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When I woke up at 4:00 AM in a dark field, after just a half hour of sleep, I wondered if I was crazy. When I put on my headlamp and running shoes for a six-mile run—my second of three runs that day—I knew that I was crazy. But I was happy about it because I knew that my teammates were just as crazy.

I was running Hood to Coast with the Google relay team. That's a 197-mile Oregon race that starts at Mount Hood, travels through Portland, and finishes on the beach in the town of Seaside. More than 1000 teams participate in the race, with 12 runners on each team running three legs each.

The 12 runners on our team were all Googlers from different parts of the company: AdSense, AdWords, Google.org, Engineering, Search and Analytics, Search Quality, and more. We had runners from a number of offices: Cambridge, Chicago, Mountain View, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle . Many of us had run Hood to Coast before and even won similar races for Google; some of us were rookies to all-night relay races. What brought us all together was a love of running and a desire to get Team Google to the finish line as fast as possible — even if that meant that we wouldn't get much sleep.

We started last Friday night with fresh legs, fresh clothes, and lots of enthusiasm. Over the next 197 miles we wore out our legs, made our running clothes and vans smell terrible, and generated even more enthusiasm by coming together as a team and cheering each other on.

We had a lot to cheer about, because everyone contributed great performances and because we ran faster than we expected. We finished in 19 hours and 45 minutes, which meant that we averaged 10 miles per hour for the race. That was good enough to finish in 9th place overall and in 3rd place in the corporate division—behind a couple of running shoe companies that you might have heard about.

We were more than happy with the result. As we gathered on the beach near the finish line, we enjoyed the sun, the sense of accomplishment, and the camaraderie of our teammates. I smiled and thought back to when I woke up at 4:00 AM in that dark field. Considering all that we had accomplished, maybe I wasn't so crazy after all.

Here's a picture of the Team Google runners and drivers, enjoying the beach at the finish.


Posted by Chris Holstrom, Technical Writer

Yahoo! is joining Michael Arrington as a major sponsor at TechCrunch50, TechCrunch's second annual conference, at the San Francisco Design Center Concourse Monday through Wednesday, September 8 - 10.

More than 50 early stage companies will pitch their products and ideas in front of a host of respected VCs, execs and entrepreneurs. A panel of judges will also award $50,000 to one of the startups. Yahoo!'s Ash Patel, Head of the Audience Products Division, will serve as one of the TechCrunch50 judges this year.

The Yahoo! Search BOSS team will also be exhibiting, so if you're a start-up or interested in starting a business in this space, stop by our booth to learn more about our open search web services platform, meet the team and see a demo of the product. We'll be there from 8 a.m. - 6 p.m. all three days. We'll also be giving away some swag and maybe a prize or two.

But what's a TechCrunch gathering without some socializing? Yahoo! is sponsoring the closing cocktail reception on Wednesday from 6 - 8 p.m., so don't miss it.

For more details on TechCrunch50 2008 and Yahoo!'s presence at the show -- including Ash Patel's panel on Monday from 2:15 - 5 p.m. -- check out the conference site.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

Whenever we release a product in beta as we just did with Google Chrome, we can always count on our users to come up with ways to improve it. This week's example: several eagle-eyed users and bloggers have expressed concern that Section 11 of Google Chrome's terms of service attempts to give us rights to any user-generated content "submitted, posted or displayed on or through" the browser.

You'll notice if you look at our other products that many of them are governed by Section 11 of our Universal Terms of Service. This section is included because, under copyright law, Google needs what's called a "license" to display or transmit content. So to show a blog, we ask the user to give us a license to the blog's content. (The same goes for any other service where users can create content.) But in all these cases, the license is limited to providing the service. In Gmail, for example, the terms specifically disclaim our ownership right to Gmail content.

So for Google Chrome, only the first sentence of Section 11 should have applied. We're sorry we overlooked this, but we've fixed it now, and you can read the updated Google Chrome terms of service. If you're into the fine print, here's the revised text of Section 11:
11. Content license from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.And that's all. Period. End of section.

It will take a little time to propagate this change through the 40+ languages in which Google Chrome is available, and to remove the language in the download versions. But rest assured that we're working quickly to fix this. The new terms will of course be retroactive, and will cover everyone who has downloaded Google Chrome since it was launched.

Posted by Mike Yang, Senior Product Counsel

It's been two months since we began "opening up" the Yahoo! Search infrastructure with the launch of Yahoo! Search BOSS and we've already seen some great products created. We shared a handful with you last month, and we're excited to see that the creativity hasn't slowed down. From new vertical search engines to a personalized search platform, developers are using BOSS to come up with a range of new products. As we promised, below are a few more examples of the interesting products that have been built using BOSS.

123People.com: Currently focused on the European market, 123People.com delivers comprehensive and centralized profiles including images, videos, phone numbers, email addresses, social networking, and Wikipedia profiles related to an individual. The site uses the XML BOSS interface to query Yahoo! Search's image and web search index in real-time. Based on the geographic location of the user and semantic analysis, 123people applies ranking algorithms and presents results tailor-made to people search.

askBOSS: One of our very own, Saurabh Sahni, explored the use of natural language processing in image search, which has historically been limited to text search. His mashup, askBOSS, is an extension of Vik Singh's QNA mashup and works by using the Mashup Framework to predict the answer to a user's question and then queries the BOSS image search API for corresponding images.

BuildaSearch: Using the BOSS Web Search API to generate customizable search results, BuildaSearch takes all the complexities out of building a search engine and allows you to control the name, look and feel of your search engine. For example, one of our team members designed a search engine to look for dog friendly activities in the bay area in just a few minutes. Engines built using BuildaSearch can be hosted on either their site or elsewhere on the web using an API provided by BuildaSearch.

Remember, if you're building mashups, make sure to tag them with "bossmashup" on Delicious so we can discover them. We'll continue to share new products that we come across. Hopefully, these examples will help to get your wheels turning. Happy building!

If you're feeling inspired to start building today, sign-up for Yahoo!'s Open Hack 2008 and join your fellow developers. Please mark your registration with "Yahoo! Search" so we can save you a space.

The BOSS team

To help promote web innovation and openness, Yahoo! is hosting Open Hack 2008 for developers next Friday and Saturday, September 12 & 13, at our Sunnyvale campus and we invite you to join us.

In our SearchMonkey- and Yahoo! Search BOSS-focused sessions, we'll share where the platforms are headed, gather important feedback and give you time to get creative and build apps.

We're calling all SearchMonkey and BOSS developers and partners. But space is limited so head to our Hack Day sign-up page as soon as possible to reserve your spot. If you sign up, please mention "Yahoo! Search" in your submission form and we'll make sure there's a ticket waiting for the first fifty who apply.

Check out the schedule below for SearchMonkey and BOSS sessions. Hope to see you in Sunnyvale.

Friday, September 12

10 - 10:50 a.m.
SearchMonkey Workshop (C2)

3 - 3:50 p.m.
BOSS Workshop (C3)

Yahoo! Search Blog team

The general election season officially kicked off last week as delegates gathered in Denver for the Democratic National Convention - and Google and YouTube were there to enable and promote the use of the Internet to bring voters and candidates closer than ever before. People across the U.S. were able to keep up with the latest convention news and action using YouTube, Picasa and Election News - centralized and featured on our Conventions site.

On the ground, delegates and attendees got a taste of Google at our Google Retreat in the Big Tent, where they could drink refreshing smoothies, enjoy free massages and sample our newest election products, including the 2008 U.S. Elections site, the Google Maps Election Gallery and Power Readers in Politics.

Many of our Democratic guests took the time to post video nominations of Senator Barack Obama at YouTube booths in the Google Retreat and inside the Pepsi Center. Our goal was to allow those in attendance to express their enthusiasm for the Party on video - and allow voters at home a more robust and diverse view of the proceedings in Denver than ever before. We collected over 500 such videos from delegates on hand. In addition, party and political leaders – among them Governor Mark Warner, Senator Harry Reid, Governor Bill Richardson, Governor Brian Schweitzer, Mayor Gavin Newsom, and Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin – and celebrities like John Legend, Charles Barkley, and Louis Gossett Jr. took the opportunity to speak directly to the YouTube community and/or to talk about why they are nominating Obama (as did Congressman Dennis Kucinich, pictured here). Their videos, and a whole lot more, including Senator Obama's acceptance speech, are available on our 2008 Conventions YouTube channel.

Along the 16th Street Mall, visitors stepped into our Google Maps voting booths to find how to register and where to cast their ballots with our US Voter Info Guide.


Our CEO, Eric Schmidt, participated in a townhall discussion moderated by Rachel Maddow on technology's role in modern politics, from the Macaca incident to the next administration.

Video Embed:


We even showcased Google Maps on a Jumbotron before Barack Obama's stadium speech in an effort to illustrate Americans' top concerns for 2008; Google App Engine helped us host the mashup and manage thousands of incoming text messages. See the live map on the DNC website.

And to celebrate the closing night of the convention, we partnered with Vanity Fair to throw a party for press, celebrities, political leaders and executives in attendance. Our guests challenged each other to tennis matches in the "hallway of Wiis" and performed their favorite hits in the Rock Band room.

This week we're in St. Paul for the Republican National Convention, which of course has taken a muted tone in the face of Hurricane Gustav. Thankfully, so far the damage has been less than predicted and the convention proceedings may be able to resume. In the meantime, delegates are using YouTube to upload messages of support via video, Google Earth to track Gustav's progress, and Google Maps to display evacuation sites and hurricane forecasts. And this week we're excited to be able to stream the convention live each night on Google News, thanks to Ustream, the official streaming provider of the RNC. When we're not showing live coverage, we'll have highlights from the previous day's activities.

Live Streaming by Ustream

Update: Added reference to Google App Engine mashups.

Posted by Rick Klau, Brittany Bohnet, and Steve Grove, Google Elections Team

A little over two years ago, we launched Picasa Web Albums to make publishing photos online easy. Now Picasa Web Albums hosts billions of online photos from around the globe, with users adding millions of new snapshots every day. Each of these photos records a different moment, or a different perspective, but one thing they all have in common is that in each case, the person behind the camera wanted to share their experience with a friend, their extended family, or maybe the world.

Today, we're rolling out major technology upgrades to both Picasa and Picasa Web Albums. As you might have guessed, these are largely focused on how we share and enjoy our photos with others.

For starters, there's a brand-new feature called "name tags" in Picasa Web Albums that helps you quickly label all the people in your photos, so you can organize and share your photos based on who's in the picture. Name tags uses advanced technology to automatically group similar faces together. That way, you can quickly label all the people you care about in your photo collection. Once you've labeled your photos, it's then a snap to do things like create a slideshow with every picture of you and your best friend, or easily share party photos with everybody who appears in that photo album. This demo video shows you what you can do with name tags:



There's more to Picasa Web Albums. The site now has a fresh, clean look that makes photos look great, and a new "Explore" page that allows you to browse some of the most interesting public content on our site, including "Recent Photos," a near-real-time view of public photos uploaded to Picasa Web Albums. You can now also email photos directly to Picasa Web Albums.

Of course, Picasa Web Albums is only half the story. The great advantage of Picasa Web Albums has always been its integration with Picasa, Google's free photo management software for your PC. And today we're making public the beta version of Picasa 3 at picasa.google.com.

Sharing photos with Picasa has always been remarkably simple, but in Picasa 3, we've made sharing so simple you don't even have to lift a finger. A new 'sync to web' button allows you to sync specified albums on your PC to the web. If you edit or add photos to the album on your PC, those changes will be automatically reflected on Picasa Web Albums. You can even specify who you'd like to share your web albums with from the Picasa software itself.




We've packed many other new features into Picasa 3. There's a slew of powerful new editing tools to retouch and restore photos, automatically detect and fix red-eye, or attractively add text to your images. Plus, there's plenty of the fun stuff -- we completely overhauled things like photo collages and slideshows, giving you more creative freedom over composition and layout. Not to mention a brand-new movie maker that can blend photos, video, webcam capture, and music to create customized movies that you can easily share on YouTube.

You can learn more about Picasa 3 and the new Picasa Web Albums on the Google Photos blog, or by watching the overview video below. Please give both a try -- and give us feedback!



Posted by Mike Horowitz, Product Manager

In yesterday's post on Google Chrome, we promised to let you know when it would be available for everyone to try -- and that time is now. Visit http://www.google.com/chrome to download and start exploring. (For the moment, it's available only for Windows users, but you can sign up on the download page to learn when the Mac and Linux versions are available.)

Posted by Brian Rakowski, Product Manager

It was a mere three years ago that YouTube streamed its first video, forever changing the way we share experiences with people regardless of time and distance. At home, equipped with ubiquitous technology like a digital camcorder, a computer webcam or even a mobile phone, we can easily create video clips and share them with our friends and family. Technology is no longer a barrier on either end. All you need is a browser and a fast Internet connection.

The same has not been true for this rich form of information-sharing in the office. Companies readily recognize the power of video as a medium for communication and collaboration, for reaching out to employees in remote offices and for knowledge transfer. Unfortunately, there hasn't been an easy way to distribute video content to an increasingly distributed workforce. Custom video sharing solutions have been prohibitively resource-intensive for businesses, and public video sharing sites don't give businesses the right level of security and privacy for internal-only content.

Enter Google Video for businesses, available today as part of Google Apps Premier Edition. Imagine YouTube's ease of sharing and watching videos, but in a secure, private environment made for content like internal corporate announcements, team member status updates, employee training materials and informal information-sharing. Videos can be easily shared with everyone in the company or with specific individuals. People can comment on, rate and tag videos that they watch, bringing even more useful information to subsequent viewers. When we started using Google Video for business inside Google, we were surprised at how quickly Googlers in 20+ countries took to the app. Many of our most popular internal videos were created of their own accord by individuals and teams for sharing with colleagues, a testament to how video has taken horizontal collaboration to the next level.

Watch this to learn how we've been using video inside Google:



You can learn more about video sharing and other innovative collaboration apps for businesses at www.google.com/apps/collaboration. And stay tuned for info about Google Video for schools and universities. It'll be available as part of Google Apps Education Edition on September 8.

Posted by Pavni Diwanji, Engineering Director

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available -- you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends -- all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build.

On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a tool to run the important stuff -- the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers.

This is just the beginning -- Google Chrome is far from done. We're releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We're hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust.

We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we're committed to continuing on their path. We've used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others -- and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.

The web gets better with more options and innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better.

So check in again tomorrow to try Google Chrome for yourself. We'll post an update here as soon as it's ready.

Update @ 3:30 PM: We've added a link to our comic book explaining Google Chrome.

Posted by Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management, and Linus Upson, Engineering Director

As Hurricane Gustav bears down on the Gulf Coast, we've assembled some resources to keep people informed and, we hope, out of harm's way. These include:

• Google meta-page to help recovery efforts and tracking: google.com/gustav_sept08.html
• Latest Gustav reports on Google News
  Special content in the Google Earth Weather folder (track Gustav's progress and forecast, see the latest advisories from the National Hurricane Center, view Louisiana Live webcams)
• More info on our LatLong blog (we'll continue to post additional info here)
  

Our thoughts are again with Gulf-region families as they struggle against the forces of nature.

Posted by Kate Hurowitz, Google Blog team

Less than a year ago, we announced the Android Developer Challenge, a two-part contest for developers to design engaging, innovative mobile applications for Android to the tune of $10 million total in awards. Since the kickoff of the first part of the contest (ADC I) last November, we've been eagerly waiting to see what these brilliant minds would come up with. The first round of ADC I closed earlier this year, awarding the top 50 entrants with $25,000 each. Today marks the closing of the second and final round of ADC I, in which 10 winners will receive $275,000 and 10 semi-finalists will be awarded $100,000. We'd like to wish a hearty congrats to all the award recipients!

Visit the Android Developers blog to read more about the finalists' projects, and check back for updates on ADC II.

Posted by Eric Chu, Android Mobile Platform

In countries like India, great maps and comprehensive local data are hard to come by. And traditional mapping approaches are stretched to the limit in such environments, where infrastructure and local businesses are evolving at a furious pace.

This need inspired us in Google India to design and build Google Map Maker, which enables users everywhere over to create rich, deep maps and fresh local data. People can mark their favorite spots in their cities and hometowns, add features such as roads, parks, and buildings, tag small businesses to help users find them, and collaborate to map neighborhoods of interest. This product is motivated by the spirit of information democracy, where people can create information that are moderated and consumed by their peers.

Today, we are bringing home this innovation by launching Google Map Maker in India, which has already been deployed in 57 other countries.



We hope Google Map Maker will result in rich local data which will benefit Google users both on the web and on mobile. The creation of base maps where there were previously none will encourage many mashups, mapplets and other cool applications that make use of this data. We're also excited to see Google Map Maker create a new breed of local map experts who bring their passion for their neighborhoods and communities into the online world, adding to local commerce, tourism and investment.

I will leave you with a map of IIT Bombay, the alma mater to many of us in Google India. When I spent a few hours mapping IIT Bombay -- the place I lived in, the school I went to, and the streets I played on, it turned out to be a surprisingly satisfying experience that reconnected me to a place that is home to many of my memories. We hope you will find the Google Map Maker experience as fun and fulfilling as we do.


Posted by Lalitesh Katragadda, Software Engineer and creator, Google Map Maker

Back in May, we introduced a site called Google for Non-Profits, to showcase the tools organizations can use to raise funds and collaborate easily and efficiently. These tools, we hoped, would enable non-profits to focus less on creaky email systems or lost documents -- and more on their missions.

For at least one non-profit, this was old news. Months before we unveiled our non-profit site, Marianne Clauw, who chairs CASA Washtenaw, an organization pairing volunteers with children in the local court system -- learned about Google products through an employee in our Ann Arbor office. With a website that she now compares to a "dusty storefront" and data sitting in a "scarily unsecure, un-backed up" state, she remembers, "I could see right away that we needed to switch to Google services."

Clauw and her colleague Ferlie Yruma used Google Page Creator (now Google Sites) to develop a shiny new website, complete with a YouTube video, a Google Calendar that reflects real-time updates, and a Checkout button allowing users to donate with a few clicks of a mouse. They applied and earned a Google Grant to run free AdWords advertising. As volunteer applications and donations trickled in, they began using Gmail and Docs to streamline the way they worked internally.

Here's what they have to say about the experience:



"Non-profits are not competitive by nature,” observes Clauw. “But we live in a competitive landscape: for donors, for volunteers, for grants. What we've done with Google is a major step in being competitive.”

When CASA Washtenaw competes at a high level, Washtenaw County kids win. And for this non-profit, that's the biggest prize of all.


Posted by Eileen Duffy, AdWords Associate

At a time when more and more digital technologies are becoming indispensable to millions of people, the field of computer science (CS) is in trouble. Enrollment and retention of CS students, particularly those historically underrepresented in the field (women, African-Americans, Native-Americans, and Hispanics) has declined sharply. According to the Computing Research Association, CS enrollment in the U.S. was at its peak in 2000, with 15,958 undergrads. By 2006, enrollment declined by roughly half: 7,798 undergrads. And enrollment among already-underrepresented groups has dropped even more sharply.

We hope to address this problem (and potential shortage) with a variety of programs beyond our scholarship initiatives. Recently, our educational outreach group, University Programs, and Diversity and Talent Inclusion teams joined forces to create the Computer Science Summer Institute (CSSI). This special institute included an interactive and collaborative CS curriculum, as well as a living-learning residential experience for student networking. We chose 17 college sophomores, all aspiring computer scientists, to attend the all-expenses-paid CSSI in Mountain View from August 3–15.

Our goals for the institute:

• To enrich the skills of students early in their CS studies (or at risk of leaving the major) in an effort to increase the pipeline into the CS major and boost retention
• To provide a social and professional network for underrepresented (women, Hispanic, African-American, and/or Native-American) technology students
• To empower students, giving them the tools, motivation and confidence to continue with CS studies
• To show students daily life at Google and the amazing applications of CS that occur here

The CSSI faculty was comprised of Google engineers and our educational outreach group. We paired students with Google "buddies" - engineers with whom they can develop a long-term advising relationship. Students heard from professionals from across the technology industry and academia about the many things they can do with a CS degree.

Students worked in teams to build a completely interactive Web 2.0 website, keeping in mind both practical programming skills and the theory behind it.

We plan to keep in touch with these students across their college careers, and to encourage future participants to complete their CS work and join the community of computer scientists.


Posted by Rebecca Selvenis, University Programs Specialist

Late last year, we introduced our newest tool for YouTube's content identification and management system, Video ID. While we have long provided copyright owners with similar content policies and tools, Video ID was revolutionary because it provided real choice and control to content owners by combining a sophisticated policy engine with cutting-edge video matching technology. With the other tools in our content ID system, Video ID helps content owners decide exactly what they want done with their videos, whether to block, promote, or even—if a copyright holder chooses to license their content to appear on the site—monetize them.

We've been curious to see what copyright holders would choose. Would the vast majority of partners block user-uploaded videos? Or would they embrace Video ID as an opportunity to generate revenue and exposure for their content online?

As it turns out, our partners are choosing the latter, monetizing 90% of all claims created through Video ID. This has led directly to a similarly significant increase in monetizable partner inventory, as our Video ID partners are seeing claimed content more than double their number of views, against which we can run ads. This means that if a partner has, say, 10,000 views of its content, leaving up videos claimed by our system will lead to an average additional 10,000 views of that same content. We call this "partner uplift," and for some partners we've seen uplift as high as 9000%.

Access to our copyright management tools is open to all rights owners, regardless of whether they choose to license their content to YouTube. But it's clear to our 300+ Video ID partners that our technology has created a framework that allows copyright holders to sanction the creativity of their biggest fans. These partners now have a new way to successfully distribute and market their content online, and with the help of our users, they are finding Video ID critical to discovering such opportunities.

You can learn more about our content identification and management system on its new home page.

Posted by David King, YouTube Product Manager

In my previous post, I described the components of your web search experience and the principles behind creating a great search experience. There are complex algorithms underlying simple features such as spelling correction and the two line snippets that describe each search result. We figure out what works by running experiments - tiny tests for a small number of users which help us determine whether that feature helps or hurts.

Experimentation is a very powerful tool, and we use it very widely to test potential changes to search. At any given time, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments on Google sites all over the world. I'll start by describing experimental changes so small that you can barely tell the difference after staring at the page, and end with a couple of much more visually obvious experiments that we have run. There are a lot of people dedicated to detecting everything Google changes - and occasionally, things imagined that we did not do! - and they do latch on to a lot of our more prominent experiments. But the experiments with smaller changes are almost never noticed.

For example, can you tell the difference between the two pages below?

Choice 1:

Choice 2:

I'm pretty sure I would not be able to tell the difference if I were to see each of them on their own. But apparently you can! At least in the aggregate, there is a measurable difference with a change like this. In case you can't tell after staring, the white space around the first search result has changed, which makes the first result in Picture 2 slightly more visually prominent. This visual prominence conveys the fact that according to our ranking signals, the first result is a substantially better match than the next result. On the plus side, it helps you focus on the first result. But if you were looking for one of the other results, it can disrupt your scanning of the page. An experiment helps us determine which effect is more prominent, and whether a change would help you search faster.

Another change, almost as minimal visually, is between these two results:

In this case, the difference in user interaction is so clear and marked we could tell extremely quickly which one worked better: the difference is in the thickness of the plus box next to the stock quote. Now, coming to the conclusion that one is "better" is tricky, and there's many a possible slip on the way there. Does more interaction with the plus box mean that it is better? How about if users then miss good results because they are distracted by the more prominent plus box? Keep watching Google to see which version won! If we've done our job right, almost without your noticing, things will work just that little bit better for you. The world will seem rosier. Birds will sing. Or maybe not - but at least you will have the best-designed plus box we can come up with :)

Okay, so not all of our experiments are insane eye tests. My main point in highlighting the above experiments is that we test almost everything, even things that you would think are so small that we could not possibly care (nor could they possibly matter). In fact, small changes do matter, and we do care.

Another class of experiments have to do with changes that are not purely visual, but rather involve changes to the underlying presentation algorithms. For instance, the algorithm that is responsible for the titles and snippets of result pages now highlights stems and some synonyms of the original query term. For the query [hp printer drivers] we will also return results that include and highlight the word "driver".This sort of "stemming," as it's called, is generally a good idea, because it helps you better identify results that match your query, but not always. Experiments of this sort help us verify (or, occasionally, overturn) our assumptions regarding changes in these algorithms.

There is a further class of experiments - the kind that are hard to miss - which introduces fairly prominent features. Even with these larger features, the goal of experimentation always remains the same: are we adding something that really helps people, or is this just another distraction? Google does not really come with a user manual (actually, there are some nicely-written help pages, but we're pretty sure most of you don't bother to read them!). So features need to stand on their own feet, without the help of a careful explanation. Part of the goal of an experiment is to understand just how a feature will be used, which might be quite different from what we initially intended.

Here's an example of an experiment that lets you comment on search results and move them around on the result page:
At this point, I can't say what we expect from this feature; we're just curious to see how it will be used.

These are a small sample of the kinds of experiments we run as we test everything from the barely visible to the glaringly obvious. So the next time you use Google and it seems a little different - well, maybe it is. Just for you!

Posted by Ben Gomes, Distinguished Engineer

Have you ever been stumped in finding the right words to search for? Back when I was planning my wedding, I had a list of wedding songs in mind, but the problem was that I couldn't remember any of the artist names or song titles. So I started typing into the Google search box parts of the lyrics that I did remember -- and like magic, I saw suggestions with the artist name and song titles that I wanted! (I was opted-in to the keyword suggestions Google Labs experiment at the time). At that moment, I was so proud to be working on Google Suggest, a search feature that provides real-time suggestions while you search.

Today we're excited because Google Suggest will be "graduating" from Labs and available by default on the Google.com homepage. Over the next week, we'll be rolling this out so that more and more of you will start seeing a list of query suggestions when you start typing into the search box.

We find that by providing suggestions upfront, we can help people search more efficiently and conveniently. Below are some great ways Google Suggest can help simplify your searching.

• Help formulate queries: Instead of just typing [hotels in washington] - did you want [hotels in washington dc] or [hotels in washington state]? Don't remember that song title or person's name? Let Google help you search (and yes, I ended up choosing "From This Moment" as our wedding song).

• Reduce spelling errors: Since suggestions are spell-corrected using the same "Did you mean?" feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, misspellings and typos can be corrected ahead of time. Instead of wasting your time with a misspelled query like [new yrok times] or [tomorow never dies], search the first time with the correctly-spelled query.

• Saves keystrokes: Who wants to spend their time typing [san francisco chronicle] when you can just type in "san f..." and choose the suggestion right away?

The Google Suggest feature originally started as a 20% project in 2004, and has since expanded to Google Labs, Toolbar, Firefox search box, Maps and Web Search for select countries, the iPhone and BlackBerry, YouTube, and now Google.com. Special thanks to my teammates Miki Herscovici (Tech Lead) and the rest of the engineering team in Haifa for their hard work in making this happen.

So what are you waiting for? Give it a try. Start typing in a query on Google.com to see Google Suggest in action!

Update: Corrected team mention.

Posted by Jennifer Liu, Product Manager

The Yahoo! Mobile team has continued to develop new enhancements to make Yahoo! oneSearch easier and more effective for our users on the go. Today, we're further enhancing the mobile search experience by rolling out a Yahoo! oneSearch shortcut for Nokia devices. This new shortcut provides users with one-click access to Yahoo! oneSearch through our downloadable client. Once installed, it only takes one click on your phone screen to initiate a search. Simply click on the pencil key or right shortcut key on your device, and you no longer have to hunt through your cell phone menu to conduct a search.

If you have a select Series 60 Nokia device (e.g. N70, N95, N73, 6120, and E65), give it a try. The Yahoo! oneSearch shortcut is currently available for you in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and South America. If you don't have a Series 60 Nokia, we're hoping to bring the oneSearch shortcut to you soon.

One of the key features of the Yahoo! oneSearch shortcut is the integration of Search Assist, which made its mobile debut in April at CTIA. Mobile Search Assist is powerful on the go when you're having to type on small keyboards or "triple tap" phone buttons; it reduces the time it takes to enter a search term through real time search suggestions and related concepts for more refined results. For example, as you type in 'Dark Knight', Search Assist may recommend suggestions such as Darth Vader or Olympian Dara Torres to help guide your search.

For more information, visit http://mobile.yahoo.com/onesearch/shortcut on your PC, or http://m.yahoo.com/shortcut on your mobile device. And let us know what you think in the comments below.

Joy Ghanekar
Yahoo! Mobile

The Yahoo! Search team was in San Jose last week at Search Engine Strategies, and in addition to participating in panel discussions on semantic search, shopping search tactics and searcher behavior, we also took part in the SES Awards.

The awards honor 15 search marketers and search engines, and the mission is to inspire innovation and encourage new ideas. Judges look at four key areas across all award categories: innovation in methodology and execution, achieving measurable success goals, excellence in tactical execution, and overall approach and category relevance. Yahoo! Search was evaluated in the "Search Engine with the Most Relevant Results" category by a panel of industry experts and the SES Awards editorial staff. We're happy to report that Yahoo! took home the top prize. We firmly believe that opening up our search ecosystem with platforms like SearchMonkey and BOSS, and adding features like Search Assist, will continue to enable us to focus on creating the best and most relevant search experience on the Web for users. But, a pat on the back is always nice!

As many know, foosball has long been a tradition here at Yahoo!. So, when we learned that there would be a foosball competition at SES, we knew our pride was on the line. On Wednesday night, Yahoo!'s Jake Rosenberg and Daniel Wong dueled with the major search engines to take home the Foosball title. Jake's snake shot was what secured the victory. Congrats Jake and Daniel!

Overall, it was a memorable event. For more on the foosball competition, check out Yodel Anecdotal and Google's Webmaster Central Blog.

Yahoo! Search Blog team