google

Official Google Blog: Introducing our European 2008 Anita Borg Scholars

A few months ago we had the great pleasure of announcing the fifth class of Anita Borg Scholars in the U.S. and our first class of Scholars in Canada. Now it’s the Europeans’ turn.

What I want from personalization in the future is …

multiple profiles that become, over time, avatars.

my searches correspond to the many roles and specialized domain knowledge bases that I’ve accumulated over time — product manager, lawyer, publisher, analyst, project management professional, climate change researcher, Harry Potter fan … I want to be able to tell the system “who I am” at any given moment and have the results correspond. More than that, i want avatars that are constantly searching on all these topics and bringing me high quality documents in a serendipitous yet thorough way.

And, while you’re at it, I want them delivered onto my wireless PDF slate…

Official Google Blog: Technologies behind Google ranking

Personalization is another strong feature in our search system which tailors search results to individual users. Users who are logged-in while searching and have signed up for Web History get results that are more relevant for them than the general Google results. For example, someone who does a lot football-related searches might get more football related results for [giants], while other users might get results related to the baseball team. Similarly, if you tend to prefer results from a particular shopping site, you will be more likely to get results from that site when you search for products. Our evaluation shows that users who get personalized results find them to be more relevant than non-personalized results.

Unfortunately, when you surf through to the information about the challenge, there is absolutely no information about the quantitative results or the techniques that the winning teams used.

This would be 1000% more interesting if they revealed the CTR and conversions that the winners were able to achieve, and if they shared the written reports by the teams.

Official Google Blog: Students surf their way to success

Together, Jamie and I recruited a panel of professors from all over the globe and came up with the Google Online Marketing Challenge. Student teams had to identify a local business with a website, but no experience of online marketing, and then were given free Google AdWords vouchers worth the equivalent of US$200.

Some of these cities look a lot better in three-d than they probably look in real life. But gotta love Google for giving cities some love. Reminds me of James Blish’s Cities in Space series … maybe Google will provide a “spindizzy” tool in v.2.

Google LatLong: Cities in 3D program in action

In March, we introduced the Cities in 3D Program, empowering local governments to contribute their own 3D models to Google. Since our original announcement, we have expanded the program to Europe and been working closely with several local governments in the US to get their models published to Google Earth. After four short months, the models from our first round of participants are available. Let’s go for a brief tour to explore these new cities….

This technology is a long way from consumer availability, but it is extremely cool…

Official Google Blog: No cameras. No lights. Just data.
The song is called “House of Cards,” from Radiohead’s recent “In Rainbows” album. In this new video, there were no cameras on set. Instead, two scanning technologies were used to capture 3D images. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produced structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne LIDAR system that uses multiple lasers was used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In the video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

Yahoo s New Build Your Own Search Engine Nips at Google s Lead - Webmonkey

Yahoo announced a new initiative Thursday called Build Your Own Search Service, or BOSS. It’s a set of programming tools developers can use to tailor Yahoo’s search index for their own use.

Good idea, but too late.

Official Google Blog: Google Mobile App: faster, easier search on iPhone & iPod Touch

Our first downloadable iPhone application is here. It’s free, and it makes searching faster and easier. It’s never as easy to type on a mobile phone
as on a full keyboard and the mobile network is rarely as fast as a desktop connection. So Google Mobile App starts working as soon as you type.

This would be a lot cooler (and more useful) on an iPhone Tablet.

Google LatLong: See which campuses received an A+

We are happy to announce the winners for the Google 2008 International Model Your Campus Competition! Congratulations to the talented students who took on such a challenging project. You can see their amazing models in Google Earth by turning on the 3D Buildings layer and navigating over to each campus, or you can see their individual collections in our 3D Warehouse. The winning schools are:

(snip)

including one of my daughter’s target schools:

• University of Wisconsin-Madison

what a great way to save money on those expensive college tours!

Official Google Blog: Introduction to Google Ranking

Today, I would like to briefly share the philosophies behind Google ranking:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.

And they really mean #3!

No discussion of Google’s ranking would be complete without asking the common - but misguided! - question: “Does Google manually edit its results?” Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us. We believe that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well … subjective, and information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity.

It would be nice if a breath of candor were introduced here.

• Humans aren’t scalable.
• Humans aren’t subject to Moore’s law.
• Humans aren’t deniable.
• Humans Not Allowed is as much about $ as about search quality.
  

As Amit Singhal undoubtedly knows, many IR studies have found that a combination of humans with algorithms works better than either alone. Not that that’s a universal truth, but it has been a common pattern.

The good news is that as long as humans are out of the loop in Google, there will be an opportunity for human experts to add value using such old-fashioned technologies as the book.

Official Google Blog: Be who you want on the web pages you visit

A while ago, I looked around the social web and wished that it could be less static. Sure, you can leave a comment on a blog or write a text blurb on your social networking profile. But what if you want to express yourself in a more fun way, with 3D graphics and real-time avatar interactions? I started asking this question as a 20% project, and I’m excited to announce today’s release of Lively by Google - a 3D virtual experience that is the newest addition to Google Labs.

Wow — this is really innovative.

Requires a Windows XP/Vista application.

So far my favorite room is SuperHero HQ.

Not sure what to make of this as a two-d text publisher.

Here’s an idea: integrate with the My Library feature of Google Books to line the room with my favorite books.