Official Google Blog: 2008
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Every year right about now we round up our blogging activity across Google. Ready? Here goes.earlier-than-planned unveiling of Google Chrome . This post alone had 1,735,093 unique visitors and generated 12% of our total-year pageviews on the blog! There was also the much-anticipated announcement of the first Android-powered phone . And people enjoyed reading about our design philosophies . Who knew a little change to a favicon would generate such interest?shared their thoughts on how various technologies will evolve in the next 10 years.voting tools , how the political process works , and what was top of mind on Election Day. It's clear that technology will be playing an even bigger role in politics in years to come.Project Virgle ; we covered new ways to get around the Googleplex and the masterminding of a giant Ferris wheel ; and we raised our glass to a couple who got married with Google .Open Source blog is shining star, with 370,000 unique visitors since its start in February), and 22 new ads-related blogs, nearly half of which are in languages other than English (there are AdSense blogs in Traditional Chinese and Russian ; and AdWords blogs in Danish , German , Turkish , French , Russian , Korean , Swedish , Norwegian , Finnish , and Spanish ). There's even an Analytics blog in French . And we also welcomed three new regional blogs, for India , Africa , and the Ukraine . Sharing information with people wherever they are in whatever language they speak is a priority for us, and each of these new blogs helps us get a little bit closer to this goal. If the total number of Google blogs makes your head spin, don't worry. We've developed a new blog directory and gadget to help you more easily track news and updates from us.Posted by Susan Straccia, Google Blog Team
The holidays are a time for giving, and Googlers across the globe have found some creative ways to give back to their communities this season. From raising money and crafting greeting cards to building gingerbread houses and giving blood, Googlers from east to west have been busy spreading good cheer. We've highlighted just a few of these efforts here, and we're looking forward to many more opportunities to give back in the new year.London Mexico City US , the UK , and Australia , inviting kids K-12 to submit a homepage doodle inspired by a particular theme. This year Mexico held its first such contest (theme: "the Mexico we want"). For each doodle submitted, Google donated to a non-profit that works to eradicate childhood malnutrition in Mexico. In total, more than 70,000 kilos (154,000 pounds) of food and aid were donated. Winner, Ana Karen Villagómez, was recently recognized in a ceremony in Mexico City; her doodle (pictured below) will appear on the Google homepage on January 6.Boston and beyond Posted by Eileen Duffy and Sarah Falck, AdWords Account Associates
When I look back on four years of tracking Old St. Nick on Christmas Eve, I can't help but smile. The Santa tracker has really come a long way. I always thought NORAD's Santa Tracker was a great holiday tradition , but I felt like it could have been even better if people could visualize exactly where Santa was on Christmas Eve. So in 2004, shortly after Keyhole was acquired by Google, we followed Santa in the "Keyhole Earth Viewer" — Google Earth's original name — and we called it the "Keyhole Santa Radar." The audience was relatively small since Keyhole was still a for-pay service at that point, and we hosted everything on a single machine shared with the Keyhole Community BBS server. We probably should have had three separate servers to host the Santa tracker — that first year, we had only a portion of a single machine. That night, about 25,000 people kept tabs on Santa and, needless to say, wreaked some havoc on our servers!SketchUp , a 3D modeling software that enabled us to include models of Santa's North Pole workshop and sleigh. We also incorporated a tracking feed directly from NORAD's headquarters, and we were now displaying NORAD's information in Google Earth. That year, more than a million people tracked Santa.www.noradsanta.org . In addition to tracking Santa in Google Earth, we added a Google Maps tracker and integrated YouTube videos into the journey as well. Now, we had Santa on the map and on "Santa Cam" arriving in several different locations around the world, with commentary in six different languages. The heavy traffic — several millions of users — put Google's infrastructure to the test, but with some heroic work by our system reliability engineers, the Santa Tracker worked continuously.Panoramio will be viewable in Google Maps for each of Santa's stops that don't include video. We've also included a few new ways to track Santa. With Google Maps for mobile, anyone can keep tabs on him from their mobile phones (just activate GMM and search for "norad santa"). You can also receive updates from "Bitz the Elf" on Twitter by following @noradsanta . And of course, be sure to visit www.noradsanta.org tomorrow morning starting at 6:00 am EST when Santa's journey begins. Enjoy, and see you in 2009!Posted by Brian McClendon, Original Google Engineering Elf
Many of us use Google Image Search to find imagery of people, clip art for presentations, diagrams for reports, and of course symbols and patterns for artistic inspiration. Unfortunately, searching for the perfect image can be challenging if the search results match the meaning of your query but aren't in a style that's useful to you. So some time ago we launched face search, which lets you limit your search results to only images containing faces (see a search without and with this option). More recently we also rolled out photo search, which limits results to images that contain photographic elements, ignoring many cartoons and drawings which may not be useful to you (see a search without and with this option).Photo content Clip art Line drawing Advanced Image Search page. The good news: no extra typing! In all these examples our query remained exactly the same, we just restricted our results to different visual styles. So whether you're interested holiday wreaths , Celtic patterns , or office clip art , it just became a lot easier to find the images you're looking for.Posted by Sean O'Malley, Software Engineer, Google Image Search
We believe great ideas can come from anywhere and everyone. And we aspire to be an organization that reflects global diversity, because we know that a world's worth of perspectives, ideas and cultures leads to the creation of better products and services. We have more than a dozen employee-driven resource groups, from Gayglers to GWE (Google Women Engineers), that actively participate around the world in building community and driving policy at Google. This is the next post in our Interface series , which takes a look at valuing people's similarities and differences in the workplace. For more information on how Google fosters an inclusive work environment, visit Life at Google on our Jobs site. – Ed. St. Bernard Project , learning everything from how to lay flooring to installing drywall as we worked on three homes. Additionally, we joined a strategy session with The Idea Village , helping them kick off their newest initiative, the 504ward Project . The opportunity to serve the community in such a meaningful way while getting to know BGN members was unique. We each put our minds, bodies, and souls into the city and the experience.United Negro College Fund's annual Walk-a-thon in Oakland, CA. Our Google-UNCF partnership also includes an annual scholarship for college students pursing a degree in engineering or computer science, and we're continuing to explore different ways to support and encourage underrepresented students.Posted by Alexa Bush, University Programs Team
Back in September we introduced an iGoogle gadget that makes it possible to read recent posts from all of our corporate blogs, right on your dashboard. With the help of developer Ben Lisbakken, we're ready to roll out the next version of the gadget , which translates posts into 34 languages. Using Google Translate , the gadget gives people all over the world access to posts they might otherwise be unable to read. The default setting translates posts into the language in which your browser is set, but you can also choose from any of our supported languages by going into the "Edit" setting (found in the "Menu" arrow in the right-hand corner). If you want to learn more about Google in Latin America or AdWords in Russia , for example, but haven't had the chance to learn Spanish or Russian, give the gadget a spin. While machine translation is not exact, and we're constantly working to improve the quality, hopefully this new feature lets you get the gist of the post.Posted by Jordan Newman, Google Blog Team
This guest post was written by Kathy Kleiman , who discovered the ENIAC Programmers 20 years ago and founded the ENIAC Programmers Project to record their stories and produce the first feature documentary about their work. More at www.eniacprogrammers.org . – Ed. "For many years in the computing industry, the hardware was it, the software was considered an auxiliary thing." – Jean Bartik Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) were forgotten, and their role in programming the first all-electronic programmable computer and creating the software industry lost. But this fall, old met young, and a great computer pioneer met today's Internet pioneers. It happened in Silicon Valley and it happened at Google.Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View honored Jean Bartik with its Fellows Award. This lifetime achievement award recognized her work as a programmer of the ENIAC and leader of the team to convert ENIAC to a stored program machine.Bob Metcalfe and Linus Torvalds . The next night, Bartik returned to CHM to discuss her life story in An Evening with Jean Jennings Bartik, ENIAC Pioneer . More than 400 people attended. They laughed at Bartik's descriptions of the ENIAC Programmers' exploits and enjoyed her stories of “Technical Camelot,” Bartik's description of her days at Eckert and Mauchly Computer Corporation in the 1950s. This video captures the evening:website provides more information about the documentary, WWII-era pictures and an opportunity to help change history. The stories Bartik shared with Googlers that day belong to the world.Posted by Kathy Kleiman, Founder, ENIAC Programmers Project
A few months back, we announced some pretty big upgrades to Picasa and Picasa Web Albums for English-speaking users in the U.S. On the PC side, we rolled out a brand-new version of Picasa , with a slew of new tools like effortless web sync, movie editing, and photo-retouching capabilities. On the web, we launched "name tags ," a new feature that automatically helps organize your photo collection based on who's in each of your pictures.download Picasa 3.1 or opt in to name tags on Picasa Web Albums.Explore page attest to this, as do the multilingual comments users receive on their most popular public albums. That's why we just launched automatic comment translation on Picasa Web Albums, which harnesses Google Translate to make sure you know that "美麗的落日" means "Beautiful sunset !"improved sharing to better video playback . Swing by the Google Photos blog to learn more about what's new.Picasa Web Albums and see for yourself!)Posted by Jason Cook, Product Marketing Manager
(Cross-posted from the Google SketchUp Blog ) SketchUp modeling challenge ever: the first annual Google SketchUp Gingerbread House Design Competition. To make it a little easier to design the gingerbread house of your dreams, I modeled a blank house to get you started. Go ahead and download it from the 3D Warehouse, then follow the instructions in the file.selection of decorations (candy canes, gumdrops, wafer roof tiles) that you can use to spiff up your model. Of course, you're welcome to do anything you like; it's your masterpiece. When you're finished, don't forget to label your gingerbread house with the tag "gingerbread2009" and upload it to the 3D Warehouse. The competition deadline is January 4th at midnight, Pacific Standard Time.SketchUpdate about a week after the competition closes on January 4th. 1st, 2nd and 3rd place – for the best overall gingerbread houses in the collection The 'Sprinkles' Prize – for the best additions to the base model (the crazier, the better) The 'Swirl' Prize – for the best use of Dynamic Components in the model The 'Sweet-tooth' Prize – for the most creative use of a single candy ingredient in a model Santa's sleigh last year. Have fun, and happy holidays.Posted by Aidan Chopra, Product Evangelist
(Cross-posted from the Google Public Policy Blog ) tried to define what we at Google mean when we talk about the concept of net neutrality.edge caching . However, they shouldn't be able to leverage their unilateral control over consumers' broadband connections to hamper user choice, competition, and innovation. Our commitment to that principle of net neutrality remains as strong as ever.last summer , this myth -- which unfortunately underlies a confused story in Monday's Wall Street Journal -- is based on a misunderstanding of the way in which the open Internet works.Edge caching is a common practice used by ISPs and application and content providers in order to improve the end user experience. Companies like Akamai , Limelight , and Amazon's Cloudfront provide local caching services, and broadband providers typically utilize caching as part of what are known as content distribution networks (CDNs). Google and many other Internet companies also deploy servers of their own around the world.Google Global Cache -- are non-exclusive, meaning any other entity could employ similar arrangements. Also, none of them require (or encourage) that Google traffic be treated with higher priority than other traffic. In contrast, if broadband providers were to leverage their unilateral control over consumers' connections and offer colocation or caching services in an anti-competitive fashion, that would threaten the open Internet and the innovation it enables.Journal story, I want to be perfectly clear about one thing: Google remains strongly committed to the principle of net neutrality, and we will continue to work with policymakers in the years ahead to keep the Internet free and open.P.S.: The Journal story also quoted me as characterizing President-elect Obama's net neutrality policies as "much less specific than they were before." For what it's worth, I don't recall making such a comment, and it seems especially odd given that President-elect Obama's supportive stance on network neutrality hasn't changed at all.Update: Larry Lessig , Save the Internet , Public Knowledge , David Isenberg , Wired and others all found fault with today's piece too.Posted by Richard Whitt, Washington Telecom and Media Counsel
We know many of you enjoy using Twitter to see what people are talking about and to let others know what you've been up to, whether it's sharing a YouTube video or checking in on your friend's tweets. To help you and your Twitter network stay connected no matter where you are on the web, we're excited to announce that Google Friend Connect has integrated with Twitter. This means that when you join a friend connected site, you can choose to use your Twitter profile, discover people you follow on Twitter who are also members of the site, and quickly tweet that you have found a cool website.Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager
Since we first released Google Chrome , the development team has been hard at work improving the stability and overall performance of the browser. In just 100 days, we have reached more than 10 million active users around the world (on all seven continents, no less) and released 14 updates to the product. We're excited to announce that with today's fifteenth release we are taking off the "beta" label!Better stability and performance of plug-ins (particularly video). Video and audio glitches were among the most common bugs fixed during the beta period. If you had problems watching videos with Google Chrome in the past, you should be pleasantly surprised with the performance now.Even more speed. Google Chrome starts up fast, loads pages quickly, and just keeps getting faster. Since the first beta, the V8 JavaScript engine runs 1.4 times faster on the SunSpider benchmark and 1.5 times faster on the V8 benchmark — and there is more speed to come.Bookmark manager and privacy controls. We heard you! Better bookmark features were a top request from our users. It's now easier to switch between another browser and Google Chrome with the bookmark import and export features, and we added a new simple way to manage large numbers of bookmarks, too. We also wanted to make it even easier for you to control your browsing data, so all of the features in Google Chrome which affect user privacy are now grouped in one place with detailed explanations for each one .unique sandbox technology creates an additional layer of defense against harmful software, while the Safe Browsing feature provides protection against phishing and malware attacks for many browser users.extensions platform along with support for Mac and Linux. If you are already using Google Chrome, the update system ensures that you get the latest bug fixes and security patches, so you will get the newest version automatically in the next few days. If you haven't used Google Chrome for a while, now might be a good time to give it another spin.Download Google Chrome and try it out. Let us know what you think .Posted by By Sundar Pichai, VP, Product Management, and Linus Upson, Engineering Director
(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog ) Abuse and Safety Center than at the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI ) conference in Washington, D.C., today.Help and Safety Tool , which lets you report concerns to us and gives you granular control over your channel, like the option of blocking comments from specific users or disabling the video comments feature on specific videos.page for more information about our presence at the conference, where Shantal Rands from Google's legal team will receive a FOSI Award for Outstanding Achievement in advancing the goal of a safer Internet. Plus, Andrew McLaughlin, Google's Director of Global Policy & Government Affairs, is speaking about "Protecting Kids and Free Speech Online," and YouTube's Policy Analyst Micah Schaffer will address online safety in social media.Posted by The YouTube Team
In the spirit of holiday giving, we've partnered with nonprofit organizations to create themes that showcase the change they are helping to create. WithiGoogle Themes for Causes , you can show your support for the cause that inspires you most by adding that theme to your iGoogle page.Heifer International , Oxfam America , Ashoka , Doctors without Borders , Save the Children , charity:water , and Conservation International — just to name a few. We're honored to help these organizations increase their reach by making their themes available to the millions of iGoogle users around the world who care about the great work they're doing.Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience, and Michaela Prescott, Senior Product Marketing Manager
Google's users are intrinsically curious. Why else would you search? And, since we at Google are pretty curious ourselves, we wondered which of our users' queries might be truly global and which may be unique to certain cultures. This is why, for the first time, our annual Year-End Zeitgeist features search data from more than 30 countries.sensation on YouTube , and the comedian who originally performed it is touring again!Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience
With just 22 days left in the year, I can't help but think back to where Street View was at the beginning of 2008. At that time, we had imagery for 23 cities in the United States, and we had just released embeddable panoramas . Although Street View was still in its infancy, we were excited about the user feedback we had gotten and the creative uses we were seeing.beaches of Florida to the snowy peaks in Alaska — and many spots in between. In March, we brought you the first national park in Street View and have since added nearly a dozen others. We've even come across some pretty quirky sights along the way, like a giant rocking chair .(before)
(after)
imagery of the Tour de France route , and kept rolling from there. After starting the year with just one country, we now have seven — France, Japan, Australia, Spain, Italy, New Zealand, and the U.S. — letting you see some of the world's most famous attractions and landmarks, ranging from the Eiffel Tower to Shibuya, Tokyo to the Pantheon .View Larger Map added to the Google Maps API . This has led to an amazing array of uses, ranging from simplifying the real estate search to creating adventure games to showing bike paths . We also integrated Street View into our own driving directions, making it easier for you to explore the real world when you finish your virtual sightseeing. And just two weeks ago, we unveiled a substantial overhaul to the Street View experience , making it much easier to access and explore imagery (and hopefully a little more fun, too).first to Google Earth , allowing you to view ground-level imagery alongside all the rich Google Earth content, and in the past few months, to a wide range of mobile devices so that the imagery is close at hand while you're out on the streets.Lat Long blog , you'll find a collection of impressive images from today's launch. And keep Street View in mind during the holiday season. Whether you're looking for a good hill to sled on, want to preview hotels for a ski trip, or need some visual cues for your directions to a holiday party, Street View can help!Posted by Stephen Chau, Product Manager
The word "magazine" is derived from the Arabic word "makhazin," meaning storehouse. Since Daniel Defoe published the world's first English magazine back in 1704, millions of magazines catering to nearly every imaginable taste have been created and consumed, passed from person to person in cafes, barber shops, libraries, and homes around the world. If you're wondering what cars people drove in the eighties or what was in fashion thirty years ago, there's a good chance that you'll find that answer in a magazine. Yet few magazine archives are currently available online.New York Magazine , Popular Mechanics , and Ebony . Are you a baseball history fanatic? Try a search for [hank aaron pursuing babe ruth's record ] on Google Book Search. You'll find a link to a 1973 Ebony article about Hank Aaron, written as he closed in on Babe Ruth's original record for career home runs. You can read the article in full color and in its original context, just as you would in the printed magazine. Scroll back a few pages, for example, and you'll find a two-page spread on 1973's fall fashions . If you'd like to read further, you can click on "Browse all issues " to view issues from across the decades.Popular Science , New York Magazine , or (for you physics enthusiasts) the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists , to rediscoverhistorical interviews , do-it-yourself articles , and even a piece on canine eyewear . In many cases, these magazines aren't just history as history, but history as perspective — a way of understanding today.obama keynote convention ], [hollywood brat pack ] or [world's most challenging crossword ] and you'll find magazine articles alongside books results. Magazine articles are tagged with the keyword "Magazine" on the search snippet.books , newspapers , or images . We think that bringing more magazines online is one more important step toward our long-standing goal of providing access to all the world's information.Posted by Dave Foulser, Software Engineer
The rivalry has become a social phenomenon, from YouTube videos condemning pirates' accents to movies predicting the outcome of a final showdown, and games that let you decide who's the mightiest. The clash comes to a head twice a year: Talk Like a Pirate Day on September 19th, and the Day of the Ninja on December 5th.searching in pirate in time for the rum-filled celebrations. But when we sat down to brainstorm how one might search in ninja, we had a challenge. As far as we know, ninjas communicate telepathically -- and sadly, our search algorithm isn't quite there yet.ninjas are there
ninjas are everywhere
ninjas are better
ninjas are awesome
ninjas are sexy
Insights for Search tool.
We're pleased to share that Google Friend Connect is now available in beta to any webmaster looking to add a "dash of social" to his or her site. This service lets webmasters add social features to their sites by simply copying and pasting a few snippets of code — no advanced coding or technical background required. preview release in May , and since then we have been working closely with a handful of website owners, social networks, and application developers to improve its speed and scalability, ease of use, and customization capabilities. We've also expanded the features available to users with richer, more integrated profiles and new ways to discuss and share content, like including YouTube videos in your comments.www.google.com/friendconnect .Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager
Healthcare professionals have always focused on reducing costs while still increasing the quality of the care they provide to patients — and this kind of efficiency becomes even more important in challenging economic times.webinar scheduled for Wednesday, December 10, at 10:00 am PT.Google Health , which empowers patients to securely organize and manage their health information online. For the full lineup of topics that will be covered, check out our post on the Enterprise blog .Posted by Sundar Raghavan, Google Enterprise Team
The holidays are upon us, and there's much to do: Gifts to be wrapped, lights to be strung, candles to be lit, and a long list of tasks at the home and the office. A little creativity can come in handy at this time of year. You can save time and money with the Google Docs template gallery for documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Whether you're a small business owner or the chief holiday organizer, the gallery includes a few special templates designed to help you spread a little holiday cheer. Here are a few tips to help you get everything done on time:survey form to update your mailing list...holiday postcard .mailing labels to save time when sending packages...festive gift tags to personalize gifts.video card to send friends and colleagues warm wishes or to thank customers for their business.main template gallery (it's worth a look!). Click the "Holiday" category to see just the holiday templates , or you can tab through to filter results by product. Pick the design you like and edit it for your needs. And you can always find help at the Google Docs Help Center .Enterprise Blog , along with other hints and tips to keep your workplace humming all through the year.Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps Elf
YouTube is offering musicians around the globe the opportunity to join a symphony orchestra via video through the world's first collaborative online orchestra. This is a chance to perform alongside world-renowned conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, learn from composer Tan Dun and many members of the London Symphony Orchestra, and consult with pianist Lang Lang. All video entries will be combined into the first-ever collaborative virtual performance, and people around the world will select their favorites to perform at New York's Carnegie Hall in April 2009.YouTube Symphony Orchestra channel and the YouTube Blog .Posted by The YouTube Team
The end of the year is a wonderful time to reflect, celebrate, and look forward to new things to come. This is also a season when things tend to get a bit too hectic. So we wanted to share some tips that we hope will help make the best of your holidays and year-end celebrations.Google's Countdown to 2009 daily and add a countdown gadget to your iGoogle page.Posted by Anita Yuen, Group Product Marketing Manager
I remember when I was 8 years old standing in the middle of our living room, gazing at our Christmas tree. I dared not blink, fearing that the twinkling tinsel, gleaming lights, and the pile of festively wrapped gifts would all be gone when I opened my eyes again. Once I finally hopped into bed, still wide-awake and staring at the ceiling, I listened to every gust of wind, every creak of the rafters, wondering if Santa had landed on our roof. “Where is Santa now?” I thought. “When will he be here?” Eventually, sheer mental exhaustion ushered me off to sleep.NORAD , the North American Aerospace Defense Command, to bring you the NORAD Santa Tracker.www.noradsanta.org , the official NORAD Tracks Santa website.(Visit www.noradsanta.org for more information.) Posted by Jeffery Martin, Geo Product Marketing Manager, child at heart
Today is Cyber Monday and we know many of you have holiday shopping on your mind. If you're not sure what to buy for that special someone, or if you're looking for ways to save on your holiday purchases, Google Product Search and Google Checkout can help.special site that brings these holiday savings and gift ideas together in one place. Enjoy your seasonal shopping!Posted by Jessica Ng, Google Product Search Team and Anita Barci, Google Checkout Team
What is the first thing that most people associate with Thanksgiving? Well, probably turkey, but pumpkin pie comes in a close second. As I am not a fan of the traditional pumpkin pie, I set out on a quest to find a delicious alternative this year. My search led me to a robust cookbook sitting on my kitchen shelves. Sheri Yard's Desserts by the Yard is an amazing compilation of a pastry chef's career spanning from coast to coast. What I found in that book turned out to be the most fluffy, decadent, flaky, scrumptious pie I have ever tasted. And apparently my officemates liked it just as much -- the triple silken pumpkin pie and I took home first place in last week's bake-off at our New York office ! So if you're looking for a holiday-perfect pie, I encourage you to try out the recipe (PDF file). It takes a little time to make, but it's so worth it.Posted by Kayla Wilson, Recruiting Coordinator
At Google we are fanatical about organizing the world's information. As a result, we spend a lot of time finding better ways to sort information using MapReduce , a key component of our software infrastructure that allows us to run multiple processes simultaneously. MapReduce is a perfect solution for many of the computations we run daily, due in large part to its simplicity, applicability to a wide range of real-world computing tasks, and natural translation to highly scalable distributed implementations that harness the power of thousands of computers.standard terabyte (TB) sort benchmark . Standardized experiments help us understand and compare the benefits of various technologies and also add a competitive spirit. You can think of it as an Olympic event for computations. By pushing the boundaries of these types of programs, we learn about the limitations of current technologies as well as the lessons useful in designing next generation computing platforms. This, in turn, should help everyone have faster access to higher-quality information.Google File System as 10 billion 100-byte records in uncompressed text files) on 1,000 computers in 68 seconds. By comparison, the previous 1TB sorting record is 209 seconds on 910 computers.archived web data in the U.S. Library of Congress as of May 2008. In comparison, consider that the aggregate size of data processed by all instances of MapReduce at Google was on average 20PB per day in January 2008 .Technology RoundTable Series .Posted by Grzegorz Czajkowski, Systems Infrastructure Team
In previous posts in this series , you have read about the challenges of building a world-class search engine. Our goal is to make Google’s search be relevant to all people, regardless of their language or country. As my colleague Amit Singhal described , we use statistical data as the basis for making sweeping algorithmic changes. Many of these changes can be rolled out across all languages we support, but in some cases the unique characteristics of each language require some algorithmic considerations and tuning. And to make things really interesting, there are cases where the same language is different across countries. Obvious examples are "color" in the U.S. vs. "colour" in the U.K., or "camião" in Portugal vs. "caminhão" in Brazil.Parliament of Tanzania to train our system with the language's nuances. Having a trained language model helps to categorize documents during crawling and indexing of the web and to parse the user's query. Once this stage was complete, we launched Swahili search in countries such as Tanzania and Kenya , enabling local searches for the "Dar es Salaam stock exchange" [Soko la hisa dar es salaam ], and "cure for Malaria" [Tiba ya malaria ]. (As always, we are using square brackets to denote a search query. For example, you can search for "soccer" in Hamburg, Germany by clicking on [fußball in hamburg ]).Spell corrections : We recently launched spell corrections in Estonian. If your Estonian is rusty, and you don't remember how to spell "smoke detector," we can suggest a spell correction for [suitsuantur ], leading to better search results.Diacritical marks : Many languages have diacritical marks, which alter pronunciation. Our algorithms are built to support them, and even help users who mis-type or completely ignore them. For example, if you're a resident of Quebec, Canada and would like to know the weather forecast in Quebec City, we'll serve good results whether you type with diacritical signs [Météo à Québec ] or without [meteo quebec ]. Czech users can read the same excellent results for a popular kids' cartoon by searching for [krtecek ] and [krteček ]. On the other hand, sometimes diacriticals change the meaning of the word and we have to use them correctly. For example, in Thai, [ข้าว ] is "rice," with completely different results than [ข่าว ], which is "news"; or in Slovakia, results for "child" [dieťa ] are different than results for "diet" [diéta ].Synonyms : A general case of diacritical support is the handling of synonyms in different languages. Korean searches showed that "samsung" can be viewed as a synonym of "삼성", so that when users search for [samsung ], they find results which have the company's name in Korean. Compounding : Some languages allow compounding, which is the formation of new words by combining together existing words. You can see a nice example in Swedish, where we return documents about a Swedish credit card for both compounded [Visakort ] and non-compounded [visa kort ] queries. Stemming : Google has developed morphological models that can receive compound words as queries, and return pages which contain their stem, possibly as part of a different compound. For example, when searching for cars in Saudi Arabia, you can search for [سيارة ] and [سيارات ] because both are variants of the same stem, and both return many common results. A Polish user can search for "movie" [film ], and get back results that contain other variants of the stem, such as "filmów," "filmu," "filmie," "filmy." A user from Belarus will find results for all word forms of the capital, Minsk [Мінск ]: "Мінску," "Мінска," "Мінскага." רה"מ ]; in Thai — a dot at the end of the word, as in police station [สน. ]; while in the U.S. — dots after each character, as in [I.B.M. ]. Chinese users quote works of art with a "《", as in: [《手机》剧情 ], and denote dates with a "日", as in: [2006年1月13日 ].hgsuv ] corrected to [السعر ]) and ([حقثسهيثىفهشم ثممثؤفهخىس ] corrected to [presidential elections ]), Hebrew ([vdrk, kuyu ] corrected to [הגרלת לוטו ]), and Cyrillic ([rehc ljkffhf ] corrected to [курс доллара ]).biskvitnyi rulet ] to [бисквитный рулет ]), "movies" in Chinese ([dianying ] to [电影 ]), and "Bank of Attica" in Greek [trapeza attikhs ] returns good results for "Τράπεζα Αττικής". Users of 8 Indic languages (such as Hindi, Gujarati, Telugu) can type the phonetic sound of the query, and choose the words in Hindi script:category browsing by Images and related searches so that people don't need to type as much. Similarly, we are now launching Google Suggest, or real-time completion of queries , in many languages.Peru , Mexico , and Spain . Similar to that, searching for [Côte d'Or] in France will return results for that region, whereas searches in Belgium will return results about the chocolate maker.inč u milimetrima ], or for Italian users who are interested in currency exchange rates [50 euro in dollari ]. Similarly, temperatures in Norway [Været i Oslo ] will be displayed in Celsius, while in the U.S. — in Fahrenheit [weather Boston ].blog post . We will translate your query to English, search English documents on the web, and translate the returned results from English back into the original query language. For example, Japanese users who are interested in viewing Halloween illustrations (Halloween is a holiday which originated in Ireland) can search for [ハロウィン イラスト ]. You can then request a Japanese translation of the English pages (at the bottom of the page), which will bring up the translation page in the screenshot below. Similarly, Korean users can search for the latest on Harry Potter [해리 포터 ], and Arabic readers can search for the opening of the Sydney Opera house [افتتاح دار الاوبرا في سيدني ]. (Click on the image to see a larger version.)(Update: Replaced example in the 4th bullet point.)Posted by Daphne Dembo, Engineering Director
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