Google Adsense College

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search
Products & User Experience

Did you notice the chrome tulips on Google's homepage today?
They are part of a special Google doodle done by renowned artist
Jeff Koons. And that isn't the only art appearing anew on
Google today. As part of our iGoogle Artists project, we have
collaborated with almost 70 artists in 17 countries on 6 continents
to create special iGoogle themes — works of art that appeal to all
ages and interests. Artists, designers and other notables involved
include Jeff Koons, Dale Chihuly, Coldplay, Diane von Furstenberg,
Dolce & Gabbana, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Michael Graves, Philippe
Starck, Robert Mankoff, Mark Morris, Oscar de la Renta, Anne Geddes
and Tory Burch. While the list of those who have contributed themes
is impressive (I've only listed 1/5th(!) of the artists here),
even more impressive is the art itself — it's spectacularly
beautiful!

Until now, iGoogle has been about getting the content you want on
your homepage. The iGoogle artist themes take personalization to
the next level — allowing you to select world-class art that
really reflects your personality for your pages. It's what
happens when great art meets technology.

As part of our launch, we will be holding an outdoor art gallery
this weekend in New York's Meatpacking District, where on
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights the art from the iGoogle
artists project will be projected on the buildings, sidewalks, and
streets. This is a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=9th Ave & Little West 12th St, New York, NY 10014&sll=40.73962,-74.00633&sspn=0.00708,0.016619&ie=UTF8&z=17&iwloc=addr" >
map of where you can find the display. We will post video of
the event on YouTube.

Check it
out. The art speaks for itself. Select your iGoogle artist
theme today at href="http://www.google.com/help/ig/art/" >www.google.com/artistthemes!

href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/blogspot/MKuf?a=VuyvgG" > border="0" />

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

Tags: , Marissa, Mayer, Posted, Products, search, user, VP

Posted by Vlad Patryshev, software
engineer

Many Google products ( href="http://www.google.com/" >Google.com, href="http://www.blogger.com/" >Blogger, href="http://earth.google.com/" >Google Earth, and others)
currently support more than 170 languages, from Abhazian to Zulu.
Translations into most of these languages are done by volunteers
from around the world who are eager to help people view and search
the web in their own native language. To facilitate how we go about
getting these languages, we created a volunteer translation
program: Google In
Your Language.

Anybody can sign up as a volunteer translator by visiting the href="http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en" >Language
Tools page and then clicking on the href="http://www.google.com/transconsole" >Google in Your Language
link. After verification, you'll be offered a list of
products to translate, including the main search site, Gmail,
iGoogle, Google Maps, and many others

Although the amount of translation for each project is not
overwhelming, it usually takes weeks for an individual volunteer to
finish translating one site. Once a reasonable percentage of
translations for Google pages in a given language is submitted,
we'll add your language to production and, after a bit of time,
you'll be able to see them in yet another language.

Some "volunteer" languages are well represented and are
nearly finished being translated, i.e. Armenian, Estonian,
Slovenian are 95% complete; even Latin has 70% of its translations
done. Representatives of other languages are not as active, i.e.
Abhazian has been available for several years, but so far we
don't have enough translations completed to release it into
production. Tibetan, Inupak, Inuktikut, Wolof, Zhuang all have less
than 10% of their content translated. Interestingly, each of those
has more speakers than Faroese, which has 74% of texts
translated.

Recently we have added a bunch of new languages to the Google In
Your Language program, including Navajo, Filipino, several Russian
Federation languages (Avaric, Chechen, Chuvash, Komi), and some
African languages (Akan, Bambara, Gikuyu, Kongo, Ndebele, Ndongo,
Nyanja, Venda). Our hope is to attract even more volunteers to
participate in this program so that Google can speak all the
world's languages one day. height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , engineerMany, google, Patryshev, Posted, Products, software, Vlad

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search
Products & User Experience

Back in 2001, Eric asked for a brainstorm of a few
"splashy" ideas in search. A designer and product manager
at the time, I made a few mockups — one of which was for
'universal search.' It was a sample search results page for
Britney Spears that, in addition to web results, also had news,
images, and groups results right on the same page. Even then, we
could see that people could easily become overwhelmed with the
number of different search tools available on Google — let alone
those that would be created over the next few years. This
proliferation of tools, while useful, has outgrown the old model of
search. We want to help you find the very best answer, even if you
don't know where to look.

That mockup and early observations were the motivation behind the
universal search effort we announced earlier today. And while that
Britney Spears mockup was the start of Google's universal
search vision, it was instantly obvious that this would be one of
the biggest architectural, ranking, and interface challenges we
would face at Google. Over several years, with the help of more
than 100 people, we've built the infrastructure, search
algorithms, and presentation mechanisms to provide what we see as
just the first step in the evolution toward universal search.
Today, we're making that first step available on google.com by
launching the new architecture and using it to blend content from
Images, Maps, Books, Video, and News into our web results.

With universal search, we're attempting to break down the walls
that traditionally separated our various search properties and
integrate the vast amounts of information available into one simple
set of search results.

Here are a few of my favorite searches that show off the power of
universal search:

href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q= steve jobs&btnG=Search">
steve jobs

href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=darth vader&btnG=Search">
darth vader

href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nosferatu&btnG=Search">
nosferatu

In addition, we've rolled out a few new navigation elements and
experimental features to help our users better navigate our site
and find the information they're looking for. These include
contextual navigation links above the search results that help
users "drill down" to specific types of information. For
instance, developers who search for [ href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=python&btnG=Search">
python] will see links for "web," "blogs,"
"books," "groups," and "code,"
whereas [ href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=downtown los angeles&btnG=Search">
downtown los angeles] will show a different set of links. Also,
in terms of integration and navigation, today we introduced a new
universal navigation bar at the top of all Google web pages to
provide easier navigation to your favorite Google products, such as
Gmail.

While today's releases are big steps in making the world's
information more easily accessible, these are just the beginning
steps toward the universal search vision. Stay tuned!

Tags: , Marissa, Mayer, Posted, Products, search, user, VP