29 hours of code

Posted by Andrew Bowers, Developer Programs

Google Code, that is. Google Developer Day has officially kicked off in Sydney, Australia, beginning our 29-hour marathon of developer activities around the world. Approximately 5,000 developers will join us today in ten countries to talk about Google's developer products, ask questions, and share their thoughts with Google engineers. For those who can't make it, we're webcasting the sessions from London and California live, and posting recorded sessions from all locations on the website.

A deep dive into technical sessions, free food, swag -- what more could a developer ask for? Well, a few new products would be a good start, and that's what we're providing.

First up is Google Gears, an open source browser extension for enabling offline web applications. Now developers will be able to create web applications that don't need a constant Internet connection to work. Users, meanwhile, can interact with Gears-enabled websites anywhere, whether they're on the couch or on an airplane. With this early release, we hope the community will provide feedback and move towards an industry standard for offline web applications. Read more on the new Gears blog.

An experimental product debuting today is the Google Mashup Editor, an online editor that enables developers to create, test, and deploy mashups and simple web applications from within a browser. Now developers can turn out those weekend projects more quickly. We've also launched a new blog where you can learn more about the Google Mashup Editor and get the latest news.

Finally, we released Google Mapplets yesterday at the Where 2.0 conference. Mapplets are mini-applications that any developer can build on top of Google Maps so that users can easily discover the creative genius and usefulness of the mashup development community. You'll find more about Mapplets here. And we're also quite excited about the interest that has been shown in Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Since its launch last May, there have been over 1 million downloads. You can read more on the GWT blog.

Between Developer Day, the product launches, and GWT's activity, we hope to keep developers around the world busy for a while. But if you run out of things to build, you can always find more ideas on Google Code.

A picture's worth a thousand clicks

Posted by John Hanke, Director for Maps, Earth and Local

I am pleased to tell you that we've agreed to purchase Panoramio, a website based in Spain that links millions of photos with the exact geographical location where they were taken. (Our FAQ has all the details.)

Panoramio is a community photos website that enables digital photographers to geo-locate, store and organize their photographs -- and to view those photographs in Google Earth. Other users can search and browse Panoramio photos and suggest edits to the metadata associated with the photos. Panoramio also offers an API that enables web developers to embed Panoramio functionality into their websites.

Those of you already using Google Earth have no doubt noticed Panoramio's striking images documenting settings from all over the world, like moonscapes in Croatia, dramatic sunsets in Australia, and innovative architecture in the United Arab Emirates.

We've been working with Panoramio for some time -- its photos have been a default layer in Google Earth since the beginning of the year. This layer will remain in place as our teams work together toward further integrating this amazing content, generated by many, into our mapping technologies.

Working in the Windy City

Posted by Brian Fitzpatrick, Engineering, Google Chicago

Despite the fact that we have dozens of offices worldwide, whenever I tell people that I work for Google in Chicago, most of them respond "Google has an office in Chicago?" Then I proceed to tell them that yes, we have a sizeable sales office in downtown Chicago (which is now in its sixth year!), and yes, we have a few engineers camped out in one corner (near the cafe and the foosball table, of course).

Well, now we're decking out the office with binary clocks and caffeinated soap because Google is hiring engineers here.



Our Chicago engineers are currently working on Open Source and developer tools, and we're ramping up other interesting data-centric projects now. So if you're an innovative engineer who likes to launch early and often, build world-class software, and be a part of a small upstart team, then we want you.

On virtualisation

Posted by Tavis Ormandy, Security Team

Following Panayiotis' and Niels' post on malware, I'd like to discuss a somewhat related topic, virtualisation. Virtual machines are often used by security researchers to sandbox malware samples for analysis, or to protect a machine from a potentially hazardous activity. The theory is that any security threat or malicious behaviour will be restricted to the virtual environment which can be discarded and then restored to pristine condition after use.

Virtual machines are sometimes thought of as impenetrable barriers between the guest and host, but in reality they're (usually) just another layer of software between you and the attacker. As with any complex application, it would be naive to think such a large codebase could be written without some serious bugs creeping in. If any of those bugs are exploitable, attackers restricted to the guest could potentially break out onto the host machine. I investigated this topic earlier this year, and presented a paper at CanSecWest on a number of ways that an attacker could break out of a virtual machine.

Most of the attacks identified were flaws, such as buffer overflows, in emulated hardware devices. One example of this is missing bounds checking in bitblt routines, which are used for moving rectangular blocks of data around the display. If exploited, by specifying pathological parameters for the operation, this could lead to an attacker compromising the virtual machine process. While you would typically require root (or equivalent) privileges in the guest to interact with a device at the low level required, device drivers will often offload the parameter checking required onto the hardware, so in theory an unprivileged attacker could be able to access flaws like this by simply interacting with the regular API or system call interface provided by the guest operating system.

While researching this topic we worked with the vendors affected to make sure they were aware of our findings, and provided patches where possible. I've also suggested some precautions virtualization you can take to minimise the impact of any flaws like this discovered in future, such as:

Reduce the attack surface

By disabling emulated devices, features and services you don't need you reduce the amount of code exposed to an attacker, thus reducing the number of possible bugs that can be exploited. You should also aim to protect the integrity of the guest operating system, making it harder for an attacker to get lower level access to emulated hardware. By keeping software in the guest up to date, and hardening it by locking down the operating system and minimising what is run with root or admin privileges, you can reduce the risk of privilege escalation attacks. If an attacker cannot get low level access to the emulated hardware, it will be more difficult to exploit the bugs in them. Remember that some legacy operating systems make no attempt to restrict access to I/O ports and similar interfaces, these should be used with caution in a security sensitive context.

Treat virtual machines as services that can be compromised

Most administrators will take steps to limit the impact of a compromise of a network facing daemon, such as using chroot() or running the daemon as a low privileged user. These same tactics can be applied to your virtual machine. As always, try to minimise what has to run as root or administrator.

Keep software up to date

Keep your virtual machine software up to date, and look out for any security advisories from your vendor so that you can apply any patches promptly.

Putting users in charge

Posted by Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel

I just wrote an opinion piece for the Financial Times on the future of search in relation to personalization. It's about what we believe to be the value of personalized search, especially when you yourself can control the level of personalization. Hope you enjoy reading it.

Bigger attachments in Gmail

Posted by Anna-Christina Douglas, Associate Product Marketing Manager

It can be frustrating to find out that the photos you're trying to share, or the presentations you're trying to send at the last minute, are too large for your email's attachment limit. Some of you have pointed out that we recently increased the allowable attachment size in Gmail from 10MB to 20MB. We think the higher limit will help make the storage in your Gmail account a little more useful. So the next time you've got to send a PDF that's a bit on the larger side, relax. You've got some more room to spare.

Teachers rock our world

Posted by Cristin Frodella, Manager, K-12 Education Programs

Yesterday we hosted our third Google Teacher Academy, this time in sunny Santa Monica. More than 50 innovative K-12 educators from across Southern California joined us to share and learn new methods of incorporating online tools and collaborative techniques into their classroom experiences. Elementary, middle, and high school teachers spent time hearing from experts and one another about subjects like lesson-plan development, group projects, and on-demand publishing using Google and non-Google tools. Carol Anne McGuire, who teaches blind and visually impaired students in Orange Unified School District, delivered the keynote along with some of her students. She brought to life "Rock Our World," an international project in which kids across continents work together online to make movies, tell stories, and compose music.

After previous Google Teacher Academies in our Mountain View and New York City offices, we consider ourselves fortunate to have a cadre of 150+ Google Certified Teachers nationwide. These "graduates" continue to inspire their students: for instance, Jerome Burg created GoogleLitTrips, a way to journey along some of literature's most classic roadtrips via Google Earth, and Cheryl Davis engages her students in the presidential election and local history through podcasts such as "Candidate Watch" and "Postcards from the Past."

We started this education program last October to support teachers, empower students and expand the frontiers of human knowledge. To say we're inspired by what we've seen is an understatement.

Calendar for mobile devices

Posted by Devesh Parekh, Software Engineer, Google Calendar team

We realize that more people in the world have mobile phones than have computers, and people take their cell phones with them everywhere. Since one of our main goals on the Calendar team is to make planning your events and maintaining your schedule as easy as possible, starting today, you can access your Google Calendar account from your cell phone!

Just visit calendar.google.com from your phone, and you'll see your agenda of upcoming events, complete with details like date, time, location, description, and guest list.

Putting health into the patient's hands

Posted by Adam Bosworth, Vice President

I gave a speech today at the 2007 American Medical Association of Informatics (AMIA) Spring Congress. I used this opportunity to suggest a vision of what I think consumers should expect from our health care system over the next decade, including three core principles of a future health care system:

• Discovery - Consumers should be able to discover the most relevant health information possible
• Action - Consumers should have direct access to personalized services to help them get the best and most convenient possible health support
• Community - Consumers should be able to learn from and educate those in similar health circumstances and from their health practitioners

Here are my notes from the speech, which include both an example of how these principles could come together to improve health care and suggestions about what core technology I believe is needed to support them.

Search without boundaries

Posted by Franz Och, Research Scientist; Maureen Heymans, Software Engineer; and Jeff Chin, International Product Manager

One of our goals at Google is to provide access to all the world's information. A big obstacle for that is the language barrier. If the ideal result page to a query is written in a language that you don't understand, then up until now it would be very hard to get access to this information. Today, we launched a new feature on Google Translate that takes a big step towards addressing this problem.

Now, you can search for something in your own language (for example, English) and search the web in another language (for example, French). If you're looking for wine tasting events in Bordeaux while on vacation in France, just type "wine tasting events in Bordeaux" into the search box on the "Search results" tab on Google Translate. You'll then get French search results and a (machine) translation of these search results into English. Similarly, an Arabic speaker could look for restaurants in New York, by searching for "مطعم نيويورك"; or a Chinese speaker could look for documents on machine learning on the English web by looking for
"机器学习".

While machine translation is not perfect, it's usually good enough for you to obtain the gist of information in a language you might otherwise be unable to access. We think this feature will be particularly useful for our international users since although the majority of Internet users out there are non English speakers, a majority of the content on the internet is still in English.

Note that this feature is currently in beta, and we're very interested in getting your feedback.

Cingular BlackBerry 8800 has Google Maps and GPS

Posted by Steve Lee, Product Manager, Google Maps for mobile

Some of us have a great sense of direction, and others find themselves, well, a little lost at times. For those in the latter camp, you can thank Cingular for launching the BlackBerry® 8800, the latest open GPS-enabled device from a major U.S. carrier. That means that when you use Google Maps for mobile, your location automatically shows up on the map.

When you download Google Maps for mobile and fire it up, you'll notice something quite unusual: a blinking blue dot showing you exactly where you are! You can use your auto-detected location to get directions and perform local searches without even entering your location -- instead of "pizza 94043", just enter "pizza" -- and we'll automatically know you want pizza in the zip code "94043."

So here's a great big hats off to Cingular -- this BlackBerry® 8800 with GPS is awesome!

Getting it done with Google Apps

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Product Marketing Manager

As you might have heard recently, in addition to search and advertising, we're focused on a third key area of innovation: powerful applications that run on the web and that let you collaborate and communicate in new ways. Not only do we offer email, calendaring, and document creation and collaboration services (and more!) for individuals, but with Google Apps, businesses, schools and other organizations can customize these tools and use them as their own internal systems.

More than 100,000 organizations large and small have started using Google Apps to deliver powerful services to employees, students and members, and since there's no hardware or software to install or maintain, getting up and running is a snap. We're hearing great stories from users, and we're getting exciting feedback from journalists, analysts and other industry experts. And just this week, PC World named Google Apps Premier Edition #1 on their list of The 100 Best Products of 2007.

We're honored to be recognized by PC World this way -- and are more inspired than ever to expand what's possible for groups of people to do using the power of the web.

What's hot today?

Posted by Corey Vickrey, Software Engineer

For more than six years, we have compiled a regular list of popular searches called the Google Zeitgeist. This has been our way to highlight the sorts of queries people type into the Google search box every day. More recently, we unveiled Google Trends to show the popularity of search terms in relation to each other overtime, and how different cities or regions may care (or not) about the trends.

And today we're introducing a new toy we are calling Hot Trends. It's a new feature of Google Trends for sharing the the hottest current searches with you in very close to real time. What's on our collective mind as we search for information? What's interesting to people right now? Hot Trends will tell you. At a glance, you'll see the huge variety of topics capturing our attention, from current events to daily crossword puzzle clues to the latest celebrity gossip. Hot Trends is updated throughout the day, so check back often.

For each Hot Trend, you will see results from Google News, Google Blog Search and web search, which help explain why the search is hot. For example, the #7 item on Thursday, May 17th was the cryptic phrase [creed thoughts]. The associated news stories and blog results show that this odd term is the name of a fake website mentioned on the season finale of The Office. Mystery solved. Of course, some searches are not as easily explained. Visit the Hot Trends group to read the explanations of others and offer your own.

If you want to look further back, you can also see what queries were hot on a particular day. On Wednesday, May 16th, [melinda doolittle], [halo 3 beta], and [ge dishwasher recall] were on the Hot Trends list. If you don't know why, maybe you'll learn something.

Hot Trends aren't the search terms people look for most often -- those are pretty predictable, like [weather] or [games] or perhaps [myspace]. Yes, [sex] too. Instead, the Hot Trends algorithm analyzes millions of searches to find those that are deviating the most relative to their past traffic. And the outcome is the Hot Trends list.

In addition to Hot Trends, we've updated Google Trends so that it's easier to use and, we hope, more useful to you. In addition to viewing the top search terms by country and city, you can view the top "subregions" (e.g. states within the U.S.) across more than 70 countries. You can now compare the leading presidential candidates around the country, for instance, or find out which states have the worst mosquito problems.

With the release of Hot Trends, we're retiring the weekly Zeitgest list, but we will still compile monthly lists for each country, and will continue our annual year-end roll-ups too.

Hot Trends is currently available only in English, but we hope to release international versions in the future.

Registration open for our scalability conference

Posted by Amanda Camp, Software Engineer

As we noted earlier, our Conference on Scalability is taking place in Seattle on June 23. And now registration is open until June 15. We have nine great talks from industry and academia including keynotes by Jeff Dean and Marissa Mayer from Google and Werner Vogels from Amazon. Space is limited, so do sign up now.

We're excited to bring together so many talented people from the Seattle area. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Introducing Google's online security efforts

Posted by Panayiotis Mavrommatis and Niels Provos, Anti-Malware Team

Online security is an important topic for Google, our users, and anyone who uses the Internet. The related issues are complex and dynamic and we've been looking for a way to foster discussion on the topic and keep users informed. Thus, we've started this blog where we hope to periodically provide updates on recent trends, interesting findings, and efforts related to online security. Among the issues we'll tackle is malware, which is the subject of our inaugural post.

Malware -- surreptitious software capable of stealing sensitive information from your computer -- is increasingly spreading over the web. Visiting a compromised web server with a vulnerable browser or plugins can result in your system being infected with a whole variety of malware without any interaction on your part. Software installations that leverage exploits are termed "drive-by downloads". To protect Google's users from this threat, we started an anti-malware effort about a year ago. As a result, we can warn you in our search results if we know of a site to be harmful and even prevent exploits from loading with Google Desktop Search.

Unfortunately, the scope of the problem has recently been somewhat misreported to suggest that one in 10 websites are potentially malicious. To clarify, a sample-based analysis puts the fraction of malicious pages at roughly 0.1%. The analysis described in our paper covers billions of URLs. Using targeted feature extraction and classification, we select a subset of URLs believed to be suspicious for in-depth investigation. So far, we have investigated about 12 million suspicious URLs and found about 1 million that engage in drive-by downloads. In most cases, the web sites that infect your system with malware are not intentionally doing so and are often unaware that their web servers have been compromised.

To get a better understanding about the geographic distribution of sites engaging in drive-by downloads, we analyzed the location of compromised web sites and the location of malware distribution hosts. At the moment, the majority of malware activity seems to happen in China, the U.S., Germany and Russia (see below):

Location of compromised web sites. These are often sites that are benign in nature but have been compromised and have become dangerous for users to visit.

Location of malware distribution servers. These are servers that are used by malware authors to distribute their payload. Very often the compromised sites are modified to include content from these servers. The color coding works as follows: Green means that we did not find anything unsual in that country, yellow means low activity, orange medium activity and red high activity.

Guidelines on safe browsing
First and foremost, enable automatic updates for your operating system as well your browsers, browser plugins and other applications you are using. Automatic updates ensure that your computer receives the latest security patches as they are published. We also recommend that you run an anti-virus engine that checks network traffic and files on your computer for known malware and abnormal behavior. If you want to be really sure that your system does not become permanently compromised, you might even want to run your browser in a virtual machine, which you can revert to a clean snapshot after every browsing session.

Webmasters can learn more about cleaning, and most importantly, keeping their sites secure at StopBadware.org's Tips for Cleaning and Securing a Website.

Massage interviews?

Posted by Reza Behforooz, Massage expert and Software Engineer

Life at the Googleplex is often full of fun surprises. One day, I was asked if I could do a massage interview. I was already a big fan of our massage program, and I was familiar with doing interviews at Google, but I didn't know about massage interviews. Regardless, it sounded Googley, and I decided to help.

Getting a massage at work is a favorite perk among Googlers. As with anyone we hire, our massage therapists have to go through an interview process...but the actual interviews are a little unique. We ask the therapists to do what they do best -- give massages. And as Googlers, it is our duty to help with the hard task of receiving table or chair massages as part of the interviews. Though we do have to write detailed feedback about the massage, just like any other interview, in this interview, all I had to do was close my eyes and relax. Who knew interviewing could be so easy!

Google Apps Partner Edition

Posted by Hunter Middleton, Product Manager

From the beginning, we envisioned making Google Apps available to any organization that might want to offer this innovative set of services to its employees, customers, students, members, or any other associates of the organization. Today, we're excited to take another step in that direction by releasing a version of Google Apps specifically designed for ISPs, portals, and other service providers, whether you have a few thousand subscribers or over a million. This new version, which we're calling the Partner Edition, makes it easy for large and small service providers to offer your subscribers the latest versions of powerful tools, like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets, without having to worry about hosting, updating, or maintaining any of the services yourself. All you have to do is point and click in the easy admin control panel and figure out what branding you'd like to layer on top of the products in order to create a customized look and feel. You can quit spending your resources and time on applications like webmail -- and leave the work to our busy bees at the Googleplex.

Google Book Search becomes more comprehensive

Posted by Adam Mathes, Product Manager, Book Search

Google Book Search allows you to instantly search the full text of over a million digitized books, but we thought that wasn't quite enough. Now when you search you'll get both digitized book results as well as records for millions of other books that still just exist in the analog world.

When you view these new added book records, you can often read reviews, a summary, or see what other people had to say about the book around the web. Since these books haven't been digitally indexed yet, you can't preview the text online, but if you've discovered something great, we offer links to buy the book or find it in a library near you.

We're doing this because we want to offer users the most comprehensive book search in the world - whether it's a book you can read online now, preview samples, see a few snippets, or just read what others have written about the book. We're still very busy digitizing millions more books, but want to make as much discoverable as possible today.

To find out more, check out our post on Inside Google Book Search.

Oh, the places you'll go....

Posted by Tammy McLeod, Software Engineer, Picasa Web Albums

If all you ever wanted to do is direct, now's your chance. You can use our free photo sharing service, Picasa Web Albums, to create nifty portable Flash slideshows that you can easily embed in any blog or web page. Check out this slideshow of our new Hollywood-themed office in Santa Monica.



The playback controls are built right in -- just roll over the slideshow to reveal them -- and it just takes a quick click for friends to get started on creating their own masterpiece.

Behind the scenes with universal search

Posted by David Bailey, Tech Lead, and Johanna Wright, Product Manager, universal search

So when we were asked to make the vision Marissa describes about universal search into a reality, we admit we were a little daunted. Googlers had tried before to do this without success -- several times. Finding the best answer across multiple content types is a well-known hard problem in the search field. Besides that, we wondered if we had become too big a company to pull off a project this complex.

Here's the challenge in a nutshell: Until now, we've only been able to show news, books, local and other such results at the top of the page, like this example for [trends in education]. But it's a tall order to earn placement at the top of our search results, so plenty often we end up not showing these kinds of results even when they might be useful. If only we could smartly place such results elsewhere on the page when they don't quite deserve the top, we could share the benefits of these great Google features with people much more often.

One challenge was being able to regularly search through all of the additional content types to find relevant results. After all, you don't know if there might be a minor news story or an obscure book relevant to your query unless you go and check. But Google's massive compute cluster -- and much effort by our infrastructure experts -- gave us a leg up on that one, and we can now search these disparate types of information about as efficiently as we search our massive index of web pages. We may have melted down a data center or two along the way, but then bugs are part of life in this business!

The next challenge was deciding when and where such results should blend in. Fortunately we have some of the world's experts on ranking, and have been able to apply the lessons learned on web search to ensure that we show news only for newsworthy queries, scanned books only when there aren't better web results, etc. It can be tricky. As we learned the hard way, just because everyone under the sun is writing about Anna Nicole Smith doesn't mean news about her should show up for the search [baby names].

Lastly, we faced the challenge of the user interface you see on the screen -- the UI. The new UI for these results is subtle, but this is one reason why the project is fun for our designers and usability experts: they get to focus on creating a simple experience for you. For example, with news results they designed a compact look for the result that includes helpful items like an image and a date, but is limited to just the most salient information. Or take our book search results, which call out the author and number of pages in the book. (Of course, we learned that sometimes you don't even need to design a user interface. In one early usability study, shortly after Barry Bonds broke Babe Ruth's home run record, we asked people "how many home runs has Barry Bonds hit?" hoping they would type [barry bonds] into the search box. Instead, each and every one simply blurted out "715".)

We also called on experts from each of our feature areas such as News and Local, and were delighted to find our startup mindset is alive and well. Folks from all over found spare time and pitched in to get us to the finish line. There were many nights when we went to bed knowing that plenty of the team's IM status still reported they were online.

And after all this elbow grease, finally we have something that works. What does it mean for you?

Although it's just a beginning, this first pass of universal search focuses on video, news, local and books. Now you'll be able to get more information Google knows about directly from within the search results. You won't have to know about specialized areas of content. If you're looking for the [atkins southwestern pork fajitas] recipe, we can now link you right to that page in the book. Or if, like me, you've been busy these past few days and have not caught up with your Tivo, don't type [sopranos] into Google, because our news result will be a giant spoiler. The search for [rachmaninoff concerto 3] includes a video of Vladimir Horowitz performing this piece (scroll down to see it), and [Animator vs. Animation 2] is pretty cool as well. (And as Johanna notes: I was delighted to see that when querying for my son's name a video showed up too.)

This is just the tip of the iceberg in making Google results more comprehensive and useful. It has involved launching a number of new systems that will make it much easier for us to continue making improvements so you get the most relevant information from our varied content areas. We hope you like it. And finally, we're especially happy to know that Google is still very much a place where we can get big things done!

Universal search: The best answer is still the best answer

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

Back in 2001, Eric asked for a brainstorm of a few "splashy" ideas in search. A designer and product manager at the time, I made a few mockups -- one of which was for 'universal search.' It was a sample search results page for Britney Spears that, in addition to web results, also had news, images, and groups results right on the same page. Even then, we could see that people could easily become overwhelmed with the number of different search tools available on Google -- let alone those that would be created over the next few years. This proliferation of tools, while useful, has outgrown the old model of search. We want to help you find the very best answer, even if you don't know where to look.

That mockup and early observations were the motivation behind the universal search effort we announced earlier today. And while that Britney Spears mockup was the start of Google's universal search vision, it was instantly obvious that this would be one of the biggest architectural, ranking, and interface challenges we would face at Google. Over several years, with the help of more than 100 people, we've built the infrastructure, search algorithms, and presentation mechanisms to provide what we see as just the first step in the evolution toward universal search. Today, we're making that first step available on google.com by launching the new architecture and using it to blend content from Images, Maps, Books, Video, and News into our web results.

With universal search, we're attempting to break down the walls that traditionally separated our various search properties and integrate the vast amounts of information available into one simple set of search results.

Here are a few of my favorite searches that show off the power of universal search:

• steve jobs
• darth vader
• nosferatu

In addition, we've rolled out a few new navigation elements and experimental features to help our users better navigate our site and find the information they're looking for. These include contextual navigation links above the search results that help users "drill down" to specific types of information. For instance, developers who search for [python] will see links for "web," "blogs," "books," "groups," and "code," whereas [downtown los angeles] will show a different set of links. Also, in terms of integration and navigation, today we introduced a new universal navigation bar at the top of all Google web pages to provide easier navigation to your favorite Google products, such as Gmail.

While today's releases are big steps in making the world's information more easily accessible, these are just the beginning steps toward the universal search vision. Stay tuned!

Why does Google remember information about searches?

Posted by Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel

We recently announced a new policy to anonymize our server logs after 18–24 months. We’re the only leading search company to have taken this step publicly. We believe it’s an important part of our commitment to respect user privacy while balancing a number of important factors.

In developing this policy, we spoke with various privacy advocates, regulators and others about how long they think the period should be. There is a wide spectrum of views on this – some think data should be preserved for longer, others think it should be anonymized almost immediately. We spent a great deal of time sorting this out and thought we’d explain some of the things that prompted us to decide on 18-24 months.

Three factors were critical. One was maintaining our ability to continue to improve the quality of our search services. Another was to protect our systems and our users from fraud and abuse. The third was complying—and anticipating compliance—with possible data retention requirements. Here’s a bit more about each of these:

• Improve our services: Search companies like Google are constantly trying to improve the quality of their search services. Analyzing logs data is an important tool to help our engineers refine search quality and build helpful new services. Take the example of Google Spell Checker. Google’s spell checking software automatically looks at your query and checks to see if you are using the most common version of a word’s spelling. If it calculates that you’re likely to generate more relevant search results with an alternative spelling, it will ask “Did you mean: (more common spelling)?” We can offer this service by looking at spelling corrections that people do or do not click on. Similarly, with logs, we can improve our search results: if we know that people are clicking on the #1 result we’re doing something right, and if they’re hitting next page or reformulating their query, we’re doing something wrong. The ability of a search company to continue to improve its services is essential, and represents a normal and expected use of such data.

• Maintain security and prevent fraud and abuse: It is standard among Internet companies to retain server logs with IP addresses as one of an array of tools to protect the system from security attacks. For example, our computers can analyze logging patterns in order to identify, investigate and defend against malicious access and exploitation attempts. Data protection laws around the world require Internet companies to maintain adequate security measures to protect the personal data of their users. Immediate deletion of IP addresses from our logs would make our systems more vulnerable to security attacks, putting the personal data of our users at greater risk. Historical logs information can also be a useful tool to help us detect and prevent phishing, scripting attacks, and spam, including query click spam and ads click spam.

• Comply with legal obligations to retain data: Search companies like Google are also subject to laws that sometimes conflict with data protection regulations, like data retention for law enforcement purposes. For example, Google may be subject to the EU Data Retention Directive, which was passed last year, in the wake of the Madrid and London terrorist bombings, to help law enforcement in the investigation and prosecution of “serious crime”. The Directive requires all EU Member States to pass data retention laws by 2009 with retention for periods between 6 and 24 months. Since these laws do not yet exist, and are only now being proposed and debated, it is too early to know the final retention time periods, the jurisdictional impact, and the scope of applicability. It's therefore too early to state whether such laws would apply to particular Google services, and if so, which ones. In the U.S., the Department of Justice and others have similarly called for 24-month data retention laws.

At the same time, regulators in other parts of governments have argued for shorter retention periods, reflecting the conflicts in every country between privacy and data protection objectives on the one hand, and law enforcement objectives on the other. Companies like Google are trying to be responsible corporate citizens, and sometimes we are told to do different things by different government entities, or to follow conflicting legal obligations. It's hard enough to get different government entities to talk to each other inside one country. When you multiply this by all the countries where Google must comply with the laws, the potential conflicts are enormous. Nonetheless, Google is committed to providing its users around the world with one consistent high level of data protection.

It’s also worth reiterating that we do not ask our users for their names, address, or phone numbers to use most of our services. For those who want to see what their logs history looks like, we offer transparent access via a Google Account to their own personal Web History.

Finally, we maintain rigorous internal controls of our logs database. We look forward to an ongoing discussion with privacy stakeholders around the world as we pursue a common goal of improving privacy protections for everyone on the Internet.

A whole new experience for Google Analytics

Posted by Jeff Veen, UI Design Manager

A year and a half ago, we released Google Analytics as a free service to help people measure the success of their Web sites. In that time, the response has been fantastic - hundreds of thousands of sites across the Web have access to this powerful analysis previously only available to the enterprise.

Now, we're taking the next step: making that analysis even more accessible and easy to use. Today we're announcing a complete redesign of Google Analytics.

We started over a year ago with dozens of interviews with power users, those new to analytics, and everyone in between. They told us they needed their data organized in a more intuitive way. They wanted to be able to see traffic trends in context with more explanation of what the numbers mean. And they needed tools to help them communicate what they'd found with others. This research fed months of development and design iteration to create a totally new user experience.

We've been working on this since I blogged about the Measure Map acquisition. Since then, we've collaborated with the combined team from Google and Urchin Software to bring user-centered design to their strong development skills. I couldn't be more pleased with the results.

You can find out more at the Google Analytics Blog and be sure to check out this demo for more details.

Presidential campaign trail winds through the Googleplex

Posted by Andrew McLaughlin, Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs, and Elliot Schrage, VP, Global Communications and Public Affairs

Though the first votes won't be cast in the presidential election for another eight months, the 2008 campaign is already in full swing. There are lots of important issues at stake in this election, including a host of thorny policy issues surrounding the Internet and the continued growth of the U.S. technology industry. Since all of us -- consumers, businesses, and political leaders -- will have to address those issues in the coming years, we've invited all the presidential candidates to come visit our headquarters in California and share their ideas in town hall-style meetings with our employees.

In February we were honored to host Sen. Hillary Clinton on campus for the first candidate visit, and last Friday we welcomed Sen. John McCain as our second visitor. We're flattered that the other candidates have responded positively to our invitations, and we're working to schedule their visits over the next few months.

Just as the Internet poses interesting policy questions, it also helps empower citizens with more information. So, to help potential voters learn more about the candidates and their views on the issues, we've posted the complete, unedited videos of these candidate talks on YouTube. Take some time to check out Sen. Clinton's talk and Sen. McCain's (as well as a special interview that Sen. McCain did with YouTube's CitizenTube).

Some updates from Google Finance

Posted by Kuldeep Gharat, Software Engineer

Earnings season is one of the busiest times in the world of finance. There's barely enough time to join an earnings call if you are combing through all the latest news and quarterly statements. Today, we're adding content on these events content so you never have to miss an earnings call again. You can view earnings calls, analyst meetings, and any other material event on your company and portfolio pages. Further, you can download these events directly to your Google Calendar.

And in response to many of your requests, we've also added a few smaller features to Google Finance, including:

• Historical prices: View and download historical end-of-day prices for any U.S. or Canadian company
• Portfolios: You can now download the latest portfolio performance and transaction details from your portfolio
  
• News feeds: Stay on top of the news using your feed client such as Google Reader, Bloglines, or as part of your iGoogle
• Last week, you may have read that there are now ticker symbols on news results for public companies on Google News. Click on the symbol and you'll go to the corresponding page on Google Finance.
  

We hope that you find these features useful. As always, please let us know what else we can to to help you manage your finances using Google Finance.

Calendar on the go

Posted by Aarati Parmar Martino, Software Engineer, Google Calendar team

Many people schedule their day on the fly, and are often away from their computers when they need to run to their next event. With Google Calendar, you don't have to be online to be alerted about upcoming events—all you need is a mobile phone. Now you can set up mobile SMS (text message) reminders that will be sent to your mobile phone.

In fact, now you can schedule reminders for events on your personal calendar or any other calendar to which you're subscribed. Whether it's your favorite baseball team's schedule, a family calendar, or any other calendar to which you have access, you can set up mobile reminders.

This feature is available in all the 18 languages we support.

G'day, California

Posted by Alice Boxhall, Software Engineer

When I mention I'm an engineer in our Sydney office, I'm often greeted with looks of surprise: it seems many people aren't aware of our Australian presence. Thus, it is with great pleasure that we are inviting engineers from Silicon Valley (or anywhere in California) to the Googleplex in Mountain View next Tuesday, 8 May for G'day Google: an evening (6-9 pm) open house event showcasing Google Australia.

G'day Google will feature:

• Demonstrations of cool Google technology that has been built in Sydney
• Talks about what global engineering products are currently being worked on in Sydney; it's not just Google Maps!
• Australian food and drink -- I'm talking Vegemite sangers, yabbies, meat pies, Australian beer, more Australian beer, and wine

There will be several Australian Google engineers there (including me!) to chat with you California sorts about life as a Google engineer down under.

Working in the Sydney office is lots of fun and incredibly challenging. My desk looks over Darling Harbour, so it can sometimes be difficult to spend all day looking at a monitor.



If you happen to be one of the 100,000 Australian expats who lives in California, it's not too late to sign up for G'day Google! We’ll have photos and reports from the event on the Google Australia blog next week.

You've got gadget mail

Posted by by Sophia Brueckner, Software Engineer, iGoogle

For a while now, we Googlers have used a bit of shorthand to refer to the Personalized Homepage -- a name that connotes interactivity, the Internet, and personalization all at once. Please meet iGoogle, the new name for the Google Personalized Homepage.



Developers around the world have been working hard to make more and more of the world's content available for iGoogle. Can you get, oh, some of the world's most beautiful pictures, updated daily? Check. Thousands and thousands of gadgets to choose from? Check. A personal note and picture from your sweetie? Now you can make your own, because starting today, without having any programming or web design experience at all, anyone can create Google Gadgets for iGoogle and send them to friends. Simple gadget templates include a photo gadget, a "GoogleGram" greeting card-style gadget, a YouTube video channel gadget, and a free-form gadget.

To make yours, choose the gadget template you'd like to use, enter your info, and enter your friends' email addresses. You can always make changes to your gadget, and you can even set some kinds of gadgets to update automatically so your friends will see a new message daily.

Today we're also making the themes that have been so popular on iGoogle in the U.S. available on every edition of iGoogle around the world, and we're making iGoogle available in 22 new locales. Visit iGoogle and click "Select theme" to pick a theme for your own page.