A roadmap for Google help

Posted by Suzanne Hampton and Terry Hurlbutt, Online Product Support Team

Those of us in user support had a pet peeve: there was no single place that held all of Google's help information at your fingertips. So we decided to build one -- and now you can visit Google Help to find tips, tricks, and troubleshooting solutions for just about every Google product and service. We don't want you to have to work hard to find anything, so we also added an A-Z guide in case you do know exactly what you're looking for.

From the Support page you can also visit the Help Center of your choice to discover answers to frequently asked questions and link to our interactive help groups to discuss various features with other Google users. So remember to keep google.com/support handy, and enjoy.

London conference on test automation

Posted by Allen Hutchison, Engineering Manager

Earlier we announced a first-time conference on test automation, something of interest to an admittedly select group. Just a reminder to those of you who work in this area that our deadline for requesting a spot at the London meeting this fall is coming up at the end of the week. Here's more information if you'd like to sign up.

Corporate info on the go

Posted by David Bercovich, Product Marketing Manager

In keeping with the blog's mobile theme today, we've just made enterprise information -- corporate networks, databases, content management systems -- searchable on mobile devices. You can read more here.

Home on the road

Posted by Maryam Kamvar, Software Engineer

It may be liberating to step away from your computer and out into the world -- but who can stand to leave the convenience of the Internet behind? I like to take the information I need with me -- like news, weather, Gmail, and everything else from my Google Personalized Homepage -- and now so can you. Before you take off, customize your mobile home page from your computer. On your Personalized Homepage, decide what you want to add to your phone, then drag and drop to reorder the items. On the road, in line, or wherever you go, you can view all this information on your phone. The world is waiting!

Saving the galaxy, one traffic jam at a time

Posted by Josh Sacks, Software Engineer

Is it wrong to refer to your own handiwork as "the new hotness"? Probably, but we're hoping you'll humor us for a bit. So what is with the new Google Maps for mobile? Well, to paraphrase Agent J:

Old and busted: Being stuck in traffic
The new hotness: Checking traffic conditions from your phone*

Old and busted: Showing up late
The new hotness: Driving directions with real-time traffic estimates

Old and busted: Typing in the same addresses over and over
The new hotness: 1-touch recall of favorite locations and routes

This release won't avert an intergalactic disaster any time soon, but we'd like to think the Men in Black would give it a try. You can too: just point your mobile phone's web browser to www.google.com/gmm.

*Update: Currently available across the U.S. with comprehensive data coverage for more than 30 metro areas; partial coverage elsewhere in U.S.

Findings on invalid clicks

Posted by Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager, Trust and Safety

Those of you who follow news about online advertising closely are seeing plenty about the issue of "click fraud" lately. Since there's been a development in a case Google is involved in, you might like to hear about it.

As part of the settlement in the click-fraud case Lane’s Gifts v. Google, we agreed with the plaintiffs to have an independent expert examine our detection methods, policies, practices, and procedures and make a determination of whether or not we had implemented reasonable measures to protect all of our advertisers. The result of that is a 47-page report, written by Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, Professor of Information Systems at NYU. The report was filed with the court in Texarkana, Arkansas, this morning.

The bottom-line conclusion of the report is that Google’s efforts against click fraud are in fact reasonable. At several points in his report, he calls out the quality of our inspection systems and notes their constant improvement. It is an independent report, so not surprisingly there are other aspects of it with which we don’t fully agree. But overall it is a validation of what we have said for some time about our work against invalid clicks.

Here are excerpts of some of the positive things Dr. Tuzhilin has to say about Google and invalid clicks:

“During this project, I visited Google campus three times and interviewed over a dozen of the Click Quality team members from the Spam Operations and the Engineering groups, as well as the Product Manager of the Trust and Safety Group. I found the members of both groups to be well-qualified and highly competent to perform their jobs. Most of them have relevant prior backgrounds and strong credentials.” (p.4)

“The current set of Google filters is fairly stable and only requires periodic 'tuning' and ‘maintenance’ rather than a radical re-engineering, even when major fraudulent attacks are launched against the Google Network.” (p.25)

“These inspection systems have been developed by Google over an extensive period of time and are constantly improved to extend their functionality and make them better for the investigators to do their inspections more effectively. I have personally observed several such inspections and can attest to how successfully they have been conducted by Google’s investigators. This success can be attributed to (a) the quality of the inspection tools, (b) the extensive experience and high levels of professionalism of the Click Quality inspectors, and (c) the existence of certain investigation processes, guidelines and procedures assisting the investigators in the inspection process.” (p. 40)

“Google has built the following four 'lines of defense' for detecting invalid clicks: pre-filtering, online filtering, automated offline detection and manual offline detection, in that order. Google deploys different detection methods in each of these stages: the rule-based and anomaly-based approaches in the pre-filtering and the filtering stages, the combination of all the three approaches in the automated offline detection stage, and the anomaly-based approach in the offline manual inspection stage. This deployment of different methods in different stages gives Google an opportunity to detect invalid clicks using alternative techniques and thus increases their chances of detecting more invalid clicks in one of these stages, preferably proactively in the early stages.” (p. 47)

We also filed a document with the court today that may be of interest. You can find it here. And there's more information on invalid clicks and how we manage them here and here.

Update: Google Desktop Gadget Contest

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

Just a quick update to let all you know that, due to popular demand, we've extended the Google Desktop Gadget Contest another two weeks. So if you have a great idea for a gadget, and want to enter it for a chance to prove your brilliance and creativity, you now have until August 14 to do so.

And if you're interested in some tips and tricks on creating Desktop Gadgets, have a look at the Inside Google Desktop blog. Good luck!