This week in search 11/19/10

Pubblicato il 19 novembre 2010 da A Googler

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. – Ed.

On the web, a “place” can mean many different things. At Google, we think about regional domains (such as .uk for the United Kingdom) as places, but we also think about websites, the different parts of our interface and real world locations like restaurants and stores. This week’s changes span all these different kinds of places, making it easier for you to find information no matter where you are—Vietnam, Hungary, holiday shopping at your local mall or browsing the Google results page. Keep reading for the latest.

Google Instant on 18 new domains
In keeping with the spirit of Instant, we’ve been working to quickly bring results-as-you-type to people around the globe. This week we expanded to 18 new domains across Europe and Asia, almost doubling our total. Our new Google Instant domains include Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Greece, Finland, Hungary, Indonesia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Norway, Pakistan, the Philippines, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Sweden, Vietnam. Now, whether you speak Catalan, Romanian or Tagalog, you’ll get search results before you’ve even finished typing.


Local product availability in search
Most of the time, when people shop, they actually buy their products from physical stores rather than online websites. This week, we made it easier for people to find local stores that sell the products they are looking by adding information about product availability to google.com. Simply search for a product and click the “nearby stores” label to see what stores carry it and whether it is in stock. We’ve partnered with more than 70 retail brands, including Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Macy’s, and Office Depot. Through these partnerships, you can see where to buy 4 billion items and can also restrict your searches to only products that are in stock nearby. (If you’re a retailer who’s interested in taking part in this free program, you can learn more on the Google Retail Blog.)


Other searches to try: [hp printer], [circulon frying pan], [ipod touch]

More relevant results from the same website
When you get back from the store and hop online to do some searching, you’re visiting a different kind of place—a website. Sometimes it turns out that one website is extremely likely to have the information you’re looking for, like when you’ve typed a website name as part of your search, or you’re looking for information from an official government office. To help you find this information more quickly, a few months ago we made a change to show more results from a particular domain when we’re confident that those results are likely to be most useful to you. This week we expanded the feature to include more queries and to show additional results (up to four) from the same website.


That’s all for this week. Search on, wherever life takes you.

Posted by Ben Gomes, Distinguished Engineer

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Earthquake motivates New Zealanders to model their town

Pubblicato il 19 novembre 2010 da Deanna

Last week, local volunteers in Christchurch and Dunedin New Zealand invested a day of their time learning how to create 3D models using Google SketchUp. The workshops focused on learning how to geo-model, a process that involves creating 3D models of buildings from photographs for display in Google Earth.

The workshop was led by local architect and geo-technology expert Jason Mill of ZNO, who was inspired to organize the events following the recent earthquake in his hometown of Christchurch. As an architect, Jason recognized the value of having a publicly accessible digital model of the city, and has invested considerable time over several years modeling the central business district of Christchurch.

The value of these models took on new meaning when many of the heritage buildings in town disappeared, leaving the community to decide what should stand in their place.

Five hours away, the city of Dunedin was unaffected by the earthquake, but given its large number of heritage buildings, local residents there decided that it shouldn’t assume that they will be there forever. They suddenly felt a greater sense of urgency around creating a historical record of these buildings.


Historic preservation and city planning are two reasons that many people model their town, but there are numerous other benefits. Local business owners are keen to be represented on the 3D map, enabling virtual tourists another means to locate them on the Internet. Downtown organizations responsible for promoting their city are other beneficiaries. Exploring a destination virtually, whether for business or leisure, is becoming as common as reading a web site.

Google supports these workshops because it aligns with our mission to build a comprehensive atlas of the world online. This atlas is a dynamic, collaborative, open platform for visualizing, sharing, and searching geographic information—whether it’s in your local neighborhood or on the other side of the globe.

By providing free authoring tools like SketchUp and Building Maker, we’re making it easy to introduce 3D buildings to the map. Maps are no longer just 2D static images on paper, they’re living reflections of the local world around us. Everyone has the ability to help shape the map and contribute their local knowledge, experiences and points of view. Adding 3D buildings to the map is just one way to achieve that.

Local residents such as those in Christchurch and Dunedin are doing more than just putting their cities on the map, they’re contributing to an atlas of the world, and becoming the curators of the special places that their cities have to offer.

Posted by Bruce Polderman, Product Manager

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Earthquake motivates New Zealanders to model their town

Pubblicato il 19 novembre 2010 da Deanna

Last week, local volunteers in Christchurch and Dunedin New Zealand invested a day of their time learning how to create 3D models using Google SketchUp. The workshops focused on learning how to geo-model, a process that involves creating 3D models of buildings from photographs for display in Google Earth.

The workshop was led by local architect and geo-technology expert Jason Mill of ZNO, who was inspired to organize the events following the recent earthquake in his hometown of Christchurch. As an architect, Jason recognized the value of having a publicly accessible digital model of the city, and has invested considerable time over several years modeling the central business district of Christchurch.

The value of these models took on new meaning when many of the heritage buildings in town disappeared, leaving the community to decide what should stand in their place.

Five hours away, the city of Dunedin was unaffected by the earthquake, but given its large number of heritage buildings, local residents there decided that it shouldn’t assume that they will be there forever. They suddenly felt a greater sense of urgency around creating a historical record of these buildings.


Historic preservation and city planning are two reasons that many people model their town, but there are numerous other benefits. Local business owners are keen to be represented on the 3D map, enabling virtual tourists another means to locate them on the Internet. Downtown organizations responsible for promoting their city are other beneficiaries. Exploring a destination virtually, whether for business or leisure, is becoming as common as reading a web site.

Google supports these workshops because it aligns with our mission to build a comprehensive atlas of the world online. This atlas is a dynamic, collaborative, open platform for visualizing, sharing, and searching geographic information—whether it’s in your local neighborhood or on the other side of the globe.

By providing free authoring tools like SketchUp and Building Maker, we’re making it easy to introduce 3D buildings to the map. Maps are no longer just 2D static images on paper, they’re living reflections of the local world around us. Everyone has the ability to help shape the map and contribute their local knowledge, experiences and points of view. Adding 3D buildings to the map is just one way to achieve that.

Local residents such as those in Christchurch and Dunedin are doing more than just putting their cities on the map, they’re contributing to an atlas of the world, and becoming the curators of the special places that their cities have to offer.

Posted by Bruce Polderman, Product Manager

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Now available with Google Apps: Google Reader

Pubblicato il 19 novembre 2010 da Jeremiah Dillon, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Editor’s note: Yesterday we launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.

Welcome to Google Reader
We all have favorite websites. The ones that we keep returning to day after day – or even several times a day – to check for new content. Whether you follow company press coverage on a set of news websites, track industry-related developments through trade journals, or follow what people are saying about your organization in the blogosphere, you can now do all of this in one place using Google Reader.

Now available with Google Apps accounts, Google Reader is a web-based content aggregator that allows you to pull updates from your favorite websites together in one place. By subscribing to a site’s RSS or Atom feed in Reader, you’re automatically notified when that website posts new content. Instead of checking many sites repeatedly for updates, Google Reader brings your favorite web content to you!

Google Reader also makes it easy to share relevant articles with colleagues at your organization using Google Apps. Reader is integrated with your existing contacts list so address auto-complete works seamlessly. For example, if you see an article in your Reader feed about new tax incentives for your industry, you can easily share this with a coworker responsible for financial planning or with an entire distribution list you have created, right from the Google Reader.


For those of you always on the move, Google Reader also makes it easy and convenient to follow the stream of updates from your favorite websites on your mobile device, automatically synced through your Google Apps account.


Learn more and get started
Google Reader can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

For more information about Google Reader you can take a look at our Help Center pages or follow the latest news and get tips and tricks from the Google Reader Blog.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google Reader at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager, Google Reader

Note: Google Reader may not be available in all areas.

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Great tech support and good karma found with Google AdWords online

Pubblicato il 19 novembre 2010 da A Googler

(Cross-posted from the Google Small Business Blog)

When Uday Challu noticed a growing dissatisfaction with avenues for technical support, he was inspired to create a better way for people to get help with their tech troubles. So in 2007 he founded iYogi.com, India’s first direct-to-consumer remote technical support company. Founded on a belief in good karma, iYogi aims to mitigate frustrations with technical products and services by delivering a high-quality customer service experience.

iYogi Founder Uday Challu


iYogi provides round-the-clock, 24-hours service on a wide variety of technical products and issues, in Australia, Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. Uday uses Google AdWords to reach these international customers.

Uday says he saw search and, in particular, AdWords as a way to reach customers in need of technical support. He says, “iYogi services are currently available in multiple geographies and advertising with AdWords seemed like the most obvious way to reach customers who were turning to the Internet to find and fix their problems.”

With the intent of starting small and building to scale, Uday targeted his first campaigns to the U.S. only. Using location and language targeting, iYogi launched a U.S.-only campaign with general keywords related to customer support, and honed his campaign over time. “We gathered lots of intelligence from the Search Query Report, which helped us identify other keywords people in the U.S. were searching for,” says iYogi Vice President of Online Marketing K.R. Sreejith. “We also tested new ad texts and customized these ad texts to highlight popular keywords.”

Then, using lessons from his experiences in targeting the U.S., Uday expanded into the Canadian market. He found his experience in the U.S. helpful for the Canadian campaign, but didn’t see similarly high volume. After examining the global competitive landscape, he decided to expand to Australia and the U.K.

“We quickly learned that ads in the U.K., for example, had to be different than ads in the U.S.,” says Sreejith. “Using the Search Query Report, we noticed that the popularity of certain keywords was different in the U.K. and that there are differences in the spelling of these terms. We also learned from our sales teams that U.K. customers spend more time on the phone than do U.S. customers. So, we edited our ad texts and landing pages to reflect these different keywords and values.”

Today, iYogi is one of the fastest growing remote tech support provider in the world. As Uday continues to expand his business internationally, he’ll continue to use insights gained from his ad campaigns and to provide the rest of the world with similarly karmic technical support experiences!

Posted by Anand Devsharma, Team Manager, India

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Web Analytics TV #14 – Just Wow

Pubblicato il 19 novembre 2010 da Nick
Well it’s another amazing episode of Web Analytics TV. In this exciting series with Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski, you ask and vote on your favorite web analytics questions via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them.

In this episode we award Darren in Southern California the “Ninja of the Episode” award for his great question about how to track clicks on links that point to the same destination page. Really great question Darren. Just send us an email and we’ll send you an autographed, personalized, copy of Web Analytics 2.0.

Here is the list of last weeks questions. Just Wow!

In this action-packed episode we discuss:
  • (0:30) Tracking dynamic/variable goal values in Google Analytics
  • (1:50) How to determine if async ga.js has loaded for outbound link tracking
  • (4:00) How GA tracks sessions/visits with tabbed browsing
  • (6:38) Adding event tracking to links without a lot of manual work
  • (8:26) Best practices for passing campaign data via custom variables
  • (10:15) Is there a way to export data from an old profile to a new one?
  • (11:10) Ways to rollup data across accounts for custom dashboards
  • (12:20) In page analytics with sites that changes content very quickly
  • (13:30) Reasons why AdWords data in the API is a bit behind the other data
  • (14:40) Native call tracking with Google Analytics
  • (15:47) Why transaction and goal metrics might differ for the same page
  • (17:30) Ways to track different links on a page that point to the same destination
  • (20:18) Sharing advanced segments and custom reports with others
  • (21:12) How to link many AdWords accounts into Google Analytics
  • (21:50) Using autotagging to avoid AdWords-GA integration issues
  • (22:47) How many visits do you need to determine statistical significance
  • (25:10) How to track pay pal with Google Analytics
  • (26:20) How reliable are city level metrics in Google Analytics
  • (27:53) Good metrics to track the effectiveness of knowledge base articles





Here are the links to the topics we discuss:


As always, if you need help setting up Google Analytics or leveraging the advanced configuration options, we recommend hiring a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

If you found this post or video helpful, we’d love to hear your comments. Please share them via the comment form below. And, if you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question and vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site. Avinash and I will answer your latest questions in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video.

Thanks!


Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

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2010 Google Faculty Summit in Shanghai

Pubblicato il 19 novembre 2010 da A Googler

The 2010 Google Faculty Summit was held Thursday and Friday, November 18-19 in Shanghai, part of our ongoing support for education in China. Senior Googlers from China and Mountain View, California gathered to explore hot topics at the cutting-edge of technology research with more than 65 experts and professors from around 30 universities and institutes including Tsinghua University, Peking University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Other topics included how to deepen collaboration between Google and China universities in areas of joint research, curriculum development and cultivation of talents.

This year’s theme was “Fostering Understanding and Strengthening Cooperation” and the meeting served as a platform for academia and industry to explore ways of teaming up with Google on university-business cooperation and technology research. The Summit, which spanned a day and a half, was also Google China’s largest education event to date.

Our discussions on Thursday focused on deep discussion about two of Google China’s most important sectors, mobile computing and e-commerce, while the morning of Friday focused on cooperation in course development. The Summit examined course development for many of today’s hottest topics, including cloud computing, Android application development and web technology, thereby strengthening the cultivation of talent in these sectors. In addition, the Summit included several topic-specific discussion groups that allowed experts and professors from institutions of higher education to meet with Google staff and discuss relevant topics and cooperation with the hope of expanding upon currently existing areas of cooperation. We’ve posted more details on the Summit here in Simplified Chinese.

Cooperation between Google and Chinese universities and institutions of higher education began in 2005 with course development and gradually grew to include projects that supported Chinese universities to cultivate innovative professionals that meet industry needs. Projects currently underway include course development, teacher training, scholarship programs, research grants for doctoral students, donations of equipment, joint research, innovative student projects, campus lectures and educational summits. We’ve established 12 research projects with universities in Mainland China including Tsinghua University, Peking University, Zhejiang University and Shanghai Jiaotong University, as well as the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the Hong Kong Chinese University. These projects focus on many areas of study, including mobile computing, machine learning, data mining, multimedia searches and natural language processing. Visit the University Relations website to learn more about our cooperation with universities. Moving forward, we’ll will continue to support our partner universities to deepen cooperation and expand areas of focus.

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

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Australia's Flight Centre and Ray White have gone Google

Pubblicato il 19 novembre 2010 da Ashley Chandler

[cross-posted from the Official Google Australia Blog]

Our Apps business is one of the fastest growing at Google today, with Australia being one of the fastest growing markets in the Asia Pacific region. Today we are announcing that two leading Australian businesses are the latest to go Google.

Flight Centre is Australasia’s largest travel agency group with more than 2,000 shops and businesses in 11 countries. Migrating to Gmail will cut their email system costs by approximately 30% annually, while giving their employees an unprecedented 25GB inbox – meaning staff will never need to be burdened by deleting emails. The new Google Apps suite has given them access to more than just email – they have a collaborative suite of tools that supports their entire global operation. Watch Flight Centre’s story below.

Ray White manages over $30 billion worth of real estate sales across Australia, New Zealand and Asia, writing $6 billion in home loans each year. In addition to providing 1,000 businesses, 8,000 agents and each of its customers a standardised communication and collaboration platform via Google Apps, Ray White also developed apmasphere – a dedicated rental property management system delivering greater efficiency and transparency for property management in Australia. Ray White developed this application on the Google App Engine platform, which provided a fast, efficient and robust development environment, with unique collaboration features. We’re convinced that Ray White’s pioneering work will form a template for other developments around the world. Watch Ray White’s Story below.

More than 3 million businesses worldwide have “gone Google” – including Australian businesses you can read about here.

Posted by Emma Robinson, Google Enterprise AU/NZ team

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