Matt Cutts is in town this week spending time with a group of Googlers involved in webmaster outreach. Matt would like to interact more with the local webmaster community, so we’re going to try a Google+ Hangout later today. Matt is a Distinguished Software Engineer heading the Google Webspam Team, and is known for talking to webmasters about how to make Google-friendly sites. To learn more about Matt, visit his blog.
If you’d like to watch the Hangout, head to Matt’s Google+ profile at 2 p.m. IST today. You can ask Matt questions in the Google+ post for the hangout, or tweet @mattcutts with the hashtag #askmatt.
A few months ago we set 14-18 year olds the bold challenge to design a science experiment that could be performed by NASA aboard the International Space Station, something that has traditionally been the preserve of qualified astronauts and scientists. Coming up with a suitable idea required huge imagination, passion and scientific curiosity, which is why we were thrilled with your response—we received a total of 2,000 video submissions from students in more than 80 countries!
Expert scientists helped us check and rank all of the entries, and today we are very proud to announce the sixty finalists. All of their submissions can now be viewed on the YouTube.com/SpaceLab Channel, and from January 17–24, you can vote for the ones you want to win. We need your help selecting the six regional winners, and ultimately the two global winners that will have their experiments performed 250 miles above Earth and live streamed on YouTube. Start voting today.
Remember, the channel is also a launchpad to some of the best space and science videos on YouTube. We’ve already received more than 39 million combined video views worldwide and we’re adding new videos and playlists regularly, like this new playlist about the mysteries of the Red Planet. Subscribe to the channel to keep up to date with all the latest content.
Didn’t make it to the final round? Check out the newly launched Google Science Fair 2012 for another chance to enter an amazing global science competition.
Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today, we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search.
Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to... all from one search box.
We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:
Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.
Together, these features combine to create Search plus Your World. Search is simply better with your world in it, and we’re just getting started.
Personal Results
Say you’re looking for a vacation destination. You can of course search the web, but what if you want to learn from the experiences your friends have had on their vacations? Just as in real life, your friends’ experiences are often so much more meaningful to you than impersonal content on the web. With your world in search, you can find:
Google+ posts. You can find relevant Google+ posts from friends talking about an amazing trip they just took, whether they’ve shared privately with you or publicly. You’ll find links shared by your friends, such as activities, restaurants and other things they enjoyed on their trip.
Photos. You can find beautiful vacation photos from your friends right in your search results page. You can also find your own private photos from Google+ and Picasa, based on captions, comments and album title.
Personal Results: a family story
As a child, my favorite fruit was Chikoo, which is exceptionally sweet and tasty. A few years back when getting a family dog, we decided to name our sweet little puppy after my favorite fruit. Over the years we have privately shared many pictures of Chikoo (our dog) with our family. To me, the query [chikoo] means two very sweet and different things, and today’s improvements give me the magical experience of finding both the Chikoos I love, right in the results page.
This is search that truly knows me, and gives me a result page that only I can see. And while I get a nice mix of personal results with results from the web, I can also click the link at the top of the results page (red arrow) for the option to search only within my world.
Profiles in Search
Every day, there are hundreds of millions of searches for people. Sometimes, it’s hard to find the person you’re looking for. Once you do find him or her, there’s no quick way for you to actually interact. Starting today, you’ll have meaningful ways to connect with people instantly, right from the search results.
Now, typing just the first few letters of your friend’s name brings up a personalized profile prediction in autocomplete. Selecting a predicted profile takes you to a results page for your friend, which includes information from their Google+ profile and relevant web results that may be related to them. And you can have this personal experience instantaneously, thanks to Google Instant. So when I search for [ben smith], I now find my dear friend Ben every time, instead of the hundreds of other Ben Smiths out there (no offense to all of them!).
In addition, you’ll find profile autocomplete predictions for various prominent people from Google+, such as high-quality authors from our authorship pilot program.
Once you select that profile, if you’re a signed-in Google+ user, you’ll also see a button to add them to your circles right on your search results page.
People and Pages
As I mentioned earlier, behind most queries are communities. Starting today, if you search for a topic like [music] or [baseball], you might see prominent people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page. You can connect with them on Google+, strike up meaningful conversations and discover entire communities in a way that simply wasn’t possible before.
Unprecedented security, transparency and control
When it comes to security and privacy, we set a high bar for Search plus Your World. Since some of the information you’ll now find in search results, including Google+ posts and private photos, is already secured by SSL encryption on Google+, we have decided that the results page should also have the same level of security and privacy protection. That's part of why we were the first major search engine to turn on search via SSL by default for signed-in users last year. This means when you’re signed in to Google, your search results—including your private content—are protected by the same high standards of encryption as your messages in Gmail.
We also want to be transparent about how our features work and give you control over how to use them. With today’s changes, we provide interface elements and control settings like those you’ll find in Google+. For example, personal results are clearly marked as Public, Limited or Only you. Additionally, people in your results are clearly marked with the Google+ circle they are in, or as suggested connections.
We’re also introducing a prominent new toggle on the upper right of the results page where you can see what your search results look like without personal content. With a single click, you can see an unpersonalized view of search results.
That means no results from your friends, no private information and no personalization of results based on your Web History. This toggle button works for an individual search session, but you can also make this the default in your Search Settings. We provide separate control in Search Settings over other contextual signals we use, including location and language.
That's unprecedented transparency and control over personal search results.
A beautiful journey begins
Search plus Your World will become available over the next few days to people who are signed in and searching on https://www.google.com in English.
While there may be 7 billion people and 197 million square miles on Earth, a septillion stars and a trillion webpages, we spend our short, precious lives living in a particular town, with particular friends and family, orbiting a single star and relying on a tiny slice of the world’s information. Our dream is to have technology enable everyone to experience the richness of all their information and people around them.
We named our company after the mathematical number googol as an aspiration toward indexing the countless answers on webpages, but that’s only part of the picture. The other part is people, and that’s what Search plus Your World is all about.
Bollywood ruled the charts with Shah Rukh Khan Don 2 Trailer being the most watched video
Jennifer Lopez - On The floor Ft Pitbull piped Salman Khan Dhinka Chika Song as the most watched music video of 2011
Kolaveri Di became the fastest rising music video of the year with over 25 million views within a month of its release
One hundred years into the future, when our great-grandkids look back to what was capturing the world’s imagination on YouTube in 2011, what will they make of us? Will they still be delighted by babbling babies? Will they still be “so excited” about the weekend? And will they be any closer to understanding the mystery of the space-traveling toaster pastry cat?
Check out YouTube.com/Rewind for a timeline of this year's most popular videos and events and to see what the world watched in 2011.
Today, we rewind through the videos and channels that absorbed our collective global attention this year. To compile these lists, we looked at global view counts of popular videos uploaded throughout this year, and, in some instances, we aggregated views across multiple versions of the same video. 2011 was a year of amazing new channels and new stars being discovered, awesome creativity, and of course, Rebecca Black. It was also a year of powerful news stories playing out on YouTube, as people witnessed and documented uprisings and natural disasters, touching personal moments and moments of protest.
In total, there were more than 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) playbacks on YouTube this year (yep, count ‘em, 12 zeroes). That’s about 140 views for every person on the earth. More than twice as many stars as in the Milky Way.
In India, YouTube users couldn’t get enough of the stars on the big screen, as bollywood ruled the charts on YouTube in India for the year 2011. From movie trailers, popular movie songs to nursery rhymes India enjoyed them all on YouTube.
In India, the top 10 most-watched YouTube videos of 2011 were:
So to all of you who picked up a guitar and sang a love song, held your camera phone high above a rioting crowd, danced along to Friday, or just forgot the webcam was on, thank you. You make YouTube what it is, and we can’t wait to hear your stories next year.
Posted by Kevin Allocca, YouTube Trends Manager, recently watched “Miracle on 42nd Street.”
Why is it that we Indians search the web? Whether it is to find a job, follow the world of politics, Bollywood or cricket, stock updates or to send flowers to a friend, listen to music or just to hang out .... we come to Google with something on our mind.
As the year comes to an end, we look back at the searches in 2011 to compose the year’s Zeitgeist—the spirit of the time. With Zeitgeist, we look at the most popular and the fastest rising terms—the terms with the highest growth in 2011—in many categories across India to give you a glimpse into the hottest trends and topics. From searching for information on local politics, the Lokpal Bill and Aadhar cards, to following news on the Japan earthquake and Osama Bin Laden’s death, people turned to Google to learn more about what was happening in India and around the world.
In 2011, Bharat started coming online. It has been a coming-of-age year for the Indian internet, with young Indians following anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare and making him the fastest rising people query of 2011. IBPS (Institute of Banking Personnel Selection) made a surprise appearance as one of the fastest rising searches, showing Indians’ interest in government jobs. Indian Railways continued to be a popular search term, with Indians getting online to book tickets and searching for train timings and other railway-related information.
On a lighter note, Poonam Pandey created a frenzy on the web with a promise she could not fulfill. Katrina Kaif continued her reign in Bollywood as the most searched celebrity in India for the fourth year in a row. 2011 also saw the Khans ruling the web with their movies Bodyguard and Ra One in the top two positions, while movies from contemporaries Aamir Khan (Delhi Belly) and Ajay Devgan (Singham) also made a mark in the top searched movies list.
In a country where cricket is a religion, it comes as no surprise to see the Indian net buzzing with excitement with the historic World Cup win, IPL and Sachin Tendulkar’s campaign for that elusive century of centuries.
While social networking sites featured on the ‘Top Searches’ list, we also saw a sudden spurt in the use of the free SMS website way2SMS, a new entry in this year’s list.
And my personal favorite is the only tech personality to make it to the top 10.. Steve Jobs, who was one of the pillars of computing and internet age and will be missed by India’s netizens.
Fastest rising searches
Fastest rising people
Top Searches
Facebook
IBPS
Google+
World Cup 2011
Bodyguard
Ra.one
Anna Hazare
IPL 2011
Poonam Pandey
Ready
Anna Hazare
Poonam Pandey
Steve Jobs
Anushka Sharma
Salman Khan
Justin Bieber
Kajal Agarwal
Katrina Kaif
Vijay Mallya
Aishwarya Rai
Facebook
YouTube
Gmail
Yahoomail
Google
Yahoo
IRCTC
Rediffmail
Indian Railways
way2sms
Top Searched People
Top Searched Movies
Top Searched events/news
Katrina Kaif
Anna Hazare
Salman Khan
Poonam Pandey
Justin Bieber
Aishwarya Rai
Sachin Tendulkar
Kareena Kapoor
Steve Jobs
Priyanka Chopra
Bodyguard
Ra One
Harry Potter
Delhi Belly
Singham
Ready
Mankatha
Transformers 3
Dookudu
Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara
IPL
World Cup 2011
CBSE result 2011
Diwali
Lokpal bill
Japan earthquake
Aadhar card
Osama Bin Laden
Pakistan
F1
Beginning today, you can head over to our Year-End Google Zeitgeist website (http://www.googlezeitgeist.com/#en/) to see the top global searches of 2011, and additional top searches in more than forty countries.
We created these lists and graphs using a combination of several tools that give insight into global, regional, past and present search trends on an aggregated level. Google Insights for Search, a publicly available tool that displays relative search volume across geographies, time periods and queries, informed many lists and graphs found on this year's Year-End Zeitgeist page.
With billions of searches conducted globally on Google each year, there are a plethora of search trends based on location, season and vertical, and our Year-End Zeitgeist cannot possibly capture them all. If you want to come up with your own lists or graphs, we encourage you to play around with our public Google Insights for Search tool to generate your own "Zeitgeist" lists for 2011.
Thanks to everyone out there for searching on Google -- and here's to more searching in 2012!
Posted by Lalitesh Katragadda, Country Head - India Products
With 2012 approaching, we're getting a head start on our New Year's resolution to shed some excess weight and improve our overall appearance. You may have seen our ongoing efforts to improve the look, feel, and user experience across many other Google products to date. And with Google Map Maker available in the United States, Canada, and more than 180 other regions, it's time for another makeover. Today, we’re revealing a new version of Google Map Maker to help users map the places they know best and make their hometowns sparkle on Google Maps.
With Map Maker, you can easily help ensure that the changing world around you is accurately reflected on the map. Add your favorite gift shop, the nearest tree farm, or even the golf course where you once got that hole in one. It’s also easier to mark the best route to Grandma’s house and draw better buildings with courtyards and crisper corners. The options are endless when it comes to mapping the places you know and love. Once approved, your contributions will appear on Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Maps for mobile for all the world to see.
You don’t have to be an expert to start using Google Map Maker. High school student and Eagle Scout Tommy Bruce is a mapping superstar who finds mapping fun, fulfilling, and a simple way to help those in his community have the best, most comprehensive information possible. He started by mapping bike trails in his hometown of Mooresville, North Carolina and is now on an exchange program in Puebla, Mexico, mapping unmarked rivers that run through town! After witnessing Tommy’s accomplishments firsthand at the U.S. Geo User Summit, even his mother Margaret began thinking of places that she’s eager to put on the map. Why not make your New Year’s resolution to improve the map for millions of people? Start here.
Supporting great non-profit organisations doing work in India
As the holiday season approaches we thought it was a good moment to update you on
some grants we're making to support education, technology and the fight against modern
day slavery.
In India, eight of the selected grantee organisations will receive funding to aid them in the
valuable work they are doing across the country.
Fighting slavery and human trafficking
Modern day slavery is a multi-billion dollar industry that impacts the lives of around 27
million people. So we're funding a number of groups that are working to tackle the
problem. For instance, in India, International Justice Mission (IJM), along with The BBC World Service Trust, Action Aid and Aide et Action, are forming a new coalition. These
organizations will work on the ground with governments to stop slave labor by identifying
the ring masters, documenting abuse, freeing individuals and providing them with therapy
as well as job training. Our support will also help expand the reach of tools like the
powerful Slavery Footprint calculator and Polaris Project’s National Trafficking Hotline.
STEM and girls’ education
Science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) open up great opportunities for young
people so we've decided to fund 16 great programs in this area. These include
Boston-based Citizen Schools and Generating Genius in the U.K, both of which work to
help to expand the horizons of underprivileged youngsters. In total, our grants will provide
enhanced STEM education for more than 3 million students.
In addition, we're supporting girls’ education in the developing world. By giving girls an
education, you not only improve her opportunities, but that of her whole family. The African Leadership Academy provides merit scholarships to promising young women
across the continent, and the Afghan Institute of Learning offers literacy classes to
women and girls in rural Afghanistan. Groups like these will use our funds to educate
more than 10,000 girls in developing countries.
Empowerment through technology
We've all been wowed by the entrepreneurial spirit behind the 15 awards in this category,
all of whom are using the web and open source programming to connect communities and
improve access to information. Vittana, for instance, helps lenders offer loans to students
in the developing world who have have a 99 percent repayment rate--potentially doubling
or tripling a recipient's earning power. Code for America enables the web industry to share
its skills with the public sector by developing projects that improve transparency and
encourage civic engagement on a mass scale. And Switchboard is working with local
mobile providers to help African health care workers create networks and communicate
for free.
To learn more about these organizations and how you can get involved, visit our Google
Gives Back 2011 site and take a look at this video:
These grants, which total $40 million, are only part of our annual philanthropic efforts.
Over the course of the year, Google provided more than $115 million in funding to various
nonprofit organizations and academic institutions around the world; our in-kind support
(programs like Google Grants and Google Apps for Education that offer free products and
services to eligible organizations) came to more than $1 billion, and our annual
company-wide GoogleServe event and related programs enabled individual Googlers to
donate more than 40,000 hours of their own volunteer time.
As 2011 draws to a close, I’m inspired by this year’s grantees and look forward to seeing
their world-changing work in 2012.
