Five years of Google blogging

It's time again for our annual wrap-up of blogging at Google. You may have noticed 2009 marked our fifth year here on the Official Google Blog — our first post was in April 2004 — and it was our busiest year yet. This is our 423rd post of 2009 — a 15 percent increase over last year. We're also pleased to note that a total of 14,493,472 readers stopped by this year, a 21 percent increase. You hail from all over: more than half of visitors are outside of the U.S. The other top countries are (in order) U.K., India, Canada, Germany and France.

What captured your attention this year? Here are the top 10 posts of 2009, by unique pageviews:

1. Introducing the Google Chrome OS - 2,591,794 unique pageviews (more than 12 percent of the year's total). The announcement of our open source operating system received more than 4x the views of any other post.
2. Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave - 639,225. Wave-mania struck after we introduced a new product for collaboration and communication at our Google I/O conference.
3. Here comes Google Voice - 357,084. We released a preview of this application to help you better manage your voice communications.
4. "This site may harm your computer" on every search result?!?! - 320,435. A short-lived error affecting Google search results led to confusion and concern; this post cleared it up.
5. Email in Indian languages - 224,052. A transliteration feature in Gmail that makes it easier to type in Indian languages was a hit. More than one million readers of the blog in 2009 were from India — a 53 percent increase over 2008.
6. Releasing the Chromium OS open source project - 217,424. A few months after announcing our operating system project, we open-sourced it as Chromium OS.
7. Now you see it, now you don't - 165,329. We introduced a new, clean version of our classic homepage.
8. Google Apps is out of beta (yes, really) - 164,319. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk all lost their beta tags (in Gmail's case, after five years!).
9. Now S-U-P-E-R-sized! - 155,196. A "small" change increasing the size of the Google search box got a lot of attention.
10. Introducing Google Public DNS - 143,122. We launched our public DNS resolver, which converts domain names into unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers.

We also developed a few different series of posts this year: one on the power of measurement, for people who want to improve the performance of their websites; a weekly series focused on search; and another on the latest in the world of Google Apps.

As always, we had some fun in 2009, with grass-mowing goats and a panda-obsessed Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) on April Fools' Day. Our curiosity was piqued by Atlantis (or not) under the sea, constellations in Google Sky Map and a fresnel lens somewhere in between.

Finally, the Google Blog network continues to grow. This year, we welcomed blogs dedicated to Google Wave, Google New Zealand, Data Liberation, Google Voice, Google Arabia, Google Thailand, European Public Policy and Google Chrome — among others — to our blogging family.

Beyond the blogs, in February we jumped head-first into the Twitterverse, starting our @google account with a geeky tweet. Since then, we've tweeted more than 1,000 times, and are grateful to have gathered two million or so followers. That puts us in the company of @algore and @ashsimpsonwentz, and (today, at least) just 65,000 or so followers behind a certain @ladygaga (although we're pretty sure that gap is only going to grow — no way we can compete with her outfits). Around 75 other Google entities and teams have gotten into the Twitter act this year as well, so we built a directory to help you keep up with all the action. Twitter also was our biggest non-Google referrer to the blog in 2009, a clear sign of its rapid growth in popularity.

Thanks for sticking with us through all of our goings-on over the past 12 months. We look forward to having you back for more in 2010. In the meantime, happy New Year!

Posted by Emily Wood and Jordan Newman, Editors, Google Blog Team

Ordinary citizens, extraordinary videos

(Cross-posted from Citizentube and the YouTube Blog)

The images are grainy, often jerky and hard to follow (like most footage shot using hand-held cameras and cellphones), but the message is unmistakable: in the months since the disputed Iranian presidential election in June, the people of Iran have become fluent in the new language of citizen video reporting. What might have seemed an isolated moment immediately following the election, when we watched videos of Iranians marching, battling and even dying on the streets of Tehran, appears to have become an essential part of their struggle.

At YouTube, we have been watching week after week as new videos have appeared on the site within hours of every single protest or similar event reported from Iran in the past six months. Thousands of uploads have brought the fear and tension of these protests to YouTube, inviting millions of views around the world. It is as if the revolts that are taking place could not do so outside the eye of the camera.

Unlike traditional news footage from foreign correspondents (currently prohibited in Iran), these videos are the voice of the people — unfiltered, unedited and with a single, sometimes disturbing point of view. No professional film could capture the one-to-one feeling of watching an ordinary citizen's images of unrest in his or her own country.



We are constantly amazed by the videos our community uploads, whether from their own backyards or the streets of a faraway land. Armed with only a camera and a means to reach the Internet, anyone can ask another to bear witness to their lives. Given the nature of the YouTube videos from Iran, we may want to turn away from some of the images we see, but we keep watching, knowing that we are seeing through the eyes of a people who have discovered the power of information — despite the often extreme measures their government is using to try to stop them.

We will continue to provide the platform for you to see what they see, hear their voices and learn about their struggles. And we encourage you to join the global conversation. Leave a comment, upload your own response video or share a moving moment with someone else.

Posted by Olivia Ma, YouTube News and Politics

This week in search 12/25/09

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

Googlers are all about the holidays, and we're always delighted to bring some extra holiday cheer to the web. Here are some of this year's festive digital offerings for you.

Holiday Google doodles
As you likely noticed, the Google homepage has been adorned with a fun series of holiday postcards this week. From snowmen to festive palm trees, each doodle depicts a postcard with a fun seasonal scene. Did you miss any of them? Check out all five days at our holiday logo gallery.

NORAD tracks Santa
This week, in partnership with NORAD, we helped share the excitement of following Santa Claus's travels with Google Maps and the Google Earth plugin. At the NORAD Santa site, children have been following the jolly journey from chimney to chimney across the globe. Don't miss the fun YouTube video of Santa's trip last year, as well as some great holiday games to play, at NORADSanta.org.

From all of us at Google, have a safe and happy holiday season. We'll see you back here next year!

Posted by Andrew Schulte, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Now, Dasher! Now, Dancer! Track Santa and his sleigh with NORAD

Sipping warm cider, watching the snow fall, unwrapping gifts — these holiday traditions always seem to produce many of the year's sweetest memories. Several years ago, we added another holiday tradition to our list — helping NORAD keep tabs on Santa every Christmas Eve.

NORAD's Santa-tracking dates back to 1955, when a Sears and Roebuck magazine ad in Colorado Springs accidentally directed readers to call NORAD instead of the "Talk-to-Santa" hotline they were advertising. Embracing the holiday spirit, the folks at NORAD provided callers with Santa's location according to their radar and have tracked his journey ever since. Many years later, in 2004, the same holiday spirit inspired us to use Google Earth — it was called "Keyhole Earth Viewer" back then — to display Santa's voyage around the world on Christmas Eve. We hosted the entire tracker on a single machine and were excited to have an audience of 25,000 following St. Nick's flight with us that night.

Our scrappy Santa tracker has come a long way since 2004. We added "Santa-cam" videos for select locations around the world, 3D SketchUp models of Santa's sleigh and his North Pole home, the official feed of Santa's location from NORAD headquarters and several other improvements. With more technical resources to support this richer experience, and the wonderful efforts of our Santa-tracking team, 2008 was the biggest year ever for NORAD Tracks Santa — more than eight million people tuned in to track Santa last Christmas Eve.



As soon as he returned to North Pole last year, Santa and his elves began planning for his 2009 flight — and we were no different. We thought hard about the different ways we could improve the Santa tracker and after a year of planning, we think this year's will be the best one yet. As usual, we'll display Santa's location, according to NORAD, in Google Maps and Google Earth at www.noradsanta.org. But we've made a few improvements to make tracking Santa even easier. Namely, we'll display Santa's journey with the Google Earth plug-in, directly on the NORAD Tracks Santa site, instead of using the Google Earth client. As a result, you'll be able to follow Santa in Google Earth's immersive, 3D environment directly within your web browser. For more information about the plugin and why we chose to use this tool to track Santa, have a look at our post on the Google Geo Developers Blog.

We're also excited about the many different ways you can keep track of Santa's location this Christmas Eve. Like last year, Santa will be trackable by visiting m.noradsanta.org on a mobile device, or searching for "Santa" on Google Maps for Mobile, available for most mobile phones (read more on the Google Mobile Blog). Santa's location will also be updated on Twitter with @noradsanta and you can keep up with news about Santa's flight with our real-time search feature.

To track Santa, visit www.noradsanta.org starting at 2am ET on Christmas Eve. There, you'll see a Google Map that will display Santa's location over the course of the day. To visualize Santa in Google Earth, just click "Track Santa in Google Earth" and you'll see St. Nick flying through Google Earth in your browser. If you don't have the Earth plug-in, click here — it will be installed automatically when you download Google Earth 5.1.

We hope you enjoy tracking Santa with us this year. And on behalf of everyone at Google — happy holidays and have a happy new year!

Posted by Brian McClendon, VP Engineering and Bruno Bowden, Senior Software Engineer

Unofficial tech support returns home for the holidays

Whenever I go home to visit my parents, I always assume a handful of new roles — I become the after-dinner dishwasher, the family chauffeur, and appropriately, my parents' personal tech support. As I go home for the holidays this week, I'll likely be asked to help fix the webcam that "used to be there" or make the font size "so I can see it again." I'll also perform a few regular maintenance tasks that my parents don't even know to ask about, such as running a virus scan, uninstalling unused applications and upgrading their software to the latest versions.

I know this phenomenon isn't unique to just my family. If you're unofficial tech support for family this holiday season like I am, one of the things you'll want to consider is checking that your family is using the latest version of their browser. Why? For me, an up-to-date browser makes a huge difference: not only so that my parents can get to what they need when they're on the web, quickly and easily — whether they're writing email, viewing photo albums online, reading cross-stitching blogs or checking the weather in Chicago — but also so that I can rest assured that they'll be browsing the web more safely and securely with the latest version of the browser with security updates. (More selfishly, a new or up-to-date browser would also make their computer notably faster when I'm visiting home and using their machine!)

Most browsers have released major updates over the past year, and to ensure your family is getting the most speed and security out of their web experience, you can help your family upgrade to the latest version of Google Chrome, Firefox 3.5, Opera 10, Safari 4, or Internet Explorer 8 — just to name a few modern browsers. Moreover, teaching your family what a web browser is and how to update it can help your family keep themselves up-to-date throughout the year. The browser is perhaps the most important piece of software on our computers, as we depend on it to get to the websites and web applications we use every day.

You can also check out Google Pack, a collection of free Google and third-party software that's ready to use in just a few clicks. From anti-virus software to keep a computer more secure and voice applications like Skype to help you keep in touch once you leave, to Google applications like Google Earth (where you can track Santa over Christmas), Google Pack's applications help your family get the most out of their computer.

Happy holidays, one and all — and happy trails on the web!

Posted by Jeffrey Chang, Associate Product Manager, Google Chrome Team

Google Checkout for Non-Profits in 2010

Over the past couple of years, Google Checkout for Non-Profits has helped thousands of organizations collect millions of dollars in donations to support various causes. Today we’re pleased to announce that we’ll be extending free donation processing until 2011 for those non-profits who are also members of our Google Grants program. All other non-profits can continue to process donations according to Checkout's standard fee structure. To find out more and to learn about an experiment we did on suggested donation amounts, please read our post on the Google Checkout Blog.

Posted by Prem Ramaswami, Product Manager and Patrick Moor, Software Engineer

This week in search 12/18/09

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

For Google, the quality of search has always been about getting you the exact, most relevant answer you were looking for in the shortest amount of time -- what we call "time-to-result." These notions of relevance and speed have been baked into our product development and are always a top priority for us. Every day we work through design, observations, and analytics to make sure that the Google you use today is better than the Google you used yesterday. In fact, at any given time we're conducting between 50 and 200 search experiments, all of which are focused on getting you the exact result you're looking for -- faster. And, given that 20% of Google search queries are ones we haven't seen in the past 90 days, and there are well over 300 billion web pages to crawl, you can imagine the extent of that challenge!

With 2009 coming to a close (not to mention the first decade of the millennium), now is a good time to look back over the evolution of time-to-result with a nod towards what's to come in 2010 and beyond.

In the beginning of the decade, many of us were like student drivers: we used search to navigate the web feeling apprehensive and deliberate with navigation (the excruciating wait times with dial-up modems didn't make it easy either!) Since then, we've all learned how to search better and faster, especially as the web has developed and diversified over time. As more and different types of information came online, we searched for it -- news, video, books, and maps became part of our daily search diet. Today, the majority of Internet users have become experienced web warriors, armed with broadband access, faster computers, and blazing fast browsers, and the time it takes to get the perfect search result has increasingly become more and more important. As a result, Internet usage behavior across the web has shifted -- and not just on Google. Recently, for example, Akamai published a study which found that Internet users in 2009 expect web pages to load twice as fast as they did in 2006. This expectation of latency is not limited to web page load time. Research firm Tubemogul found that more than 81 percent of all online video viewers click away if they encounter a video that's rebuffering. Speed matters now more than ever -- we don't have the time or tolerance to wait.

Our own years of testing have conclusively shown that when speed of a feature or product improves, usage, quite simply, goes up. During the early development of Google Maps for mobile, we went with compressed tiles over uncompressed map tiles, a difference barely perceptible to the human eye. The compression resulted in two to three times the increase in speed, and ultimately doubled usage of maps. But it's not just about actual latency -- it's also about perceived latency. During the development of Google News, which is quite a dynamic and complicated page, we broke the results page into smaller blocks of HTML, appearing above and below the fold. This smart tabling dramatically improves the way you perceive the page's load time. Although Google News takes about 8 seconds to fully load due to the richness of the page, the results you first see above the fold are there nearly instantly, thus altering that perception of latency.

So, it's clear speed and latency enhancements are an important focus for us, especially since they make the experience you have with our products much more useful and enjoyable. Above all else, we care about getting you an answer as fast as possible, and we do this through not only improving our search results but also by working with the web community to speed up the entire web. 2009 brought some incredible advancements that are worth noting.

In 2009, our "under the hood" infrastructure focus became more pronounced, as we kicked off our Make the Web Faster campaign. Our goal has been simple, to make the web browsing experience as fast as turning the pages of a magazine. To help increase browsing speeds, we released projects such as Page Speed to help webmasters optimize their sites, and Google Public DNS, to help people obtain faster, safer, and more valid DNS results.​ Finally, we started work on SPDY, pronounced "SPeeDY" -- a new protocol designed to minimize latency. The notion of these "under the hood" improvements are vital to building a faster web. But what about the relevance and comprehensiveness of the actual "result" aspect of time-to-result?

Early this year, we saw a lot of evidence that people are getting much more sophisticated in their searching, asking Google to solve harder problems (for example, by making longer and more complex queries). For this reason, in 2009 alone we have released many improvements: nearly 500 ranking changes; well over 100 UI changes; tripled how much you see in local universal results; brought personalized search to all users; and tripled the frequency with which you see images when you enter a query. To better help you choose from the results we improved the way that we summarize the results by dynamically varying the length of the description, creating jump-to shortcuts that take you straight to the relevant section of a page, and displaying the site hierarchy to inform you of the context of the page within the website. To save time and keystrokes, we now show you universal search features in Suggest; try searching for for weather, currency conversions, or flight status. This dramatically improves your ability to benefit from previous queries, getting you answers more quickly and easily than ever before. And just last week, we brought speed to a whole new level with realtime search -- so that you can find information that is literally just seconds old.

As these "time-to-result" efforts continue to emerge in 2010, we'll keep pushing the envelope on indexing speed, accuracy, and comprehensiveness. And that means you can expect the search experience to get more social, more personal, more interactive, and more ubiquitous -- getting you the information you're exactly looking for when and where you need it. Ultimately, the faster you get what you're looking for, the more enriched your life will be, and that makes us very happy. So what's the ultimate goal in the future? Allowing only a single barrier to instantly getting you the search result you're looking for -- the speed of light.

Here's to a great 2009, and an even greater 2010 in search!

Posted by Jack Menzel, Group Product Manager, Search

Tips and tricks for deploying Google Apps

Has your company, school or organization decided to "go Google" — but not yet fully "gone?" Perhaps you'd like more guidance on the technical, marketing or training details? Or maybe you could use some resources to help you deploy? Making the decision to go Google can be the easiest part, but we realize that it sometimes takes a little boost to finish the process, which is where we come in.

Our Google Apps Deployment team has assisted hundreds of organizations — large and small — make the switch to Google Apps. To ensure that your implementation is a success, we've developed step-by-step tools to guide you through the process, and best practices to make your transition as smooth and easy as possible. Here are some of the resources you can explore when going Google:

Sign up for a Deployment Training Webinar. In this live session, a deployment specialist will walk you through the deployment planning steps and use cases.

Take advantage of our deployment guides, which include creative examples and templates, to help with your technical and marketing rollout:

• For enterprises
• For small/medium businesses
• For schools

Recently, we also launched two learning sites to jump start your transition to Google Apps: the customizable Google Enterprise Launch Site for large enterprises and the Apps Learning Center for small businesses. You can find out more about these Google site templates in the Enterprise Deployment Site.

To find answers to your technical questions about Google Apps, visit the Administrator Help Center. We also provide overviews and videos for integration and migration tools, including Microsoft Outlook Sync, Google Blackberry Enterprise Server Connector and Lotus Notes Migration.

We hope these resources help with your move to Google Apps, and we can't wait to welcome you to the Google Apps family.

Posted by Cindy Chin, Google Apps Deployment Specialist

Carbon offsets at Google

As leaders from around the world meet in Copenhagen to address global climate change this month, we thought it was a good time to reflect on our own carbon footprint. In 2007, we committed to become a carbon neutral company. We know that it isn't possible to write a check and eliminate the environmental impact of our operations. So what does “carbon neutrality” mean to us?

First, we aggressively pursue reductions in our energy consumption through energy efficiency, innovative infrastructure design and operations and on-site renewable energy. Our Google designed data centers use half the energy of typical facilities. We're also working to accelerate the development of economic, clean renewable energy at scale through research and development, investment and policy outreach. At this time, however, such efforts don't cover our entire carbon footprint. Therefore, since 2007 we've gone a step further and made a voluntary commitment to buy carbon offsets to cover the portion of our footprint that we cannot yet eliminate — which is what we mean by "carbon neutrality."

So what exactly is a carbon offset? The idea behind an offset is that we pay someone to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in a specific, measurable way, thus offseting an equal climate impact on our side. To determine our impact, we calculate our annual carbon footprint, which is then verified by an independent third party. We include direct energy consumption (like natural gas) and electricity use, employee commuting, company vehicle use, business travel and estimates of carbon emissions from building construction and from the manufacturing of servers used in our datacenters. We then buy an equivalent number of carbon offsets.

While carbon offsets seem simple in principle, in practice they are surprisingly complicated. In particular, it's often difficult to say whether or not the offset project results in emissions reductions that would have happened anyway. We find ourselves asking whether the project in fact goes beyond "business as usual." In the world of offsets, this concept is referred to as "additionality." Carbon offsets have a mixed reputation because some projects are not additional. Here at Google, we have set a very high bar to ensure that our investment makes an actual difference in reducing greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing offsets that are real, verifiable, permanent and additional.

To date, we have selected high quality carbon offsets from around the world that reduce greenhouse gas emissions — ranging from landfill gas projects in Caldwell County, NC, and Steuben County, NY, to animal-waste management systems in Mexico and Brazil. Our funding helps make it possible for equipment to be installed that captures and destroys the methane gas produced as the waste decomposes. Methane, the primary component in natural gas, is a significant contributor to global warming. We chose to focus on landfill and agricultural methane reduction projects because methane's impact on warming is very well understood, it's easy to measure how much methane is captured and the capture wouldn't happen without our financing (for the projects we're investing in, they couldn't make enough money selling the gas).

We need fundamental changes to global energy and transportation infrastructure to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions over the long term. In the meantime, the projects to which we contribute offer measurable emissions reductions and allow us to take responsibility for our carbon footprint. To that end, we're always looking for good emissions-reduction projects to support. If you have a landfill gas or agricultural methane carbon offset project you think we should consider, please visit this page for more information about how to participate in our latest carbon-offset procurement round.

Posted by Alice Ryan, Green Energy Project Manager

Translate Google Sites with one click

Google brought translation features to many of our products in 2009, including Google Docs and Gmail and we're happy to add one more before the New Year. To make it easier for people around the globe to read the site you created with Google Sites, we've integrated with the Google Translate Element. Now, whenever someone visits a Google Site in another language, they will be given the option to translate the content into the language of their choice. All they have to do is click on the translate link at the bottom right-hand side of the page. Now, the content on your site can be translated into 51 languages, allowing you to reach a whole new audience. Check out this before and after for a Korean school's website below (or try it out for yourself).

Before

After

We hope this feature helps expand your Google site's reach to more people.

Posted by Michael Cheng, Software Engineer, Google Sites

Transliteration goes global

Most of us use a keyboard to enter text; it's one of the most basic activities we perform on a computer. However even this simple activity can be cumbersome in many parts of the world. If you've ever tried to type in a non-Roman script using a Roman keyboard, you know that it can be difficult to do. Many of us at Google's Bangalore office experienced this problem firsthand. Roman keyboards are the norm in India, making it difficult to type in Indian languages. We decided to tackle this problem by making it very easy to type phonetically using Roman characters and we launched this service as Google Transliteration.

Using Google Transliteration you can convert Roman characters to their phonetic equivalent in your language. Note that this is not the same as translation — it's the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other. For example, typing "hamesha" transliterates into Hindi as: , typing "salaam" transliterates into Persian as: and typing "spasibo" transliterates into Russian as . Since our initial launch for a single Indian language, we've been hard at work on improving quality, adding more languages and new features.

Today we are pleased to introduce a new and improved version of Google Transliteration, available in Google Labs or at http://www.google.com/transliterate.

In this new version, you can select from one of seventeen supported languages: Arabic, Bengali, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. You can also compose richly formatted text and look up word definitions with our dictionary integration. If the default transliteration is not the word you wanted, you can highlight it to see a list of alternatives. For even finer-grained control, we provide a unicode character picker to allow character-by-character composition.

Google Transliteration is integrated into several Google properties and we have an API and bookmarklets to extend this capability to other websites. A solution we initially built to solve a problem we saw here in India is now being used in many other parts of the world as well - one small example of the scale and leverage that technology can bring in today's increasingly globalized environment. As with all labs products, we will continue to improve the technology and try out new features. We would love to hear from you, so do let us know what you think.

Posted by Nilesh Tathawadekar and Mohammed Aslam, Software Engineers

Browser Size: a tool to see how others view your website

In a newspaper, the most important story is featured on the front page. If it's a really important piece, then it's placed "above the fold," which means you can find it on the top half of the first page — the bottom half is folded behind and isn't readily seen when you first look at the newspaper.

The same concept applies to browsers as well. There's no clear line for "above the fold" on a browser — there are many different sizes of monitors, browsers are not always full screen and other things like toolbars can take up space. Consider a "Donate" button on a non-profit site. If it's far down the page, you may not see it when you first view the page. You can of course scroll downwards, but many people don't scroll and will miss it entirely. For example, on the download page for Google Earth, the install rate increased by 10% when we moved the "Download" button 100 pixels upward. We can attribute that increase to users who wanted to try out Google Earth, but didn't see the button before.

To help you understand how everyone sees your website, we created a tool called Browser Size in our 20% time. Browser Size is based on a sample of data from visitors to google.com. Special code collects data on the height and width of the browser for a sample of users. For a given point in the browser, the tool will tell you what percentage of users can see it. For example, if an important button is in the 80% region it means that 20% of users have to scroll in order to see it. If you're a web designer, you can use Browser Size to redesign your page to minimize scrolling and make sure that the important parts of the page are always prominent to your audience. We hope people will use this tool to make their websites better, in turn making the web better for everyone.


If you're interested in learning more about Browser Size, check out our post on the Google Code Blog.

Posted by Bruno Bowden, Senior Software Engineer

More great news sources to discover in Fast Flip

Three months ago, we launched Google Fast Flip, a service that seeks to make reading articles online as fast and simple as flipping through a magazine or newspaper. It's still early in this experiment, which is why Fast Flip remains in Google Labs. But so far our initial thesis has held up: If you make it easier to read news online, people will read more of it. Users have told us they like being able to browse content so quickly, and we've been pleased with the amount of time they have spent reading articles in Fast Flip.

We've also received good feedback from the three dozen publishers who joined us for the launch, as well as a lot of interest from others. Today, we're excited to be adding articles from another two dozen publishers representing more than 50 newspapers, magazines, web outlets, news wires and TV and radio broadcasters. Some of the new sources include Tribune Co. newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, McClatchy Company newspapers such as the Miami Herald and the Kansas City Star, the Huffington Post, Popular Science, Reuters, Public Radio International, POLITICO and U.S. News & World Report. Now you can use Fast Flip to engage with content from even more of your favorite news outlets in an innovative way, and continue to explore topics covered by a diverse group of sources. And, through the mobile version, you can flip through all these new articles on your Android-powered device or iPhone.

While we're encouraged by the positive feedback about Fast Flip, it's just one of many experiments you'll see us try in partnership with news publishers. Our goal is to work with the industry to help it continue to innovate and build bigger audiences, better engage those audiences and generate more revenue. We're looking forward to innovating and iterating with all these new partners in Fast Flip. And if you have more suggestions for ways we can improve Fast Flip, please let us know.

Posted by Jack Hebert, Software Engineer

What you watched and searched for on YouTube in 2009

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

This year has been the biggest yet for online video, and for the first time we're sharing our official Most Watched lists and some of the fastest-rising search terms on YouTube. Some moments were big (President Obama's inauguration), some small (a Minnesota wedding party erupts into dance), some expected ("New Moon"), some surprising (Susan Boyle) — but all of them inspired, entertained and connected millions of people around the world via YouTube.

For these lists, we looked at view counts of YouTube's most popular videos (in some instances we aggregated views across multiple versions of the same video):

Most Watched YouTube videos (Global):
1. Susan Boyle - Britain's Got Talent (120+ million views)
2. David After Dentist (37+ million views)
3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views)
4. New Moon Movie Trailer (31+ million views)
5. Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views)

Most Watched music videos on YouTube (Global)*:
1. Pitbull - I Know You Want Me (82+ million views)
2. Miley Cyrus - The Climb (64+ million views)
3. Miley Cyrus - Party In The U.S.A. (54+ million views)
4. The Lonely Island - I'm On A Boat (48+ million views)
5. Keri Hilson - Knock You Down (35+ million views)

Then, to determine the fastest rising search terms for each month, we examined the billions of queries that people searched for on YouTube (through December 15):

Fastest Rising YouTube search terms by month (Global):
January: inauguration
February: christian bale
March: the climb
April: susan boyle
May: pacquiao vs hatton
June: michael jackson thriller
July: michael jackson
August: usain bolt
September: kanye west
October: paranormal activity
November: bad romance
December: tiger woods

Fastest Rising YouTube search terms by month (U.S.):
January: obama inauguration
February: on a boat
March: watchmen
April: susan boyle
May: pacquiao
June: michael jackson thriller
July: wedding
August: send it on
September: kanye west
October: paranormal activity
November: adam lambert
December: tiger woods

There are a lot of interesting nuggets in here. The fastest rising U.S. search term in July was [wedding], clearly related to JK Wedding Entrance Dance, the third Most Watched YouTube video of the year. And while [michael jackson] was Google's fastest rising search term in 2009, [michael jackson thriller] was the faster rising search on YouTube. Movie trailers ("New Moon," "Watchmen," "Paranormal Activity") and inspirational moments (Susan Boyle, Usain Bolt) were popular, as were sensational celebrity scandals (Christian Bale, Kanye West, and most recently, Tiger Woods).

We hope to expand these lists in the future, so if there are any "Most Watched" categories you'd like to see in 2010, let us know by leaving a comment on the YouTube Blog.

*Note: Some music videos may be unavailable in your country due to copyright restrictions.

Posted by Jamie Davidson, Associate Product Manager

Live on YouTube: Leaders answer your questions in the CNN/YouTube Climate Debate

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

Today, at 8 a.m. ET, a panel of world climate leaders, among them former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and journalist Thomas Friedman, will gather in Copenhagen and answer the top questions that you submitted to the CNN/YouTube Climate Debate channel.

You can watch them address the issues that matter to you in real-time: We'll be live-streaming the debate at www.youtube.com/cop15.

Thank you for making this event truly international. We received thousands of questions from Italy to Brazil, Nigeria to New Zealand. To get a scope of just how many countries are represented, see this map, which depicts global submissions through a Google Earth layer.

And if you didn't have a chance to submit a question, but still want to raise your voice about climate change, we encourage you to join the discussion on Twitter during the debate using hashtag #cnnytdebate.

Posted by Steve Grove, Head of News & Politics, YouTube

The top ten ways to get your business ready for the holidays

A few weeks ago, we jump-started the holiday shopping season with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Like us, you probably browsed the shops and sites for the coolest products and best shopping deals for your holiday purchases. But if you're a business or an advertiser, you probably know that some of the biggest shopping weekends of the year are approaching — and you need to get your business ready for the rush!

If you're as geeky as we are, you're probably doing everything you can to figure out how to best use the tools available on the web to find the right customers and effectively measure the results from the money you spent on marketing.

At T-minus ten days before Christmas, its not too late to look over your holiday campaigns and we’d like to share with you our top 10 holiday tips — a quick checklist to help you make use of important data now and improve your holiday campaigns.

Consider it a gift from one geeky data whiz to another!

1. Update your wishlist:
Use the Search-based Keyword Tool to find keywords that you never thought of incorporating into your campaign for the holidays. (Here is a how-to guide for how best to use the tool: Monetize The Long Tail of Search).

2. Know what's hot this season:
Research on Insights for Search to see what the “Rising Searches” are and understand how people are searching for your brand (and your competitors!).

3. Read the wish lists:
Who could be looking for you? Type your website URL into Google Ad Planner to see who is looking for your site, broken down by demographic categories like age and gender.

4. Follow the reindeer:
Where else are they going? Use Ad Planner to find other websites that share the same demographics as yours. Putting display ads on that site might be a great way for you to target that audience!

5. Build new toys:
Create new AdWords campaigns for your holiday lines and products. Incorporate new keywords and keep in mind the trends you found on Insights for Search.

6. Train the elves:
Test your AdWords campaigns by introducing new holiday promotions. Then, test your promotions — a promotion for "30% off" might resonate better with your customers than "Buy One Get One Free."

7. Check your list twice:
Use Google Analytics to better understand where your traffic is coming from during the holiday season. Find out who's coming to your website, when they're coming and where they're coming from.

8. Map out the route:
How long are people staying on your website? Use Google Analytics to understand your purchasing cycle. Which pages have the highest bounce rate? And which pages are people leaving the quickest?

9. Test run on the sleigh:
Run experiments using Website Optimizer on the landing pages you have linked from your ads. Make sure the images are in the right place and that they're not a distraction for your customer. Play around with the size of the image and the image type.

10. Does the chimney work?:
Test different versions of your purchase page to find out what works best. Change the "purchase" button on your webpage. Pick different colors — bright versus dark colors — and vary the button sizes. Try out different text on your button. See which of these variations lead to the most clicks to conversions.

We wish you a happy, data driven holiday season.

Posted by Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist

A deep dive on display advertising

2009 has been a busy year for Google in the area of display advertising — that is, the image, video and interactive ad formats that run across the web.

Our goal is to improve display advertising on the web for everyone. We're working to help advertisers get better results from their display ad campaigns, enable publishers to make more money from their ad space and deliver better, more relevant ads (and, ultimately, more ad-funded web content) to users.

To achieve these goals, in 2009 we released a host of new features for display advertisers on the Google Content Network and on YouTube, launched the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange and made significant enhancements to our ad serving products.

On Tuesday December 15 at 10am PT, we're hosting an educational webcast for analysts, investors and press about our display advertising business. This is our second educational webcast — the first, on search advertising, was held in September.

The webcast will be available at investor.google.com, and a replay will be available on the same website. If you're interested in hearing about our efforts in this space, please feel free to tune in.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, Vice President of Product Management

Making URLs shorter for Google Toolbar and FeedBurner

This morning, we launched updated versions of the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner that offer a new URL shortening service from Google called the Google URL Shortener. We mentioned our URL shortener as a feature in both announcements, so we wanted to say a little more about how this product works and why we're offering it.

People share a lot of links online. This is particularly true as microblogging services such as Twitter have grown in popularity. If you're not familiar with them, URL shorteners basically squeeze a long URL into fewer characters to make it easier to share with others. With character limits in tweets, status updates and other modes of short form publishing, a shorter URL leaves more room to say what's on your mind — and that's why people use them.

First, we think people who use the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner will benefit from a shortener that is easily accessible — making it faster and easier to share, post and email links. Second, we've built this on Google's global infrastructure to offer the following benefits:

• Stability: Google's scalable, multi-datacenter infrastructure provides great uptime and a reliable service to our users.
• Security: As we do with web search, shortened URLs are automatically checked to detect sites that may be malicious and warn users when the short URL resolves to such sites.
• Speed: At Google we like fast products and we've worked hard to ensure this service is quick. We'll continue to iterate and improve the speed of Google Url Shortener.

Google URL shortener is not a stand-alone service; you can't use it to shorten links directly. Currently, Google URL Shortener is only available from the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner. If the service proves useful, we may eventually make it available for a wider audience in the future.

We're excited about enabling this functionality — try it for Toolbar and FeedBurner!

Posted by Muthu Muthusrinivasan, Ben D'Angelo and Devin Mullins, Software Engineers

Share any web page from your Toolbar (and more)

Hello from the Google Toolbar team! Before we head off for the holidays, we wanted to give you some new features to play with.

We've been busy working on even more ways to make web browsing easier and more fun. First off is our new Share feature in Toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox. This makes it easy for you to share any page on the web with your friends over various social networks, blogs or email.


For example, I love Top Chef and have been following it all season. Last week was the season finale and I wanted to share head judge Tom Colicchio's great write-up with my friends. Using Toolbar, I just clicked on the Share button and selected Twitter. Toolbar created a new window with the page's title, space for my comments and a link to the page (automatically shortened by Google's new URL shortener, goo.gl).


You can just as easily share to Blogger, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Gmail or other services. For those you use frequently, you can save a step by adding them as buttons in the settings option in the Share menu. We've also integrated with more local social networks — for example, if you're in Japan, you can share with your friends on Hatena.

With this new release, we've also "graduated" the My Location feature from Toolbar Labs. It's now available in Toolbar for Internet Explorer (Firefox already has a similar feature built in to the browser). After you authorize Toolbar to detect your location, you can simply search [coffee] and Toolbar will return search results targeted to your location. This is done without associating location information with your Google Account. Thanks to everyone who helped us test it!

Here's a video demo of these features.

Last but certainly not least, Google Sidewiki is now available in nearly all Toolbar languages, and as a Chrome extension.

To try it out, download our latest release, code-named Dangermouse. And follow us on Twitter at @googletoolbar and @googlesidewiki to stay updated with the latest Toolbar and Sidewiki news.

Posted by Mina Radhakrishnan, Toolbar Product Manager

Cloud apps, big city: LA goes Google

This fall we've seen lots of government agencies decide to make the switch to cloud computing, joining the many businesses already using Google Apps for email and collaboration at work. Today we'd like to officially welcome another customer to the mix: the City of Los Angeles. Starting today, Los Angeles will be equipping 34,000 city employees with Google Apps for email and collaboration in the cloud.

The story of Los Angeles moving to Google Apps started early this year, when the city's Chief Technology Officer, Randi Levin, and her team at the Information Technology Agency (ITA) looked to replace their aging, on-premise system with more secure, productivity-focused technology. After calling for proposals and carefully evaluating over 14 different ones, Randi and the ITA decided to revamp the city government's email technology by adopting Google Apps. Los Angeles' going Google will help the city on a number of fronts. The cloud computing system will improve the security and reliability of city email, transitioning from servers in the City Hall basement to hosted, secure data centers. Employees will also have a new avenue for collaboration with Google Apps in the cloud: sharing docs, sites and videos and editing them together in realtime as they work on making the city run more smoothly and efficiently and thus better serving Angelenos city-wide. Furthermore, Randi and her team realized that moving to Apps would mean less taxpayer money spent on IT — valuable budget that can be rededicated to other city efforts over the next few years.

Check out this video to hear more from Randi on Los Angeles and Apps.



Los Angeles is the second-largest city in the U.S., and the latest in a string of cities, like Washington D.C. and Orlando, FL, to go Google. With this switch to the cloud, Los Angeles joins the group of leaders on the innovation front — not only with regard to budget but technology as well. Bringing in cloud applications will make city work more efficient, which is great for Los Angeles residents too. Read more from Randi on the Google Enterprise blog, and stay tuned to follow Los Angeles' Google Apps story, and to learn about other governments moving to the cloud.

Posted by Matt Glotzbach, Product Management Director, Google Enterprise

This week in search 12/11/09

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

What a busy week for Google! From the launch of real time, to the addition of universal search features in Suggest, searching on Google just got a whole lot better this week.

Real-time search
Want to know what people are saying about [google chrome] right now? Or maybe you're wondering if things can get any worse for [tiger]? With Google's real-time search, you can find out what's happening right now. Once you've entered a query, you can also click on "Latest results" or select "Latest" in the Search Options menu for a full page of the latest web, blogs, news and updates. You can also restrict your results to "Updates" mode which shows only short form content from our partners that we announced on Monday, which will include Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca. Finally, you can also check out the common topics people are publishing to the web in real-time by going to the "Hot Topics" section in Google Trends. Real-time search is live worldwide in English, and is available on mobile too from google.com and google.com/trends on Android and iPhone.

Check out the video from our real-time search announcement here.

Universal search features in Suggest
Google Suggest learned a new trick this week, or rather 10 of them. To save time and keystrokes, we now show universal search features in Suggest for a range of straightforward questions, including ones for: weather, flight status, local time, area codes, package tracking, answers, definitions, calculator, unit conversions, and currency conversions. So the next time you start searching on Google for [weather in wichita], the [alaska area code], or look to [define dichotomy], chances are you won't even need to hit enter to see the answer. Though these features are available for Google.com users in English so far, we're working hard to expand them to our international users.

Google Similar Pages beta on the Chrome extensions gallery
Ever find yourself enjoying the webpage you're looking at, but curious to discover other pages similar to it? Or trying to find more pages about a topic, but struggling to come up with the right query? We certainly do, which is why we're excited to introduce the Google Similar Pages beta Chrome extension to help do just that. We use the same data for this as for the "Similar" link you see next to web search results, which you may have seen next to the Cached link for many web search results. But this Chrome extension is portable -- so you can use it to see similar page wherever you are on the web, not just on the Google search results page.

Quick Scroll on the Chrome extensions gallery
This week we released a Chrome extension called Google Quick Scroll. Once installed, this tool lets you use Google's search capabilities even after leaving our results page. For some queries, after you click on a result and the page you're visiting is done loading, the Quick Scroll panel will pop up in the lower right corner of your screen. The panel highlights the most relevant content on the page, based on what you just searched for on google.com. Clicking one of the bits of text in the panel will scroll you directly to that part of the page. This should save you from scrolling around or using Control-F to manually hunt for the relevant content on the page. The Quick Scroll panel won't appear for all queries or results; it'll only pop up when we think that relevant content for your search is buried down the page or hard to find.

After you've installed the tool, try these example queries and results:
[does flap of butterfly wings affect weather] - click on result from en.wikipedia.org
[visiting berber villages in morocco] - click on result from www.gonomad.com
[evidence universe expands and contracts] - click on result from www4.ncsu.edu

Google Quick Scroll, like all extensions, requires the Beta version of Chrome 4, and can be installed from the Chrome Extensions Gallery here.

More Transit information in search results
We know a lot of people rely on public transit to get where they're going, and we want to make it even easier for you to find the right stop for your travels. Starting this week, when you search for local businesses in cities where public transit is popular, we'll show you nearby public transit stops in the map appearing at the top of your results. For example, if you wanted to visit [heidelberg nyc], we now show you that it's near the 86th Street station. If you were in Germany, you might want to take the tram to the National Theater stop for [hofbrauhaus munich]. Clicking on the station name will take you to Google Maps with your query and the transit stop highlighted, so that you can easily get full directions.

Stay tuned for more great posts for the remainder of 2009!

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

Ad policies — the year in review

We’ve always said that a top priority for us is making sure that your search results are relevant, useful and safe. Of course, this commitment to a positive search experience extends to the ads you see on Google too. Earlier this week we took a stand to fight Internet scams, and in recent months, we've also put a new procedure in place to eradicate "scammy" ads. But that's not all we've done in the past year to help you get the best possible information from our ads.

Given that there are hundreds of thousands of businesses running ads through our AdWords system, you can imagine that reviewing all the ads is no easy feat! That's why we have both automated and manual ways to check them, and advertising policies meant to ensure that the ads you see on Google — and on partner sites that show our ads — are appropriate, fair, consistent and of the highest quality. We regularly review and update our guidelines to make sure they continue to provide the best user experience. Here's a recap of the improvements we’ve made in 2009.

Making sure the ads work
When you click on an ad for a holiday gift basket, you probably want to go directly to a website with gift basket choices. That's why we have link policies to ensure that the URLs in our ads actually get you to the sites you want to visit. For example, our updated Display URL policy helps advertisers better organize the URLs in their AdWords campaigns to make sure that when you click on an ad for gift baskets, a webpage with gift baskets is exactly where you go.

Making sure the ads are legitimate
To protect you from unsavory online entities that hope to victimize folks, we've shared tips to help you avoid falling for scams that sound too good to be true, and have taken recent legal action against fraudulent online schemes. To make sure that the ads are safe, we've also increased our efforts to detect scam ads and remove them from our system. For example, we’ve recently implemented a new process for permanently disabling AdWords accounts that attempt to harm users by doing things like installing malware on your computer, or offering free services that bait you into accepting hidden fees. This practice better protects users and is even stricter than our previous process of disapproving scam ads and disabling their domains. We're now trying to proactively prevent suspicious characters from creating new accounts with us regardless of their websites.

Making sure the ads are appropriate
We try to make sure that the ads you see aren't obtrusive, inappropriate or offensive. Our editorial policies help verify that ads meet basic grammar, spelling and composition rules. For example, we don't allow excessive punctuation or capitalization, because it would be really annoying if all ads were littered with lots of exclamation points or used all caps for their messages.

Our content policies make sure that the types of things offered in ads are appropriate. There are some things we don't allow because they are not legal in many countries — like child pornography and drugs — and other things we don't allow because they're offensive and considered socially unacceptable. To help us figure out where to draw these lines, we consider factors such as legal regulations, public sentiment and general codes of ethics and values.

Our commitment to appropriate ads also applies to the sites we accept to our AdSense program. We want website owners who have news and shopping-related information on their sites to be able to show you relevant ads. But we don't like sites that do inappropriate things, like repurpose copyrighted material without permission or automatically initiate unwanted downloads. To protect users and ensure we work with good sites, we take a look at website content and practices in accordance with our AdSense policies, and don't allow sites that violate the policies in the program. We act quickly to weed out the non-compliant sites so that someone who's looking online at sites that, for example, have illegal content like child porn or engage in shady invalid click activity won't see ads from Google there.

As new issues crop up, we revisit our content policies to make sure they're comprehensive and help to show you the best ads we can. Over this year, for instance, we've updated our global alcohol policy and U.S. trademark policy to give you additional relevant ad options. You can find more information about these changes and all our other policies on our Advertising Policies page.

To make good on our promise to show you ads and sites that help you find what you want, we enforce our advertising policies in both automated and manual ways. These are rules that aren't meant to be broken, so when we discover violations, we stop any offending ads from running. We also encourage users who’ve had a poor experience with an ad to report it, so we can look into it and take any necessary action.

While we've done a lot in 2009 to make ads better and more useful, we recognize that our systems aren’t always perfect. We'll continue to work hard in 2010 to show you only the most relevant, high quality and safe ads possible.

Posted by Alana Karen, Director, Online Sales and Operations

Google Apps highlights – 12/11/2009

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label "Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

We've been busy over the last three weeks adding new functionality to make communicating and sharing with Google Apps easier than ever, whether you use Google Apps for work, for school or at home.

Google Docs search improvements
In the past, when you searched for a document, spreadsheet, presentation or PDF in your Google Docs list, the results were a set of exact matches arranged by "last modified date". Since Tuesday, we now provide personalized search results in Google Docs, sorted by relevancy — a combination of factors including whether you're an author on the document and if the file is explicitly shared with you. Search in Google Docs also supports stemming and synonyms now, so even if your search terms aren't quite exact, you can still find what you're looking for.


Offline Gmail graduates from Labs
After making many improvements to Offline Gmail since it first launched as a Labs feature (like the new ability to add attachments while offline), on Monday Offline Gmail graduated from Labs. Now it's easier to for Gmail users to enable offline access and adjust their preferences. Just to to the the "Offline" tab in Gmail's "Settings" area.

Picasa Web Albums connects with Eye-Fi
On Monday we announced a special offer to help you make even better use of our new overflow storage plans for photos and personal email. For a limited time, we'll send you a free Eye-Fi card (a $95 value) when you buy 200 GB of paid Google storage for $50. The Eye-Fi card offer lets you wirelessly upload photos and videos to Picasa Web Albums or to your computer, right from your camera, no cables required!


Collaborative albums in Picasa
You've been able to collaboratively manage online albums in Picasa Web Albums together with friends and family since August, and on Tuesday we released an update so you can upload to collaborative albums directly from the Picasa software. From Picasa, you can also now manage the collaboration settings for your online photo collections.


Google Groups for businesses and schools
Also on Tuesday, we launched Google Groups for businesses and schools using Google Apps. Employees and students can now set up group aliases without taxing IT administrators for support, and group members can browse and search archives of messages sent to the alias. Group aliases also make it easier to share items like documents, spreadsheets, presentations and sites with a whole list of people at once, instead of adding recipients who should have access individually. You can watch an overview of what's new on YouTube.

Improvements to BlackBerry support for businesses and schools
Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server enables "push" email, contacts and calendar for BlackBerry devices. Two weeks ago, we added new functionality so businesses can support 500 BlackBerry devices per server — doubling the previous capacity. This lets businesses support fewer servers for BlackBerry users. We also added support for BlackBerry Professional Software, which is used by smaller companies to support up to 30 BlackBerry devices.

Who's gone Google?
I'm happy to offer a warm welcome to Mattson Technology, LCC International Inc., Fresno State University, The University of Delaware, St. Joseph's College and the thousands of other businesses and schools that made the switch to Google Apps in the last few weeks!

We hope these updates help you get even more from Google Apps. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Two new features enhance search beyond the results page

On Monday, when Amit Singhal introduced Google real-time search, he talked about bringing you information at the speed of light. But speed isn't just about the time it takes the results to load, or even the time it takes us to index new information — it's about the time it takes to get you the information you're looking for.

That's why this week we're making two more improvements to satisfy your information needs more quickly: we're adding universal search features to Google Suggest, and we've released a powerful new extension for Google Chrome called Google Quick Scroll. Both features are examples of ways we want to extend the power of Google search beyond the results page.

Universal search features in Google Suggest
Let's say you're planning a vacation to Belgium for the holidays. Most vacation planning includes many simple questions: What's the weather? Is my flight on time? How many euros can I get for $100? For a long time we've provided answers to these kind of questions in one simple place with universal search features on the results page. Building on the improvements we made to Google Suggest earlier this year, now we're adding these features to the list of suggested search terms beneath the search box.

For example, let's say you want to visit the capital of Belgium, but you can't remember what it is. Type "capital of belgiu" in the search box and you'll immediately find your answer (Brussels) before you're even done typing. Similarly, you can type, "weather brus" and quickly decide how much warm clothing to bring (a lot!).

This kind of information will appear in Suggest either above or below the suggested search terms for a variety of queries. For example, you can type "delta 140" to see the flight status. You can also quickly discover the current time, figure out how many Euros you'll get per dollar, or even brush up on metric conversions. In total, there are currently 10 universal search features available in Google Suggest: weather, flight status, local time, area codes, package tracking, answers, definitions, calculator, currency and unit conversions — and we plan to add additional features in the future.

Quick Scroll to the information you're looking for
Many queries aren't as simple as [weather brussels], so in addition to adding universal search features to Google Suggest, this week we released a new Google Chrome extension called Quick Scroll which enables you to use Google's search capabilities even after leaving our results page.

After clicking a result, most searchers end up scrolling around looking for the relevant sections of the page. You may have learned to use the find feature in your browser (Control-F on a PC or Command-F on a Mac) to search for specific words on the page. The browser find function is a useful tool, but it's limited to matching the exact words you type, and most people don't know about it. With Quick Scroll, the process of finding relevant content and scrolling to it happens automatically, as an extension of your Google search.

Continuing our prior example, let's say you've heard that, in Belgium, Belgian waffles are served by street vendors, but you want to be sure. You do a search for [belgian waffles served by street vendors?] and click on the first result. With Google Quick Scroll, a small black box appears in the lower right hand corner of the browser with a couple snippets of text from the page that might be relevant to your query. In this case one of the snippets says, "In Belgium, it is served warm by street vendors." Click on the text snippet and Quick Scroll will take you right to that part of the page with the relevant text highlighted.


Apparently, Belgian waffles are in fact served warm by street vendors (yum!). In the screen shot, you can see that the highlighted section doesn't include the exact phrase "belgian waffles served by street vendors," so in this case the browser find command wouldn't actually be able to take you to the information you're looking for. Like Google Search, Quick Scroll analyzes things like proximity, prominence and position of the words to identify the most relevant content. You can think of it like a personal assistant who reads webpages before you do and highlights the parts you might want to read. If several sections of the page have useful content, Quick Scroll will show you multiple text excerpts from different portions of the page and you can click on any of them to scroll to that spot.

To use Quick Scroll or any other Chrome extension, you need the beta version of Chrome 4. Once you have it, you can install Quick Scroll from the extensions gallery. Because it's not always needed, you may notice that Quick Scroll doesn't appear for every result. If Google detects that the entire page is relevant to your query, then there's no need to scroll to a specific section.

With universal search features in Google Suggest and Google Quick Scroll, we hope you save precious seconds for many of the searches you perform. As Amit said on Monday, "seconds matter."

Posted by Ruth Dhanaraj & Matias Pelenur, Software Engineers