A query less ordinary

Posted by Roger Skubowius, Software Engineer

A lot of our work in the mobile space has been about delivering quick answers to everyday questions. Services like Google SMS, Personalized Home, and Local for mobile bring you movie times, phone numbers, the latest news headlines and directions from point A to point B.

But what about those problems that are a little less everyday? What if, say, you're out somewhere and absolutely must know if that new Super Monkey Ball game for the Nintendo DS is in stores yet?

If you search for [Super Monkey Ball DS release date] in an ordinary web browser on your PC, your first result is this complex, graphics-rich page. Search that same phrase on Google with your mobile phone, though, and your top result is this lightweight, phone-friendly version of the same page. That's because now whenever you click on a Google search result through your mobile web browser, Google automatically translates the page's layout to make it as easy as possible to read on a small screen. We also break long-winded web pages into smaller pieces and do our best to show you the portion that's relevant to your query, first.

The whole idea is to get you the information you want as quickly as possible, so you can spend less time downloading and scrolling through long documents on a pocket-sized screen, and more time (what else?) playing Super Monkey Ball.

Read More

Google.org's new director

Posted by Sheryl Sandberg, VP, Global Online Sales & Operations

We are excited to announce the appointment of Larry Brilliant as executive director of Google.org. Google is extremely fortunate to have found in Dr. Brilliant the combination of experience in building and scaling successful programs and ventures in the fields of medicine, philanthropy and technology. His passion for making an impact by tackling some of the most difficult international health issues facing humanity is exactly what we hope he will bring to bear as he helps shape Google’s philanthropic mission and strategic goals.

Read More

About Desktop for enterprise

Posted by Karen Wickre, Google Blog team

You may have read about Google Desktop 3. There are some misconceptions about how it works, particularly for enterprise users. To learn more, read this post from our friends on the Enterprise team.

Read More

One for the books

Posted by Jen Grant, Product Marketing Manager, Google Book Search

"At this time, the hogs of the region ran wild, as they do now in portions of the border states. Some of them were savage, and all, after the manner of swine, were difficult to manage...All the ordinary resources were exhausted in the attempts to get them on board. There was but one alternative, and this Abraham adopted. He actually carried them on board, one by one. His long arms and great strength enabled him to grasp them as in a vise, and to transfer them rapidly one by one from the shore to boat."

It's the early 1800s, and the "Abraham" in question is Abraham Lincoln, whose superior hog-handling skills are described at length in J.B. McClure's Anecdotes of Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln's Stories, one of the many public domain books you can browse using Google Book Search.

Why are we paging through presidential history? Today is Presidents Day -- or, to be more accurate, Washington's Birthday. What we now call Presidents Day was first celebrated on February 22, 1796, commemorating George Washington's birth in 1732. But according the calendar that was in use when Washington was born, his birthday was on the 11th, not the 22nd. When he was a young man of 20, Great Britain and her colonies adopted the modern Gregorian calendar, skipping 11 days and making January, not March, the first month of the year.

That's right – over the course of Washington's life, the times quite literally changed. And to make things even more complicated, in 1968 Congress passed a law making the third Monday in February a holiday commemorating Washington's Birthday, regardless of the date. Since then, historically minded sorts have suggested it be called "Presidents Day" to account for Lincoln's February 12 birthday too; today many people associate the third Monday in February with both Washington and Lincoln.

What hasn't changed, of course, is our fascination with the presidency. So on this Presidents Day we dug up a few gems from the "West Wing" of the Google Books Library Project. Enjoy.

The Washington Yearbook (Compiled by William Rice,1908)
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Edited by H.A. Washington, 1859)
The Rough Riders (Theodore Roosevelt, 1899)
Biography of Andrew Jackson (Phlio A. Goodwin, Esq., 1832)
The Writings of James Monroe (Edited by Stanislaus Murray Hamilton, 1898)

Update: Due to copyright regulations in your jurisdiction, if you live outside of the U.S. you may not be able to see the Full Book View for some of the titles above.

Read More

Global searches go to local libraries

Posted by Christian DiCarlo, Content Partnerships Team, Google Scholar

Recently I’ve been working with libraries on something we’re excited to announce for Google Scholar users. Libraries are fantastic repositories of scholarship, and we want to make them as visible and accessible as possible. We’ve just expanded our Library Search program in Google Scholar to help people around the world find works of their interest in local libraries. That program now includes links to libraries in Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland.

If for example you're a student in Sweden searching Google Scholar for [chemistry], you can click the “Library Search (Sweden)” link underneath the book titled "Principles of polymer chemistry" to see the list of Swedish libraries that hold the book. Then just pay a visit to one of those libraries to reserve it. If you’re outside Sweden, you can activate the Swedish library catalog links from the "Library Links" box in the "Scholar preferences" by searching for Sweden.

If you are a library patron and can't find the books from your library, ask your local library to participate in this program. If you are a librarian and would like to work with us to help users find scholarly literature in your library, please contact us.

We'd like to thank our union catalog partners for helping to make this happen. Here's hoping researchers worldwide will use it to find and build on the amazing collections in the world's libraries.

Read More

Response to the DoJ motion

Posted by Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel

In August, Google was served with a subpoena from the U. S. Department of Justice demanding disclosure of two full months’ worth of search queries that Google received from its users, as well as all the URLs in Google’s index. We objected to the subpoena, which started a set of legal procedures that puts the issue before the Federal courts. Below is the introduction to our response to the Department of Justice's motion to the court to force us to comply with the subpoena. You can find the entire response here. (This is a 25-page PDF file.)


I. INTRODUCTION
Google users trust that when they enter a search query into a Google search box, not only will they receive back the most relevant results, but that Google will keep private whatever information users communicate absent a compelling reason. The Government's demand for disclosure of untold millions of search queries submitted by Google users and for production of a million Web page addresses or "URLs" randomly selected from Google's proprietary index would undermine that trust, unnecessarily burden Google, and do nothing to further the Government's case in the underlying action.

Fortunately, the Court has multiple, independent bases to reject the Government's Motion. First, the Government's presentation falls woefully short of demonstrating that the requested information will lead to admissible evidence. This burden is unquestionably the Government's. Rather than meet it, the Government concedes that Google's search queries and URLs are not evidence to be used at trial at all. Instead, the Government says, the data will be "useful" to its purported expert in developing some theory to support the Government's notion that a law banning materials that are harmful to minors on the Internet will be more effective than a technology filter in eliminating it.

Google is, of course, concerned about the availability of materials harmful to minors on the Internet, but that shared concern does not render the Government's request acceptable or relevant. In truth, the data demanded tells the Government absolutely nothing about either filters or the effectiveness of laws. Nor will the data tell the Government whether a given search would return any particular URL. Nor will the URL returned, by its name alone, tell the Government whether that URL was a site that contained material harmful to minors.

But, the Government's request would tell the world much about Google's trade secrets and proprietary systems. This is the second independent ground upon which the Court should reject the subpoena. Google avidly protects every aspect of its search technology from disclosure, even including the total number of searches conducted on any given day. Moreover, to know whether a given search would return any given URL in Google's database, a complete knowledge of how Google's search engine operates is required, inevitably further entangling Google in the underlying litigation. No assurances, no promises, and no confidentiality order, can protect Google's trade secrets from scrutiny and disclosure during the course of discovery and trial.

Finally, the Government's subpoena imposes an undue burden on Google without a sufficiently countervailing justification. Perhaps the Government can be forgiven its glib rejection of this point because it is unfamiliar with Google's system architecture. If the Government had that familiarity, it would know that its request will take over a week of engineer time to complete. But the burden is not mechanical alone; it includes legal risks as well. A real question exists as to whether the Government must follow the mandatory procedures of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in seeking Google users' search queries. The privacy of Google users matters, and Google has promised to disclose information to the Government only as required by law. Google should not bear the burden of guessing what the law requires in regard to disclosure of search queries to the Government, or the risk of guessing wrong.

For all of these reasons, the Court must reject the Government's Motion.

Read More

Gamesmanship

Posted by Michael Krantz, Google Blog Team

There's nothing we love more at Google than a public event that gives us an excuse to trot out some celebratory bells and whistles. Case in point: the 2006 Winter Games, now playing in Torino, Italy and on a wide-screen TV and, yes, computer screen very near you. How can Google help enhance your enjoyment of the world's finest athletes competing in one of the world's most gloriously wintry natural settings without actually getting up out of your office chair? Let us count the ways...

To begin with, our man Dennis is publishing a series of Torino-themed doodles showcasing the different events; check back with our home page early and often over the next couple weeks to see how the series progresses -- and for the historically minded, take a look at earlier doodles for Sydney '00, Salt Lake '02 and Greece '04.

Our intrepid in-house satellite globetrotters, meanwhile, have updated Google Earth and Google Local with high resolution imagery of the Torino area; you can read more about what the Earth folks have in store for you just below.

Speaking of vicarious thrills: want to surf the same web pages the athletes themselves will be perusing? The Lenovo i.lounge Start Page is the official homepage at the Athlete Villages and various other Winter Games VIP locations. It features no less than 8 Google products and should prove useful to thousands of hungry, lost, homesick, bored, news-hungry or otherwise information-needing athletes. And you can noodle around on them, too.

Finally, if you're from Italy, France, Great Britian, Switzerland, Austria, Greece or Spain and are interested in employing your geek skills to win a Fiat Sedici, throw yourself headlong into the Fiat/Google Earth Contest, which involves using Google Earth to sniff out a Torino location big enough to hide a car but (presumably) small enough to not be totally obvious within a few minutes. Those who aren't fortunate enough to reside in one of those countries can still enter to win an all-expenses-paid trip to Italy for a Ferrari 360 Experience (I don't know exactly what that is, but it certainly sounds cool).

Good luck to fanatical Fiat finders and to all the athletes at the Winter Games.

Read More