Googler insights into product and technology news and our culture.
Now anyone can Talk
Last year, we launched Google Talk, a free and easy service for making voice calls and sending instant messages. It used to be that only Gmail users could use Google Talk but now anyone can sign up for Google Talk. If you haven't tried the service yet, here are 5 good reasons to give it a try:
- now anyone can use the service (Gmail accounts no longer required)
- free and crystal clear voice calls to your friends and family anywhere in the world
- transfer files and folders to others
- free voicemail messages (MEEP!)
- IM from your BlackBerry
Your inbox for the web
Do you ever wish that finding interesting stuff on the web was as easy as watching TV? Some nights, I just want to relax, tune in to HBO and see what's on. Other times, I know exactly what I want to watch: all those Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes that I've recorded, for one thing. But on the web, the only way to "tune in" is to go to the websites themselves and see what's there. What I really want is for the websites to come to me instead, so I can read them when I feel like it.
Enter Google Reader. Today there's a new version that makes it even easier to keep track of your favorite websites. Think of Google Reader as your inbox for the web. When you check your email, you don't go to each of your friends' mailboxes to see if they sent you anything — you just check your inbox. Google Reader does the same thing for the Internet, by putting all the sites that interest you in one convenient location and indicating when something has been updated. Here's a quick video intro for you:
Happy trails with Google Transit
A little less than a year ago we announced the launch of a new Labs product, Google Transit Trip Planner. We made it easier for Portland commuters to find the fastest and most effective way to get around the city using public transportation.
Today, we're thrilled to tell you that we've added five more cities to our coverage:
Now riders in these cities (and Portland, of course) can use Google to plan trips using public transportation, and in some cities, compare the cost of public transportation with the cost of driving. You can also specify when you want to leave or arrive, and see different route possibilities. Here are some things you can find out:
- In Seattle, how to get from UW to Google's Kirkland office
- In Pittsburgh, how to get from brunch at Pamela's to a 1pm matinee at the Waterfront
- In Honolulu, how to get from the airport to Waikiki Beach
The transit agencies in Google Transit Trip Planner now serve a population of more than 6 million people with over 1 million transit trips per day. For us, that's a fivefold increase in transit riders that we can help -- but we realize that it's still only a small fraction of the world's transit riders. To help expand coverage and to make it easier for transit agencies to get their schedules included, today we're announcing a lightweight Google Transit Feed Specification. If you're from a transit agency interested in being included in this Labs product, just write to us.
Google Calendar does something about the weather
Maybe you haven't tried Google Calendar yet because you don't think your daily routine is complicated enough to use one. But it's more than just a personal organizer – it also keeps you current about other kinds of time-related information, like what the weather will be on Friday.
Our latest feature, web content events, makes it easier to distinguish between what you've scheduled for yourself and other things going on around you. A web content event appears as an icon at the top of the day – you can either mouse over that to get a quick summary, or click it to bring up a web page with more information.
You can add web content events to your own calendar for weather forecasts, moon phases, and even Google doodles (those special-occasion logos you sometimes see on Google.com). Now you can be the first to know when there's a new one!
Developers can also create their own web content event calendars to share. We think this opens a whole new world for interesting calendar content, and we're excited to see what people will come up with. For more on how to create one, take a look at these tips for getting started.
How long is 8 years in Internet time?
This week we celebrate Google's 8th birthday, and I hope you like the commemorative logo that appears on today's homepage:
Having worked at Google for 6 years, I've been lucky enough to design our birthday images (and a lot of other doodles). I hope you enjoy reading the candles. :)
Our approach to content
The Internet has broken down many of the barriers that exist between people and information –- effectively democratizing access to human knowledge. By typing just a few keywords into a computer you can learn about almost any subject. Google is one of many organizations that work to make this possible.
But today only a fraction of the world’s information is available online. Our aim to help organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful means working with a lot of information – newspaper articles (many written over a century ago), books (of which there are millions), images, videos (including all of the new footage users are creating), websites, important financial information and much, much more.
Because we don’t own this content, over the years we’ve come up with three primary principles to ensure that we respect content owners and protect their rights:
- we respect copyright;
- we let owners choose whether we index their content in our products;
- we try to bring benefit back to content owners by partnering with them.
There are many legal rights that help protect content. Among the most important is copyright. Content creators deserve to be rewarded for their creative work -- and copyright law is fundamental to ensuring that as well as fostering future creativity. While protecting the rights of owners, those laws also encourage others to make use of content in limited ways. That's why newspapers are allowed to include short quotations from in-copyright books in their reviews. That's also why search engines can show snippets (small excerpts) of text in their results. Copyright owners benefit from these types of usage because they help to publicize their works.
Google News is a good example of how Google protects copyright in practice. We index the content of thousands of news sources online. When users go to Google News, they see only headlines, snippets and image thumbnails from the relevant news articles. If people want to read the story, they must click through links in our results to the original website.
Google Book Search is another example. We're digitizing and indexing millions of books as part of our effort to make these works as easily found as web sites are today. Some of these books are in the public domain. For those, we will show the full text of the book. Other books are in copyright. For these we show only bibliographic information and a few snippets of text, unless we have the owners’ prior permission to show more.
There are also times when, in addition to securing permission, we pay for greater use of content. For example, we've agreed to pay the Associated Press (AP) for the right to make new uses of its news content – uses that go beyond the limited uses permitted by copyright laws. This use of AP’s content will make our services even more valuable. We also license content from third parties for several other Google services such as Google Earth Google Finance and Google Maps.
Letting content owners choose
Even if use of their work would be perfectly legal, we respect the wishes of content owners. For example, if a content owner asks us to remove his or her content from our web search results, we do. If a newspaper does not want to be part of Google News, we take the paper’s stories out. And if publishers would prefer not to have their books included in Google Book Search, we honor their request. It’s simple: we always allow content owners to opt out – quickly and easily.
Of course, some people argue that we should be asking content owners to opt in, not requiring them to opt out. Google aims to provide comprehensive search results. This would be impossible in a world where permission simply to index (which is entirely legal) was necessary. But we also believe that opt-out rather than opt-in benefits not just Google users, but also content owners. If content isn't indexed it can't be searched. And if it can't be searched, how can it be found? Imagine a library with no index of titles or subjects of the books on its shelves, or no catalogue of the authors who wrote them.
Benefitting content owners
There are around one billion people online today -- all of them wanting access to information. We partner with publishers, news organizations and others to help them to reach a wider global audience. By enabling people to discover information, Google drives web traffic, customer queries, advertising revenues and sales to our partners, both online and offline.
Take our AdSense advertising program. We display ads on thousands of partners’ websites – and we let them keep the majority of the revenue generated. The same is true for our Book Search publisher partners – they keep the lion’s share of the advertising on the books they include in our program. And Google Video helps media companies generate revenues in a number of different ways. They can upload their videos and share them freely with millions of users globally, generating awareness for their content – and some may sell their videos through our online store. We also place ads within videos on Google Video and throughout our AdSense network through a new product called Adsense for Video -- and as with AdSense and Book Search, we share the money with the content owner.
And we have other initiatives to help our partners sell their content. In Google News, we work with some companies whose content is only available via subscription. We index their content and then when people click on their story we link them to the site where they can purchase the individual story, login if they are a subscriber, or subscribe to the paper. And we recently added a feature to Google News which enables searchers to find historical articles, many of which are only available from the owner for a fee.
Protecting content owners’ rights, respecting their wishes, helping to reward them for their creative endeavors – these are the primary principles that guide Google’s approach. We believe it’s the best way to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful.
Towards a more efficient computing infrastructure
Intel CTO Justin Rattner was kind enough to invite me on stage today during his R&D keynote at the Intel Developers' Forum to talk about some of the computing platform challenges we face in building large-scale Internet services. Talking to industrial colleagues and the academic community about some of our most important platform-level requirements is something I always make time for. If you're trying to build interesting systems, life is easier when hardware vendors are aware of what works for you and what doesn't.
Chip multiprocessing -- the idea that multiple simpler processing units in one chip can be a better choice than a single hulking one -- is an example of a technology we've been vocal supporters of for quite a while. See for example "Web Search for a Planet" and "Price of Performance." We're happy to see this thinking being embraced by several vendors.
The focus of our message at IDF today was efficiency: power efficiency and programming efficiency. There are several hard technical problems surrounding power efficiency of computers, but we've found one that is actually not particularly challenging and could have a huge impact on the energy used by home computers and low-end servers: increasing power supply efficiency. All computers, including personal computers and servers, have power supplies to convert the alternating current (AC) from the outlet to the direct current (DC) needed by the machine. Typical power supplies waste 30-45% of their input power, and relatively simple modifications can bring this waste down to 10%. Others, like 80 PLUS, have also identified and targeted these inefficiencies. We believe that the development of a new open standard is necessary to achieve very high efficiencies at low costs, so we have begun discussions with Intel and other vendors that we hope might lead to significantly more efficient power supplies. Here's a short white paper describing this in more detail (PDF). If you'd like us to keep you posted on our progress, please send us a note at efficient-psu@google.com.
Programming for systems with many computers can be a daunting task, but one that our engineers have to face every day. Simplifying this task has a direct impact on programmer productivity, and consequently the rate of innovation. Software tools such as MapReduce have been very successful at Google by making it easier to process huge amounts of data quickly by spreading it over many computers. However, the efficiency of the computation can still suffer because of the limitations of the underlying computer platform. For example, programmers only have two major storage options that are widely available: memory (DRAM, specifically) and disk drives. Latency of disk accesses is about 100,000 times slower than memory, while memory is approximately 200 times more expensive (per gigabyte) than disks. These two alternatives are so far apart that programmers are forced to choose from two extremes, making some computations very difficult. I suggested to the IDF audience that there might be an opportunity for intermediate solutions in this space, faster than disks but cheaper than memory. Some forms of FLASH memory might soon be possible solutions, for example.
It's always rewarding to exchange notes with our friends in industry and academia, whether through participation in events or by publishing papers. I expect we'll continue to do that.
Google Notebook improvements
Four months back Google Notebook launched, enabling you to collect and organize information as you find your way through the Wild West. Since then, we've gotten a ton of great feedback and learned what features you'd love to have -- and we've put that feedback into action. For starters, you can now collaborate on a notebook with fellow notebookers (of course, you can still share your published version with the entire world if you want to).
There are many other great features, like a much slicker drag-and-drop UI to let you organize better, a trash bin for all your deleted items, and the ability to undo your last action. And we realize a lot of you wanted to see your notebooks on your personalized homepage. Now you can, through the Google Notebook module for your Personalized Homepage. Add it to get quick access to your notebook, either for that upcoming trip to Bora Bora or your "to-do" list.
If you haven't tried Google Notebook yet, we bet you'll love it. And as always, we would love to hear your comments, because that helps us make it even better.
About the Google News case in Belgium
You may have read recently about Google being taken to court in Belgium. Whilst we aren't allowed to comment on the judgment itself, we thought you may want to know the facts of the case -- what actually happened, and when -- and the issues it raises.
In August Google was sued by an organization called Copiepresse, which represents a number of newspapers in Belgium. It argued that our search engine and news site breached these publications’ copyright.
In September a court ruled in favor of Copiepresse and ordered us to remove these publishers’ content from both Google. be and Google News. We did this within the time specified. The court also required Google to post its ruling to the home pages of Google.be and Google News Belgium.
Last week we asked the court to reconsider its decision and requested that the requirement to post the ruling on our home pages be suspended. The court on Friday 22nd September agreed to reconsider its ruling in November this year, but maintained the requirement that we must post the initial judgment to our home pages for five days or face a fine of 500,000 Euros a day.
As the case will be heard in November, we can only offer general comments on the larger issues it raises at the moment. Any legal discussion must be pursued in court. Nevertheless we do feel that this case raises important and complex issues. It goes to the heart of how search engines work: showing snippets of text and linking users to the websites where the information resides is what makes them so useful. And after all, it’s not just users that benefit from these links but publishers do too -- because we drive huge amounts of web traffic to their sites.
Of course, if publishers don’t want their websites to appear in search results (most do) the robots.txt standard (something that webmasters understand) enables them to prevent automatically the indexing of their content. It's nearly universally accepted and honoured by all reputable search engines.
Google News is no different than Google web search in this regard: We only ever show the headlines and a bit of text. If people want to read the entire story they have to click through to the newspaper’s website. And if a newspaper does not want to be part of Google News we remove their content from our index –- all they have to do is ask.
We hope that this explanation helps, and will keep you posted about any developments.
Our call from space
Today Anousheh Ansari, the first female private space explorer, called the Googleplex from the International Space Station. (We're nervously awaiting the long-distance bill.) Larry Page took the call. The topics ranged from what Anousheh forgot to pack (her husband!) to her hopes for the future of space exploration. I took notes. Here are some highlights:
What was the most fun in space?
Flying from one end of the Space Station to the other. She's gotten so good that she can nearly make it all the way without hitting any walls.
What was the biggest surprise?
Seeing the Earth rotate for the first time. Every time Anousheh wants to remind herself that she's really in space, she looks out the window, watches the Earth rotating, and pinches herself to make sure she's still awake.
Larry (wistfully): When can we come up to join you?
You'll have to come up one at a time. In any case, construction is speeding up on the International Space Station, so tourists will probably be fewer for the time being. She hopes Larry can improve the food; although the cheese pasta is fun to chase, it's not much fun to eat. At least there are M&Ms.;
What would you change about the space station?
(Fast reply): "Add another shower!" And then - "Add Internet access!" (Wild cheering from Googlers.) Right now email is batched. Larry suggested that Anousheh plan that for her next trip -- and she shot back, "Actually, I'm planning my next trip!"
Do you have anything inspirational to say?
"Explore the boundaries. Try new things. Be free-thinkers and use your imaginations. Learn from your environment, your teachers, your books -- but then go beyond your knowledge. I always wanted to go to space, although I didn't wind up working for NASA. I detoured to different areas, but finally I found a way to make it happen."
After the call ended, Larry commented that Anousheh had been a visionary and an inspiration from the earliest days of the Ansari X Prize. To be inspired yourself, check out her blog.
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