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This week in search 10/16/09
October 16, 2009
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.
This week, we made a few improvements to help webmasters better understand how their pages interact with Google search. Here's an overview:
Fetch as Googlebot
As a webmaster, have you ever wondered what Google "sees" when we visit your site? Our understanding of your web page affects which searches your page is returned for and its relevance rank. New this week, we're providing a tool as part of our Webmaster Tools Lab that lets you to
see what Googlebot sees
in the hope that this will help site owners better understand why we think your pages are relevant, and to what. We think this can help webmasters design pages that are easier for Googlebot to understand, and more importantly, easier for users to understand.
Malware details
You may occasionally see on Google a notice that says "This site may harm your computer." We place this warning in search result snippets when we see signals that a particular web page may be spreading malware. Webmasters occasionally will see this warning on one of their pages that wasn't intended to be malicious. This is because sometimes your site could be distributing malware — and you might not even know it or be able to easily find it.
Malware details
is designed to help webmasters track down what on their site is triggering this label and clear the problem — thus, making their page (and the web) safer for users.
Hope you enjoyed this week's features. Stay tuned for what's next!
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience
A new home for accessibility at Google
October 16, 2009
Information access is at the core of
Google’s mission
, which is why we work to make the world's content available to people with disabilities, such as blindness, visual impairment, color deficiency, deafness, hearing loss and limited dexterity. Building accessible products isn't only the right thing to do, it also opens up Google services to very significant populations of people. According to the United Nations,
650 million people
live with a disability, which makes them the world's largest minority.
We regularly develop and release accessibility features and improvements. Sometimes these are snazzy new applications like the a new
talking RSS reader
for Android devices. Other times the changes aren't flashy, but they're still important, such as our recent incremental improvements to
WAI-ARIA support in Google Chrome
(adding support for ARIA roles and labels). We also work on more foundational research to improve customization and access for our users, such as
AxsJax
(an Open Source framework for injecting usability enhancements into Web 2.0 applications).
We've
written frequently
about accessibility on our various blogs and help forums, but this information has never been easily accessible (pun intended) in one central place. This week we've launched a handy new website for Accessibility at Google to pull all our existing resources together:
www.google.com/accessibility
. Here you can follow the latest accessibility updates from our blogs, find resources from our help center, participate in a discussion group, or send us your feedback and feature requests. Around here, we often say, "launch early and iterate" — meaning, get something out the door, get feedback, and then improve it. In that tradition, our accessibility website is pretty simple, and we expect this site to be the first of many iterations. We're excited about the possibilities.
The thing we're most excited about is getting
your feedback
about Google products and services so we can make them better for the future. Take a look and let us know what you think.
Posted by Jonas Klink, Accessibility Product Manager
Street View: We can trike wherever you like
October 16, 2009
With Street View on
Google Maps
, you can take a virtual drive over the
Golden Gate Bridge
or see the bustle of
Times Square
from the comfort of your own home. But some of the country's most interesting and fun places aren't accessible with our Street View car. What if you want to tour the campuses of prospective universities, scout a new running trial, or plan the most efficient route to your favorite roller coasters in a theme park?
I first started thinking about this question around two years ago. My day job is working as a mechanical engineer on the Street View team, but I do a lot of mountain biking in my spare time. One day, while exploring some roads less traveled, I realized that I could combine these two pursuits and build a bicycle-based camera system for Street View. The result? The Street View trike:
I've already had a chance to take the Street View trike out to photograph some hard-to-reach places for Google Maps, like the
Arastradero Open Preserve
and
LEGOLAND California
. When I'm out riding — and once people understand what exactly I'm up to — I'm often asked if we can come to their alma mater, local bike trail or favorite beach boardwalk. Now, we're giving everyone a chance to tell us exactly where in the U.S. they'd like the trike to go next.
At
www.google.com/trike
, you can suggest interesting and unique spots in six categories:
Parks & Trails
University Campuses
Pedestrian Malls (e.g., outdoor shopping areas, boardwalks)
Theme Parks & Zoos
Landmarks
Sports Venues (e.g., golf courses, racing tracks, stadium grounds)
Nominations will be open until October 28. We'll then comb through all of the suggestions and let all of you cast your final votes on a winner from each category for the Street View trike to visit. For any privately-owned or operated location, like a campus or theme park, we'll work directly with the relevant organization prior to collecting the imagery.
When we unveiled the Street View trike in the U.K., we received more than 10,000 nominations and 35,000 votes;
Stonehenge
and
Warwick Castle
were two of the top vote-getters. We can't wait to see what you'll come up with in the U.S. — head to
www.google.com/trike
to submit your most inspired ideas.
Posted by Dan Ratner, Senior Mechanical Engineer
Managing your reputation through search results
October 15, 2009
(Cross-posted on the
Webmaster Central Blog
)
A few years ago I couldn't wait to get married. Because I was in love, yeah, but more importantly, so that I could take my husband's name and people would stop getting that ridiculous picture from college as a top result when they searched for me on Google.
After a few years of working here, though, I've learned that you don't have to change your name just because it brings up some embarrassing search results. Below are some tips for "reputation management": influencing how you're perceived online, and what information is available relating to you.
Think twice
The first step in reputation management is preemptive:
Think twice before putting your personal information online
. Remember that although something might be appropriate for the context in which you're publishing it, search engines can make it very easy to find that information later, out of context, including by people who don't normally visit the site where you originally posted it. Translation: don't assume that just because your mom doesn't read your blog, she'll never see that post about the new tattoo you're hiding from her.
Tackle it at the source
If something you dislike has already been published, the next step is to
try to remove it from the site where it's appearing
. Rather than immediately contacting Google, it's important to first remove it from the site where it's being published. Google doesn't own the Internet; our search results simply reflect what's already out there on the web. Whether or not the content appears in Google's search results, people are still going to be able to access it — on the original site, through other search engines, through social networking sites, etc. — if you don't remove it from the original site. You need to tackle this at the source.
If the content in question is on a site you own, easy — just remove it. It will naturally drop out of search results after we recrawl the page and discover the change.
It's also often easy to remove content from sites you don't own if you put it there, such as photos you've uploaded, or content on your profile page.
If you can't remove something yourself, you can
contact the site's webmaster
and ask them to remove the content or the page in question.
After you or the site's webmaster has removed or edited the page, you can expedite the removal of that content from Google using
our URL removal tool
.
Proactively publish information
Sometimes, however, you may not be able to get in touch with a site's webmaster, or they may refuse to take down the content in question. For example, if someone posts a negative review of your business on a restaurant review or consumer complaint site, that site might not be willing to remove the review. If you can't get the content removed from the original site, you probably won't be able to completely remove it from Google's search results, either. Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by
proactively publishing useful, positive information
about yourself or your business. If you can get stuff that you
want
people to see to outperform the stuff you don't want them to see, you'll be able to reduce the amount of harm that that negative or embarrassing content can do to your reputation.
You can publish or encourage positive content in a variety of ways:
Create a
Google profile
. When people search for your name, Google can display a link to
your Google profile in our search results
and people can click through to see whatever information you choose to publish in your profile.
If a customer writes a negative review of your business, you could ask some of your other customers who are happy with your company to give a fuller picture of your business.
If a blogger is publishing unflattering photos of you, take some pictures you prefer and publish them in a blog post or two.
If a newspaper wrote an article about a court case that put you in a negative light, but which was subsequently ruled in your favor, you can ask them to update the article or publish a follow-up article about your exoneration. (This last one may seem far-fetched, but believe it or not, we've gotten multiple requests from people in this situation.)
Hope these tips have been helpful! Feel free to stop by our Web Search Forum and
share your own advice or stories
about how you manage your reputation online.
Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst
Google Translator Toolkit and minority languages
October 15, 2009
Today, we've added 285 new languages to
Google Translator Toolkit
, bringing the total number of languages supported by this product to
345
— and making it possible to translate between 10,664 language pairs. Google Translator Toolkit is a language translation service for professional and amateur translators that builds on
Google Translate
and makes translation
faster and easier
.
In addition, we've made the Translator Toolkit interface available in
35 languages
, so that more people can access the service in their own language.
At Google, we're focusing on how Translator Toolkit can help preserve and revitalize small and minority languages. Minority languages, also called regional, indigenous, heritage or threatened languages, are languages spoken by the minority people in one locale in a sovereign state or country. Were these endangered languages to become extinct, it would mean an immeasurable loss of knowledge, culture and way of life to minority people worldwide.
For this project we worked with Dr. Te Taka Keegan, a Māori language activist and senior lecturer in computer science at the University of Waikato who spent much of his career on how technology can assist in minority language revitalization. At Google, Dr. Keegan researched how computer-aided translation tools can help preserve minority languages.
To support his research, we released an alpha version of the Translator Toolkit to various members of Māori translation community in Aotearoa (New Zealand).
Māori
, an Eastern Polynesian language spoken predominately in Aotearoa (New Zealand), is a good starting point because it is one world's 7,000 languages under threat of extinction. According to the
2006 census
, 132,000 people can hold a conversation in Māori. That's roughly 24% of Māori or 4% of New Zealanders.
Dr. Keegan found that tools such as Translator Toolkit can help minority languages in several ways:
Translation memories and glossaries, when shared across members of a language community, can help unify the language’s written form, increasing translation speed and quality of documents published in that language and preserving the language in the long run.
Because computer-aided translation can improve translation speed and quality, translators become more productive. When automatic translation is available, as it is for 87 of Google Translator Toolkit's 345 languages, it increases speed further by producing instant translations that people can use as a starting point for their work. And at Google, we use these human translations to improve the translation algorithm of Google Translate over time, creating a virtuous cycle that benefits both human translators and machine translation.
Online presence of small languages keeps languages relevant in the age of the Internet and globalization, encouraging minority language use by children, who are ultimately responsible for bringing the language to future generations.
Languages provide identity, pride, a sense of belonging and spiritual guidance to minority language communities. We hope that by giving both majority and minority language speakers around the world the tools to make online content accessible in their language, we will enable more people to share their culture and knowledge with others worldwide.
Ko te reo te hā te mauri o te Māoritanga
Language is the very life-breath of being Māori.
(Māori)
Mak-muwekma mak-noono ya roote 'innutka, mak-'uyyaki_,
Nuhu, mak pekre ne tuuxi,
'At mak roote 'innutka hu_i_tak.
Our culture and our language are the way to our past,
From it we embrace the present,
And follow the road to the future.
(
Muwekma Ohlone Indian tribe, original residents of San Francisco and Santa Clara Counties, California, the home of Google)
Posted by Michael Galvez, Product Manager, and Sanjay Bhansali, Engineering Manager
Introducing this year's CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Finalists as iGoogle artists!
October 15, 2009
We're always delighted to introduce new design flair to our user experience, especially through the personal expression of iGoogle themes. As a canvas for artists to express themselves and reach Google users around the world, we've shared more than 125 iGoogle Artist themes since May 2008. Today, I'm excited to announce ten new artist themes, all from talented up-and-coming fashion designers you may not have already heard of.
Each year,
Vogue
and
CFDA
sponsor a fashion fund, created to support emerging designers. Through inspiration drawn from Google, our colors and our products, this year's ten finalists have created both incredible fashions and corresponding iGoogle themes. From the high-tech and contemporary designs of
Wayne
to the Google Maps-inspired work of
Sophie Theallet
, each of these ten new themes is a unique way to refresh your homepage's fall wardrobe.
Artist themes are one of many ways we invite talented artists and innovators to share their designs, whether world-renowned or emerging. So check out the
latest Artist themes
and pick one that appeals to you.
Finally, we'd like to offer our congratulations to this year's Fashion Fund finalists. We're proud to be showcasing them in our iGoogle artist themes. Based on their iGoogle themes and design entries, their talents are obvious and we're happy to see them recognized!
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience, and Michaela Prescott, Senior Product Marketing Manager
A green tour of the Google campus
October 15, 2009
We care about a clean energy future and that's a commitment that starts at home. In honor of
Blog Action Day 2009
and this year's climate change theme, we wanted to walk you through some of the green features of
our global headquarters
here in sunny Mountain View, California.
Getting to work
: We've got a shuttle service that brings employees from around the Bay Area to the Googleplex every day. These shuttles are outfitted with wi-fi and fueled by B20 biodiesel. And employees who
bike
, walk, skip, hop or otherwise self-power to work can earn points that translate into a donation from Google to their charity of choice.
Turning on the lights
: The rooftops at our headquarters are covered in 9,212 photovoltaic
solar panels
that produce 1.6 MW of electricity — enough energy to power about 1,000 California homes.
Healthy buildings
: The facilities at our main campus use sustainable building materials that are environmentally friendly and healthier, such as "cradle-to-cradle" certified products designed to never end up in landfills, fresh air ventilation, daylighting, and whenever possible, PVC- and formaldehyde-free materials.
No, we're not kidding
: We've been known to
use goats
instead of lawn mowers to graze the fields surrounding our campus.
Getting around town
: We have a fleet of 8 plug-in vehicles that Google employees can use free of charge to run errands during the day. (In the summer of 2008 our Google.org
RechargeIT initiative
launched a controlled driving experiment, and our plug-in hybrids achieved more than 90 MPG!) Shared bicycles are also scattered among our buildings for Googlers to use for short trips around campus, reducing the need for cars during the work day.
Waste not, want not
: Waste from our Mountain View cafes is separated and the organic component is composted. As a result, we've reduced waste sent to landfills, reduced greenhouse gases and recycled nutrients leading to improved soil quality without chemicals. And any disposable plateware and cutlery we continue to use in the cafés is now compostable.
Check out
this website
to learn more about Google's green initiatives, and thank you to Blog Action Day for orchestrating the " largest-ever social change event on the web" yet again.
Posted by Anthony Ravitz, Real Estate & Workplace Services
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