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Behind the scenes of the Search Options panel
May 14, 2009
On Tuesday, we announced
Search Options
, which are a collection of tools that let you slice and dice your results and generate different views to find what you need faster and easier.
We know that people search for a wide variety of things and we're continually thinking of new search features to help them find information more quickly and easily. The idea for the Search Options panel originated as a way to accommodate the functionality offered by these new features within the search results page. While it might seem like the panel was simple to put together, a lot of collaboration between design, research, and engineering happened behind the scenes in order to produce the best experience possible.
The team began by generating a broad range of directions, which we refined through design sessions and reviews. Confident about a handful of concepts, we began to seek out user feedback using
eye-tracking
and
usability studies
. These studies provided us with valuable feedback about how people understood the options in the panel and interacted with them.
Here's an example of an eye-tracking path that illustrates how a participant wanted to get a sense of the quality of the results before deciding what search option to apply:
After each study, we iterated on the designs, making changes to everything from the order and behavior of the options, to the location of the panel and the way people opened and closed it. We also paid close attention to the visual design of the options panel. We wanted it to feel familiar –- not only to work the way you expect from Google, but to look and feel like Google, too. Even though you just started using the panel, we hope it will seem as if it were there all along.
Below, you can see some of our initial concepts for the Search Options panel:
And here are examples of various iterations, once we had a firm concept in mind:
Once the designs were further solidified, we ran a number of tests with a small portion of our live searches to see how many visitors used the Search Options panel and which options were most popular. This quantitative research complemented qualitative feedback to give us a more complete idea of people’s understanding of Search Options. This process brought us to what you see today.
Even now that the Search Options panel has launched, the work is not over. We’ll continue to monitor how people interact with Google Search, find ways to improve the user experience, listen to
your feedback
, come up with new tools, and, who knows, maybe even add more wonder to the wonder wheel.
Posted by Jen Kozenski Devins, Jamie Divine, Melanie Kellar, and Marcin Wichary, User Experience Team
Bike to Work Day 2009
May 14, 2009
Almost every Friday, I jump on my bike in San Francisco and ride roughly 45 miles to get to work at the
Google campus
in Mountain View — it takes about 3 hours. Most people think I'm crazy, but seeing the sun rise over the bay and feeling the rush of the air as I speed down
Cortland Hill
at close to 30mph on my bike makes it all worth it.
Today and tomorrow, Googlers in 42 offices from around the world are joining me in celebrating
Bike to Work Day
. Google's participation in this national event began in 2003 with only a handful of participants. Through the years, the tradition has grown from a purely local event to one that involves numerous offices in competition to get the longest distance biked, the most bikers, and the greatest percentage of an office participating.
More than 500 Googlers in the San Francisco Bay Area participated, jumping on their bikes and leaving traffic behind. The benefits to us are clear; not only is biking great for health and fitness, but it also spares the earth a day of pollution.
To see us in action, check out the photo album below.
Posted by Debbie Leight, Product Marketing Manager
This is your pilot speaking. Now, about that holding pattern...
May 14, 2009
Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That's basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.
An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We've been working hard to make our services ultrafast and "always on," so it's especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We're very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we'll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won't happen again. All planes are back on schedule now.
Posted by Urs Hoelzle, SVP, Operations
Understanding health-related searches
May 13, 2009
As we
blogged last summer
, there are lots of experiments running on Google web search all over the world. Today we've started a temporary experiment that some people might find interesting: we're researching how Google users search the Internet when they or someone they know is feeling sick.
Understanding how people search when they're feeling sick is an important problem to solve, as it can help improve projects like
Google Flu Trends
, which uses aggregated search data to detect influenza epidemics. Statistics gathered in this experiment may also help Google deliver more relevant search results in the future. For example, someone who searches for [arthritis pain] to understand why an aging parent is experiencing joint pain might want to learn about nearby health facilities and potential treatments, whereas somebody who searches for [arthritis pain] because she is doing a research project might want results about how common arthritis is and what its risk factors are. Rather than make educated guesses about how many users are searching because they're sick, we're running this experiment to collect real statistics. This is not a permanent change, but a short-term experiment. A small percentage of random health-related searches will trigger the poll question.
For example, at the bottom of the search results for [headache], some users will see a survey which asks whether they were searching because they or someone they know has a headache:
Similarly, if you happen to search for [ibuprofen], a common anti-inflammatory drug, you might see a survey which asks whether you were searching because you or somebody you know is taking ibuprofen:
Data collected in this survey will be aggregated across thousands of users. Survey responses will be stored together with the original search query, but will not be associated with email addresses or other personally identifiable information. Survey data will not be used for advertising — it will only be used to help Google improve health-related search results and to help refine public health trends based on aggregated search queries, much like Google Flu Trends. You can learn more about how Google protects users' privacy at our
Privacy Center
.
For more information, please take a look at our
FAQ
.
Posted by Roni Zeiger, MD, Product Manager and Jeremy Ginsberg, Software Engineer
30,000 new Google Apps business users at Valeo
May 13, 2009
Since Gmail launched in 2004 with, what was at the time, an unprecedented 1GB of storage per person, we've been focused on continuously improving the email experience with things like fast search to find messages quickly,
mobile support
,
offline access
and integrated IM, and
voice and video chat
. Gmail was really the beginning of how we're rethinking personal and group productivity, and over the last couple of years, business adoption has accelerated rapidly as the hosted suite has emerged as a powerful, affordable successor to on-premises business technology.
Today, more than a million businesses have moved beyond traditional software and hardware to cloud computing – where data and applications live online – and they're using the Google Apps suite not just for Gmail, but also for shared calendaring, collaborating on files without attachments, private video sharing and quickly deployable internal and external sites. IT managers are refocusing the money and time saved towards core projects that help their individual businesses become more competitive.
Today we're thrilled to share news about another exciting partnership:
Valeo is deploying Google Apps
to the company's entire office-based workforce.
This marks a significant moment for Google Apps, because Valeo has 30,000 Internet-connected employees, making this one of the largest enterprise deployments of Google Apps to date. Valeo is moving to the cloud with the support of Capgemini, one of the world's most highly regarded technology advisory firms. This deployment across Valeo's distributed workforce of 192 business entities in 27 countries and five continents demonstrates the vast scalability of Google Apps. Whether your company has just five employees in a single room, or tens of thousands of people scattered around the globe, Google Apps can easily provide powerful messaging and collaboration tools.
If you help make technology decisions where you work, we invite you to
learn about Google Apps
and join the million businesses that have already become more productive by rethinking their approach to technology.
Posted by Laurent Guiraud, Google Enterprise
We have a Knol for Dummies.com winner!
May 12, 2009
Today, we're pleased to announce that the winner of our
Knol for Dummies.com contest
is "
How to talk to your doctor
" by
Dr. Jennifer Frank
, whose knol about "getting the most out of a short-but-sweet office visit" was selected for its quality, clarity, and usefulness. It will be
featured on Dummies.com
, and she will receive $1,000.
You can read Dr. Frank's knol
here
. Dr. Frank's tips on are just the type of authoritative content that makes great knols.
Congratulations also go to the four finalists, who will also be featured on Dummies.com:
How to Calibrate Lag in Guitar Hero
by
Tom Nolan
How to Make the Best Barbecue Ribs Ever
by
Craig "Meathead" Goldwyn
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Getting a Grant (But Were Afraid to Ask)
by
Rita Hubbard
How to Make Great Coffee
by
Stephen Buchwalter
and
Paivikki Buchwalter
Thanks to everyone who participated in the competition. We enjoyed learning how to do so many interesting things — from the importance of being nice to the staff at your doctor's office to the difference between spare ribs and babyback ribs — and hope knol readers did too.
Posted by Matt Ghering, Product Marketing Manager, Knol
A planetarium in your pocket
May 12, 2009
At today's
Searchology event
we were pleased to launch Google Sky Map for Android. Google Sky Map turns your Android-powered mobile phone into a dynamic window on the night sky. When you point your phone upwards you will see a map of the brightest stars, constellations and planets in that part of the sky. The next time you see a bright star and want to know what it's called, Sky Map can help you identify it.
Whether you are an aspiring astronomer or just want to impress your date, download Sky Map from the Android Market. For more information watch the video below or visit the
Lat Long Blog
.
Posted by John Taylor, Software Engineer
More Search Options and other updates from our Searchology event
May 12, 2009
Today we are hosting our second Searchology event, to update our users, partners, and customers on the progress we have made in search and tell them about new features. Our first Searchology was two years ago, when we were excited to
launch Universal Search
, a feature that blended results of different types (web pages, images, videos, books, etc.) on the results page. Since then Universal Search has grown quite a bit, adding new types of results, expanding to new countries, and triggering on ten times as many queries as it did when we launched it.
But as people get more sophisticated at search they are coming to us to solve more complex problems. To stay on top of this, we have spent a lot of time looking at how we can better understand the wide range of information that's on the web and quickly connect people to just the nuggets they need at that moment. We want to help our users find more useful information, and do more useful things with it.
Our first announcement today is a new set of features that we call Search Options, which are a collection of tools that let you slice and dice your results and generate different views to find what you need faster and easier. Search Options helps solve a problem that can be vexing: what query should I ask?
Let's say you are looking for forum discussions about a specific product, but are most interested in ones that have taken place more recently. That's not an easy query to formulate, but with Search Options you can search for the product's name, apply the option to filter out anything but forum sites, and then apply an option to only see results from the past week. Just last week, at our Shareholders' Meeting, I had a woman ask me why she couldn't organize her results by time, with the most recent information appearing first. "Come back Tuesday," I wanted to say!
The Search Options panel also gives you the ability to view your results in new ways. One view gives you more information about each result, including images as well as text, while others let you explore and iterate your search in different ways.
Check out a video tour here:
We think of the Search Options panel as a tool belt that gives you new ways to interact with Google Search, and we plan to fill it with more innovative and useful features in the future.
Another challenging problem we have worked on is better understanding the information you get back from a search. When you see your results from a Google search, how do you decide which one has the best information for you? Or, how can we help you make the best decision about where to click?
We call the set of information we return with each result a "snippet," and today we are announcing that some of our snippets are going to get richer. These "rich snippets" extract and show more useful information from web pages than the preview text that you are used to seeing. For example, if you are thinking of
trying out a new restaurant
and are searching for reviews, rich snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the restaurant's price range:
In this example, you can quickly see that the Drooling Dog Bar B Q has gotten lots of positive reviews, and if you want to see what other people have said about the restaurant, clicking this result is a good choice.
We can't provide these snippets on our own, so we hope that web publishers will help us by adopting
microformats
or
RDFa
standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface. This will help people better understand the information you have on your page so they can spend more time there and less on Google. We will be rolling this feature out gradually to ensure that the quality of Google's search results stays high. If you are a webmaster and are interested in participating, visit the
rich snippets help page
to learn more.
We also showed a preview of a new tool that we're calling Google Squared. Unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared doesn't find webpages about your topic — instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet. We'll be opening it up to users later this month on Google Labs.
These features really explore search from a broad and entirely new perspective. Because we realize that when you can't quickly find just the exact information or content you need or want, it's our problem, not yours. And it's a problem with plenty of room left for innovation. Stay tuned.
Posted by Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, and Jack Menzel, Group Product Manager
18th International World Wide Web Conference
May 11, 2009
The 18th International
World Wide Web Conference
(WWW 2009) was recently held in Madrid. This is the forum in which Larry and Sergey
introduced the "Google" search engine
back in 1998. Conferences like WWW are highly beneficial for all attendees, as they provide a forum for constructive interactions and discussions among the diverse, global community that is contributing so much to the advancement of the web. As one of the major sponsors this year, Google contributed significantly in various scientific and social forums. Here's a short report of those activities:
Google and the Prado Museum collaboration
:
In January 2009, we announced a
collaboration
between
Google Earth
and Spain’s
Museo del Prado
, which lets people zoom in on some of the gallery’s main portraits and view them in a resolution so fine -- up to 14,000 megapixels -- that even individual brush strokes and cracks in the varnish are clearly visible. The Prado Museum has become the first art gallery in the world to provide access to and navigation of its collection in Google Earth. The initiative includes 14 of the Prado’s most famous paintings -- works by Francisco de Goya, Diego Velázquez, Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Paul Rubens, and more. Such ultra-high resolution imaging, enabling users to virtually feel, see and be present with the original masterpieces, is just one way in which the web can make important contributions to the art community. To celebrate this, Google hosted an event at the Prado Museum, where guests received a guided tour of some of the main exhibits, and had the opportunity to network with fellow researchers, academics and engineers, as well as Google's own
Vint Cerf
.
Research Contributions:
Google contributed to the WWW conference by authoring or co-authoring several papers and presentations. I gave a keynote speech on
The Continuing Metamorphosis of the web
(you can read more about that topic on the
Google Research blog
). Some other papers to highlight are:
--
Sitemaps: Above and Beyond the Crawl of Duty
, Uri Schonfeld, N. Shivakumar
--
Estimating the ImpressionRank of Web Pages
, Z. Bar-Yossef & M. Gurevich
--
Detecting The Origin Of Text Segments Efficiently
, O. Abdel-Hamid, B. Behzadi, S. Christoph & M. Henzinger
--
What's Up CAPTCHA? A CAPTCHA Based On Image Orientation
, R. Gossweiler, M. Kamvar & S. Baluja
--
Computer and iPhones and Mobile Phones, oh my! A logs-based comparison of search users on different devices
, M. Kamvar, M. Keller, R. Patel, and Y. Xu
--
Collaborative Filterin for Orkut Communities: Discover of User Latent Behaviour
, W. Chen, J. Chu, J. Luan, H. Bai, Y. Wang, and E. Chang.
--
Fast Dynamic Reranking in Large Graphs
, P. Sarkar, A. Moore
--
WEB 2.0: Blind to an Accessible New World
, J. Hailpern, L.Guarino-Reid, R. Boardman, S. Annam
--
How Opinions are Received by Online Communities
: A Case Study on Amazon.com Helpfulness Votes, C. Danescu, G. Kossinets, J. Kleinberg, L. Lee
--
Bid Optimization for Broad Match Ad Auctions
, E. E. Dar, Y. Mansour, V. Mirrokni, M. Muthukrishnan & U. Nadav
--
General Auction Mechanism for Search Advertising
, G. Aggarwal, S. Muthukrishnan, D. Pal & M. Pal
Best Paper Award and the Internet Monetization Track:
The WWW program committee changed the best paper and poster process this year. They first chose several
nominated papers
from different tracks, and after seeking feedback from conference attendees, they chose their best paper: Ashish Goel's and Kamesh Munagala's
Hybrid Keyword Search Auctions
. The authors of this paper propose a unified approach to an auction for cost-per-click and cost-per-impression settings, and show promising properties of their proposed auction. The paper was presented in the Internet Monetization Track at WWW — a new track which, despite its short term at WWW, became very popular this year. Other tracks like web search, data mining, and the social web have been active at WWW for years and already attract many high-quality research papers. The best poster award went to a paper co-authored by Google's
Monika Henzinger
about
Purely URL-based Topic Classification
.
Before closing, I want to return to the Prado Museum collaboration with Google Earth: Now that there is really high resolution imaging and the ability to distribute it to a vast audience, the benefits of combining art and technology are greatly increased. In another medium, witness the success of the
Metropolitan Opera's high definition broadcasts
that are bringing that art form to a much larger audience. Another place where Google recently helped fuse technology and the arts was with the
YouTube Symphony Orchestra
. In the case of fine art, our collaboration with the Prado museum enables much broader access to the masterpieces while also providing museum attendees with an unparalleled opportunity to study details of the works before and after a visit. For example, the intense detail in
Bosch's
Garden of Earthly Delights
is difficult to comprehend in front of the large, heavily visited triptych, but seeing the painting in person after some previous study makes it far more exciting. So, it would seem that we can use technology in the art world to achieve benefits for all.
Posted by Alfred Spector, VP of Research and Special Initiatives
Energy and the Internet
May 11, 2009
There's been a lot of debate lately about the growing amount of energy needed to power the Internet, and we wanted to weigh in on the discussion. A few months ago, I first blogged about the about amount of
energy used in one Google search
. Our engineers crunched the numbers and found that an average query uses about 1 kJ of energy and emits about 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide. But those raw numbers don't really put the environmental impact of searching the Internet into perspective. To add some context, below is data about the C02 impact of some everyday activities and items compared to Google searching:
Activity
Google Searches
CO2 emissions of an average
daily newspaper
(PDF) (100% recycled paper)
850
A glass of
orange juice
1,050
One load of dishes in an
EnergyStar dishwasher
(PDF)
5,100
A five mile trip in the
average U.S. automobile
10,000
A
cheeseburger
15,000
Electricity consumed by the
average U.S. household
in one month
3,100,000
We work hard to provide our users with the fastest products using the least amount of energy. We have a team of dedicated engineers focused on designing and building the
most efficient data centers
in the world. In fact, through efficiency innovations, we have managed to cut energy usage in our data centers by over 50 percent, so we're using less than half the energy to run our data centers as the industry average. This efficiency means that in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will likely use more energy than we will use to answer your query.
And the energy used by computers is growing; people are more plugged-in today than ever before in history. There are more than one billion PCs and laptops currently in use, and that number is expected to grow to four billion by 2020. We've got cell phones, PDAs, iPods, and GPS devices — not to mention the data centers that store all of our digital information "in the cloud." The electricity needed to run all of our computers, gadgets, and gizmos is growing and now accounts
for half of all ICT emissions
. (ICT stands for "information and communications technology.")
Although the amount of energy used to power ICT is growing, it's important to measure all of the ways information technology helps us save energy too. A study by The Climate Group, in fact, shows that
ICT emissions pay for themselves
(PDF) (and then some) by enabling significant reductions in emissions by other sectors of the economy. After all, it's much more efficient to move electrons than to move atoms. "Virtual" tools like email, video-conferencing, and search engines replace more carbon-intensive activities like snail mail, business travel, and driving.
We can still make progress at improving computing efficiency across the industry, however, and Google is committed to doing so. In 2007 we co-founded the
Climate Savers Computing Initiative
, a non-profit organization committed to reducing global CO2 emissions from the operation of computers by 54 million tons a year by 2010. Check out their website for more information on how you can reduce the environmental impact of your own computer use.
Update 7/16/09:
Google's Q2 2009 data center efficiency measurements are now available
here
.
Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations
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