Reducing our carbon footprint

Reducing our carbon footprint

5/06/2009 03:05:00 PM

In June 2007 Google made a voluntary commitment to become carbon neutral. To honor this commitment, we calculated our global carbon footprint, purchased high-quality carbon offsets, and worked with a third party to certify our calculations and validate our offset portfolio. Through this process, we've neutralized all of Google's 2007 emissions, as well as part of our 2008 emissions. We'll continue to invest in offset projects until we reach carbon neutrality.

Offsets are only a small part of what we are doing to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. While offsets with strong additionality can achieve real emissions reductions in unregulated sectors at a relatively low cost, we view them as a short-term solution for Google, not as a substitute for other action. They provide a way for us to take responsibility for our emissions now, while we continue to advocate the development of utility-scale renewable energy. Current standards for offsets require a significant amount of work to evaluate the quality of each offset project and ensure that projects go beyond "business as usual." Stronger additionality standards -- that are more stringent, clear, and objective -- would also make it simpler for corporations like Google to use offsets as part of an overall strategy to neutralize emissions.

While we do plan to continue with the purchase of offsets to neutralize the emissions we cannot eliminate through efficiency or renewable energy, our green team will focus on what we do best -- engineering technology solutions. We've seen the success of transportation and IT efficiency programs like RechargeIT and the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, and the potential of renewable power and energy information initiatives such as RE and Google PowerMeter.

The best way to reduce our corporate footprint is to not use electricity in the first place. Google will continue to reduce our emissions directly by building and designing some of the world's most efficient data centers as well as using on-site renewable energy to power our facilities. Over the last five years, we have eliminated over half the emissions we would have produced in the absence of these critical measures. Offsets serve to neutralize the rest. In the future, we will continue to drive for improvements in energy efficiency and to find affordable sources of renewable energy.

What's your Google story?

What's your Google story?

5/07/2009 08:45:00 AM

Working on the search team over the last few years, I have heard interesting stories of how Google has made a difference to individuals across the world. For instance, Yanick Cusson from Canada wrote to tell us about how he found his father:

"I will always remember the very first day I got Internet at home. I had not seen my father in 17 years and had no clue where he was. The very first web page I went to was Google, and I simply wrote his name in the search box, and guess what? A public announcement from the government dated four years back mentioned him as promoted! I called the person who wrote the announcement, and by luck, she worked one floor up from my father's office. She transferred me directly to him, and we started talking. We have been in touch since then, and it's great!"

It's stories like this that show us how Google Search can make a real difference for people — and that's what keeps us excited to come to work every day. If you have a story to share about how Google Search has made an impact on your life, we would love to hear it. Tell us here by writing your story or posting a video. We look forward to hearing from you.

Listening to Google Health users

At Google, we believe that consumers should have convenient and secure access to all their health data so that they can be better informed and be more involved in their care. Recently, a data-savvy patient known as e-Patient Dave blogged about data that was imported into his Google Health Account from his hospital in Boston, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Once he saw his data in Google Health, he saw diagnoses that were both alarming and wrong. Where did they come from?

It turns out that they came from the billing codes and associated descriptions used by the hospital to bill the patient's insurance company. These descriptions, from the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9), often do not accurately describe a patient because the right ICD-9 code may not exist. So the doctor or hospital administrator chooses something that is "close enough" for billing purposes. In other cases, the assigned code is precisely what the doctor is trying to rule out, and if the patient turns out not to have that often scary diagnosis, it is still associated with their record. Google Health faithfully displayed the data we received on Dave's behalf. We and Beth Israel knew that this type of administrative data has its limitations but felt that patients would find it a good starting point. Too often, this is wrong.

At Google, we are constantly learning important lessons from our users. Two days after we learned about this issue, I met with Beth Israel CIO John Halamka, the patient's physician Dr. Danny Sands, and e-Patient Dave himself. We agreed on a reasonable plan: Beth Israel will stop sending ICD-9 billing codes and will instead only send to Google Health the free text descriptions entered by doctors. Beth Israel is also working with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to associate those free text descriptions with a more clinically useful coding system called SNOMED-CT, so that we can offer patients useful services like automatic drug interaction checking. The result will be more accurate and useful information in patients' Google Health profiles.

This week, all four of us were also at a conference called Health 2.0 in Boston. Dave's story, and the lessons we all learned, were the focus of much discussion. We are grateful to Dave for his openness and passion for making things right. We're also glad this happened because we and many others now better understand the limitations of certain types of health data and we are working with partners to improve the quality of the data before it gets to Google Health and our users. We look forward to sharing what we learn with the broader community. We also learned that the patient community is surprisingly interested in understanding these data issues. Dave and his doctor Danny Sands collaborated on an informative post about different data vocabularies used in different aspects of healthcare. The patient-controlled "data liquidity" that Google Health supports is clearly an important part of the future of health care. We are more committed than ever to putting consumers in charge of their own health information.

Rich Media Ads

Since last year's DoubleClick acquisition, we've increased our focus on helping marketers and agencies use Google tools for all of their display advertising needs. DoubleClick Rich Media is the part of DoubleClick that provides the technology for the most technically advanced and engaging of these display ads, which are typically created by creative agencies for their brand-focused clients. To help make this process even easier and efficient, today we're launchingDoubleClick Studio, our new rich media production and development tool.

To describe rich media, it helps to think about other ad formats that we're all familiar with, starting with the simplest: text ads. With just a few keystrokes, anyone can create simple messages in a standardized format, and place them on a site like Google.com in minutes. Then we have standard display ads, ads that usually include text with a visual such as a logo or a graphic. These can be in formats we're all familiar with like .jpg, .gif, .swf and more. Standard display ads can either be static or animated with tools like Flash. They typically have only one interaction, meaning that when you click on them, you'll be taken to a destination site. And then at the most complex level, from a design and interaction perspective, we have rich media ads. With rich media, you can have ads that expand when users click or roll over, for example, and there are extensive possibilities for interactive content, such as HD video or even the ability to click to make a phone call.

But making a rich media ad possible requires much more complex technology to ensure that all of the ad behaviors function properly, that all of the interactions can be measured, and to serve the ads onto web pages. Every piece of the canvas, from the video play button to the button that allows for expansion, requires coding in Flash that's made possible by a rich media technology provider like DoubleClick Rich Media. With all of this complexity, there's also a lot of room for error. So in addition to enabling the development of the ads, tools like DoubleClick Studio provide quality analysis and preview functionalities to make sure that the ads work the way they should.

Here is a graphic that represents some of the differences between types of online ads:

With DoubleClick Studio, we hope to make it easier for our existing users to produce rich media ads, and to expand the number of advertisers that can make these useful formats part of their marketing strategy. This is also a good thing for Internet users; rich media capabilities make advertising even more useful, letting a viewer interact with an ad and learn about a brand without having to leave the page they're on. And, advertisers have an expanded creative canvas within the ad itself, allowing for deeper, higher-quality content in the ad itself. At Google, we believe that ads at their best are useful information.

To read more about DoubleClick Studio, visit the DoubleClick blog.

Privacy Policy for http://onlinegooglesites.blogspot.com

If you require any more information or have any questions about our privacy policy, please feel free to contact us by email at shafprince@gmail.com. 

At http://onlinegooglesites.blogspot.com, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us. This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by http://onlinegooglesites.blogspot.com and how it is used. 

Log Files
Like many other Web sites, http://onlinegooglesites.blogspot.com makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol ( IP ) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider ( ISP ), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user’s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable. 

Cookies and Web Beacons 
http://onlinegooglesites.blogspot.com does use cookies to store information about visitors preferences, record user-specific information on which pages the user access or visit, customize Web page content based on visitors browser type or other information that the visitor sends via their browser. 

DoubleClick DART Cookie 
.:: Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on your site.
.:: Google's use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to your users based on their visit to your sites and other sites on the Internet. 
.:: Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following URL - http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html 

Some of our advertising partners may use cookies and web beacons on our site. Our advertising partners include ....
Google Adsense


These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on http://onlinegooglesites.blogspot.com send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see. 

http://onlinegooglesites.blogspot.com has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers. 

You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. http://onlinegooglesites.blogspot.com's privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites. 

If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browsers' respective websites. 

Two new improvements to Google results pages

Today we're rolling out two new improvements to Google search. The first offers an expanded list of useful related searches and the second is the addition of longer search result descriptions -- both of which help guide users more effectively to the information they need.

More and better search refinements 

Starting today, we're deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

For example, if you search for [principles of physics], our algorithms understand that "angular momentum," "special relativity," "big bang" and "quantum mechanic" are related terms that could help you find what you need. Here's an example (click on the images in the post to view them larger):

Let's look at a couple of examples in other languages. In Russian, for the query [гадание на картах] (fortune-telling with cards), the algorithms find the related terms "таро" (tarot), "ленорман" (lenormand) and "тибетское гадание мо" (tibetan divination mo). In Italian, if you search for [surf alle canarie] (surf at the canary islands), we now offer suggestions based on the three most famous Canary Islands: "lanzarote," "gran canaria," and "fuerteventura":

We are now able to target more queries, more languages, and make our suggestions more relevant to what you actually need to know. Additionally, we're now offering refinements for longer queries — something that's usually a challenging task. You'll be able to see our new related searches starting today in 37 languages all around the world.

And speaking of long queries, that leads us to our next improvement...

Longer snippets

When you do a search on Google, each result we give you starts with a dark blue title and is followed by a few lines of text (what we call a "snippet"), which together give you an idea of what each page is about. To give more context, the snippet shows how the words of your query appear on the page by highlighting them in bold.

When you enter a longer query, with more than three words, regular-length snippets may not give you enough information and context. In these situations, we now increase the number of lines in the snippet to provide more information and show more of the words you typed in the context of the page. Below are a couple of examples.

Suppose you were looking for information about Earth's rotation around the sun, and specifically wanted to know about its tilt and distance from the sun. So you type all of that into Google: [earth's rotation axis tilt and distance from sun]. A normal-length snippet wouldn't be able to show you the context for all of those words, but with longer snippets you can be sure that the first result covers all those topics. In addition, the extra line of snippets for the third result shows the word "sun" in context, suggesting that the page doesn't talk about Earth's distance from the sun:

Similarly, if you're looking for a restaurant review that covers all the parts of the meal, longer snippets can help:

But don't just take our word for it — try it out yourself with your favorite long, detailed query.

These are just two recent examples of improvements we've made. We are constantly looking for ways to get you to the web page you want as quickly as possible. Even if you don't notice all of our changes, rest assured we're hard at work making sure you have the highest quality search experience possible.

A shiny new beta for Google Chrome

In December, we took the 'BETA' label off our first version of the Google Chrome browser. Since then, we have continued to release fixes and updates to this version, while building and testing new browser improvements in our developer releases. Now, we're ready to roll out thenext beta of Google Chrome to get some early feedback on features that are still being polished.

The first thing you might notice about this new beta is the speed improvement, but you'll also find additional browsing tools, such as basic form autofill, full page zoom, support forautoscroll, and a new way to drag tabs into side-by-side view.

If you're already using Google Chrome and choose to install the new beta, you will update and replace the current version on your desktop. Otherwise, you can just keep on using the stable version.

You can find out more about this release on the brand-new Google Chrome Blog.