Google Adsense College

Posted by Andrew Moore, Engineering
Director

On Tuesday, March 4, the href="http://maps.google.com/?q=40.444542,-79.945659 (Google Pittsburgh)&hl=en" >
Google Pittsburgh office will open its doors to the technical
community for a special evening. We'll kick things off with
some mingling over beer, wine and snacks, and then transition into
a tech talk with one of our local engineers, Pat Stephenson.

Pat will discuss the implementation of Dapper, a low-overhead
system for monitoring the performance of large, distributed
applications at Google, and the tools his team has built to analyze
the data in a talk titled "Dapper: It's 11 p.m. and do you
know where your RPC is?"

We hope to create a collegial atmosphere where members of the
technical community can learn from and get to know one
another.

If you're in the Pittsburgh area, please href="http://services.google.com/events/pittsburgh_techtalk_dapper" >
join us. Space is limited, however, so hurry and register.

Tags: , Andrew, DirectorOn, Engineering, March, Moore, Posted, Tuesday

Posted by Marcus Mitchell, Engineering
Director

We're always interested in supporting computer science
education, and in encouraging top talent from diverse backgrounds.
Which is why we've just sponsored the Sixth Annual href="http://www.spelman.edu/~sccso/" >Spelman
College Computer Science Olympiad for the second consecutive
year. In all, 16 teams from eight Historically Black Colleges &
Universities (HBCUs), or Association of Computer/Information
Sciences and Engineering Departments at Minority Institutions
(ADMI) participated.

These teams competed in five computer science-related events. One
of these was a href="http://www.google.com/webmasters/gadgets/"
>Google Gadgets competition, where the
assignment was to build an interactive, creative and useful Google
Gadget. Students brought their semi-completed gadgets and got
troubleshooting advice and tips at a hack session, where Googlers
and students worked together into the night to perfect them. The
following day, each team presented their gadget to our panel of
three judges (myself and 2 other Googlers).

We chose first, second and third place winners, whose gadgets will
be uploaded to the href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open"
>iGoogle Directory soon:

First place: Morehouse College Team 2 (Lawrence Forrester,
Kevin Walton, Mark Slade, Michael Davis) href="http://kevin.ultinets.net/gadget/hopstop/hopstop.xml"
>

Second place: Old Dominion University Monarchs (Duc Nguyen,
Cesar Barbieri, Darrin Lee, Nicole Jackson)

Third place: Spelman College YOMamaBoards (Jonecia Keels,
Jazmine Miller, Paige McReynolds, Arielle Baine)

It was inspiring to see the energy, enthusiasm, and skill of these
future computer scientists — our congratulations to all the teams
that participated.

onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"
href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_Ap14FtNN91w/R__9GrBJl5I/AAAAAAAAA40/Qg3KLw4UujU/s1600-h/Hopstop Gadget.JPG" >
alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5188143586822690706"
border="0" />

First-place
winner.

Tags: , always, DirectorWere, Engineering, interested, Marcus, Mitchell, Posted

Posted by Ricardo Jenez, Engineering
Director

Google aspires to be an organization that reflects our global
audience by supporting a diversity of perspectives, ideas and
cultures, which is one reason we created scholarship programs with
both the href="http://www.uncf.org/scholarships/scholarDetailSGA.asp?id=84" >United
Negro College Fund and href="http://scholarships.hispanicfund.org/applications/subsectionID.1,pageID.123/default.asp" >
Hispanic College Fund. These programs provide $5,000 to both
undergraduate and graduate students who have demonstrated academic
excellence in the fields of computer science and computer
engineering. They're meant to encourage students to excel in
their studies and become active role models and leaders. It's
our hope that these programs also help dismantle barriers that keep
women and minorities from entering computing and technology fields.
(Read
more about the various Google scholarship programs.)

A few other Googlers and I recently volunteered to help select the
winners for this year's round. We were inspired reading the
scholarship applications; in fact, we identified with the
difficulties that these students faced in order to get a great
education.

Now it's time to congratulate the 33 winners. This accomplished
group of men and women demonstrated excellence in the field of
computer science and made significant contributions to their
communities. Each person receive $5,000 towards their studies, and
they're all invited to attend our annual scholarship weekend,
held at our Mountain View headquarters next spring.

2007 Google United Negro College
Fund Scholarship Winners

Christopher Clark, University of California, Los Angeles

Linda Mmayi, American Inter-Continental University

Delvin Kelleybrew, Howard University

Andrew Pryor-Miller, University of California, Los Angeles

Nia Bradley, Howard University

Kieran Jordine, Albany State University

Shanna-Shaye Forbes, University of Texas, Austin

Tanisha Washington, CSU Long Beach

Kalifa Llewellyn, Howard University

Jason Mars, University of Virginia

Hans Anderson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2007 Google Hispanic College Fund
Scholarship Winners

Nicole Ameche, University of California, Irvine

Garrett Brown, University of Michigan

Lina Cordero, CUNY City College

Carolina Gomez, Georgia Institute of Technology

Sonny Hernandez, University of Southern California

Juan Lang, University of California, Davis

David Mireles, University of Texas, El Paso

Josh Morales, University of Texas, Pan American

Omar Oropeza, University of Texas, Brownsville

Hillaury Perez, University of Houston

Isaac Persing, University of Arizona

Christian Roca, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science
& Art

Adelein Rodriguez, University of Central Florida

Jose Romero-Mariona, University of California, Irvine

Amanda Ryan, Victoria College

Marlies Santos Deas, Miami Dade Community College

Caio Soares, Auburn University

Christopher Soghoian, Indiana University, Bloomington

Oscar Tapia, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Yuly Tenorio, University of California, Berkeley

Pablo Guikubi Vanwoerkom, Indiana University, Bloomington

Joshua Zuniga, Oregon State University

height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , aspires, DirectorGoogle, Engineering, Jenez, organization, Posted, Ricardo

Posted by Steve Horowitz, Engineering
Director

Last week we href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/wheres-my-gphone.html" >
announced the href="http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/" >Open Handset
Alliance, a group of mobile and technology leaders committed to
improving the mobile experience and href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rYozIZOgDk" >Android, the
first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile
devices.

Today, the team is releasing an early look at the href="http://code.google.com/android/" >Android SDK for
developers interested in building applications for Android. To get
things rolling, we've also announced the href="http://code.google.com/android/adc.html" >Android Developer
Challenge, which provides $10 million in awards for developers
who build great applications for Android. Read more on the new href="http://android-developers.blogspot.com/" >Android Developers
blog to learn about this exciting mobile platform.

With so many brilliant minds striving to design engaging,
innovative applications, mobile users around the world (3 billion
and counting!) can expect phones equipped with dynamic and
unprecedented applications very soon. height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , announced, DirectorLast, Engineering, Horowitz, Posted, Steve, week

Posted by Sam Schillace, Engineering
Director

We're pleased to announce that we've acquired the assets of
Zenter, a company that provides software for creating online slide
presentations.

You've heard us talk a lot about using the web to improve group
collaboration and information sharing. These days, when you create
a document — whether it's a text document, a spreadsheet, or a
presentation — you usually want to share it, collect feedback, or
communicate about it in some way. We on the href="http://docs.google.com/" >Google Docs &
Spreadsheets team focus on making this experience easier and
more powerful for you. In particular, we're working to href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/were-expecting.html" >add
presentation-sharing capabilities to Google Docs &
Spreadsheets, and we're excited about the addition of
Zenter's technology and team to that effort.

Tags: , announce, DirectorWere, Engineering, pleased, Posted, Sam, Schillace

Posted by Christine Hong, Head of
Engineering Operations, Asia Pacific

We're hosting an Asia Pacific open house for engineers on
Thursday, June 28 from 6-9pm on the href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=1600 Amphitheatre Pky, Mountain View, CA 94043&sll=37.0625,-95.677071&sspn=82.939223,105.996094&ie=UTF8&ll=37.423412,-122.086515&spn=0.042466,0.051756&z=14&iwloc=addr&om=1" >
Google campus in Mountain View. Ping Li from Accel Partners
will moderate a panel discussion by the four directors of our
engineering centers in India, Korea, Taiwan, and China. They'll
talk about top tech trends in their respective markets, and
we'll demo products developed in each location. Of course,
there will be plenty of food & drink, and a raffle. This should
be an informative networking event for Bay Area engineers and
entrepreneurs with a technical background.

Agenda:

6-6:30 pm - Registration, food, drinks

6:30-8 pm - Panel discussion and Q&A

8-9 pm - Product demo, networking, and a raffle drawing

If you're an engineer or an entrepreneur with a technical
background who'd like to come, please email me at chong at google dot com for your
invitation. Make the subject line "APAC Open House 2007"
and include:
- name
- title
- affiliation/company
- contact info

We're looking forward to seeing you on the 28th.

Tags: , Asia, Christine, Engineering, Head, Hong, Operations, Posted

Posted by Miguel García, Software
Engineer, Zürich Engineering Office

Google's href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/faq_translation.html#whatis" >
automatic translation is handy for getting translations of
complete sentences, paragraphs, and documents. But when you need to
translate a single word, a bilingual dictionary can be very useful
because it gives you translations for the many possible meanings a
word might have. With that in mind, we've added href="http://translate.google.com/translate_dict?hl=en" >dictionary
translations to Google
Translate. Now, for example, if you want to know how to say
"play" in Spanish, you can href="http://translate.google.com/translate_dict?q=play&sa=N&hl=en&langpair=en|es" >
use our dictionary translation and learn that depending on the
context it can be "jugar", "tocar", or
"obra", among others.

Tags: , engineer, Engineering, Garc, Miguel, Posted, rich, software

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

href="http://www.google.com/apis/gadgets/" >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 href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?source=gapi&num=24&url=http://www.google.com/ig/modules/todo.xml" >
to-do lists to href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?source=gapi&num=24&q=zelda&btnG=Search Homepage Content" >
Zelda, from a href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?source=gapi&num=24&url=http://www.google.com/ig/modules/eyes.xml" >
pair of eyes that follow your mouse around the screen to an
entire customer relationship management ( href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?source=gapi&num=24&url=http://www.crmforgoogle.com/google/crm.html" >
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 href="http://www.google.com/gadgetventures/" >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 href="http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2007/06/google-gadget-ventures.html" >
Tom's post on the Google Code Blog and the href="http://www.google.com/gadgetventures/" >Google Gadget
Ventures web page. I'm extremely excited to see what you
all come up with! height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , Engineering, Kamvar, Lead, PersonalizationSometimes, Posted, Sep, think

Posted by Peeyush Ranjan, Engineering
Manager and Hong Zhang, Software Engineer

We work hard to keep our search results as fresh as possible so
that they reflect the most up to date content on the web. However,
given the immense medium the Internet is, it's hard to find all
those pages that have just come into existence and make them
available when people come looking for the latest information on
new topics, whether it's a highly anticipated cell phone
launch, news about a popular celebrity or the latest political
maneuvers. What makes providing the latest information harder is
the small amount of time we have between the page creation and when
we'd like to serve those results to you.

Despite these challenges, one thing should not be hard: finding the
freshest results on the page. To make it easier for you to spot the
newer pages among the search results, we are now going to tell you
how long ago we've seen a page containing what we think
you're looking for.

For example, if on August 6th you were searching on Google.com for
latest financial information following the Friday financial sector
action, here's how that result would have looked in the
past:

onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"
href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_Ap14FtNN91w/RriVrQizDmI/AAAAAAAAANA/TU4s-s-7ggA/s1600-h/Fresh result-old.jpg" >
alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5095987548777549410"
border="0" />

From this you could only see that we crawled this page at a day
level granularity. But now when you do this search you will also be
able to tell how long ago we noticed this page, so you can quickly
pinpoint which of these is results is likely to contain more recent
information. Here's the same example showing the annotation
that tells you there's something new in the results we've
seen recently.

onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"
href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_Ap14FtNN91w/RriWRAizDoI/AAAAAAAAANQ/0S-7GyFMtBM/s1600-h/fresh result-new.jpg" >
alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5095988197317611138"
border="0" />

So if you're looking for the most recent content on the web,
this change should make it easier to find. And if you're a
webmaster looking to tell us about all the new content on your site
we haven't looked at yet, check out our support for href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/11/joint-support-for-sitemap-protocol.html" >
sitemaps. height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , Engineering, Hong, manager, Peeyush, Posted, Ranjan, Zhang

Posted by Brian Fitzpatrick,
Engineering, Google Chicago

Despite the fact that we have href="http://www.google.com/corporate/address.html" >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 href="http://maps.google.com/maps?oi=map&q=20 West Kinzie Street Chicago, IL 60610 (Google Chicago)" >
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 href="http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/lights/59e0/" >binary
clocks and href="http://www.thinkgeek.com/caffeine/accessories/5a65/" >caffeinated
soap because Google is href="http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?answer=57998" >
hiring engineers here.

onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"
href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_Ap14FtNN91w/RlZnYl8PxxI/AAAAAAAAAHQ/ikQJUPPXnRw/s1600-h/ChicagoGooglersBig.JPG" >
alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5068352102851397394"
border="0" />

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 href="http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?answer=57998" >
we want you.

Tags: , Brian, ChicagoDespite, Engineering, fact, Fitzpatrick, google, Posted