Finding easy-to-read web content

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

Like most of you, when I search the web, I want to find relevant information with a minimal amount of distraction. But because I can't see and I use a device that converts web text to speech, I'm even more in tune with the distractions that can sometimes get in the way of finding the right results. If the information I'm after is on a visually busy page, I have to sort through that page to find the text I want--an extra step that can sometimes be very time-consuming.

That's why I've been passionate about a project I'm working on at Google called Google Accessible Search. Accessible Search adds a small twist to the familiar Google search: In addition to finding the most relevant results as measured by Google's search algorithms, it further sorts results based on the simplicity of their page layouts. (Simplicity, of course, is subjective in this context.) When users search from the http://labs.google.com/accessible site, they'll receive results that are prioritized based on their usability.

In its current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully--that is, pages with few visual distractions, and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on Google Co-op's technology, which improves search results based on specialized interests.

This is still an early-stage experiment, and we hope to improve the product's quality over the next few months based on user feedback. Check it out over on our Labs page and tell us what you think.

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Stocking up

Posted by Navneet Loiwal, Software Engineer, Google India

A few months ago we launched Google Finance. Since then, we've listened carefully to your feedback and learned a lot about what you like and what you don't like about our product. And in response to these requests, we're pleased to announce a few small new features, including a stock-market module on the business section of Google News and support for multiple portfolios. We've also added an auto-suggest feature to the search box to help you find the companies and funds you're searching for more quickly, as well as an auto-refresh feature that keeps the data on your portfolio page current. In addition, rumor has it that a lot of users like to have the choice of reading message boards in reverse chronological order. So we've made sure our discussion groups have that feature, too. Lastly, it's earnings season, and we've been impressed by a small company called SeekingAlpha that offers free transcripts on many earnings calls, so we've added links to them.

These are small steps, and you can expect to see more features and ideas from us in the coming months. We appreciate your feedback and hope you'll continue to push us to make Google Finance better.

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"Let click fraud happen"? Uh, no.

Posted by Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety

You may have seen some of the media coverage generated by a blogger's quoting Eric Schmidt about click fraud. By using select excerpts and ignoring the context of the remarks, that blog post made for an interesting read, but was unfortunately misleading.

Eric spoke at a SIEPR economics event at Stanford in March. At the end of his remarks he took questions. (You can view the whole presentation and Q&A that followed here.)

Here's the relevant question Eric was asked about click fraud: "Recently there’s been some talk about click fraud being a potential threat to the entire advertising business model. I was just wondering what your thoughts on that were and if there’s an economic solution to it more than just technical solutions."

Eric made clear from the very beginning that he wasn't describing our approach to click fraud and was answering hypothetically. He introduced his answer by saying: "Let’s imagine for purposes of argument that click fraud were not policed by Google and it were rampant ..."

The "let it happen" excerpt followed, in which he discusses the economic forces that can retard click fraud: "Eventually the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for the conversion will decline because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks. In other words, the value of the ad declines. So, over some amount of time, the system is, in fact, self-correcting. In fact, there is a perfect economic solution, which is to let it happen."

But he made clear that we don't take that approach, by adding that click fraud is "a bad thing and because we don’t like it, and because it does, at least for the short-term, creates some problems before the advertiser sees it, we go ahead and try to detect it and eliminate it." He also said, "In Google's case, we worry about this a lot and we have a number of technical engineers who think that this is great fun to try to go ahead of this and get ahead of it."

The fact is that Google strives to detect every invalid click that passes through its system, and to prevent those clicks from ever reaching an advertiser's account. And Eric and many others at Google have discussed the problem of invalid clicks publicly many times -- on our quarterly earnings calls, at our Press Day, and in other places, such as blogs. Anyone who has followed Google knows that Eric, and others at Google, have stated several times that Google fights invalid clicks, that we've devoted significant resources to manage it, and that we take it very seriously.

Update: Added link to the original story.

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Code Jamming in Dublin

Posted by Jeanne Williams and Anne Driscoll, Staffing Programs Team

On June 29th, Google Dublin hosted the onsite finals for Code Jam Europe 2006. This is the third of four code competitions slated for this year, with China in January, India in April and a Global Code Jam this fall.

After nearly 10,000 registrants and three intense online rounds, the top 50 finalists persevered and flew to Dublin for the final challenge. ACM members also joined the coding community fun, traveling from countries as far afield as Kazakhstan, Russia, Sweden, Egypt, Spain, France, Poland and Bulgaria to celebrate the success of the finalists. Several of the ACMers had qualified for the Code Jam Finals in their own right, and having them in Dublin added a real buzz to the proceedings.

Over 15 countries were represented in the finals, and 31 of the top 50 are from Eastern Europe. We celebrate the success of the top finishers: Tomasz Czajka from Poland took home the €2500 grand prize; second- and third-prize winners were Petr Mitricheve and Roman Elizarov, both from Russia, who won €1000 each.

Watch the fun that defined Code Jam Europe in this short clip from the 3-day event -- and keep on coding to prepare for the next one!

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Tour de France goes 3D with Google Earth

Posted by Peter Birch, Product Manager

I don't know about you, but with the action and excitement heating up in the Tour de France, it's hard to keep track of exactly where everybody is riding. When you're trying to understand the Herculean effort that these cyclists go through in stages like L'Alpe d'Huez, or which streets in Paris the final stage will pass through, 2D maps just aren't as compelling.

But now you can make sense of it all by flying around the route yourself. A new KML file available on the official Tour de France website lets you see the entire course overlaid on satellite imagery for Google Earth.

This special Google Earth tour is available in French, German, and Spanish as well as English. Pick your language on the Le Tour site, and once you've done that, look for the "Tour on Google Earth" link in the lefthand navigation under Route. Then you can see the starts, the finishes, even information on each of the cities along the way. Just move the KML file into your "My Places" folder on Google Earth, and follow along day by day. (Did you know that Huy has the unique privilege of hosting stages for the Tour de France, the Giro and the Tour of Belgium this year? We didn't either.)

Be sure to try out the tilt feature to see the truly daunting magnitude of all of those climbs where riders are battling it out in this year's wide-open race. "Beyond Category" climbs? No thanks -- we'll stick to the flats and leave those verticals to the pros!

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Armchair travel with Google Pack

Posted by Hannah Tang, Software Engineer

Even though I've lived in one city my entire life, I've always loved to travel and experience all the languages and cultures around the world. So it's been exciting to be a member of the team responsible for making Google Pack available internationally.

I'm happy to tell you that starting today Google Pack is available in Australia,
Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the U.K. It includes a batch of useful software like Picasa (for organizing your vacation photos), and Firefox (for safer web browsing). And it comes with Google Updater, which keeps all the Pack programs current so you don't have to. Maybe with all the time you save, you can do some travelling of your own.

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We get letters (4)

Posted by Karen Wickre, Google Blog team

Our inbox is filled with stories from people who tell us how they use Google, and occasionally we feature these stories here. If you have a noteworthy tale, write to us.

In the world of marketing, there's always keen interest in knowing what the "target customer" does with the company's products. What are these people really like? How do they use our products?

Well, now we know about one in detail. Meet Alex, age 12. She just completed 6th grade in the Seattle area. And she wrote this essay for her class. If we made Alex up, you wouldn't believe us, so take a moment to read her report yourself.

Her dad Bill wrote to say that Alex "just totally loves doing research on the web and playing with making web sites. She did a cyber camp a couple of years ago, but most of what she knows comes from her mom" (who at the time led development of an online commerce business).

What's more, Bill goes on to say, Alex "has just discovered geocaching" and he adds "I started teaching her python as a first programming language this winter, but she got bored until I could figure out how to do some visual stuff that was more engaging than console read/writes :-)." He also notes that she "just discovered usability studies, and has been seen "flipping through one of her mom's several books on web design, engaging the reader, and ecommerce. Her dream job when she grows up is to be a technical program manager or web designer."

To us, the ideal Google user sounds a bit like Alex - resourceful, keen to try new things, and clearly, someone who appreciates ease of use. So we're really pleased that a number of our services meet her needs.

By the way - she got 106/100 for her essay (extra points for writing technique). Nice work, Alex! And a happy holiday weekend to our American readers. We'll see you next week.

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