This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. – Ed.
This week, we had a number of exciting announcements:
Refine your searches by location Location can tremendously aid the way you search, so we were pleased to add the ability to refine your searches by location to the Search Options panel. Say you’re big on the outdoors and want to find bike rental information, bicycling blogs or the closest sporting goods store. There’s a good chance you’re looking for information that’s relevant to your region, city or even a city you’re visiting on vacation. That’s where this tool can help. One of the really useful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don’t have to worry about adding a city name (e.g., “Berkeley”) to your query and missing webpages that are in a similar region (e.g., “East Bay”, “Oakland”) but might not specifically mention the city in your search.
Example search: [bike stores] – Click on “Show options” to adjust the location. You can narrow the location down to near you, the city you’re in, the region or state. You can also select “Custom Location” and enter it directly.
Fetch as Googlebot Mobile added to Webmaster Tools Labs Last October, we launched Webmaster Tools Labs, and it has been a huge success. Malware Details have helped thousands of users identify pages on their site that may be infected with malicious code, and Fetch as Googlebot has given users more insight into our crawler. Today, we’re happy to introduce an additional Labs feature to our line-up: the ability to fetch pages as Googlebot-Mobile.
This was a common request from users with mobile-specific sites, and we thought it was a great idea. We have two mobile options: cHTML (primarily used for Japanese sites) and XHTML/WML. We’re excited to bring you this feature based on your feedback, and we look forward to launching more of them in future. Let us know what you think!
Facebook in real-time search Starting this week we added Facebook content to real-time search in the U.S. Real-time search, which we launched in December, helps you tap into the most relevant, freshest search results on the web, many of which are just seconds old. With this latest addition, you can access the news, photos and blog posts that Facebook fan pages publish to the world. You can find the Facebook Pages updates in our real-time mode by clicking on “Show Options” and then “Latest” or “Updates.”
Our Video Volunteers homepage lineup today features videos about nonprofits tackling important health issues: artist Jesse McCartney thanks you for standing up to cancer; themike99 tells a personal story about the tie between mercury poisoning and kidney failure; BangPopLA champions Whole Child LA and their work to help kids with chronic pain; and themattieboosh offers this animated take on the importance of funding leukemia research:
We had a record-breaking number of nonprofits participate in this round of Video Volunteers. Fifty health-oriented organizations signed up to have a member of the YouTube community make a video for them, and while we are only able to showcase a handful on the homepage today, we hope that many more nonprofits will have videos made for them. We’ll leave these opportunities from health orgs up for a few more days on the Video Volunteers channel, so if you didn’t make a video, but are passionate about helping one of these organizations, please reach out as soon as you can.
Next week, we’ll launch our “Global Development” round of Video Volunteers. It’s an issue that encompasses a number of different subjects, like poverty, sanitation and the need for infrastructure, and there are a number of nonprofits doing work in this area, like the One Campaign, Plan International, One Million Lights, and the Playing for Change Foundation. We hope you’ll make one of them a video. Ramya Raghavan, Nonprofits & Activism Manager, recently watched “Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation.”
After hearing of the devastatingly powerful 8.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Chile overnight, we began to mobilize several teams to see what Google resources could help with disaster response.
Google Map Maker is currently available in Chile, and we are making this map data available for download by relief and aid organizations. Visit http://mapmaker.google.com/datadownload for more information and to access the data. If you have familiarity with the region, please help these efforts by contributing data about Chile on Google Map Maker. We will be refreshing the download data frequently to reflect the latest set of contributions.
For those concerned about loved ones in Chile, the Person Finder tool, initially created in the wake of the Haiti earthquake, can be used to submit or search for information about individuals who may have been affected. The Person Finder tool has been translated into Spanish and is currently available at http://chilepersonfinder.appspot.com/, as well as several media sites and the US Department of State website. The gadget can easily be embedded on any site:
This My Map shows earthquake measurement data from the US Geological Survey to help give a better understanding of the areas most affected and the extent of the powerful aftershocks:
We will be updating imagery, maps, and other information as they become available and will continue to post updates to this blog. An overview of resources available, latest news, and links to make a donation can be found on Google’s Chile earthquake relief page at http://www.google.com/relief/chileearthquake/.
No knowledge is ever wasted. In college I took three semesters of Greek civilization because I thought it was nifty (and apparently I also had some plan involving never graduating, but that eventually fell through). Although this makes me more fun at parties than I’d otherwise be, I have had no practical use for the information. Until now!
We’re pleased to announce the addition of Athens, Greece to the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth. No trip to virtual Athens would be complete without a visit to the Parthenon. The architecture of the Parthenon is fascinating; all of its lines exhibit subtle curvature (the columns, for example, are slightly convex) in order to avoid the optical illusion of concavity resulting from parallel lines viewed at a distance. While you’re on the Acropolis, duck over to the Herodeion Theater, where for almost two thousand years music and theater performances have been held — check out its schedule during the Athens Festival.
With the 2010 Winter Olympics in progress, naturally the site of the revival of the modern Olympics comes to mind. The 1896 Summer Olympics were held here; also, check out the Athens Olympic Stadium and sports complex constructed for the 2004 Summer Olympics. If your tastes run more towards archaeology, there’s the Archaeological Museum, where you can see the Antikythera Mechanism among many other artifacts. Count on a geek to be interested in ancient mechanical computers…
Guest post: Tony Hirst is a lecturer in the Department of Communication and Systems at the UK’s Open University, co-founder of document discussion platform WriteToReply.org and member of the JISC’s DevCSI Developer Focus Group. An aspiring “mashup artist”, he blogs regularly at OUseful.info.
For several years, I have been exploring various ways of using online applications to grab and display data from around the web and represent it in a visual form. One fertile source of near-live data, particularly for sports results, is Wikipedia; but how can you get data out of Wikipedia and then display it in a chart, or on a map?
For the 2008 Olympics, I looked at how to create a map-based view of the overall medal tables using Google spreadsheets. With the Olympics coming round again – this time the 2010 Winter Olympics – I thought I’d take the opportunity to update that original mashup with a few tricks I’ve learned since then. In part as a teaching example, I came up with a recipe that illustrates a lot of functionality many people are unaware of, in a self-contained and hopefully coherent way – how to import data into a spreadsheet, how to write an application script, and how to use a spreadsheet as a database. The aim is to create a heat map of the current state of the medals table for the 2010 Winter Olympics that I can add to iGoogle.
The recipe runs as follows:
- Take one Winter Olympics Medal table on Wikipedia - Use the importHTML function to import the table into a Google spreadsheet - Filter out the name of each country from the imported table using either a Google Apps script function containing a regular expression or a SPLIT() formula; return the country name to the medal table spreadsheet - Take one ISO country code table, found via a web search, and copy and paste it into a second spreadsheet worksheet. You will use this sheet as a database - Using a =QUERY() formula applied to the ISO country code sheet, find the ISO country code for each country in the medal table. (Note that some extraneous space characters in the SPLIT country name require the trailing space to be recognized) - Arrange the columns, by copying cells if necessary, so that you have a column of ISO country codes followed by number of medals. For example, ISO country code, number of gold medals, ISO country code, number of silver medals, and so on. - Highlight a country code column and a medal tally column that are side by side, select a heatmap widget from the tools menu and configure it as required - Embed your Winter Olympics 2010 Live Medals Table Heatmap in your blog or iGoogle from the Gadget menu.
As the Wikipedia medals table is updated, your medals table heatmap should be too. To preview the spreadsheet, please visit here.
Today we’re happy to announce that Google has joined the Cloud Security Alliance, a non-profit organization of experts focused on best practices and education efforts around the security of cloud computing.
Cloud computing continues to gain momentum, and organizations such as the CSA are an important part of an ecosystem that works to increase transparency, lower risks, and promote independent research. The CSA’s focus on security best practices offers valuable information to organizations looking to move to the cloud, and as a member of the CSA, we look forward to providing ongoing education about cloud computing and its value to the organizations that use it.
With Street View in Google Maps, you can explore millions of images taken in places across the world. But the photographs you see are based on what the cameras on top of our cars, driving on public roads, can capture (or, in a few cases, what the cameras on our trike or even perched on a snowmobile can capture). That’s one reason why we began integrating user photos into Street View last year. User photos allow you to view locations from entirely new perspectives, whether through the eyes of a talented photographer with a knack for capturing architectural detail, or simply taken from locations we couldn’t get to. Today, we’re making it easier to navigate through these images in a way that should feel similar to how you’re used to exploring within Street View.
Let’s say you are planning a vacation to Prague and want to get a sense of the area before you go there. You go to Street View and start looking around, finally ending up at the historic plaza where the road ends: Even though you can’t go inside the pedestrian-only plaza with Street View, you can click on the User Photo thumbnail in the upper right corner to enter our photo navigator. That allows you to view a variety of user-submitted photos from Picasa, Panoramio, and Flickr that present a look at some buildings in the plaza: While navigating through user photos, you’ll now notice “orbs” – small silver circles – that hover on and around many user photos. These new click-and-drag controls appear when there are neighboring photos for a location. By clicking or dragging these orbs, you can move to a new nearby photo. Polygons surrounding the zoom orbs show the approximate location of the next image when zooming in:
Clicking the highlighted orb in the middle of the polygon will take you to this picture, which is a closer shot of the buildings covered by the polygon: Clicking again on the highlighted orb in the user photo above will show you a close-up photo of the details on the building’s facade: You’ll find that there are two kinds of orbs: ones that allow you to zoom, and ones along the border of the image that allow you to pan around the location. We wanted to make the experience of navigating user photos more consistent with the smooth Street View experience you know and love, so you can now also drag anywhere in an image to pan. As you click and drag the photo, you’ll see the next picture transition into view:
Besides coming from Street View, you can also get to user photos using the Photo Layer in Google Maps (under the ‘More’ button). For instance, following this this link you can get to a cool view of the plaza from a tower, and then you can easily browse to other photographs also taken from the tower. You should try it out for yourself to really get the feel for this seamless new navigation experience, but here’s a short video that will also give you a walk-through of this feature:
Our personal suggestion is that you start at the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. We hope you enjoy this new way to explore through the impressive array of user photos in Street View!
Posted by Daniel Filip and Daniel Cotting, Computer Vision Team, Google Zürich
Analysts often consider an aggregated view of their visitors when assessing reports in Google Analytics. Every visitor is assumed to be of the same type. But, looking at the information in an aggregated form is not nearly as useful as assessing the data for individual audience segments. Different types of visitors – whether new, returning, organic, paid, and so on – behave very differently and have vastly different expectations. The ability to understand what each of them wants, and how to cater to them, is important towards building a successful online presence.
Google Analytics makes it easy to segment your audience with advanced segments. Google Analytics includes a number of predefined advanced segments (e.g. new visitors, paid search visitors, iphone users) that you can take advantage of immediately. More importantly, however, you can create custom advanced segments tailored to your own specific needs.
One of the new Google Analytics features announced in October is the ability to share custom advanced segments with other users across accounts. Using this feature, I’ll share links to my favorite custom segments that you can use too. Head over to the Solutions for Southeast Asia blog to learn more and for links to the following segments.
Location has become an important part of the way we search. If you’re a foodie looking for restaurant details, food blogs or the closest farmer’s market, location can be vital to helping you find the right information. Starting today, we’ve added the ability to refine your searches with the “Nearby” tool in the Search Options panel. One of the really helpful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don’t have to worry about adding “Minneapolis” to your query and missing webpages that only say “St. Paul” or “Twin Cities.” Check it out by doing a search, clicking on “show options” and selecting “Nearby.”
You can choose to see results nearby either your default location or a custom location, and you can narrow down to results at the city, region or state level. Try these examples:
For over seven hours yesterday, the nation’s top leaders gathered in Washington for a unique conversation on the future of health care reform. Moderated by President Obama, the health care summit revealed disparate views on current legislation, with Democrats arguing for comprehensive reform and Republicans pressing for a more incremental approach (or for starting over entirely). We streamed the entire summit on CitizenTube, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader John Boehner, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid all agreed to answer some of your top-voted questions from our Google Moderator platform during the event. (We also offered the opportunity to Senator Mitch McConnnell, the Senate Minority Leader, but he was unable to participate due to a scheduling conflict.)
Though it’s doubtful many of you were able to tune in to the entire meeting, the fact that it was broadcast online was an important aspect of the discussion. It spoke to one of the top concerns that YouTube users posed to President Obama in our YouTube Interview earlier this month, when they demanded that health care proceedings become more transparent.
We selected three top-voted questions and the two top-voted ideas that you submitted during the summit, and the lawmakers replied with the YouTube videos that we’ve embedded below, as well as posted on the YouTube homepage. (We didn’t ask the top-voted question regarding putting legistlation online, as all the legislation is currently available on the Internet.) Seeing each lawmaker answer the same five questions affords an interesting perspective on where both parties stand with respect to the issues that matter most to the citizens who participated.
Here are the questions and ideas that each leader answered. We’ll leave the full list up on CitizenTube for the next few days:
1. What is the explicit reasoning behind mandating the purchase of healthcare services? - Chris, University of Florida
2. Do you believe that healthcare is a right, or that health insurance is a right? - Brian, Student
3. Thompson Reuters had performed a study in which they concluded that 40% of healthcare waste was from unnecessary care. Unnecessary care is primarily a result of a fear of being sued, aka malpractice. What is being done to address malpractice? - JatPat, Chicago, IL
4. Why not quit artificially limiting the market? Stop tying health insurance to employers and increase the market dramatically. Allow insurance providers to sell across state lines and increase it even more. The larger the market the lower the price. - crodgers1981, Lincoln, NE
5. All people voting on these bills should be required to personally read the entire bill before being allowed to vote on it. It is ridiculous that these bills are thousands of pages long. Bills should be written in clear language. - Blinn, Illinois
Here are Speaker Pelosi’s answers:
Here are Congressman Boehner’s:
And here are Senator Reid’s replies:
YouTube has become the place where leaders can connect directly with citizens around key events in the political process. That opportunity for meaningful dialogue makes politics feel more personal, more democratic, and opens up Washington in exciting new ways. Stay tuned for more YouTube interviews, and let us know in the comments who you’d like the chance to speak with on this platform. Steve Grove, YouTube News and Politics, recently watched “White House Health Care Summit Part I.”
