In the United States, our lives would be unrecognizable without the First Amendment. Every time you search, tweet, blog, pray (or not), gripe about your government, gather with your friends online or off, upload a video, read a newspaper or send an email to your member of Congress, you’re enjoying the rights it guarantees:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
We’re celebrating the First Amendment on the 1st of July by joining news organizations, artists, librarians, lawyers, educators and many others in supporting 1 for All, a national campaign to teach Americans about the source of these fundamental freedoms. From now through July 25, you can show your support for the First Amendment by submitting a 30-second video that demonstrates your freedom to speak, rock or assemble. The best videos will be featured on YouTube, on TV and at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.
At a time when restrictions on speech are increasing around the globe, we think it’s essential to remind ourselves that we can’t take freedom of expression for granted. Get informed, get involved and stand up with us for the First on the 1st.
Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer
We’re introducing the Yahoo! Search Widget for the Android smart phones today, making it much easier to access web search on the Android phone home screen.
The UI is simple and compact to fit the size of your phone screen. Under the covers, we’ve packed in some cool features.
You can type the query using the touch screen or use the voice input to speak your search query. Whether you enter the query by touch screen or voice, you’ll see search suggestions that help you find exactly what you’re looking for.
In the Yahoo! Mobile Search results, you’ll see shortcuts, news and deeper results only a tap away. Try searching for “World Cup” and you’ll get a concise set of the latest scores and news, with deeper results about the games.
While the app is currently only available in the U.S., the voice input package is available in multiple languages. Look for your country-specific version to roll out soon in your local Android Market.
Try out the Yahoo! Search widget and our other widgets by scanning the barcode below with your Android phone. We’d love to hear what you think.
Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome Jim Helou, Vice President of the Google division at DLT Solutions, a Google Enterprise Partner. Jim and his team provide leading enterprise solutions, such as the Google Search Appliance, to the Public Sector.
The DLT team understands the principle of service and works with their Public Sector customers to determine the best product fit, necessary services & training, post-implementation support and procurement options to fulfill their mission.
"Practice what you preach." We’ve all heard that saying, right? At DLT Solutions, we’re a modern day example of the age-old adage. DLT Solutions, a value-added reseller of information technology products to federal, state and local government, recently partnered with Google to bring their innovative products to the public sector marketplace. Among Google’s business solutions is the Google Search Appliance 6.0. We at DLT figured what better way to preach the gospel of Google than to be users ourselves.
DLT Solutions recently installed the Google Search Appliance (GSA) for searching the DLT intranet. We chronicled the installation of the Search Appliance 6.0 by two DLT Web developers at our headquarters outside of Washington D.C in a two-part real time video, now available to view at www.DLT.com/GSA.
The video is a timed demonstration of how fast and easy Google’s latest version of the Search Appliance is to install. In less than 20 minutes we had taken the Google Search Appliance out of the box, installed, and configured the Search Appliance for our intranet file search. Your own deployment time may take longer depending on how many data sources you're searching and how many files you need to crawl. The point, however, is just how easy it is – one server, two network cables, and a power cord. No army of consultants necessary.
Looking back, search results in the pre-GSA days were…sloppy. Nowadays, with the GSA, the customizable search criteria makes for a more personal internal search experience. Employees can find the information they need faster allowing them to focus on more mission-critical tasks.
DLT uses Google’s search solution for not only our intranet, but also our public website. The Search Appliance’s relevant search results in the recognizable Google format has allowed our government users to get the information they need while increasing the number of qualified prospects for DLT.
We confidently tell our customers how easy the Google Search Appliance is to install and use. We know. We’ve done it.
Posted by Dan Israel, Product Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise
It’s been 71 days since the offshore drilling rig Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, causing the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. Since then, we’ve used our platforms to make sure that people can watch and participate in real time, access all the latest information on the crisis and response and share concerns through various programs and initiatives.
Now we’re teaming up with PBS NewsHour to take you to BP headquarters in Houston for an exclusive interview with Bob Dudley, President and CEO of BP’s Gulf Coast Restoration Organization. In a live session moderated by the PBS NewsHour’s Ray Suarez, Mr. Dudley will respond directly to your questions.
Now is your chance to ask BP questions on accountability, the clean-up plan, recovery efforts in the Gulf Region, environmental impact, the status of the relief well drilling, the role of the U.S. government, the future of offshore drilling and of BP as a company.
Using Google Moderator on youtube.com/citizentube, submit your questions and vote the best ones to the top. Then join us for the live interview tomorrow, Thursday, July 1, at 3:30 pm ET/12:30 pm PT on CitizenTube. Portions of the interview will also be aired Thursday evening on the PBS NewsHour and available on YouTube.
Early on, we partnered with NewsHour to bring you a live stream of the oil gushing into the waters of the Gulf. On June 15, we streamed President Obama’s Oval Office address on the oil spill crisis on CitizenTube. After the President’s speech, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs answered questions submitted by YouTube users, who cast nearly 200,000 votes to select the top questions from 7,000+ submitted.
We hope that these various opportunities to engage and participate in a current event help you and fellow citizens stay more informed and have your voice heard.
Posted by Olivia Ma, YouTube News Manager and Ginny Hunt, Google Public Sector Manager
Korean speech recognition has received less attention than English, which has been studied extensively around the world by teams in both English and non-English speaking countries. Fundamentally, our methodology for developing a Korean speech recognition system is similar to the process we have used for other languages. We created a set of statistical models: an acoustic model for the basic sounds of the language, a language model for the words and phrases of the language, and a dictionary mapping the words to their pronunciations. We trained our acoustic model using a large quantity of recorded and transcribed Korean speech. The language model was trained using anonymized Korean web search queries. Once these models were trained, given an audio input, we can compute and display the most likely spoken phrase, along with its search result.
There were several challenges in developing a Korean speech recognition system, some unique to Korean, some typical of Asian languages and some universal to all languages. Here are some examples of problems that stood out:
Developing a Korean dictionary: Unlike English, where there are many publicly-available dictionaries for mapping words to their pronunciations, there are very few available for Korean. Since our Korean recognizer knows several hundred thousand words, we needed to create these mappings ourselves. Luckily, Korean has one of the most elegant and simple writing systems in the world (created in the 15th century!) and this makes mapping Korean words to pronunciations relatively straightforward. However, we found that Koreans also use quite a few English words in their queries, which complicates the mapping process. To predict these pronunciations, we built a statistical model using data from an existing (smaller) Korean dictionary.
Korean word boundaries: Although Korean orthography uses spaces to indicate word boundaries (unlike Japanese or Mandarin), we found that people use word boundaries inconsistently for search queries. To limit the size of the vocabulary generated from the search queries, we used statistical techniques to cut rare long words into smaller sub-words (similarly to the system we developed for Japanese).
Pronunciation exceptions: Korean (like all other languages) has many exceptions for pronunciations that are not immediately obvious. For example, numbers are often written as digit sequences but not necessarily spoken this way (2010 = 이천십). The same is true for many common alphanumeric sequences like “mp3”, “kbs2” or mixed queries like “삼성 tv”, which often contain spelled letters and possibly English spoken digits as opposed to Korean ones.
Encoding issues: Korean script (Hangul) is written in syllabic blocks, with each block containing at least two of the 24 modern Hangul letters (Jamo), at least one consonant and one vowel. Including the normal ASCII characters this brings the total number of possible basic characters to over 10000, not including Hanja (used mostly in the formal spelling of names). So, despite its simple writing system, Korean still presents the same challenge of handling a large alphabet that is typical of Asian languages.
Script ambiguity: We found that some users like to use English native words and others the Korean transliteration (example: “ncis season 6” vs. “ncis 시즌6”). This makes it challenging to train and evaluate the system. We use a metric that estimates whether our transcription will give the correct web page result on the user’s smart phone screen, and such script variations make this tricky.
Recognizing rare words: The recognizer is good at recognizing things users often type into the search engine, such as cities, shops, addresses, common abbreviations, common product model numbers and well-known names like “김연아”. However, rare words (like many personal names) are often harder for us to recognize. We continue to work on improving those.
Every speaker sounds different: People speak in different styles, slow or fast, with an accent or without, have lower or higher pitched voices, etc. To make our system work for all these different conditions, we trained our system using data from many different sources to capture as many conditions as possible.
When speech recognizers make errors, the reason is usually that the models are not good enough, and that often means they haven’t been trained on enough data. For Korean (and all other languages) our cloud computing infrastructure allows us to retrain our models frequently and using an ever growing amount of data to continually improve performance. Over time, we are committed to improve the system regularly to make speech a user-friendly input method on mobile devices.
Recently Apple released Safari 5, which included a bug where non-integral right-shifts were not being evaluated properly. There were several reports, both internally and externally, of GWT-based applications unexpectedly crashing when running in Safari 5 (including Google Wave). Upon further inspection of the crash, we determined that the bug is triggered when calling several of GWT's array sorting methods, which in turn perform non-integral right-shifts as part of the compiled code.
That's the bad news. The good news is that we have a fix for this issue, plus several other house keeping items that we've rolled into a 2.0.4 release, which can be downloaded from GWT’s main download site.
If you’re experiencing the Safari crash, you’ll need to recompile and deploy your GWT app. The changes in 2.0.4 are completely compatible with your existing 2.0 app, and should have no negative impact. To that extent we’ve already dogfooded 2.0.4, verifying that it fixes the Wave crash that was originally reported.
There’s an old saying that all news is local. But all news is personal too—we connect with it in different ways depending on our interests, where we live, what we do and a lot of other factors. Today we’re revamping the Google News homepage with several changes designed to make the news that you see more relevant to you. We’re also trying to better highlight interesting stories you didn’t know existed and to make it easier for you to share stories through social networks.
Before:
After:
The new heart of the homepage is something we call “News for you”: a stream of headlines automatically tailored to your interests. You can help us get it right by using the “Edit personalization” box to specify how much you’re interested in Business, Health, Entertainment, Sports or any subject you want to add (whether it’s the Supreme Court, the World Cup or synthetic biology). You can choose to view the stories by Section view or List view, and reveal more headlines by hovering over the headline with your mouse. We’ll remember your preferences each time you log in. If you don’t want customized Google News, hit “Reset personalization" to clear all personalization preferences. If you haven't previously customized and would prefer not to, simply close the “Edit personalization” box. You can always go back and change it later.
To give you more control over the news that you see, we’re now allowing you to choose which news sources you’d like to see more or less often. You can do so in News Settings. These sources will rank higher or lower for you (but not for anyone else) in Google News search results and story clusters. We’ve also added keyboard shortcuts for easier navigation, like in Gmail or Google Reader. When you’re in Google News, hit the question mark key to pop up a full list of shortcuts.
There are the subjects that interest you and then there’s the major news of the day. To make it easy for you to find the big stories like Hurricane Alex, we’re adding links to topics that many outlets are covering. You’ll find these topics in the Top Stories section on the left side of the homepage as well as in linked keywords above headlines. Clicking on a topic link takes you to a list of related coverage that you can add to your news stream. You can change your preferences any time in “Edit personalization.”
We’re also more prominently displaying the Spotlight section, which features stories of more lasting interest than breaking news and has been one of our most popular sections since we introduced it last fall. And then there’s local news; we’re now highlighting weather and headlines about your city or neighborhood in their own section, which you can edit with whichever location you want to follow.
Finally, you can now easily share story clusters with other people via Buzz, Reader, Facebook or Twitter. Just select the drop-down menu marked by an arrow on the top-right of each story cluster. In the drop-down, you can also choose to see more or less of the first news source.
The redesigned Google News homepage is rolling out today in the English-language edition in the U.S., and we plan to expand it to all editions in the coming months. We’re making the ability to choose which sources you’ll see more or less often available in all English-language editions worldwide and plan to expand it soon. For more information about these changes, check out the video below or visit our Help Center.
For a performance nerd, this year's Velocity conference had to be Mecca. There was an abundance of great sessions, covering a wide variety of performance and operations topics.
Performance!
I'll get to the Yahoo session shortly, but first I wanted to share my favorite session from the conference. John Rauser from Amazon gave a great talk on how TCP affects the performance of web sites. The premise of my talk (further below) is that we all need to know more about the parts of the stack we don't work on to be better at our jobs; John's presentation is a wonderful example of why this is true. In this presentation, John shows how measures that the fathers of the internet put in place to protect it from congestion are now limiting our ability to serve really fast web sites.
So what about the Yahoo stuff? We have so much... and, boy, do we love performance. We had a total of 10 sessions at the conference, from 7 speakers and 1 product announcement. Not bad.
Many of you already saw the Boomerang announcement last week, which Phil Tellis (@bluesmoon) was excited to announce during his session on "Latency: Why You Should Worry and What you Can Do About it":
Nicholas Zakas (@slicknet) also gave a great talk on "Performance on the Yahoo! Homepage":
Having personally worked with Nicholas on the Yahoo! homepage, I can personally attest to the challenges involved in optimization while adding more dynamic engaging features. Nicholas' talk breaks down — in a really approachable way — balancing the needs of a dynamic product versus the cost of performance. Nicholas frankly addressed the tradeoffs and where it made sense to "cheat."
Nicholas is, off course, author of the new O'Reilly/Yahoo! Press book High Performance JavaScript. I thought I'd include a photo of my copy — if you ask Nicholas on Twitter, you never know, he might sign yours too.
It wouldn't be performance without Stoyan Stefanov (@stoyanstefanov). Stoyan participated in three sessions at Velocity. Personally, I especially liked his "Psychology of Performance" talk, which should be essential viewing for all developers.
Remember, it's what the user perceives that matters more than what happened on the network. Stoyan and Yahoo! alumni Nicholas Sullivan (@stubbornella) also presented "The Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS".
I (@sh1mmer) spoke to Mac Slocum from O'Reilly about my session — "I made a Map of the Internet - And what it can teach us about speeding up web sites" — and other tips for speeding up web sites.
As I mentioned above, I'm really keen on the idea of having an understanding of how what you do fits into the bigger picture. We all draw these perfect diagrams showing how are system works that ignore all the real-world constraints. I hope my slides will give you a sense of the overall systems and how they plug together to make the internet and the web work.
But wait! I couldn't talk about Velocity without talking about operations as well.
Yahoo!'s Lief HedStrom (@zwoop) introduced Apache Traffic Server in his session "Apache Traffic Server - HTTP Proxy Server on the Edge." As a core piece of infrastructure at Yahoo!, Traffic Server has allowed us to scale our web infrastructure in a number of interesting ways. Lief's talk discusses the different ways we use Traffic Server to improve the performance and reliability of our Web stack.
We also had Yahoo! SVP of Operations Cheryl Ainoa talking about "Innovation At Scale." She discussed how we deal with infrastructure at Yahoo! scale. She compares launching a bottle rocket to NASA: while they both have launch sequences, the complexity of each is dramatically different. Cheryl talked through two case studies of how Yahoo! used its technology to innovate within service engineering, to fight problems like spam.
tl;dr (too long, didn't read)
The too-long-didn't-read version is simple: At Yahoo!, we like our pages fast, and we like our operations smart.
We hope that some of this material will help you improve your own sites. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask.
Tom Hughes-Croucher (@sh1mmer)
Yahoo! Technology Evangelist
Editor's Note:With the launch of the Google Apps Marketplace in March 2010, many members of our Authorized Reseller Program are taking full and immediate advantage of the benefits the Marketplace provides – new apps for their customers and a new channel for resellers to sell their own customized apps to Google Apps users. We asked Julia Rivard, VP-Communications for Canadian-based SheepdogInc.ca, to talk about her experiences as a Google Apps reseller and now a vendor within the Google Apps Marketplace.
SheepDogInc.ca, founded by Shawn Wilkie and Brandon Kolybaba, recognized early on the strengths and functionality associated with the Google Apps suite of communication and collaboration tools. In 2007, we began working with Google to become an authorized Google Apps reseller, allowing our team to bring Google Apps migration expertise to organizations in Canada and across North America. Based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, our team has migrated many organizations which were formerly utilizing a mishmash of tools to the unified, cloud computing platform created by Google Apps.
SheepDogInc.ca's position as an authorized Google Apps reseller accelerated our move towards custom application development in the cloud. The launch of the Google Apps Marketplace enabled us to create applications in the cloud specifically catered towards the needs expressed by our clients. For example, our team developed an application on Google App Engine for the 2009 World Canoe Championship that delivered race results to millions of global followers as well as a medal counting application for the Canadian Olympic Committee that delivered updates to Olympic athletes on their mobile devices at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Focused on enhancing and improving existing business processes, SheepDogInc.ca recently launched our custom application, gTrax in the Marketplace.
gTrax
gTrax is a time tracking business tool that enables employees to track their work, facilitates intuitive reporting functionality, and integrates the user's Google Calender with the time-tracking application.
The application is aimed at organizations looking for a simple and user-friendly process of drilling down and analyzing time management and internal activities, and helps identify and allocate internal resources to projects which facilitates accurate time budgeting. Complete integration with Google Calender means that gTrax utilizes entries from the employee's calender thereby reducing the need for repeat data entry and decreasing the overhead associated with other time-tracking systems.
The developers at SheepDogInc.ca have been working tirelessly to develop a user-friendly mobile interface for gTrax. The app is now fully accessible on both the Android and iPhone platforms allowing users to conveniently access gTrax from their mobile device. Since all data is securely stored in the Google cloud, it is accessible anytime and anywhere.
Our relationship with Google as an authorized reseller has allowed us to deploy the Google Apps suite in numerous organizations across North America and the addition of the Google Apps Marketplace has created new and exciting opportunities for SheepDogInc.ca. With our development team focused on creating applications on Google App Engine, we now build both fully customized apps for specific client's business needs, as well as packaged apps for a larger audience of users through the Marketplace.
Do you ever wonder who’s helping you optimize your webpages? Who works hard to ensure your payments get to you on time? Who works with our product and engineering teams to deliver the products and features that you want?
Over the next few weeks you’ll find out just that! We’re kicking off a video series where you’ll meet some of our AdSense team members. You can hear their stories, learn more about their role in AdSense, and listen to the tips they have to offer.
In the first video, Debby, a member of the AdSense Optimization team talks about her favorite websites, what she likes about working for Google, and the Google products that she recommends every publisher try.
Tom Hughes-Croucher (
