Hey—we've moved. Visit
The Keyword
for all the latest news and stories from Google
Official Blog
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
How our cloud does more with less
September 8, 2011
We’ve worked hard to reduce the amount of energy our services use. In fact, to provide you with Google products for a month—not just search, but Google+, Gmail, YouTube and everything else we have to offer—our servers use less energy per user than a light left on for three hours. And, because we’ve been a carbon-neutral company since 2007, even that small amount of energy is offset completely, so the carbon footprint of your life on Google is zero.
We’ve learned a lot in the process of reducing our environmental impact, so we’ve added a new section called
“The Big Picture”
to our
Google Green site
with numbers on our annual energy use and carbon footprint.
We started the process of getting to zero by making sure our operations use as little energy as possible. For the last decade, energy use has been an obsession. We’ve designed and built some of the most efficient servers and
data centers
in the world—using half the electricity of a typical data center. Our
newest facility
in Hamina, Finland, opening this weekend, uses a unique seawater cooling system that requires very little electricity.
Whenever possible, we use renewable energy. We have a large solar panel installation at our Mountain View campus, and we’ve
purchased the output
of two wind farms to power our data centers. For the greenhouse gas emissions we can’t eliminate, we purchase high-quality
carbon offsets
.
But we’re not stopping there. By
investing
hundreds of millions of dollars in renewable energy projects and companies, we’re helping to create 1.7 GW of renewable power. That’s the same amount of energy used to power over 350,000 homes, and far more than what our operations consume.
Finally, our products can help people reduce their own carbon footprints. The
study
(PDF) we released yesterday on Gmail is just one example of how cloud-based services can be much more energy efficient than locally hosted services helping businesses cut their electricity bills.
Visit our
Google Green site
to find out more.
Posted by Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure
(Cross-posted on the
European Public Policy
and
Green
Blogs)
Google just got
ZAGAT
Rated!
September 8, 2011
“Did you know there's a place in Menlo Park near the Safeway that has a 27 food rating?” one of my friends asked me that about two years ago, and I was struck because I immediately knew what it meant. Food rating... 30 point scale... Zagat. And the place... had to be good. With no other context, I instantly recognized and trusted Zagat's review and recommendation.
So, today, I'm thrilled that Google has acquired Zagat. Moving forward, Zagat will be a cornerstone of our local offering—delighting people with their impressive array of reviews, ratings and insights, while enabling people everywhere to find extraordinary (and ordinary) experiences around the corner and around the world.
With Zagat, we gain a world-class team that has more experience in consumer based-surveys, recommendations and reviews than anyone else in the industry. Founded by Tim and Nina Zagat more than 32 years ago, Zagat has established a trusted and well-loved brand the world over, operating in 13 categories and more than 100 cities. The Zagats have demonstrated their ability to innovate and to do so with tremendous insight. Their surveys may be one of the earliest forms of UGC (user-generated content)—gathering restaurant recommendations from friends, computing and distributing ratings before the Internet as we know it today even existed. Their iconic pocket-sized guides with paragraphs summarizing and “snippeting” sentiment were “mobile” before “mobile” involved electronics. Today, Zagat provides people with a democratized, authentic and comprehensive view of where to eat, drink, stay, shop and play worldwide based on millions of reviews and ratings.
For all of these reasons, I'm incredibly excited to collaborate with Zagat to bring the power of Google search and Google Maps to their products and users, and to bring their innovation, trusted reputation and wealth of experience to our users.
(BTW, Kaygetsu, the place in Menlo Park, definitely lives up to its 27 food rating!)
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Local, Maps and Location Services
Gmail: It’s cooler in the cloud
September 7, 2011
(Cross-posted on
Gmail
,
Green
and
Enterprise
blogs)
Cloud computing is
secure
,
simple
, keeps you
productive
and saves you money. But the cloud can also save energy. A
recent report
by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and Verdantix estimates that cloud computing has the potential to reduce global carbon emissions by millions of metric tons. And Jonathan Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford who has led several studies on data center energy use, has
written
that for many enterprises, the cloud “is significantly more energy efficient than using in-house data centers.”
Because we’re
committed to sustainability
, we sharpened our pencils and looked at our own services to see how they stack up against the alternatives.
We compared Gmail to the traditional enterprise email solutions it’s replaced for
more than 4 million
businesses. The results were clear: switching to Gmail can be
almost 80 times more energy efficient
(PDF) than running in-house email. This is because cloud-based services are typically housed in highly efficient data centers that operate at higher server utilization rates and use hardware and software that’s built specifically for the services they provide—conditions that small businesses are rarely able to create on their own.
An illustration of inefficient server utilization by smaller companies compared to efficient utilization in the cloud.
If you’re more of a romantic than a businessperson, think of it this way: It takes more energy to send a message in a bottle than it does to use Gmail for a year, as long as you
count
(PDF) the energy used to make the bottle and the wine you drank.
We ran a similar calculation for YouTube and the results are even more striking: the servers needed to play one minute of YouTube consume about 0.0002 kWh of energy. To put that in perspective, it takes about eight seconds for the human body to burn off that same amount. You’d have to watch YouTube for three straight days for our servers to consume the amount of energy required to manufacture, package and ship a single DVD.
In calculating these numbers, we included the energy used by all the Google infrastructure supporting Gmail and YouTube. Of course, your own laptop or phone also consumes energy while you’re accessing Google, so it’s important to
choose an efficient model
.
There’s still a lot to learn about the global impacts of cloud computing, but one thing we can say with certainty: bit for bit, email for email, and video for video, it’s more efficient in the cloud.
Posted by David Jacobowitz, Program Manager, Green Engineering and Operations
Happy birthday, Freddie Mercury
September 4, 2011
From time to time we invite guests to post about items of interest and are thrilled to have Brian May join us to talk about friend and bandmate Freddie Mercury.
Our doodle celebrating Freddie's birthday can be seen around the world on September 5 and, out of respect for Labor Day, in the U.S. on September 6.
A guitarist and songwriter, Brian May is a founding member of Queen and wrote many of the band’s hits, including “We Will Rock You,” “The Show Must Go On” and “I Want It All.” Brian is also a respected solo artist and one of the founders of Freddie for a Day (
www.freddieforaday.com
), an organization helping to fight HIV/AIDS globally. - Ed.
I was first introduced to Freddie Mercury—a paradoxically shy yet flamboyant young man—at the side of the stage at one of our early gigs as the group “SMILE.” He told me he was excited by how we played, he had some ideas—and he could sing! I'm not sure we took him very seriously, but he did have the air of someone who knew he was right. He was a frail but energised dandy, with seemingly impossible dreams and a wicked twinkle in his eye. A while later we had the opportunity to actually see him sing ... and it was scary! He was wild and untutored, but massively charismatic. Soon, he began his evolution into a world-class vocal talent, right in front of our eyes.
Freddie was fully focused, never allowing anything or anyone to get in the way of his vision for the future. He was truly a free spirit. There are not many of these in the world. To achieve this, you have to be, like Freddie, fearless—unafraid of upsetting anyone's apple cart.
Some people imagine Freddie as the fiery, difficult diva who required everyone around him to compromise. No. In our world, as four artists attempting to paint on the same canvas, Freddie was always the one who could find the compromise—the way to pull it through. If he found himself at odds with any one of us, he would quickly dispel the cloud with a generous gesture, a wisecrack or an impromptu present. I remember one morning after a particularly tense discussion he presented me with a cassette. He had been up most of the night compiling a collage of my guitar solos. "I wanted you to hear them as I hear them, dear," he said. "They're all fab, so I made them into a symphony!"
To create with Freddie was always stimulating to the max. He was daring, always sensing a way to get outside the box. Sometimes he was
too
far out ... and he'd usually be the first to realise it. With a conspiratorial smile he would say "Oh ... did I lose it, dears?!" But usually there was sense in his nonsense—art in his madness. It was liberating. I think he encouraged us all in his way, to believe in our own madness, and the collective mad power of the group Queen.
Freddie would have been 65 this year, and even though physically he is not here, his presence seems more potent than ever. Freddie made the last person at the back of the furthest stand in a stadium feel that he was connected. He gave people proof that a man could achieve his dreams—made them feel that through him they were overcoming their own shyness, and becoming the powerful figure of their ambitions. And he lived life to the full. He devoured life. He celebrated every minute. And, like a great comet, he left a luminous trail which will sparkle for many a generation to come.
Happy birthday Freddie!
Posted by Dr. Brian May, CBE. Guitarist.
Navigating a proposal with Google Maps for mobile
September 2, 2011
I recently decided to propose to my girlfriend, Faigy. I knew I wanted to do something meaningful and —yes—a little over the top, so I decided to put my software engineering skills to work to create the ultimate romantic scavenger hunt. On the road to “The Big Question,” I wanted Faigy to visit places around New York City that were filled with memories of our relationship. My plan was to construct a map of the route and get my girlfriend from one destination to the next, all with the element of surprise. Google Maps gave me the tools I needed to make the magic happen.
View
Faigy & Ari's Engagement Route
in a larger map
I used
My Maps
to plan out
the route
—from the Trader Joe’s we shop at on the Upper West Side, to
Magnolia Bakery
where we spent part of our first date, to Hudson Bar & Lounge where we enjoyed a night of dancing, to
Carnegie Hall
where Faigy once surprised me with tickets to a Beethoven concert, all the way to the lighthouse on
Roosevelt Island
where we went on our second date.
I secretly coordinated with Faigy’s manager at work to give her a Nexus One preloaded with Google Maps for mobile, a camera and instructions to go to the first location. I had a friend stationed at each of the six locations before the final stop to give Faigy a rose, take a picture of her with the roses and make sure she
checked in
with Google Maps. Meanwhile, I anxiously awaited her arrival at the Roosevelt Island lighthouse.
Her phone had a custom mobile app I’d built (with the help of my fellow Google engineers Andrew Oplinger and Matt Keoshkerian). The app would let Faigy check in to each location, then prompt her for a password to find out the next location. I provided each friend with a question to ask Faigy, tied to our memories of that particular place, the answer to which was the password. When Faigy entered the password, the app would automatically initiate
walking navigation
to the next location.
When she got to the checkered pin that marked her last destination, her seventh and final rose also came with a question—but this one was from me, and it wasn’t any ordinary question. I’ll leave it to you to guess what her answer was!
Posted by Ari Gilder, Software Engineer
Google Apps highlights – 9/2/2011
September 2, 2011
This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “
Google Apps highlights
" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.
Over the last few weeks, we added a few frequently-requested improvements to Google Apps, including offline access in Gmail, Calendar and Docs, page numbering in documents, and page-level permissions in Google Sites. If you’ve been waiting for these features, please give them a try!
Work offline in Gmail, Calendar and Docs
You can connect to the Internet in more and more places now, but you probably occasionally find yourself in situations when you can’t use web apps because of spotty connectivity. Now you can
stay productive even without a connection
in Gmail, Calendar and Docs on Chrome, thanks to new offline capabilities for each of these applications.
Free calls home for overseas U.S. Military personnel
On Tuesday, Gmail also added the ability for all U.S. Military personnel with valid .mil email addresses to
call the United States for free
. We appreciate the hardships our troops face, and we hope to make staying in touch with friends and family a little easier for them while they’re deployed.
Page numbers in Google Docs
A while back we added
page headers and footers
in Google Docs, and now you can add
automatic page numbers
at the top or bottom of your pages. We’ve heard from plenty of students and teachers who asked for this feature, so we’re glad to be making Google Docs just a little bit better for them.
Page-level permissions in Google Sites
Sometimes project sites are most useful when the whole team can access everything in the site, but there are other situations—like when you’re sharing a site with a client—when you might not want everyone to have full access. That’s where
page-level permissions
come in handy. It’s a simple way to specify who can see each page in your Google Sites.
Administrative audit history
Another useful feature that we added for organizations this week is
administrative change reporting
. This new area of the control panel lets admins see a record of administrative changes that have been made to their Google Apps setup, including changes to user accounts, application settings, mobile settings and administrative delegation.
Who’s gone Google?
More than 4 million businesses are using Google Apps now, and the wave of organizations switching over continues to accelerate. Yesterday at
Dreamforce
, Eric Schmidt shared a couple new details about the growing momentum in this area, including the fact that more than 5,000 businesses sign up each day, and that there are more than 40 million total active users in organizations using Google Apps.
To get a flavor of how organizations are putting Google Apps to work,
Viocorp
,
North Carolina A&T State University
and
Lamar Advertising
shared their stories over the last few weeks.
Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager
A fall spring-clean
September 2, 2011
Technology improves, people’s needs change, some bets pay off and others don’t. So, as Larry previewed on our
last earnings call
, today we’re having a fall spring-clean at Google.
Over the next few months we’ll be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features. The list is below. This will make things much simpler for our users, improving the overall Google experience. It will also mean we can devote more resources to high impact products—the ones that improve the lives of billions of people. All the Googlers working on these projects will be moved over to higher-impact products. As for our users, we’ll communicate directly with them as we make these changes, giving sufficient time to make the transition and enabling them to take their data with them.
Here’s a quick overview of where a number of products and features are headed:
Aardvark
: Aardvark was a start-up we acquired in 2010. An experiment in a new kind of social search, it helped people answer each other’s questions. While Aardvark will be closing, we’ll continue to work on tools that enable people to connect and discover richer knowledge about the world.
Desktop
: In the last few years, there’s been a huge shift from local to cloud-based storage and computing, as well as the integration of search and gadget functionality into most modern operating systems. People now have instant access to their data, whether online or offline. As this was the goal of Google Desktop, the product will be discontinued on September 14, including all the associated APIs, services, plugins, gadgets and support.
Fast Flip
: Fast Flip was started to help pioneer news content browsing and reading experiences for the web and mobile devices. For the past two years, in collaboration with publishers, the Fast Flip experiment has fueled a new approach to faster, richer content display on the web. This approach will live on in our other display and delivery tools.
Google Maps API for Flash
: The Google Maps API for Flash was launched to provide ActionScript developers a way to integrate Google Maps into their applications. Although we’re deprecating the API, we’ll keep supporting existing Google Maps API Premier customers using the Google Maps API for Flash and we’ll focus our attention on the JavaScript Maps API v3 going forward.
Google Pack
: Due to the rapidly decreasing demand for downloadable software in favor of web apps, we will discontinue Google Pack today. People will still be able to access Google’s and our partners’ software quickly and easily through direct links on the Google Pack website.
Google Web Security
:
Google Web Security
came to Google as part of the Postini acquisition in 2007, and since then we've integrated much of the web security functionality directly into existing Google products, such as safe browsing in Chrome. Although we will discontinue new sales of Google Web Security, we’ll continue to support our existing customers.
Image Labeler
: We began Google Image Labeler as a fun game to help people explore and label the images on the web. Although it will be discontinued, a
wide
variety
of
online games from Google are still available.
Notebook
: Google Notebook enabled people to combine clipped URLs from the web and free-form notes into documents they could share and publish. We’ll be
shutting down Google Notebook in the coming months
, but we’ll automatically export all notebook data to Google Docs.
Sidewiki
: Over the past few years, we’ve seen extraordinary innovation in terms of making the web collaborative. So we’ve decided to discontinue Sidewiki and focus instead on our broader social initiatives. Sidewiki authors will be given more details about this closure in the weeks ahead, and they’ll have a number of months to download their content.
Subscribed Links
: Subscribed Links enabled developers to create specialized search results that were added to the normal Google search results on relevant queries for subscribed users. Although we'll be discontinuing Subscribed Links, developers will be able to access and download their data until September 15, at which point subscribed links will no longer appear in people's search results.
We’ve never been afraid to try big, bold things, and that won’t change. We’ll continue to take risks on interesting new technologies with a lot of potential. But by targeting our resources more effectively, we can focus on building world-changing products with a truly beautiful user experience.
Update
Sept 5
: Clarified language around sales of Google Web Security.
Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President
Labels
accessibility
41
acquisition
26
ads
131
Africa
19
Android
58
apps
419
April 1
4
Asia
39
books + book search
48
commerce
12
computing history
7
crisis response
33
culture
12
developers
120
diversity
35
doodles
68
education and research
144
entrepreneurs at Google
14
Europe
46
faster web
16
free expression
61
google.org
73
googleplus
50
googlers and culture
202
green
102
Latin America
18
maps and earth
194
mobile
124
online safety
19
open source
19
photos
39
policy and issues
139
politics
71
privacy
66
recruiting and hiring
32
scholarships
31
search
505
search quality
24
search trends
118
security
36
small business
31
user experience and usability
41
youtube and video
140
Archive
2016
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2007
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2006
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2005
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2004
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Feed
Google
on
Follow @google
Follow
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.