Custom Search goes global

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Enterprise Search and Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Search

In our Mountain View, California lobby, there's an image of a globe radiating colo(u)red beams of light, representing searches in different languages in countries all over the world. It's quite mesmerizing to watch. (You should check it out if you visit.)


Today, we're pleased to tell you that the Google Custom Search platform is available in 40 languages, in close to 80 countries worldwide. And now you can search your Custom Search engine (CSE) in the language of your choice. We hope to see more people creating useful CSEs -- we want to see more colo(u)red beams on the globe!

The Custom Search platform brings the relevance, reliability, speed and power of Google search to webmasters and developers worldwide. Webmasters can use CSE to create tailored search experiences on community web sites; businesses can add hosted site search to their web sites; users can add search to their blogs and web pages; and developers can build search right into their applications with the Custom Search APIs. There's no software to install or hardware to maintain. CSEs can be built in minutes and are easy to customize and manage. You can also control the appearance of the search results to match the look and feel of your web site. Now, you can administer your favo(u)rite CSE in the language of your choice.

There's a free, ads-supported version, and there's also the Custom Search Business Edition (CSBE), in which further customization of search results is possible using an XML API, and ads are optional. CSBE also offers options for email and phone support.

Our international launch of the Custom Search platform now brings CSBE to your country. Millions of businesses all over the world have a web presence but offer users no ability to search their site. Users are left on their own to navigate content once they land on a site. Now, organizations and businesses everywhere can enable Google-hosted site search to help users find what they need.

The UK Parliament uses CSBE on its website to make nine million documents easily accessible to the public. Monarch Airlines is using CSBE to help manage the growing number of customer enquiries about hand baggage regulations and the increased focus on airline security. Since adding CSBE they have seen a 30% reduction in inbound email as more customers now find what they need online. A leading Serbian media system B92, which includes both a TV and radio station and a leading web portal, B92.net, offers Custom Search on various sections of its site, such as sport, business, culture and technology. B92.net also uses several unique features, including linked CSEs, search refinements, and the capability to exclude certain sections of their sites from search results. Belfabriek, a provider of 0800 and 0900 service numbers in The Netherlands, wanted to offer customers the speed and quality of searching with Google. Since using CSBE, the number of callers has decreased substantially as people find the information they need and register their numbers directly through their website. Indian cricket site Cricbuzz uses a CSE to provide cricket fans relevant cricket content for any search related to cricket, using search refinements for drilling down into scores, player profiles, records, blogs and news.

We'd like to hear from you about your CSE too. Please keep that feedback coming.

Getting to know the candidates

Posted by Ginny Hunt, Public Policy Communications Team

Yesterday Senator Obama became the latest U.S. presidential candidate to visit Google headquarters in Mountain View for a talk and then Q&A. We're heartened to see how most every candidate is taking full advantage of the Internet, by making good use of YouTube together with their own websites, blogs and social networks to inform voters of their positions and share more of their thinking than traditional campaigns ever allowed.

The next big event we're looking forward to is the November 28 CNN/YouTube Republican debate. Stay tuned for that, and if you'd like to watch the talks other candidates have given at Google, here they are.

Google Checkout badges for non-profits

Posted by Prem Ramaswami, Product Manager

You may have heard about the recently launched Google Checkout for Non-Profits, which is a fast and easy way to make online donations to your favorite non-profits. Now we'll begin displaying the Google Checkout badge on the AdWords ads of non-profits, which will help connect donors with the organizations they'd like to support. Visit our Checkout Blog for more details.

Australia's election map redrawn

Posted by Rob Shilkin and Julian Sonego, Google Australia

Australia's federal election is on 24 November 2007, and the campaign is well and truly in its final stages. Prime Minister Howard and Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd are adding final details to their policies and making their final appeal for votes.

You may recall that we launched an election site in September to help Australians stay informed. We've now updated the "Australian 2007 Election" feature in Google Maps so that, for all 150 House of Representatives seats, you can click on any candidate's name to see all their Google search results, or their YouTube channel. And with one click, you can now find an incredible array of information from across the Internet -- news stories, videos, personal websites, party websites, blogs, and all the rest -- about all 1,054 candidates for all 150 seats.

We've also added in all polling booth locations based on information from the Australian Electoral Commission, so voters can easily find their nearest polling booth on the map, together with opening hours and wheelchair accessibility. Voting in Australia is compulsory, so there's now no excuse not to turn up and have your say next Saturday.

Free expression and controversial content on the web

Posted by Rachel Whetstone, Director of Global Communications and Public Affairs, EMEA

Our world would be a very boring place if we all agreed all the time. So while people may strongly disagree with what someone says, or think that a particular newspaper article is total nonsense, we recognize that each of us have the right to an opinion.

We also know that letting people express their views freely has real practical benefits. Allowing individuals to voice unpopular, inconvenient or controversial opinions is important. Not only might they be right (think Galileo) but debating difficult issues in the open often helps people come to better decisions.

While most people agree in principle with the right to free expression, the challenge comes in putting theory into practice. And that's certainly the case on the web, where blogs, social networks and video sharing sites allow people to express themselves - to speak and be heard - as never before.

At Google we have a bias in favor of people's right to free expression in everything we do. We are driven by a belief that more information generally means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual. But we also recognize that freedom of expression can't be -- and shouldn't be -- without some limits. The difficulty is in deciding where those boundaries are drawn. For a company like Google with services in more than 100 countries - all with different national laws and cultural norms - it's a challenge we face many times every day.

In a few cases it's straightforward. For example, we have a global all-product ban against child pornography, which is illegal in virtually every country. But when it comes to political extremism it's not as simple. Different countries have come to different conclusions about how to deal with this issue. In Germany there's a ban on the promotion of Nazism -- so we remove Nazi content on products on Google.de (our domain for German users) products. Other countries' histories make commentary or criticism on certain topics especially sensitive. And still other countries believe that the best way to discredit extremists is to allow their arguments to be publicly exposed.

All this raises important questions for Internet companies like Google. Our products are, after all, specifically designed to help people create and communicate, to find and share information and opinions across the world. So how do we approach these challenges?

It should come as no surprise to learn people have different views about what should appear on our sites. How and where to draw the boundaries is the subject of lively debate even within Google. We think that's healthy. And partly because of this, we realize that creating a flawless set of policies on which everyone can agree is an impossible task.

Google is not, and should not become, the arbiter of what does and does not appear on the web. That's for the courts and those elected to government to decide. Faced with day-to-day choices, however, we look at our products in three broad categories: search, advertising and services that host other people's content.

Search is the least restricted category. We remove results from our index only when required by law (for example, when linked to content infringing copyright) and in a small number of other instances, such as spam results or results including unauthorized credit card and social security numbers. Where feasible, we tell our users when we remove results.

At the other, most restrictive, end of the spectrum, we have what might be called commerce products –- the text of the advertisements we carry, which are subject to clear ad content policies.

The most challenging areas are where we host other people’s content -- offerings like Blogger, Groups, orkut and video. On the one hand, we're not generating the content and we aim to offer a platform for free expression. On the other hand, we host the content on our servers and want to be socially responsible. So we have terms that we ask our users to follow. (See Blogger and orkut for examples.)

So the question becomes: how do we enforce those terms? In general, Google does not want to be a gatekeeper. We don't, and can't, check content before it goes live, any more than your phone company would screen the content of your phone calls or your ISP would edit your emails. Technology can sometimes help here, but it's rarely a full answer. We also have millions of active users who are vocal when it comes to alerting us to content they find unacceptable or believe may breach our policies. When they do, we review it and remove it where appropriate. These are always subjective judgments and some people will inevitably disagree. But that’s because what’s acceptable to one person may be offensive to another.

We also face the added complication that laws governing content apply differently in the different parts of the world in which we operate. As we all know, some governments are more liberal about freedom of expression than others. These legal differences create real technical challenges, for example, about how you restrict one type of content in one country but not another. And, in extreme cases, we face questions about whether a country's laws and lack of democratic processes are so antithetical to our principles that we simply can't comply or can't operate there in a way that benefits users.

But it's not only legal considerations that drive our policies. One type of content, while legal everywhere, may be almost universally unacceptable in one region yet viewed as perfectly fine in another. We are passionate about our users so we try to take into account local cultures and needs -- which vary dramatically around the world -- when developing and implementing our global product policies.

Dealing with controversial content is one of the biggest challenges we face as a company. We don’t pretend to have all the right answers or necessarily to get every judgment right. But we do try hard to think things through from first principles, to be as transparent as possible about how we make decisions, and to keep reviewing and debating our policies. After all, the right to disagree is a sign of a healthy society.

Calling all developers: $10M Android challenge

Posted by Steve Horowitz, Engineering Director

Last week we announced the Open Handset Alliance, a group of mobile and technology leaders committed to improving the mobile experience and Android, the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices.

Today, the team is releasing an early look at the Android SDK for developers interested in building applications for Android. To get things rolling, we've also announced the Android Developer Challenge, which provides $10 million in awards for developers who build great applications for Android. Read more on the new Android Developers blog to learn about this exciting mobile platform.

With so many brilliant minds striving to design engaging, innovative applications, mobile users around the world (3 billion and counting!) can expect phones equipped with dynamic and unprecedented applications very soon.

Crossing team and global boundaries

Posted by Reza Behforooz, Software Engineer

In my first month at Google, I complained to a friend on the Gmail team about a couple of small things that I disliked about Gmail. I expected him to point me to the bug database. But he told me to fix it myself, pointing me to a document on how to bring up the Gmail development environment on my workstation. The next day my code was reviewed by Gmail engineers, and then I submitted it. A week later, my change was live. I was amazed by the freedom to work across teams, the ability to check in code to another project, the trust in engineers to work on the right thing, and the excitement and speed of getting things done for our users. Engineers across our offices (and across projects) have access to the same code; I didn't have to ask for anyone's permission to work on this.

Since then, I've done my best to use my 20% time on other projects. A few weeks ago, I noticed that our engineering team in India had launched an on-screen keyboard for several Indic languages on Labs. I speak Farsi, and thought it would be useful to make one for myself and ham-zaboonam (that's Farsi for 'people who speak my language'). After launching my latest project for Google Maps, I emailed M. T. Raghunath, the engineer in India who built out the keyboard Gadgets, to learn how I could make one for Farsi. He had already worked with several language experts to create keyboards in 14 Indic languages and had recently included right-to-left support for Urdu and Arabic, which he created with the help of Googlers from our Hyderabad office. He was excited and pointed me to the code. After a week of iteration, you too can now use the Farsi Gadget.

Google has many engineering offices around the world; I currently work in Seattle and M. T. works in Bangalore. We have a lot more engineers than a few years ago when I made the changes to Gmail, but I'm happy to relive the same magic I shared with the Gmail team with a Googler across the globe. By the way, a Kashmiri Gadget is also available, thanks to help from Sarwat Nisa, a Hyderabad-based Googler.