YouTube highlights – 11/18/2010

This is the latest in our series of YouTube highlights. Every couple of weeks, we bring you regular updates on new product features, interesting programs to watch, and tips you can use to grow your audience on YouTube. Just look for the label ?YouTube Highlights? and subscribe to the series. ? Ed.

Since our last update, we?ve reached a new milestone in video uploads, seen new comedy and music programs launch, and shared a new, more ?cinematic? YouTube viewing experience with Google Chrome. Read about all of it below.

35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute
Remember in March when we shared that more than 24 hours of video was being uploaded to YouTube every minute? Well, our users continue to amaze us, and as of last week, 35 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. If we were to measure that in movie terms (assuming the average Hollywood film is around 120 minutes long), it?s the equivalent of more than 176,000 full-length Hollywood releases every week.

Laugh along with us and Comedy Thunder
NextNewNetworks, the YouTube partner responsible for bringing original content like Obama Girl and Key of Awesome to YouTube, recently launched a new series called ?Comedy Thunder.? Eight comedy teams and comedians will each post a video based on a specific theme that changes every week. Here?s one of the latest videos:



Do you love K-POP?
Korean pop music or ?K-POP? has earned millions of fans around the world. MBC, a major TV network in Korea, has joined with YouTube to search the world for the next big K-POP talent. Check out some of the top Korean music labels like YG Entertainment, SM Entertainment and JYP Entertainment for inspiration before submitting an audition video. Don?t worry if you don?t speak Korean; you can audition in any language.?

The Mexican Revolution on YouTube
November 20 marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the Mexican Revolution and we?ll observe that anniversary on YouTube by celebrating a new revolution: Mexican film-making. Thanks to YouTube partner Mubi, we?ll present feature film Revolución, made up of 10 individual shorts that explore the topic of Mexico?s revolution from celebrated filmmakers such as Gael Garcia Bernal, Diego Luna, Carlos Reygadas, Rodrigo Garcia and Patricia Riggen. You?ll also have the opportunity to get your questions answered by the filmmakers using Google Moderator for YouTube.



Google Chrome browser extensions for YouTube
For you movie buffs out there, we did some research and found a few handy Chrome extensions that can make your YouTube viewing experience more ?cinematic.? For example, Window Expander for YouTube maximizes YouTube videos to fill your entire browser. With Turn Off the Lights, you can make the entire page outside the video fade to dark like you?re in a movie theater. The OpinionCloud extension summarizes comments on YouTube, so you can quickly get the crowd?s overall opinion.

The Google Chrome team also recently released an extension called YouTube Feed, which notifies you whenever new videos are available in your YouTube homepage feed. You can directly access, rate and like videos?right in your browser.

Give YouTube Topics on Search a whirl
We know that sometimes people come to YouTube looking for a specific video, but at other times, they have only a rough idea of the kind of videos they want. We?ve been there too, and have been thinking for a while about this challenge of searching when you don?t yet know exactly what you?re looking for. Here?s our take on how discovery for videos could work on YouTube in the not-too-distant future. Find out what happens when we search for [LOL] and [cat] to find funny cat videos.



YouTube marketing tips for advertisers
Many businesses use YouTube to get the word out about their company, launch a new product or connect with customers. Orabrush has earned 13 million video views from a video made for just $500 about its tongue-cleaner, and has used YouTube along with Google AdWords to achieve more than $1 million in sales. The Orabrush team offered five tips for success in this recorded webcast with AdAge.

And finally?if you missed the live-streamed Bon Jovi concert, you can still catch it on the band?s YouTube channel. To stay-up-to-date on YouTube news and events, visit us on the YouTube Blog.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Marketing Manager, The YouTube Team

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A curious guide to browsers and the web

Twenty years ago this month, Tim Berners-Lee published his proposal for the World Wide Web. Today, the web is an explosion of pages and apps teeming with videos, photos and interactive content. These powerful new web experiences?such as "The Wilderness Downtown," our HTML5 collaboration with the band Arcade Fire?are possible thanks to cutting-edge web technologies that bring all this content to life in the modern browser.

But how do browsers and the web actually work? What is HTML5?or HTML, for that matter? What do terms like ?cookies? or ?cloud computing? even mean? More practically, how can we keep ourselves safe from security threats like viruses when we?re online?

To help answer these questions, we collaborated with the wonderful illustrator Christoph Niemann to publish an online guidebook called ?20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web.? This handy guide is for those of us who?d like to better understand the technologies we use every day.


?20 Things? is written by the Chrome team, and continues our tradition of finding new ways to help explain complex but fascinating ideas about technology. Many of the examples used to illustrate the features of the browser refer back to Chrome.

We built ?20 Things? in HTML5 so that we could incorporate features that hearken back to what we love about books?feeling the heft of a book?s cover, flipping a page or even reading under the covers with a flashlight. In fact, once you?ve loaded ?20 Things? in the browser, you can disconnect your laptop and continue reading, since this guidebook works offline. As such, this illustrated guidebook is best experienced in Chrome or any up-to-date, HTML5-compliant modern browser.

For things you?ve always wanted to know about the web and browsers but may have been afraid to ask, read on at www.20thingsilearned.com (or, you can use the handy shortened URL at goo.gl/20things). If you find ?20 Things? informative, don?t forget to share it with your friends and family!

Posted by Min Li Chan, Product Marketing Manager, Google Chrome

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2010 Google Faculty Summit in Shanghai

The 2010 Google Faculty Summit was held Thursday and Friday, November 18-19 in Shanghai, part of our ongoing support for education in China. Senior Googlers from China and Mountain View, California gathered to explore hot topics at the cutting-edge of technology research with more than 65 experts and professors from around 30 universities and institutes including Tsinghua University, Peking University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Other topics included how to deepen collaboration between Google and China universities in areas of joint research, curriculum development and cultivation of talents.

This year?s theme was ?Fostering Understanding and Strengthening Cooperation? and the meeting served as a platform for academia and industry to explore ways of teaming up with Google on university-business cooperation and technology research. The Summit, which spanned a day and a half, was also Google China?s largest education event to date.

Our discussions on Thursday focused on deep discussion about two of Google China?s most important sectors, mobile computing and e-commerce, while the morning of Friday focused on cooperation in course development. The Summit examined course development for many of today?s hottest topics, including cloud computing, Android application development and web technology, thereby strengthening the cultivation of talent in these sectors. In addition, the Summit included several topic-specific discussion groups that allowed experts and professors from institutions of higher education to meet with Google staff and discuss relevant topics and cooperation with the hope of expanding upon currently existing areas of cooperation. We?ve posted more details on the Summit here in Simplified Chinese.

Cooperation between Google and Chinese universities and institutions of higher education began in 2005 with course development and gradually grew to include projects that supported Chinese universities to cultivate innovative professionals that meet industry needs. Projects currently underway include course development, teacher training, scholarship programs, research grants for doctoral students, donations of equipment, joint research, innovative student projects, campus lectures and educational summits. We?ve established 12 research projects with universities in Mainland China including Tsinghua University, Peking University, Zhejiang University and Shanghai Jiaotong University, as well as the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the Hong Kong Chinese University. These projects focus on many areas of study, including mobile computing, machine learning, data mining, multimedia searches and natural language processing. Visit the University Relations website to learn more about our cooperation with universities. Moving forward, we?ll will continue to support our partner universities to deepen cooperation and expand areas of focus.

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

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Great tech support and good karma found with Google AdWords online

(Cross-posted from the Google Small Business Blog)

When Uday Challu noticed a growing dissatisfaction with avenues for technical support, he was inspired to create a better way for people to get help with their tech troubles. So in 2007 he founded iYogi.com, India?s first direct-to-consumer remote technical support company. Founded on a belief in good karma, iYogi aims to mitigate frustrations with technical products and services by delivering a high-quality customer service experience.

iYogi Founder Uday Challu

iYogi provides round-the-clock, 24-hours service on a wide variety of technical products and issues, in Australia, Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. Uday uses Google AdWords to reach these international customers.

Uday says he saw search and, in particular, AdWords as a way to reach customers in need of technical support. He says, ?iYogi services are currently available in multiple geographies and advertising with AdWords seemed like the most obvious way to reach customers who were turning to the Internet to find and fix their problems.?

With the intent of starting small and building to scale, Uday targeted his first campaigns to the U.S. only. Using location and language targeting, iYogi launched a U.S.-only campaign with general keywords related to customer support, and honed his campaign over time. ?We gathered lots of intelligence from the Search Query Report, which helped us identify other keywords people in the U.S. were searching for,? says iYogi Vice President of Online Marketing K.R. Sreejith. "We also tested new ad texts and customized these ad texts to highlight popular keywords."

Then, using lessons from his experiences in targeting the U.S., Uday expanded into the Canadian market. He found his experience in the U.S. helpful for the Canadian campaign, but didn?t see similarly high volume. After examining the global competitive landscape, he decided to expand to Australia and the U.K.

?We quickly learned that ads in the U.K., for example, had to be different than ads in the U.S.,? says Sreejith. ?Using the Search Query Report, we noticed that the popularity of certain keywords was different in the U.K. and that there are differences in the spelling of these terms. We also learned from our sales teams that U.K. customers spend more time on the phone than do U.S. customers. So, we edited our ad texts and landing pages to reflect these different keywords and values.?

Today, iYogi is one of the fastest growing remote tech support provider in the world. As Uday continues to expand his business internationally, he?ll continue to use insights gained from his ad campaigns and to provide the rest of the world with similarly karmic technical support experiences!

Posted by Anand Devsharma, Team Manager, India

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This week in search 11/19/10

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

On the web, a ?place? can mean many different things. At Google, we think about regional domains (such as .uk for the United Kingdom) as places, but we also think about websites, the different parts of our interface and real world locations like restaurants and stores. This week?s changes span all these different kinds of places, making it easier for you to find information no matter where you are?Vietnam, Hungary, holiday shopping at your local mall or browsing the Google results page. Keep reading for the latest.

Google Instant on 18 new domains
In keeping with the spirit of Instant, we?ve been working to quickly bring results-as-you-type to people around the globe. This week we expanded to 18 new domains across Europe and Asia, almost doubling our total. Our new Google Instant domains include Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Greece, Finland, Hungary, Indonesia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Norway, Pakistan, the Philippines, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Sweden, Vietnam. Now, whether you speak Catalan, Romanian or Tagalog, you?ll get search results before you?ve even finished typing.


Local product availability in search
Most of the time, when people shop, they actually buy their products from physical stores rather than online websites. This week, we made it easier for people to find local stores that sell the products they are looking by adding information about product availability to google.com. Simply search for a product and click the ?nearby stores? label to see what stores carry it and whether it is in stock. We?ve partnered with more than 70 retail brands, including Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Macy?s, and Office Depot. Through these partnerships, you can see where to buy 4 billion items and can also restrict your searches to only products that are in stock nearby. (If you?re a retailer who?s interested in taking part in this free program, you can learn more on the Google Retail Blog.)


Other searches to try: [hp printer], [circulon frying pan], [ipod touch]

More relevant results from the same website
When you get back from the store and hop online to do some searching, you?re visiting a different kind of place?a website. Sometimes it turns out that one website is extremely likely to have the information you?re looking for, like when you?ve typed a website name as part of your search, or you?re looking for information from an official government office. To help you find this information more quickly, a few months ago we made a change to show more results from a particular domain when we?re confident that those results are likely to be most useful to you. This week we expanded the feature to include more queries and to show additional results (up to four) from the same website.


That?s all for this week. Search on, wherever life takes you.

Posted by Ben Gomes, Distinguished Engineer

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Preserving Alan Turing’s papers at Bletchley Park

As you may have seen, some key papers from British computer scientist and wartime codebreaker Alan Turing are up for auction today at Christie?s in London. Dr Turing is a hero to many of us at Google for his pioneering work on algorithms and the development of computer science. (He?s also an important figure for many across the world who face homophobic attacks and bullying, an issue that we have spoken about elsewhere.)

Why are these papers so important? Dr Sue Black, a computer scientist at University College London and a key campaigner for Bletchley Park, where Dr Turing worked, explains: ?The lot includes codebreaker Max Newman's copies of many of Turing's papers. Some of the papers have on them comments from Newman, a friend of Turing?s who testified in his defence at his trial. These papers belong at Bletchley Park, home of the codebreakers, and where these two codebreakers worked together side by side, helping to save millions of lives during World War II.?

Sue asked Google for support in purchasing the papers for Bletchley Park, which we agree is clearly the right place to house them. As has been reported earlier today, we are backing the bid with a contribution of $100,000 towards a successful purchase.

There?s still a long way to go to raise all the money required; we hope that others will be able to come forward too. The deadline for contributions to the bid has been extended until 2pm GMT today. Anyone interested in supporting it should contact Sue directly, or go to http://www.justgiving.com/turing-papers/.

Posted by Simon Meacham, Developer Advocate

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Spreading holiday cheer and regional cuisine through AdWords

When we here in the U.S. think of Thanksgiving, many of us think of our favorite foods: perhaps a fresh-from-the-oven pumpkin pie, a sweet glazed ham or a succulent turkey. But thanks to Charlie Hohorst III of Lafayette, La., tens of thousands of Americans dream instead of a turkey... stuffed with a duck... stuffed with a chicken.

For the past 15 years, Hohorst has run food shopping site Cajun Grocer, which specializes in more than 1,000 different authentic Louisianan foodstuffs and delicacies. The ?turducken??a Cajun dish consisting of a de-boned turkey filled with duck, chicken and stuffing?is ?the bread and butter? of his business, says Hohorst. He can attest to their growing popularity as he ships an ever-increasing number of turduckens to cities all over the country, from Los Angeles to Boston.

Cajun Grocer?s business has grown hand-in-hand with the use of Google AdWords. Before starting AdWords campaigns in 2002, sales were fueled primarily by word of mouth, and reaching the right audience at an affordable price was a challenge. ?With a specialty product like a turducken,? says Hohorst, ?who do you target and how do you target them?? Using AdWords, Cajun Grocer can show off their products alongside relevant searches on Google and measure every penny spent on advertising.

Cajun Grocer?s ad for ?turducken? searches, using AdWords Product Extensions.

The process of hand-crafting all eight types of turducken for the Thanksgiving rush starts in April and continues through packing and last-minute shipping as late as November 23.

Aside from their role in spreading the culinary influence of his native Louisiana, what Hohorst really loves about turduckens is that, much like the Thanksgiving holiday itself, they give people a reason to come together. ?They?re a gathering item. Many people have heard of them, and when someone they know has one, it can bring in 10 or even 20 people.?

Posted by Jim Prosser, Communications Manager

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Introducing Google Earth 6—the next generation of realism

(Cross-posted on the Google LatLong Blog)

Today we?re introducing the latest version of Google Earth, our interactive digital atlas. Now you can explore your childhood home, visit distant lands or scope out your next vacation spot with even more realistic tools.

In Google Earth 6, we?re taking realism in the virtual globe to the next level with two new features: a truly integrated Street View experience and 3D trees. We?ve also made it even easier to browse historical imagery. Over the next several days on our LatLong blog, we?ll be digging deeper into these great new features, but here?s an overview to whet your appetite.



Integrated Street View
When Google Earth was first introduced, people were wowed by the ability to virtually fly from outer space right down to the roof of their house. While flying over rooftops gives you a super-human view of our world, the ground level is where we experience our daily lives. We took our first baby steps toward bringing the Google Earth experience to street level with our implementation of Street View in Google Earth in 2008, which enabled flying into Street View panoramas. In Google Earth 6, the Street View experience is now fully integrated, so you can journey from outer space right to your doorstep in one seamless flight.

Now, you?ll notice that Pegman is docked right alongside the navigation controls?an ever-present travel companion ready whenever you want to get your feet on the street and take a virtual walk around. Just pick up Pegman and drop him wherever you see a highlighted blue road to fly right down to the ground. Once there, you can use the navigation controls or your mouse to look around. And unlike our earlier Street View layer, you can now move seamlessly from one location to another as if you?re walking down the street by using the scroll-wheel on your mouse or the arrow keys on your keyboard. If you want to visit somewhere farther away, simply click the ?exit? button and you?ll immediately return to an aerial view where you can easily fly to your next destination.

Drag and drop Pegman to enter Street View. The blue lines indicate where Street View imagery is available.

3D trees
I think we can all agree that our planet without trees would be a pretty desolate place. Besides the ever-important task of providing us with the oxygen we breathe, trees are an integral part of the landscape around us. In Google Earth, while we and our users have been busy populating the globe with many thousands of 3D building models, trees have been rather hard to come by. All that is changing with Google Earth 6, which includes beautifully detailed, 3D models for dozens of species of trees, from the Japanese Maple to the East African Cordia to my personal favorite, the cacao tree. While we?ve just gotten started planting trees in Google Earth, we already have more than 80 million trees in places such as Athens, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco and Tokyo. Through our Google Earth Outreach program, we?ve also been working with organizations including the Green Belt Movement in Africa, the Amazon Conservation Team in Brazil and CONABIO in Mexico to model our planet?s threatened forests.

To enjoy these leafy additions to Google Earth, make sure you turn on the 3D buildings layer on the left side panel. As a starting point, try a search for ?Palace of Fine Arts San Francisco.? Once you arrive at your destination, click the zoom slider. You?ll then be taken down to the ground where you can use our new ground-level navigation to walk among the trees.

3D trees in San Francisco, California

Easy-to-use historical imagery
One of the features people told us they liked best in Google Earth 5 was the availability of historical imagery, which enables you to visually go back in time to see such things as Warsaw in 1935, London in 1945, and Port-au-Prince Haiti before and after the devastating earthquake of January 2010. But it wasn?t always obvious when historical imagery was available for a particular place, making this feature one of Google Earth?s lesser-known gems.

So with this new version, we?ve made it very easy to discover historical imagery. When you fly to an area where historical imagery is available, the date of the oldest imagery will appear in the status bar at the bottom of the screen. If you click on this date, you?ll instantly be taken back in time to view imagery from that time period. You can then browse through all the historical imagery available for that location, or simply close the time control and return to the default view.

The site of Google's Mountain View campus in 1948

To download Google Earth 6, or to see videos of our newest features, visit http://earth.google.com.

Posted by Peter Birch, Product Manager

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Learn about the human side of climate change with Kofi Annan

(Cross-posted on the Google.org and LatLong Blogs)

Climate change is too often misunderstood to be simply an environmental issue, rather than a human issue. For our children and grandchildren, climate change is an issue of public health, economics, global security and social equity. This human side of climate change is explained in a new Google Earth tour narrated by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Within these stories, you?ll find data and tools to explore this topic in more depth, and meet some of the people who are actively working on managing the risks of climate variability and change. We encourage you to take the tour to learn more about these human issues and the inspiring work of groups like the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) that are helping farmers cope with climate change. We hope this video will serve as a useful tool as educators help students around the world understand the complexity of this issue.



This is the latest in our series of climate change tours that we?re releasing leading up to the global U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP16) talks in Cancun, Mexico this week.

As part of the Google Earth for Educators Community, we?ve also created a special Climate Change Educators Resources page that teachers can use in their classrooms. Here, teachers can find the tools they need to create lesson plans about climate change, including all the individual Google Earth KML layers available for download. Teachers and students can overlay multiple data layers that help illustrate climate change, and discuss and analyze them as part of K-12 and higher education curriculum. We?re also looking for lessons plans for any school grade that use this narrated tour or these Google Earth KML layers, so if you?re a teacher or instructor, please submit your lesson plan for review now.

Visit google.com/landing/cop16/climatetours.html or the Climate Change Educators Resources page to learn more about climate change today.

Posted by Dr. Amy Luers, Google.org

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Deck the halls with smarter shopping

To paraphrase an old adage, ?tis the season to go shopping?and this year, ?tis the season for shopping smart. Beginning en masse on Thanksgiving, when a significant number of major retailers opened their doors to allow bargain detectives to take advantage of early deals, people have been showing their shopping savvy, with no signs of stopping.

Using Insights for Search and research data from a Google/OTX study, we took a look at some trends we?re seeing from consumers in the U.S.?a new kind of shopper, the rise of mobile and a near-seamless online-to-store connection?and then satisfied our inner cool-seeker by taking a look at some of the most searched-for holiday gifts.

The new shopper
This year?s holiday shoppers are the smartest searchers in history. They?re searching for more specific terms and looking for more information than ever?from printable coupons to take into their local store, to the location of said stores; some people are even scanning barcodes to get more information about a product.

For example, searches for [black friday ads], [thanksgiving coupons], [black friday shipping code] and [buy one get one free] skyrocketed this year, as super-smart shoppers did their research before heading online or to the stores. They also made sure to get ahead of the Cyber Monday game: searches for things like [cyber monday deals] and [cyber monday sales] rose much quicker and earlier this year than last.


Shoppers didn?t stop looking for information once Cyber Monday arrived: [best cyber monday deals 2010] was the second-fastest rising search in the U.S. yesterday. Other top searches related to Cyber Monday included:


Mobile matters
For years, we?ve heard that it?s ?the year of mobile.? This year it?s actually true, and people are embracing access to information on the go. Anyone who has a smartphone has a personal assistant now?and in their pocket, no less! People are using their mobile phones to compare prices, look for store locations and inventory in stock locally, and find deals.

According to research we conducted with OTX, 52% of U.S. smartphone users plan to use their phone to compare prices during the holiday shopping season and 40% plan to use their phones to read product reviews. We?ve seen evidence of this trend through the increased use of Google Shopper, a mobile shopping app that helps shoppers on the go research items and find the best place to buy them?whether online or in a nearby store.

Online meets offline
This year, both consumers and retailers are thinking about shopping differently. Gone is the wall between online and offline research and purchasing; consumers think about online and offline behavior relatively seamlessly these days?and retailers do too. Retailers are integrating things like inventory data across channels so that people can find what they?re looking for easily, online and off. Search queries show this crystal clear connection between information-hunting online and purchasing offline.

Searches for [black friday store hours], [printable coupons], and specific store names and hours have risen dramatically in the last year, as consumers do their homework prior to leaving home to shop.


Hot holiday gifts
Each holiday shopping season brings with it a number of buzzworthy toys. While we can?t be sure which toys will be on that list this year, searches for a number of items have risen significantly in recent weeks and months.

Those looking for toys for all ages have recently looked for information related to [squinkies], [lalaloopsy], [educational toys] and [ereaders]; searches for all of the above have risen dramatically in the past 30 days, as have searches for classic toys such as [legos] and [cabbage patch kids].

For lovers of a different kind of gift, a royal engagement may have prompted a rush on sapphire rings; searches for the same have risen dramatically in the past 30 days.


If you?d like to learn more about this year?s holiday shopping season, including some tidbits on what retailers are thinking, check out the Google Retail Blog for useful information.

In the meantime, happy (smart) shopping?and we hope you had a fruitful Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday!

Posted by Dan Schock, Google Retail Industry Director

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Plant trees for change with Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai

(Cross-posted from the LatLong Blog)

Occasionally, we invite distinguished guests to contribute to our blogs and we?re very happy to have Wangari Maathai share her perspective here. In collaboration with Wangari Maathai?s Green Belt Movement and several other partners, the Google Earth Outreach team has created several narrated tours on the topic of climate change in preparation for the UNFCCC?s COP16 Climate Summit 2010 in Cancun, Mexico. Fly underwater to learn about the effects of ocean acidification on sea life with Oceana. Zoom around Mexican mangroves in 3D and learn about the importance of this biodiverse habitat... and what must be done to protect it for future generations. Visit google.com/landing/cop16/climatetours.html to experience these tours. -Ed.

Ask most people what trees mean to them and the first thing that comes to mind is the tree outside their bedroom window or the forest where they played as a child. Trees do occupy a powerful place in our emotions, but the most powerful argument to protect our world?s trees is not based on sentiment. There is a vital interdependency between communities and the trees they rely on for survival. Trees are our watersheds, protectors of the natural environment, and sources of food. Remove the trees from the equation and the community feels the impact.

I came to this realization in the 1970s in Kenya. I was talking to women in my community about their problems: hunger, access to water, poverty, wood fuel. I saw a link between their needs and the condition of the land and thought, ?Why not plant trees to address these issues?? Trees hold the soil to the ground so that we can grow food in it, they protect watersheds and facilitate harvesting of rain water, fruits trees supplement food and trees give us domestic energy and wood with which to build our shelters. So while still working at the University of Nairobi, I established a tree nursery in my backyard, planted seven trees at a public park and founded the Green Belt Movement. The organization works to empower communities, to build their capacity to restore Africa's forests and put an end to the problems that deforestation and other forms of environmental degradation cause. As a result of this idea, more than 40 million trees have been planted to restore the environment and improve the lives of the people who are linked to the land.

When we were offered a unique opportunity to partner with the Google Earth Outreach team on a project using new Google Earth technology to visualize trees in 3D, we were thrilled. For accuracy and integrity we worked very closely with Google, advising them on the modeling of unique African trees like the broad-leaved Croton, the Nile tulip tree and the East African Cordia. These tree models illustrate the biodiversity in our tree planting sites, especially in the forests, and how we carefully select trees that are indigenous and sustainable to the natural surroundings.

Broad-leaved Croton, the Nile tulip tree and the East African Cordia (from left to right)

We then used data from real planting locations to ?plant? the tree models in Google Earth and create 3D visualizations. Now, for the first time in Google Earth, people from all over the world will be able to virtually visit these planting sites, explore the 3D trees and connect with the work that we are doing.

Green Belt Movement planting site in 3D on Google Earth

Tree planting is a simple activity with tangible results, and anyone can participate. It helps people come together to address common problems and work collectively towards community improvement and sustainability. I hope that seeing our beautiful tree planting sites in 3D on Google Earth will be a source of inspiration for people to engage, plant trees and organize planting activities in their own communities. Taking charge of our lives and the environment around us can help ensure a lasting legacy and healthy future for our children.



Learn more about the Green Belt Movement and support our work at http://www.greenbeltmovement.org.

Posted by Wangari Maathai, environmentalist, activist and founder of the Green Belt Movement

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Ready... set... track Santa!

From feasting on a turkey dinner to singing carols around the fire, there are certainly plenty of traditions to enjoy during the holiday season. Much to the delight of the child in each of us, the ritual of gift-giving continues today, and I know I still find cheer at the bottom of my stocking every Christmas morning.

Another tradition that brings joy to youngsters everywhere is the one started in 1955 by NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which every year counts down to Christmas Eve and tracks Santa?s whereabouts as he delivers presents across the globe. Google similarly started tracking Santa in 2004 and has been partnering with NORAD on this fun project since 2007. Keeping the tradition alive, today marks the kick-off of this year?s countdown at www.noradsanta.org. On the NORAD website, kids can play holiday-themed games (a new one is released each day) and get updates from the North Pole as Santa prepares for his big sleigh ride.

If you haven?t tracked Santa in years past, we hope this is the year you?ll start a new tradition of visiting www.noradsanta.org and following Santa?s journey all around the world. Starting at 2 a.m. EST on December 24, you?ll be able to track him in real-time on Google Maps from your computer or phone as well as on Google Earth with the plug-in by searching for [santa].

So this year, along with my family?s usual tradition of gathering around to hear my mum read ?Twas the night before Christmas,? we?ll gather around the computer to see when Santa might be coming to our neighborhood. In honor of the occasion, I wrote a new opening verse:

'Twas the night before Christmas, and Santa was near
According to NORAD, he would soon be right here
So we hopped into bed and dreamt of new toys
And awoke in the morning to much Christmas joy

Happy holidays to all, and to tide you over till Christmas Eve, enjoy this video with highlights from Santa?s journey last year!



Posted by Bruno Bowden, Software Engineer

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Being bad to your customers is bad for business

A recent article by the New York Times related a disturbing story. By treating your customers badly, one merchant told the paper, you can generate complaints and negative reviews that translate to more links to your site; which, in turn, make it more prominent in search engines. The main premise of the article was that being bad on the web can be good for business.

We were horrified to read about Ms. Rodriguez?s dreadful experience. Even though our initial analysis pointed to this being an edge case and not a widespread problem in our search results, we immediately convened a team that looked carefully at the issue. That team developed an initial algorithmic solution, implemented it, and the solution is already live. I am here to tell you that being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google?s search results.

As always, we learned a lot from this experience, and we wanted to share some of that with you. Consider the obvious responses we could have tried to fix the problem:

• Block the particular offender. That would be easy and might solve the immediate problem for that specific business, but it wouldn?t solve the larger issue in a general way. Our first reaction in search quality is to look for ways to solve problems algorithmically.
  
  
• Use sentiment analysis to identify negative remarks and turn negative comments into negative votes. While this proposal initially sounds promising, it turns out to be based on a misconception. First off, the terrible merchant in the story wasn?t really ranking because of links from customer complaint websites. In fact, many consumer community sites such as Get Satisfaction added a simple attribute called rel=nofollow to their links. The rel=nofollow attribute is a general mechanism that allows websites to tell search engines not to give weight to specific links, and it?s perfect for the situation when you want to link to a site without endorsing it. Ironically, some of the most reputable links to Decor My Eyes came from mainstream news websites such as the New York Times and Bloomberg. The Bloomberg article was about someone suing the company behind Decor My Eyes, but the language of the article was neutral, so sentiment analysis wouldn?t have helped here either.
  
  As it turns out, Google has a world-class sentiment analysis system (Large-Scale Sentiment Analysis for News and Blogs). But if we demoted web pages that have negative comments against them, you might not be able to find information about many elected officials, not to mention a lot of important but controversial concepts. So far we have not found an effective way to significantly improve search using sentiment analysis. Of course, we will continue trying.
  
  
• Yet another option is to expose user reviews and ratings for various merchants alongside their results. Though still on the table, this would not demote poor quality merchants in our results and could still lead users to their websites.

Instead, in the last few days we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience. The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue, and Google users are now getting a better experience as a result.

We can't say for sure that no one will ever find a loophole in our ranking algorithms in the future. We know that people will keep trying: attempts to game Google?s ranking, like the ones mentioned in the article, go on 24 hours a day, every single day. That?s why we cannot reveal the details of our solution?the underlying signals, data sources, and how we combined them to improve our rankings?beyond what we?ve already said. We can say with reasonable confidence that being bad to customers is bad for business on Google. And we will continue to work hard towards a better search.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

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Google doodles for your phone

(Cross-posted from the Google Mobile Blog)

While we?ve had oodles of Google doodles on our desktop homepage since Larry and Sergey created our very first in 1998, doodles on our mobile homepage have been few and far between. Today, we?re happy to announce that we?re bringing more doodles to your phone, beginning with Android 2.0+ and iOS 3+ devices worldwide. In fact, almost all of the doodles we show on our desktop homepage will now have corresponding mobile versions on these phones. When the doodles are available, just go to google.com in your mobile browser to see them.

Want your doodles within easy reach? You can get to google.com quickly by adding a shortcut to your home screen.

Posted by Steve Kanefsky, Software Engineer

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U.S. General Services Administration is going Google

(Cross-posted on the Google Enterprise Blog)

The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) today announced its decision to move 17,000 employees and contractors to Google Apps for Government. GSA oversees the business of the U.S. federal government, providing real estate and building management services as well as acquisition and procurement assistance to other federal agencies.

GSA?s decision to switch to Google Apps resulted from a competitive request for proposal (RFP) process that took place over the past six months, during which the agency evaluated multiple proposals for replacing their existing on-premises email system. GSA selected Google partner Unisys as the prime contractor to migrate all employees in 17 locations around the world to an integrated, flexible and robust email and collaboration service in 2011.

By making this switch, GSA will benefit in a number of ways. Modern email and collaboration tools will help make employees more efficient and effective. Google Apps will bring GSA a continual stream of new and innovative features, helping the agency keep pace with advances in technology in the years ahead. And taxpayers will benefit too?by reducing the burden of in-house maintenance and eliminating the need to replace hardware to host its email systems, GSA expects to lower costs by 50 percent over the next five years.

Earlier this year, Google Apps became the first suite of cloud computing email and collaboration applications to receive Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification, enabling agencies to compare the security features of Google Apps to that of existing systems.

GSA is leading the way in embracing the federal government?s ?cloud first? policy, under which agencies should opt for hosted applications when secure, reliable, cost-effective options are available. We are thrilled that GSA has chosen to move to the cloud with Google and look forward to expanding our productive partnership with them.

Posted by Mike Bradshaw, Director, Federal Enterprise team

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Introducing Google Earth Engine

(Cross-posted from the Google.org blog)

Today, we launched a new Google Labs product called Google Earth Engine at the International Climate Change Conference in sunny Cancun, Mexico. Google Earth Engine is a new technology platform that puts an unprecedented amount of satellite imagery and data?current and historical?online for the first time. It enables global-scale monitoring and measurement of changes in the earth?s environment. The platform will enable scientists to use our extensive computing infrastructure?the Google ?cloud??to analyze this imagery. Last year, we demonstrated an early prototype. Since then, we have developed the platform, and are excited now to offer scientists around the world access to Earth Engine to implement their applications.

Why is this important? The images of our planet from space contain a wealth of information, ready to be extracted and applied to many societal challenges. Scientific analysis can transform these images from a mere set of pixels into useful information?such as the locations and extent of global forests, detecting how our forests are changing over time, directing resources for disaster response or water resource mapping.

Congo Basin Water Map (detail): Original satellite image (left) and derived water map (right), created using Google Earth Engine [Potapov, P., Hansen,M. - South Dakota State University].

The challenge has been to cope with the massive scale of satellite imagery archives, and the computational resources required for their analysis. As a result, many of these images have never been seen, much less analyzed. Now, scientists will be able to build applications to mine this treasure trove of data on Google Earth Engine, providing several advantages:

• Landsat satellite data archives over the last 25 years for most of the developing world available online, ready to be used together with other datasets including MODIS. And we will soon offer a complete global archive of Landsat.
• Reduced time to do analyses, using Google?s computing infrastructure. By running analyses across thousands of computers, for example, unthinkable tasks are now possible for the first time.
• New features that will make analysis easier, such as tools that pre-process the images to remove clouds and haze.
• Collaboration and standardization by creating a common platform for global data analysis.
  

Google Earth Engine can be used for a wide range of applications?from mapping water resources to ecosystem services to deforestation. It?s part of our broader effort at Google to build a more sustainable future. We?re particularly excited about an initial use of Google Earth Engine to support development of systems to monitor, report and verify (MRV) efforts to stop global deforestation.

Deforestation releases a significant amount of carbon into the atmosphere, accounting for 12-18% of annual greenhouse gas emissions. The world loses 32 million acres of tropical forests every year, an area the size of Greece. The United Nations has proposed a framework known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) that would provide financial incentives to tropical nations to protect their forests. Reaching an agreement on early development of REDD is a key agenda item here in Cancun.

Today, we announced that we are donating 10 million CPU-hours a year over the next two years on the Google Earth Engine platform, to strengthen the capacity of developing world nations to track the state of their forests, in preparation for REDD. For the least developed nations, Google Earth Engine will provide critical access to terabytes of data, a growing set of analytical tools and our high-performance processing capabilities. We believe Google Earth Engine will bring transparency and more certainty to global efforts to stop deforestation.

We?ve been working with several partners to fully develop this platform. In particular, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has been a key strategic and funding partner. The Moore Foundation has also committed over $12 million dollars through its Environmental Conservation Program to projects that support the development of Google Earth Engine. The Moore Foundation?s Environment Program finances practical, enduring solutions to environmental challenges and works to improve the way society uses and manages important terrestrial, freshwater, and coastal marine ecosystems to create working land and seascapes that support resilient and productive ecosystems for current and future generations. They?ve funded the U.S. Geological Survey to scale their infrastructure and accelerate bringing historic Landsat data off tape, and online, through Google Earth Engine.

This animation shows the breadth and depth of the Landsat archive that has been uploaded into Google Earth Engine to date. We are grateful to the USGS for their ongoing technical collaboration.

Support from the Moore Foundation includes funding for several scientists to develop and integrate their desktop software to work online with the data available in Google Earth Engine. Those scientists?Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Carlos Souza of Imazon?are also key partners, along with Matt Hansen of the Geographic Information Science Center at South Dakota State University. All are at the cutting edge of forest monitoring in support of climate science.

In collaboration with Matt Hansen and CONAFOR, Mexico?s National Forestry Commission, we?ve produced a forest cover and water map of Mexico. This is the finest-scale forest map produced of Mexico to date. The map required 15,000 hours of computation, but was completed in less than a day on Google Earth Engine, using 1,000 computers over more than 53,000 Landsat scenes (1984-2010). CONAFOR provided National Forest Inventory ground-sampled data to calibrate and validate the algorithm.

A forest cover and water map of Mexico (southern portion, including the Yucatan peninsula), produced in collaboration with scientist Matthew Hansen and CONAFOR.

We hope that Google Earth Engine will be an important tool to help institutions around the world manage forests more wisely. As we fully develop the platform, we hope more scientists will use new Earth Engine API to integrate their applications online?for deforestation, disease mitigation, disaster response, water resource mapping and other beneficial uses. If you?re interested in partnering with us, we want to hear from you?visit our website! We look forward to seeing what?s possible when scientists, governments, NGO?s, universities, and others gain access to data and computing resources to collaborate online to help protect the earth?s environment.

Update on 12/6: Additional information on the Moore Foundation, Google Earth Engine?s Landsat archive, and the Congo Basin Water Map have been added to the post.

Posted by Rebecca Moore, Engineering Manager, Google Earth Engine

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YouTube highlights – 12/2/2010

This is the latest in our series of YouTube highlights. Every couple of weeks, we bring you regular updates on new product features, interesting programs to watch and tips you can use to grow your audience on YouTube. Just look for the label ?YouTube Highlights? and subscribe to the series. ? Ed.

Since our last update, we?ve premiered a new film on YouTube, highlighted a host of holiday content to get you geared up for cooking, entertaining and decorating with style, celebrated the one-year anniversary of auto-captions on YouTube and introduced a ?viewer?s choice? video ad format.

New film premieres on YouTube
Wong Fu Productions (Wesley Chan, Ted Fu, Philip Wang) and Ryan Higa premiered their new film, Agents of Secret Stuff, on YouTube. Written in a few days and shot in an intense week by a small crew, the movie is a powerful example of what a little ingenuity and a video camera can do. More than 3 million people have already checked out the film, which is about an assassin trying to fit into high school while carrying out an assignment.



Cooking for the holidays
If you?re looking to pick up a few new culinary tricks for the holidays, you can learn how to make chocolate sea salt crostini, scalloped oysters and more from Chef John Mitzewich, star of YouTube?s most subscribed cooking channel, FoodWishes. More than 97,000 foodies have viewed Chef John?s 500th video posted to YouTube, Potato Ball in Potato Box. He recently answered a few questions about how he makes his videos and the trends he?s seeing in viewer demand for recipes.



More recipes and how-to tips on the YouTube Holiday Solutions Center
Every holiday season we see a surge in viewers searching for cooking videos and recipes on YouTube. To discover a delicious new dish, check out the YouTube Holiday Solutions Center, where we?ve collected a range of videos on a single channel from party-planning experts such as Chow.com, Cool Mom, the Food Network, Real Simple, Southern Living and Target. In addition to recipes, this channel also includes fun projects and home decorating tips.

Happy birthday to YouTube?s automatic captions
November 19 marked one year since we launched automatic captions on YouTube. Captions not only help the deaf and hearing impaired, but with machine translation, they also let people around the world access video content in any of 51 languages. Captions can also improve search and even enable people to jump to the exact parts of the videos they're looking for. Since last year, people have watched video with automatic captions more than 23 million times. We?ve also seen more than 7.6 million caption translations.

How to upload great-looking web video and other helpful tips
Heather Menicucci, director of the Howcast Filmmakers Program, has returned to the YouTube Blog for her series of tips on improving your video-making skills. In one post, Clayton Long, producer for the Bajillionaires Club, offers his expertise on the preferred genres, cameras and workflows for making web videos. For advanced videomakers, Professor Compressor provides insights on best-quality codecs (H.264 and MP4), how to fix common issues such as video that looks squished or stretched, why multi-pass encoding is important and more.

Choice and control with TrueView Video Ads
Our new family of ad formats called TrueView Video Ads gives viewers choice and control over which advertiser?s message they want to see and when. We think TrueView has something for everyone: consumers choose ads that are more relevant to them, advertisers more precisely find the audiences they want, and content creators continue to fund great content with an ad experience that is less intrusive. Read our announcement on the InsideAdWords blog.

We?ll update you again in a few weeks. Till then, for more information on what we?re up to, head on over to our YouTube Blog.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Marketing Manager, The YouTube Team

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2011 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship

(Cross-posted on the Google Students Blog)

Dr. Anita Borg devoted her life to revolutionizing the way we think about technology and dismantling the barriers that keep women and minorities from entering the computing and technology fields. In honor of Anita's vision, we established the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in 2004, awarding scholarships to women who share her passion for technology. Once again, we?re proud to announce the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarships in the U.S. and Canada. The deadline to apply for the 2011 scholarship is Tuesday, February 1, 2011.

• The Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship is open to current female students who are entering their senior year of undergraduate study or enrolled in a graduate program in the 2011-2012 academic year at a university in the United States or Canada. Students should be enrolled in a computer science, computer engineering or a closely related technical program, and maintain a record of strong academic performance. Scholars and finalists will be announced in May 2011 and will be invited to attend the annual Google Scholars? Retreat?a three-day networking retreat at the Googleplex in Mountain View in the summer of 2011.
  
  
• The Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship for First Years is open to current female high school seniors who are intending to enroll as full-time students at a university in the U.S. for the 2011-2012 academic year. Applicants should have a record of strong academic performance and plan to pursue a degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a closely related technical program. The winning scholars will be invited to attend the Google FUSE networking retreat in 2012.

You can hear from some of this year?s scholars on how receiving the Anita Borg scholarship has impacted them:



For those of you outside of North America, the Google Anita Borg Scholarship program is also available in Asia, Africa, Australia, Canada, Europe, the Middle East and New Zealand?visit www.google.com/anitaborg for more information.

Finally, the Anita Borg Scholarship is just one of many scholarships and networking opportunities we offer to students in order to encourage them to excel in technology and become active role models and leaders in the field. For more information about all of Google?s scholarship programs, please visit www.google.com/jobs/scholarships.

Posted by Azusa Hanashima, Talent & Outreach Programs

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Call credits for military families this holiday season

(Cross-posted from the Google Voice Blog)

Keeping in touch with family during the holiday season can be challenging for anyone, but it?s especially difficult for military families with loved ones serving around the country or overseas.

Gmail?s built in video chat and free calls to the U.S. and Canada can help keep friends and family in contact regardless of how far apart they may be. To make staying in touch this holiday season even easier for military families, we?re offering a $10 calling credit to help them reach their loved ones serving abroad.

These international call credits can be used to make calls with Google Voice or from right inside Gmail, and will provide families with roughly 30 minutes of call time to Afghanistan, 60 minutes to Iraq, or hundreds of minutes to many countries in Europe and around the world.

To make this possible, we?ve partnered with Blue Star Families and Sesame Street, two organizations dedicated to supporting service members and their families.

Photo by Sesame Workshop, 2010

To be eligible for $10 calling credits, military family members must:

1. Be a member of either Blue Star Families or Sesame Street Family Connections?registration is free for all military families
2. Provide their Gmail address
3. Enable calling in Gmail and accept the terms of service OR have an existing Google Voice account
4. Complete this registration form by December 22, 2010

We recognize the sacrifices military family members make when loved ones serve abroad, and we?re proud to help make it a little bit easier for families to stay connected over the holidays.

At this time, Google Voice and calling in Gmail are available in the U.S. only.

Posted by Michael Bolognino, Product Marketing Manager

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Can we talk? Better speech technology with Phonetic Arts

In Star Trek, they don?t spend a lot of time typing things on keyboards?they just speak to their computers, and the computers speak back. It?s a more natural way to communicate, but getting there requires chipping away at a range of hard research problems. We?ve recently made some strides with speech technologies and tools that take voice input: for example, we launched Voice Search, Voice Input and Voice Actions for mobile phones, allowing you to speak web searches, compose emails by voice, ask your phone to play any song, and more. And last year we started automatically transcribing speech to produce captions on YouTube videos.

But what about when the computer speaks to you?in other words, voice output? There are already places you can hear this in action today?for example, Google Translate ?speaks? translated text in multiple languages, and you can listen to navigation instructions as you drive?but there?s still a lot to do. That?s why we?re pleased to announce we?ve acquired Phonetic Arts, a speech synthesis company based in Cambridge, England. Phonetic Arts? team of researchers and engineers work at the cutting edge of speech synthesis, delivering technology that generates natural computer speech from small samples of recorded voice.

There?s a particular focus right now in the U.K. on technology and innovation, and we?re delighted to be deepening our investment in the country with this acquisition. We already have a strong engineering center in London and look forward to welcoming Phonetic Arts to the team. We are excited about their technology, and while we don?t have plans to share yet, we?re confident that together we?ll move a little faster towards that Star Trek future.

Posted by Mike Cohen, Manager, Speech Technology

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Our big gift for small businesses

(Cross-posted from the Google Small Business Blog)

To kick off 2011, we wanted to thank a few small businesses for taking the first step toward enhancing their online presence?and to provide additional resources for achieving this goal. So over the holiday season, we paid a surprise visit to five small businesses who recently started advertising their businesses online: Create A Cook and Twinkle Star in Massachusetts, Ramy?s Garage and Atlas Flooring in Texas, and Cloud 9 Frozen Yogurt in Georgia. These small businesses span several industries, but their founders share one common goal: to expand beyond their brick-and-mortar storefronts and into the world of e-commerce.

To help, we gave them each of them $100,000 in AdWords spend for 2011 as well as free consultations with AdWords representatives. Because we know online presence means more than just AdWords, we?ll also be providing them with web consultations, wireless service for the year as well as a few other little surprises. See footage from our surprise visit below:



We?re looking forward to making big investments in small businesses far beyond these lucky five. Small businesses have long benefited from Google products and services; now our hope is that all small business owners can have greater access to the tools and training they need to develop a cohesive strategy for doing more business online. We started last year by creating the Google Small Business Center and asking small business owners about their biggest wishes for 2011. We received an overwhelming response from business owners who, like the owners of these shops, want to do more business in the clouds in 2011.


We?re thrilled to help these five small business owners find online success in 2011 and we think we have a lot to learn from their experiences. We?ll check in on them from time to time and report on their successes as well as their growing pains.

In the meantime, check the Google Small Business Blog for updates, and if you?re a business owner, visit the Google Small Business Center for information on how you can bring your business online in 2011.

Posted by James Croom, Product Marketing Manager, Google Small Business Team

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It's a Targeted Targeted Targeted Targeted World

In a recent survey CNET asked AOL, Ask.com, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo about their privacy policies and behavioral targeting. In some cases they asked follow-up questions for clarification.

Here are the results



Source: http://news.com.com/How+search+engines+rate+on+privacy/2100-1029_3-6202068.html

So what did the Search engines say about Behavioral Targeting?

AOL was very open about using Behavioral Targeting. They have been using Revenue Science and recently purchased Revenue Science?s competitor Tacoda.

ASK said they do not use behavioral targeting. I have not paid much attention to ASK so I cannot comment if that is true or not.

ASK said they do not use behavioral targeting. I have not paid attention to ask so cannot comment if that is true or not.
Google said they do not use behavioral targeting. However as I engine.html">showed you last month, they use same session targeting, I call it behavioral targeting. Their following answers were not clear to me

"CNET: Do you do behavioral targeting, meaning showing ads to users based on their behavior across multiple queries?
Grand: We are committed to protecting user privacy. We also want to provide users with a more rewarding online experience by making the advertising and content users see relevant to them. We believe the targeting capabilities, reporting and analytics we offer today provide advertisers with an excellent ROI and provide a high-quality user experience. Currently, our system incorporates a large number of signals (such as the user's query, the user's location, type of site, content, and the advertiser's landing page) when targeting and ranking ads. We have not focused on demographic targeting to date for targeting ads on search result pages."

Isn?t that what is called behavioral targeting? Demographic is one element and is not the main ingredient for Behavioral Targeting, Behavioral Targeting is based on behavior, demographic provides another criteria to segment the behavior by but is not required. Once again, do not confuse Behavioral Targeting with targeting based on Demographic information. Seems like Google is saying since we do not use Demograohic information we are not doing Behavioral Targeting.

"CNET: We weren't able to figure out your answer to our question asking whether you do behavioral targeting. In other words, if I search for "New York City vacation" in one query and "vacation hotels" in a second query a moment later, does Google.com evaluate the two responses, figure out that I'm probably looking for New York City hotels, and display ads appropriately?
Grand (Google): No.
Well, I showed some examples of it last month, check out my article titled "engine.html">Ad Targeting on Google Search Engine".

MSN: Representative of MSN said that they offer Behavioral Targeting through AdCenter. He indicated that they will begin offering behavioral ad targeting on third-party sites. He also said that MSN uses some demographic data from services such as Hotmail and Windows Live for targeting but uses in non-identifiable fashion."

Yahoo, was very open about using behavioral targeting. According to yahoo
"Per our privacy policy, when a user is logged into a Yahoo product or service, they are not anonymous to us. Logged-in users may receive customized ads based on general demographic categories such as geo-location, gender, and/or age range."

What does this all mean?

Well, Behavioral Targeting has arrived, you will be targeted (and already are weather you know it or not). Yahoo, MSN and AOL are doing it. Google, even if they are denying it, is already targeting you. ASK will follow suite soon. "It's a Targeted Targeted Targeted Targeted World".

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