF helps to account for the carbon that’s stored in trees, plants and soil: greenhouse gases could be released when forests are burned or cut down, or captured when existing forests grow or new forests are set.
We, along with UNFCCC, hope that the map will underscore the importance of global climate agreements that aim to decrease greenhouse gas emissions. You can read more on the UNFCCC website.
Update (8/5/09): Note that Sweden’s emissions in the LULUCF sector are overstated in the UNFCCC database underlying the GHG map. The database currently contains the latest submissions of all Annex I countries up to September 2008. Sweden has submitted revised data in February 2009. The database for the GHG map is scheduled to be updated with the revised data in October 2009. All the latest country submissions can be found here. And finally, many thanks to Jonah Jones for help designing the user interface.
Posted by Benjamin Kott, Green Business Operations (London) and Simon Ilyushchenko, Site Reliability Engineer (Mountain View)
OK, Ashton might have more followers on Twitter than
we do, but we’re not going quietly into the night. Let’s take a
friendly celebrity tussle to Facebook, shall we? where we’ve got the 12th most popular Product/Celebrity fan page
(thankyouverymuch). With 3.1 million fans, we’re hovering above Mr.
Demi Moore, Rihanna and, er, potato chips (Pringles). That’s not too
bad, but our sights are on you, Will Smith, Megan Fox, Lady Gaga, Adam
Sandler and Vin Diesel. You stand in our way of leaderboard glory so
it’s time for a good old fashioned Internet showdown.
You heard it here: we’re going to pass these celebs in the next 60 days and if we don’t, we’ll eat humble pie and
spotlight video(s) on our homepage for the
nonprofit or non-commercial cause of their choosing. It’s a stretch
goal, to be sure, as we’d have to gain approximately the following
numbers of fans to beat…
Think we can do it? Help us get there by joining our Facebook group
now. Because we so want to be able to say that we’re stronger than Vin
Diesel, cooler than Will Smith and hotter than Megan Fox. Hunter Walk, Director, Product Management, recently favorited “J.J. Abrams: The mystery box.”
A few weeks ago, we announced support for transliteration in Custom Search in a bunch of languages, including Arabic and a set of Indic languages. The auto-transliteration feature allows your users to conveniently type in English, for example, and search in one of these languages.
Now, that list of transliteration languages in Custom Search has grown. We now support a dozen languages, including Urdu and Nepali.
The feature is very simple to use: you can turn transliteration on in the Language settings section of the Basics page on the Custom Search control panel.
Once you’ve enabled automatic transliteration, a language button next to the search box alerts your users. As a user types, the query is transliterated into the selected language in real-time, allowing the user to search in that language.
Ah, Burlington, Vermont in late summer….can you do any better? The summer is winding down and the last quarter of the year is still a ways away and easily prepared for. All of France is on vacation. The weather is just right on Lake Champlain. There’s some time to get energized for the holiday season. It’s a good chance to take a break, roll up your sleeves, learn some new skills and do some networking. And if online marketing and analysis is your field, there’s no better time and place than Burlington this August to do it.
Join Google Seminar for Success leaders in Burlington from August 11 – 14 for an enriching and fun few days at their Seminars For Success Summit ‘09. Epikone, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, hosts this summit every year, and we’ve never heard a bad word about it. This year should be the best yet. Here’s what to expect:
Industry leaders from Google Analytics Authorized Consultants EpikOne and WebShare, AdWords Seminar Leader Anastasia Holdren, Analytics Evangelist AvinashKaushik and others will cover in-depth training on Google’s online marketing suite and dive into strategic insights at the thought leadership day.
Daily workshops will cover all aspects of Google AdWords, Google Analytics and Website Optimizer along with special sessions on social marketing, mobile strategies and more.
Plus each night you’ll experience the best Vermont has to offer while socializing with peers, including brewery tours, lake cruises, shopping, sightseeing and more.
Did we mention brewery tours? Burlington was voted one of the best small cities in which to do business by “Inc. Magazine” and offers tons of outdoor activities for families. It’ll be fun, but don’t get us wrong – you will come away from this Summit with increased expertise and contacts that will do nothing but benefit you and your business.
Here at Google, user feedback helps us improve our products. While we love to hear praise on what’s working well, the honest direct feedback on what’s not working is just as valuable and motivating. We’d like to share a couple of stories about recent product changes that were shaped greatly based on the feedback you have provided in the Google Mobile Help Forum. Hopefully, you’ll continue to raise your voice and help us build better and more useful products.
iGoogle for Android and iPhone
In January, the high-end version of iGoogle for Android was discontinued because we felt it was too slow, and users were, instead, redirected to the standard Mobile iGoogle site. At the time, we thought you’d welcome the improvements to speed and stability. We humbly found out that we were wrong. One thread in the user forum received over 350 replies and almost 18,000 page views! Here’s what some folks had to say:
“Its not just that the standard mobile verision of iGoogle is weak, its vastly inferior to the optimized version for iPhone…” – mccarrabba
“The mobile version is not good enough. Why should I have to suffer because other mobile devices offer crappy browsers? This is a horribly short-sighted decision.” – tewha
Well, we heard you loud and clear. Our team read each of the forum posts, and listened to why the standard version did not meet your needs. Last month, we brought back iGoogle for Android and iPhone and made it better than ever. The new version is faster and easier to use, and there’s support for tabs and more of your favorite gadgets. We also now support the in-line display of articles for feed-based gadgets, so you can read article summaries without leaving the page.
We’re glad that so many of you voiced your ideas. iGoogle is back and better, and it seems like folks are pretty stoked:
“Personally, I could have cried. And I mean that in a good way. OMG-about time!! I’m leaving on vacation and was for sure I was going to have to take my laptop. Tabs actually work! My gadgets work! Its back! Hip Hip Hooray!” – ktigger2
Google Maps for mobile Soon after we launched Google Maps for mobile 3.0 and Google Latitude on four platforms (Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian S60), we received some helpful feedback on where improvements could be made and problems fixed.
Keeping in mind the input of many faithful Help Forum posters, we released two updated versions for Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 users in April (version 3.0.1) and July (version 3.2). These versions added new features, like Layers, and included some fixes and new ways to use Maps for mobile that were among the most requested by you. For example, the My Maps feature request received over 2,000 votes on our Mobile Product Ideas page. We also used specific Help Forum conversations to tweak behavior, such as the backlight timeout on Symbian phones, and to fix issues, like copy and paste for Windows Mobile phones.
In June, we also updated Maps in Android Market to Maps 3.1, introducing popular feature requests like Transit directions and Google Search by voice. We’ve received lots of positive feedback about pushing out these features:
“Not only is this an awesome update, but what an awesome way to distribute!” – matt
In addition to the iGoogle and Maps for mobile updates, your feedback also led to the development of other exciting new features — for example, labels for Gmail and direct YouTube uploads on Android. Your ideas and requests help us to drive and prioritize new products and features, so please post your thoughts on the Help Forum. As you continue to show us what you care about, we’ll continue to listen as we work on our mobile products.
Posted by Chris Nguyen & Gabe Garcia, Google Mobile Consumer Operations
Quite a few of you use Gmail’s custom “From:” to send messages with one of your other email addresses listed in place of your Gmail address. Since these messages are sent by Gmail’s servers but “from” a non-Gmail address, we have to include your original Gmail username in the “Sender” field of the message header to comply with mail delivery protocols and help prevent your mail from being marked as spam. Most email programs just display the “From” address and not the “Sender” field, but some (including versions of Microsoft Outlook) show these messages as coming “From username@gmail.com On Behalf Of customaddress@mydomain.com” which really annoyed people.
We heard your request for another option that wouldn’t show the “on behalf of” text loud and clear, and now there’s a new option that does just that. Instead of using Gmail’s servers to send the message, we’ll use the servers where your other email address lives. Since Gmail isn’t the originating domain, we don’t have to include “Sender” info in the header. No more “on behalf of.”
Here’s the difference. All custom “From:” addresses used to work like this:
Now, if your other email provider supports POP and/or IMAP access, you can choose to send your message like this instead:
To switch to this new method, go to the Accounts page under Settings, and click “edit info” from the “Send mail as” section. Then choose the option to “Use your other email provider’s SMTP servers.”
We recognize that your other address might not have a server that you can use to send outbound messages — for example, if you use a forwarding alias rather than an actual mailbox, or if your other email provider doesn’t support authenticated SMTP, or restricts access to specific IP ranges. For this reason, we’ve kept the original method as well. Check out our Help Center for further details on these two “send mail as” configuration options.
If you use Google Apps Premier or Education edition and would like to send mail as another address within your domain or within an aliased domain, no sweat. We do all the work behind the scenes so your original username won’t be listed in the “Sender” header, and your recipients won’t see “on behalf of.”
Google offers a bunch of free information tools that marketers can use to grow their business. They’re especially useful and relevant now as budgets are tighter, while at the same time the need to grow your business has never been greater. The latest episode of Data Driven Discussions focuses on two of Avinash’s favorite tools in addition to Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer: Insights for Search and Ad Planner.
Both can be hugely informative and useful for any marketer. In this video, after typically making sure Nick, our Google Analytics Developer Relations Manager, is on his toes, Avinash, the Analytics Evangelist here at Google, gives real world use cases from his own experience using each of these products.
He uses Insights For Search to find out the actual demand around a keyword, product, trend or even industry, broken down by geography and clearly showing whether “interest over time” is growing or waning. Below, you can see a screen shot of an Insights For Search comparison between the terms “AdWords” and “Google Analytics.”
Take a look at this great article on more ways to use Insights For Search, including choosing advertising messages, examining seasonality, creating brand associations, and entering new markets.
Next, Avinash discusses Ad Planner which is even more useful for a marketer. It tells marketers what websites their target customers are likely to visit so that they can make more informed advertising decisions. Avinash takes us through the Ad Planner process, where you type in an example website, keyword or demographic information which reflects the audience you’re looking for, and out pops a list of sites related to those conditions, as well as traffic and demographic estimates about that site. It’s incredibly easy and is a wealth of information! If you’ve ever wondered what sites to target – now you know. And you can even go one step further and create and save a media plan right within the tool.
And here’s a video on using Ad Planner:
And at the end of the Data Driven Discussions episode, Avinash goes so far as to basically call me a dork. Though, an insult from our Analytics Evangelist is somehow like a slap on the back from a buddy who wants you to succeed.
The Google Checkout store gadget — a new offering just released to Google Labs — allows anyone to create an online store using a Google spreadsheet. How does it all work?
Using new Spreadsheet Data APIs, we’ve integrated Google Docs and Google Checkout to make online selling a breeze. In three simple steps, you’ll be able to create an online store that’s powered by Google Checkout and has inventory managed and stored in a Google spreadsheet.
No complicated coding or technical tasks are required. You can get your first online store up-and-running in under five minutes.
1. Sign up for Google Checkout 2. List products you want to sell in a Google spreadsheet 3. Place the Google Checkout store gadget on your website. (Also supported: Google Sites, Blogger, and iGoogle).
Signing up for Google Checkout is quick and easy. You’ll use your Checkout account to process orders placed at your new online store. Plus, Checkout can also help you attract new leads, convert more sales, and enjoy sophisticated protection against fraud.
2. List products you want to sell in a Google Docs spreadsheet
First, create a copy of our template spreadsheet. Next, replace the sample inventory with your own. Our step-by-step guide will walk you through the set-up and publishing of your spreadsheet.
You can embed the store gadget anywhere you’d like. The step-by-step guide has detailed instructions for embedding your new online store in Google Sites, Blogger, iGoogle, or your personal website. Sample sites with the gadget embedded:
The weather is just right on Lake Champlain. There’s some time to get energized for the holiday season. It’s a good chance to take a break, roll up your sleeves, learn some new skills and do some networking. And if online marketing and analysis is your field, there’s no better time and place than Burlington this August to do it.
