Where art thou?

4/30/2008 06:27:00 AM

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience

Did you notice the chrome tulips on Google's homepage today? They are part of a special Google doodle done by renowned artist Jeff Koons. And that isn't the only art appearing anew on Google today. As part of our iGoogle Artists project, we have collaborated with almost 70 artists in 17 countries on 6 continents to create special iGoogle themes -- works of art that appeal to all ages and interests. Artists, designers and other notables involved include Jeff Koons, Dale Chihuly, Coldplay, Diane von Furstenberg, Dolce & Gabbana, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Michael Graves, Philippe Starck, Robert Mankoff, Mark Morris, Oscar de la Renta, Anne Geddes and Tory Burch. While the list of those who have contributed themes is impressive (I've only listed 1/5th(!) of the artists here), even more impressive is the art itself -- it's spectacularly beautiful!

Until now, iGoogle has been about getting the content you want on your homepage. The iGoogle artist themes take personalization to the next level -- allowing you to select world-class art that really reflects your personality for your pages. It's what happens when great art meets technology.

As part of our launch, we will be holding an outdoor art gallery this weekend in New York's Meatpacking District, where on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights the art from the iGoogle artists project will be projected on the buildings, sidewalks, and streets. This is a map of where you can find the display. We will post video of the event on YouTube.

Check it out. The art speaks for itself. Select your iGoogle artist theme today at www.google.com/artistthemes!

My Maps are Our Maps

12/21/2007 11:51:00 AM

Posted by Joscelin Cooper, Google Blog team

The tools used for navigation and exploration are fraught with metaphorical possibility. A compass or telescope can be a powerful symbol for search, discovery, and the fearless embrace of the unknown. A map can tell you where you are, give you an idea of what lies ahead, and even better, give scale and breadth to your location. Maps connect us with the world in a way that is tangible, visual and now, even interactive.

And for any of the myriad places you can point to on a map, there are traditions, stories, pictures and memories -- each is as unique and fascinating as its teller. For this year's holiday season we've created a My Map for you to customize.


View Larger Map

Mark your place in the world with photos, video and stories that illuminate something about how you celebrate. Your stories can make for a considerably bigger map than any featuring geopolitical boundaries and highway markers; they can mark a human space of Chanukah candles, Christmas trees, family feasts and reunions great and small. We look forward to seeing how you make your mark.

Search privacy and Personalized Search

9/24/2007 03:35:00 PM

Posted by Jane Horvath, Senior Privacy Counsel

Online privacy isn’t always an easy thing to understand—or to explain. When I recently joined the company, I was happy to learn that Google was continuing with the effort to make our privacy practices (and your choices) even clearer and more accessible. We are using YouTube to post videos that explain how, when, and why we collect information about searches, and how you can protect your privacy while using our search engine.

If you watched the first privacy video, you learned about some of the information we collect (IP addresses, cookies, and search queries) and how we use this information to improve your search experience as well as prevent against fraud and other abuses. We appreciated all of the feedback we got in response to the first video.

In response to your requests for more detailed information, in our second video we're offering a closer look at personalization and the privacy tools available when you choose to personalize your search. Personalization has been an area that raises concerns about privacy, and we want you to understand how we personalize search results while protecting your privacy.

As the video explains, search algorithms that are designed to take your personal preferences into account, including the things you search for and the sites you visit, have better odds of delivering useful results for you. So if you’ve been checking out sites about the Louvre and you search for [Paris], you’re more likely to get results about the French capital than the celebrity heiress. The privacy tools we’ve designed — such as “pause” and “remove” buttons — help put you in control of personalization.

So sit back, take a look, and then tell us what you think about this video (and the earlier one too). We look forward to hearing from you.

Ga-Ga for Gadgets

6/27/2007 06:24:00 PM

Posted by Sep Kamvar, Engineering Lead for Personalization

Sometimes I think I know a lot. I can code like a champ and also know the difference between a Monet and a Manet. But on closer inspection, maybe I don't know very much at all. When it comes to fine wines, for instance, I can't tell the difference between Châteauneuf-du-Pape and Chateau-de-Cardboard, and if you asked me who played in the Super Bowl last year, I'd probably say the Dolphins. And lots of people at Google are like me: we know some things, and have some good ideas, but we certainly don't know everything or have all the good ideas.

So when we designed iGoogle, our personalized homepage, we baked that recognition right in to the product by developing the Google Gadgets API. Google Gadgets are applications that developers can create and anyone can embed into their iGoogle homepage or their own website. In the year and a half since we launched Google Gadgets, we've seen a lot of growth in this program. The developer community has created thousands of gadgets, and the top gadgets get tens of millions of pageviews per week. This is great for our developers, as iGoogle gives the gadgets broad distribution, and it's great for our iGoogle users, as they benefit from a richer variety of options for their personalized homepage. There have been some really interesting gadgets created, from to-do lists to Zelda, from a pair of eyes that follow your mouse around the screen to an entire customer relationship management (CRM) application.

We've been hearing from a lot of gadget developers that they'd like to spend more time developing if they could, and we've been thinking about ways to help them do that. To that end, we're happy to announce Google Gadget Ventures, a new pilot program that will help fund third-party gadget development and gadget-related businesses. We plan to offer two types of funding: $5,000 grants for gadget developers who want to invest time making their already successful gadget even better, and $100,000 seed investments for new gadget-related businesses. For now, applications are restricted to gadget developers who have more than 250,000 pageviews per week on their gadget.

Our hope with Google Gadget Ventures is to help create an ecosystem where developers can spend more time doing what they love -- building great gadgets. You'll find more details on how to apply on Tom's post on the Google Code Blog and the Google Gadget Ventures web page. I'm extremely excited to see what you all come up with!

Spice up your schedule with the Google Calendar gallery

6/07/2007 06:02:00 AM

Posted by Peter Colijn, Software Engineer

Don't you think that calendars should be more than lists of appointments and meetings? Well, we think an online calendar should be filled with what interests you most, which is why we just unveiled the Google Calendar gallery. Those of you with Google accounts and your friends (who might not have one) can create, share and save your favorite upcoming events directly in Google Calendar. Now you can find all sorts of interesting schedules to add to yours, like these:

Atlantic Records - See your favorite musical artist's concert schedules.
Cordless Records - Find out where the latest independent artists are playing.
TLC - Keep up to date on new shows on the TLC Channel.
Disney - Plan your family vacation around special events at Disneyland.
Eventful - Track fun events in your local area.
Jambase - Know which live music acts are coming to your area.
NBA - Follow your favorite basketball team, and never miss a game.
Netflix - Find out when your favorite new movies are available on DVD.
Orbitz Deals - See special travel deals next to your personal calendar.
Zvents - Gather ideas for things to do this weekend.

The new Google Calendar gallery makes it easy to fill your days with events that you care about and don't want to forget. So take a look around and see if there's something that interests you. Maybe you can even find a perfect excuse to duck out of the office a bit early on Friday. We won't tell!

Working in the Windy City

5/30/2007 09:03:00 AM

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.

Putting users in charge

5/25/2007 11:38:00 AM

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.

Universal search: The best answer is still the best answer

5/16/2007 04:19:00 PM

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!

You've got gadget mail

4/30/2007 08:59:00 PM

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.

Your slice of the web

4/19/2007 04:23:00 PM

Posted by Payam Shodjai, Product Manager for Personalization

I'll probably visit more than 100 web pages today, and so will hundreds of millions of people. Printed and bound together, the web pages you'll visit in just one day are probably bigger than the book sitting on your night table. Over the next month alone, that's an entire bookcase full! The idea of having access to this virtual library of information has always fascinated me. Imagine being able to search over the full text of pages you've visited online and finding that one particular quote you remember reading somewhere months ago. Imagine always knowing exactly where you saw something online, like that priceless YouTube video of your friend attempting to perform dance moves from a bygone age. Better yet, imagine having this wealth of information work for you to make searching for new information easier and faster.

Today, we're pleased to announce the launch of Web History, a new feature for Google Account users that makes it easy to view and search across the pages you've visited. If you remember seeing something online, you'll be able to find it faster and from any computer with Web History. Web History lets you look back in time, revisit the sites you've browsed, and search over the full text of pages you've seen. It's your slice of the web, at your fingertips.

How does Web History work? All you need is a Google Account and the Google Toolbar with PageRank enabled. The Toolbar, as part of your browser, helps us associate the pages you visit with your Google Account. If you're currently a Search History user, you'll notice that we've renamed Search History to Web History to reflect this new functionality. To sign up for Web History, visit http://www.google.com/history.

Searching without a query

4/18/2007 12:11:00 PM

Posted by Sep Kamvar, Engineering Lead for Personalization

You already know that search is at the core of everything we do: we want to deliver useful and relevant information every time you do a search. But what about when you don't have a query in mind, or if you just don't feel like typing in a query? Today we're releasing two features that reduce the need for you to type in specific queries to get the information you want. Both of these are available to Search History users.

The first is a recommendations button on the Google Toolbar that looks like a pair of dice. Click on the dice, and we'll take you to a site that may be interesting to you based on your past searches. If you want another, just click the dice again and we'll show you a new one. We'll give you up to 50 new sites per day that might be of interest. Just add the button to your Toolbar. (In order to use this feature, you need the latest version of the Toolbar.)

If you prefer to get your information at a glance, we've added a recommendations tab that you can add to your personalized homepage. Simply click on "Add A Tab" on your Google Personalized Homepage, and type in "Recommendations" for the tab name (keep the "I'm feeling lucky" checkbox checked). We'll give you a page of recommendations that are updated daily.

Don't expect very much at the beginning, but the more you build up your search history, and the more you use these features, the better they'll become. Over time, we will give you more and better recommendations.

Personality goes a long way

3/20/2007 07:26:00 AM

Posted by Jessica Ewing, Product Manager

Whenever I get a new cell phone, the first thing I do is change the background theme. It seems like such a small thing, but for whatever reason adding a beach or a dancing pig or something else makes me feel like it's my own.

We wanted to offer you a way to add some personality to your Google homepage, too, but we had to ask ourselves some tough questions. How do we add personality without taking away from the information? How do we make sure people don't get sick of looking at the same theme every day?

Today we're releasing six themes for the personalized homepage that try to solve these challenges: a city, a teahouse (super cute -- this one is my favorite), a winter scene, a sky, a beach and a bus stop. All of our themes are dynamic: they change with your own local time of day, current weather conditions or season. If you add the beach theme, for example (changes with time of day), it will ask you for your Zip code and adjust itself to match your local sunrise and sunset times. So if you happen to be stuck in a windowless office, you can at least crack open a cold one and watch the sun set over your desktop.

You can add a theme by first setting up a personalized homepage. One your homepage is set up, click the "Select Theme" link on the right-hand side of the page. From there you can choose between the classic theme and the six new themes we've designed. We hope this feature makes the Google homepage feel a little more like, well, home.

We implemented our themes using a CSS framework so we can scale, and plan to push out many new themes beyond these six. So tell us what themes you want to see.

Talk on your Personalized Homepage

3/14/2007 02:43:00 PM

Posted by Rhett Robinson, Software Engineer

We created the Personalized Homepage to help you gather all the things you care about on Google and across the web in one place. And since one of the things we all care about is communicating with friends, today we're excited to unveil a new version of Google Talk for your Personalized Homepage. The Google Talk Gadget lets you see your contacts and chat with your friends right on your homepage, and you don't have to download anything to start chatting. We've also added a few new features to make your chats a bit more colorful, like the ability to view YouTube videos and Picasa Web Albums photos in your chats. And just like many other gadgets, you can also add the Google Talk Gadget to your own webpage or blog.

To see the Google Talk Gadget in action on the Google Personalized Homepage, check out this short video. You can also read more about it on the Google Talk Blog. Then go ahead and add it to your homepage.

I'm feeling lazy...

3/02/2007 05:57:00 AM

Posted by Kai Shih, Software Engineer

A few nice updates to the Personalized Homepage this week for those who are feeling too lazy to customize it. If for instance you're feeling lazy about browsing for new content to add to your homepage, there's a new feature that will give you item-to-item recommendations. For my part, I have the Digg gadget on my page. If I click on the gadget's drop-down menu and select "You might also like..." I'll get a bunch of stuff that other people who like Digg also liked, including Slashdot, Wired News, Macworld, and more.

For those who are too lazy to create new tabs to organize stuff, here's a bit of magic. If you add a new tab to your homepage, you can name your tab and have the option of letting us select the content for you based on your chosen name. Say I create a tab called "Astronomy" to get the latest news and info on that topic. We'll populate the page with the NASA image of the day, the current moon phase, and a bunch of feeds related to astronomy. Less lazy folks are welcome to try to stump us with tab names.

And if you just don't know what you want, we've added ratings and reviews to our directory, so you can see what other people have to say before committing to a new gadget.

Let us know what you think. We're never too lazy to listen.

Personally speaking

2/02/2007 10:40:00 AM

Posted by Sep Kamvar, Engineering Lead for Personalization, and Marissa Mayer, VP Search & User Experience

Google's goal has always been to give you exactly the information you want right when you want it. With the growth of the Internet and all the new information coming online every day, this might sound hard.

We're constantly trying to improve the quality of your search results. One of the ways we're tackling this is by personalizing your search experience. After all, you're the only one who actually knows what you're really looking for.

We have two main ways of personalizing your Google experience. First, you can customize products and services like the Google Personalized Homepage. Personalizing your homepage gives you the at-a-glance information that you care about—such as your latest Gmail messages, news headlines, or to-do list—right at your fingertips, just the way you want it.

Second, we offer automatic personalization through things like personalized search and recommendations. Our goal with these types of technologies is to make your Google search experience better based on what we know about your preferences, without you having to do any extra work.

Today, we're taking another step toward making personalization more available to you by combining these two into a single signed-in experience. Now, when you're signed in, you'll have access to a personalized Google—one that combines personalized search results and a personalized homepage.

Keep in mind that personalization is subtle—at first you may not notice any difference. But over time, as the search engine learns your preferences, you'll see it. For example, I (Sep) am an avid Miami Dolphins fan (no joke). Searching for [dolphins] gives me info about my favorite football team, while a marine biologist colleague gets more information about her salt-water friends.

If you don't want to see personalized results, just sign out of your Google Account. After all, the goal is to give you what you want when you want it. So give it a whirl and let us know what you think.

Yes, you can have a pony

10/03/2006 04:07:00 PM

Posted by Adam Sah, Software Engineer

It's crazy over here -- in the last few months, we've had thousands of gadgets submitted for the Google Personalized Homepage. If you've used it, you've seen them -- those useful little units you can add, remove, and move around on your page. We have old-school games, clocks, calendars, and horoscopes. We've got a VAT calculator. We've got a pony.

We've extended these gadgets to work on Google Desktop and Google Pages, but it occurred to us that these would be slick on other people's web pages, too.

Today we're opening up our gadget inventory for your viewing and cloning pleasure. In other words, now you can copy and paste some simple HTML to add the Google Gadgets you like to your own webpage. Check out our directory of Google Gadgets for your webpage to see all the options. And as always, if you can't find one like the one you had in mind, you can always write a gadget yourself.

Map Search gadget for the homepage

8/15/2006 03:21:00 PM

Posted by Tom Stocky, Product Manager

We just released a Google Map Search gadget for the personalized homepage -- an easy way do local searches and then quickly scroll through the results on a map. You programmers might like to know that this makes use of three Google APIs at the same time: the Google AJAX Search API, the Google Maps API, and the Google Gadgets API. The next challenge? Let's go for four...

Saved locations on Google Maps

8/04/2006 11:35:00 AM

Posted by Thai Tran, Product Manager

One of the most common requests we've received is for the ability to store a list of personal addresses on Google Maps -- and now you can. To get started, click on the "Saved Locations" link in the upper right corner of the site and sign in to your Google Account. If you're already signed in, this link will take you to your saved locations list -- Google Maps will automatically save every location you search for. You can also go to the Saved Locations list to disable auto-saving of locations or to add, modify, or delete previously-saved locations.

From here, you can also add a label (your choice of an easy-to-remember name, e.g."home") to any of your saved locations. The next time you start entering an address or a label into Google Maps, we'll offer to auto-complete it for you if it's in your saved locations. Auto-completion is also available when you're searching for businesses. If you've labeled the address "1600 Amphitheatre Pky, Mountain View, CA" as "work" (as some Googlers would), when you start typing [pizza near work], we'll offer to auto-complete it as [pizza near 1600 Amphitheatre Pky, Mountain View, CA].

Here’s a tip: When a list of auto-completions is offered, you can hit the Tab key to select the first one.

Make your own buttons

7/28/2006 11:58:00 AM

Posted by Ben Lewis, Toolbar Product Manager

Custom Buttons are by far my favorite feature in the new Google Toolbar, which comes out of beta today. Clearly I’m not the only one, either -- we have over 600 buttons in the gallery, with new buttons being added every day -- and here are some some of my favorites, if you'd like to add them to your Toolbar. If you’re interested in making your own, it’s pretty easy. Just go to one of your favorite sites, right-click on the search box, and then click “Generate Custom Search.” You can find out how to add advanced features to your buttons here.

Home on the road

7/25/2006 09:38:00 AM

Posted by Maryam Kamvar, Software Engineer

It may be liberating to step away from your computer and out into the world -- but who can stand to leave the convenience of the Internet behind? I like to take the information I need with me -- like news, weather, Gmail, and everything else from my Google Personalized Homepage -- and now so can you. Before you take off, customize your mobile home page from your computer. On your Personalized Homepage, decide what you want to add to your phone, then drag and drop to reorder the items. On the road, in line, or wherever you go, you can view all this information on your phone. The world is waiting!