Author Archive

From time to time, the resident physician at Google headquarters weighs in with her thoughts on healthy living. This is not medical advice, and you should check with your own doctor before pursuing any particular course of action.

Posted by Dr. Taraneh Razavi, M.D., Staff Doctor

Watching scenes of fists flying over an LCD monitor during a holiday sale made me wonder about stress, and how one can maintain a holiday spirit at a stressful time of year. According to Stedman's Medical Dictionary, it's stress, not the holidays, that make the body react to "forces of a deleterious nature that disturb its normal physiologic equilibrium." That sounds bad.

There is extensive research that confirms the harmful effects of stress when it occurs continuously with out the relaxation phase. In the international INTERHEART study, patients with a first heart attack reported significantly more stress in financial, home and work-related situations than the control studies. In another study of 1055 medical students who were followed for 36 years, it was found that those who had a higher anger response to stress had higher risk of developing premature heart disease (before age 55). Even exposure to traffic has been implicated. (Uptodate.com has more references if you are interested.)

Stress can also adversely impact high blood pressure, cholesterol, immune response, skin disorders, rheumatoid arthritis, intestinal motility, diabetes, cancer survival, and other conditions. It is now considered to be as much a risk factor as obesity, smoking, and sedentary life style so learning to counteract this response is important.

Although the external stress factors (irritating co-workers, hurricanes) are hard to control, there are several ways to reduce the internal stress response. Here's a short list - check it twice:

• Make a list and prioritize. It's OK if the holiday cards don't go out until 1/2...07.
• Exercise. No, it's not the answer to everything, but it has been shown to decrease the stress hormones.
• Take a vacation (break with tradition! A year-end getaway might help limit stress). If not a vacation, at least take a stroll, or take deep breaths while counting to 10.
• Hugging for 20 seconds has been shown to reduce blood pressure.

Beyond these immediate steps, you can find many resources via the University of Massachusetts' Stress Reduction Program and Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, including local referrals. Or check the nonprofit Omega Institute for a vacation centered around stress reduction.

If you still feel you're under severe stress, or you're not improving with any of the above measures, then please do consult your doctor. And here's my advice: if the turkey is rubbery, use it as an exercise ball. Happy holidays, everyone.

Posted by Yu Chen, Software Engineer

As part of the personalization team, I'm pretty addicted to looking at my search history for interesting patterns. So I decided to go a step further and write a script to pull together some stats about how I was searching. We thought other people might like to see this sort of thing too, so today we launched a Trends feature that gives you a look at a list of your top searches and clicks and other info about your search activity.

To use it, you have to turn on Personalized Search and be signed in to your Google Account while you search. (If you don't have a Google Account, it's easy to create one for free.) Just click the "Trends" link on your Search History page, or go directly to your Trends.

Posted by Shannon Bauman, AdSense Team

Whether you're gazing up at the glistening giant Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center in the heart of Manhattan or passing by the elaborate gingerbread house in the window of your local candy store, it's mighty hard to miss that the holiday season is in full swing. The creativity and energy people put into decorating is so inspiring, in fact, that we decided to do a little decorating of our own in Google AdSense (those "Ads by Google" that you've probably seen on lots of websites and blogs).

Like the cherries that Aunt Ellie puts in her famous fruitcake, we're spicing up our ads with some great Google-y images: snowmen, holiday packages, and Waldo, the ice skating penguin. Unlike the fruitcake, though, these ads don't last for years and years – they're just present until December 26. And here's what they look like.

AdSense publishers can opt in to the designs by going to their account settings. And in the new year, we'll be rolling out more designs for holidays and events around the world.

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

The recent announcement of the AOL partnership has been the source of a lot of rumors and misconceptions. We'd like to clear some of those up.

- Biased results? No way. Providing great search is the core of what we do. Business partnerships will never compromise the integrity or objectivity of our search results. If a partner's page ranks high, it's because they have a good answer to your search, not because of their business relationship with us.

- Indexing more of AOL's content. Our goal is to organize all of the world's information. When we say "all the world's information," this includes AOL's. We're going to work with the webmasters at AOL -- just as we work with webmasters all over the world -- to help them understand how the Google crawler works (with regard to robots.txt, how to use redirects, non-html content, etc.) so we don't inadvertently overlook their content.

- AOL will receive a credit towards advertising purchased through Google's ad program. You might wonder if this will affect the ad auction. It won't. We don't offer preferential treatment on advertising (in either the auction or the display) to any of our partners.

- We have a service called "onebox" for which we provide some additional links separate from ads (sponsored links) and search results. (Try searching on [new york transit strike] and look for the news section.) AOL and its products have always been a part of onebox, along with many other providers, and will continue to be.

- There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.

Our service and our business works because of you - our users. You're important to us and something that we think about all the time -- as we build new products, negotiate deals, and think about what our future holds.

We're looking forward to what AOL can help us do for you, and believe that our new agreement with them will only create a better experience for you in 2006 and beyond -- one where you can continue to trust that we're giving you a result because it's the best one we can possibly provide.