Why's the location under my ad?

In the spirit of posting quick but useful tips, here's a question (paraphrased from a post in the AdWords Help community) that we'd like to answer:

The state of California, where my office is located, shows under my ad. Why is that there? I'm not sure I want it there, so how do I get rid of it?

Here is what's happening: When an advertiser has targeted a city or region in their campaign, the name of that city or region will show under their ad to users who are identified by the AdWords system as being located in that area. This tells the user that your product or service is especially relevant to them - and is intended to help you reach more qualified users.

What to do: If you'd prefer that your ad appear without a region name (while still reaching qualified users), you may want to consider running a country- and territory-targeted campaign with region-specific keywords and ad text, rather than a regionally targeted ad. More details may be found right here.

Posted by Blake, Inside AdWords crew

Don't miss this chance to prove yourself

Posted by Jeanne Williams, Staffing Programs

There are only 5 days left until registration closes for Google Code Jam 2006. So far, about 16,000 competitors have signed up to show off their programming skills -- and perhaps win an all-expenses paid trip to our New York City engineering office to compete in the finals on October 27. The winner gets $10,000 and global bragging rights: people have registered in huge numbers not only from the U.S., but from India, China, Canada, Brazil, the Russian Federation, Poland, Pakistan, Iran, Australia, the U.K., Germany, Singapore, Japan, Hungary -- you get the idea.

The top 100 finalists will be flown to NYC to show us what they've got. Have you got what it takes to Code Jam? Then by all means register here.

Get your products into our search results with Google Base

As an AdWords advertiser, we know that you're interested in increasing the amount of traffic to your site. In the past, we've let you know about Sitemaps to make your site more crawler-friendly for our search results. Now, with Google Base, there's another way to make your products or services searchable on Google. Here's Alison from the Google Base team with the details:

Your site may already be included in our crawl index, but we want to ensure that you also know how you can supplement these results with Google Base - you can submit the products or services that you offer directly to Google Base making them eligible to show on Google.com when a user searches on a relevant query.

Google Base allows you to easily submit all types of online and offline information; whether it's a large selection of shoes that you sell online or information about your consulting service, we'll make it easier for people to find it on Google. If your product or service isn't online yet, we can help you put it there -- for free.

For example, let's say you use AdWords to advertise your job search service. With Google Base, you can include specific information about job offers like title, job description, location and salary and we'll display them in relevant search results on Google, helping you to increase awareness about your service. The more details you include about the information you want to share, the greater the likelihood it will be found by those looking for exactly what you have to offer.

If you're ready to submit information to Google Base, there are currently three ways to do so: you can upload individual items manually via a web form, submit multiple items through a bulk upload, or use our just-released API.

No matter how you choose to submit your info, we hope you'll find this to be a worthwhile addition to the targeted traffic you are already getting from your AdWords campaigns.

Posted by Sarah, Inside AdWords crew

Download the classics

Posted by Adam Mathes, Associate Product Manager, Google Book Search

Starting today, you can go to Google Book Search and download full copies of out-of-copyright books to read at your own pace. You're free to choose from a diverse collection of public domain titles -- from well-known classics to obscure gems.

Before the rise of the public library -– a story chronicled in this 1897 edition of The Free Library – access to large collections of books was the privilege of a wealthy minority. Now, with the help of our wonderful library partners, we're able to offer you the ability to download and read PDF versions of out-of-copyright books from some of the world’s greatest collections.

Using Google Book Search, you can find The Free Library and many other extraordinary old books, such as:

* Ferriar's The Bibliomania
* A futurist from 1881's 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century
* Aesop's Fables
* Shakespeare's Hamlet
* Abbott's Flatland
* Hugo's Marion De Lorme
* Dunant's Eine Erinnerung an Solferino
* Bolívar's Proclamas
* Dante's Inferno

To find out-of-copyright books that you can download, simply select the "Full view" radio button when you search on books.google.com. (Please note that we do not enable downloading of any book currently under copyright. Unless we have the publisher’s permission to show more, we display only small snippets of text –- at most, two or three sentences surrounding your search term -– to help you determine if you’ve found what you’re looking for.)

Of course, this is just the beginning. As we digitize more of the world's books -- whether rare, common, popular or obscure -- people everywhere will be able to discover them on Google Book Search.

Quick tips for editing your seasonal campaigns

As small children wearing book-filled backpacks return to the sidewalks, it's a sure sign that fall is just around the corner. As you enjoy the last few weeks of summer, it's also a good time to look through your active Ad Groups and decide if you need to make any seasonal changes. Below are a few quick tips to make sure your campaigns are seasonally relevant.

Are there items that you only advertise in the summer? If so, there are a number of tools that can help you change these items and replace them with a product for the fall. If you'd like to quickly replace all mentions of 'swimsuit' in your keyword list with 'jacket', the Find and Edit Keywords Tool is for you. To do the same in your ad text, you can take advantage of the Find and Edit Ad Text Tool.

If you'd prefer to keep this Ad Group in place until next summer rolls around, remember that you can simply pause it and resume it again next year. Or, if you know that you'll stop taking orders for your summer cruise on September 15, you can make sure that you stop advertising at the right time by setting an end date for that campaign.

Posted by Sarah, Inside AdWords crew

Get your people talking

Posted by Raju Gulabani, Product Manager, Google Apps for Your Domain

Back in February, we blogged about an experiment called "Gmail for your domain" that enabled IT administrators to power their custom domain email with Gmail with 2GB of storage, powerful search tools, and other Gmail features to all of their users. Since then, we've been listening to feedback from thousands of small businesses, K-12 schools, non-profits, universities, even families with their own websites, and based on what they've suggested, we've added so many features that the original name just didn't describe the service accurately any longer.

So say hello to Google Apps for Your Domain, a service available at no cost to organizations of all shapes and sizes.

We think we may be on to something here: all the functionality of Gmail, Google Talk and Google Calendar wrapped up with tools to make them work for your organization, plus Google Page Creator for designing and publishing your website. There's no hardware or software required, and you can customize the user interfaces with your branding and color scheme, so they look and feel like your own.

Things have come a long way in the last six months, and we're still working on the service. If you're from a larger business or university with more advanced needs for communications and sharing, please get in touch regarding premium versions of the service, due out later this year.

We love you, webmasters

Posted by Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Webmaster Central, and Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist

We always aim to offer our users relevant and helpful results, and webmasters provide the great content that we point to. Unfortunately -- though we've had the pleasure of chatting with many of you in a variety of forums, around the blogosphere, and at many conferences across the world -- we simply haven't been able to interact with every one of you. So we're excited to announce our new Google Webmaster Central, which enables us to have productive conversations with many more of you, all the time.

Recently, we've added:

• A new Webmaster Central blog, where you'll find lots of information about how we crawl and index sites.
• An expanded Webmaster Help Google Group featuring helpful conversations with other webmasters and Googlers.
• Tons of new and updated FAQs.

Furthermore, Google Sitemaps has been renamed Google webmaster tools. It's more than a new coat of paint; we've added and improved lots of geeky goodies to help give you more info and control.

For those of you who've already established a Google sitemap, have no fear: the Sitemaps protocol remains unchanged and Sitemaps submission mechanisms and reporting is still available from the Sitemaps tab. If you haven't already added a Sitemap, you might want to learn more about it. (In short, putting a Sitemap file on your site enables you to tell us what pages your site has, which of them are most important, and how often they are typically updated.)

You've worked hard on your sites, and, not surprisingly, you want to make sure they're listed appropriately in Google, so of course you have lots of questions. You can find many answers simply by creating a Google webmaster tools account (if you have a Google Account, you're already set), adding your site URL to your account, and verifying that you own the site. A few of the many things you can do with webmaster tools:

• Tell us if you'd prefer your site's URLs to be indexed with the www or without.
• View any errors we had crawling your site.
• See an analysis of your robots.txt file and a way to test changes to it.
• See what searches bring up your site in the results and what position the site shows up.
• Request reinclusion of your site if you're previously violated the webmaster guidelines.

We've also put together a comprehensive webmaster help center to answer more of your questions, such as:

• What are Google's webmaster guidelines?
• How can I improve my site's ranking?
  
• Why doesn't my site show up for a specific keyword?
• My URL changed, so how can I get Google to index my new site?
• What's a "supplemental result"?

With our webmaster tools and webmaster help center, we're able to tackle an increasing number of questions and make the answers available to all webmasters. But we're not planning to rest on our laurels. We're listening to your concerns (in person and all over the Net!) and working hard to expand the content and languages of our help center. We appreciate the webmaster community very much, and look forward to many great conversations to come. We couldn't do search without you.

Happy birthday, Google Talk!

Posted by Lewis Lin, Product Marketing Manager, Google Talk

A year ago today, we launched Google Talk. On the days leading up to launch, we spent long summer nights fueled by Reza's eclectic play list. Thankfully, Google Talk didn't have Music Trends back then. The team listened to everything from 2Pac to Ludacris to Biggie.

We want to thank all the users who have submitted product feedback. We'd also like to thank the millions of users who are using the Google Talk network – either through the Google Talk client, Gmail chat, or other supported clients. Our users love the chat integration within Gmail, and we're planning to make it easier to chat with your buddies through other Google services.

Want to send us a birthday message? Leave us a voicemail at talkbirthday@gmail.com.

MEEP.

Finding the wealth in your library (and everyone else's)

Posted by Bruno Fonseca, Google Brazil

As a student and then as a researcher, I used to haunt libraries in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. I spent time looking for the books I needed, but also happened to find gems by chance, as I scanned the shelves I walked by. Fun as it was to find an unexpected treasure, I always knew that much remained hidden. Large libraries are way too big to just walk around and browse, even for an enthusiastic teenager.

Today, we're launching the Library Catalog Search feature in Google Book Search, designed to help casual readers and bookworms everywhere find gems in the libraries around the world. Queries on Google Book Search will automatically include results from library catalogs when appropriate. Each result includes a "Find Libraries" link to help readers find libraries that hold the book -- ideally a library nearby, or if need be, a library far away. For example, after reading Martin Gardner's book Fads and Fallacies, I wanted to follow up on Immanuel Velikovsky's books about scientific explanations for biblical miracles. Clicking on the "Find Libraries" link for Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision, I found that a copy was available in the University of Sao Paulo library.

This is true of many types of books in countries all over the world -- my colleagues in Google's Zurich office tell me about being able to find Harry Potter and the Chambers of Secrets for their nephews and nieces. In many cases, it's even possible to click through to the local library and reserve the book.

For this feature, we have worked with more than 15 library union catalogs that have information about libraries from more than 30 countries, as well as with our colleagues working on Google Scholar (which includes a similar feature just for scholarly books).

We would like to acknowledge and fete our partners who have collected information about the wealth in world's libraries with amazing thoroughness and care. And we're looking to work with union catalogs in other parts of the world so it can be just as easy for library patrons elsewhere to learn what their libraries have waiting for them.

If you're a library patron and can't find the books you're looking for, ask your local library to participate in this program. If you are a librarian at a union catalog and would like to work with us to help users find books in your collections, please contact us.

Here's hoping readers worldwide will use this to discover and explore the wonderful collections in the world's libraries.

Calendar and Notifier for the Mac

Posted by David Oster, Software Engineer-Mac Clients

Creating a better user experience for Google Calendar on a Mac was my first project at Google. So I'm excited to tell you that Google Calendar now works great in Safari, and we've just launched a major Mac-only upgrade for the Gmail Notifier.

The Google Notifier for the Mac has:

• Notifications for upcoming events and unread mail
  
• Built-in pop up notifications
• Custom sounds
• As always, great new icons

So start keeping track of your life with Google Calendar and the Google Notifier.

By the way, since we put this out there last Friday, we've already received a lot of feedback, which we've used to fix some bugs. So keep the comments coming! We want to make the Google Notifier even better.

I got 99 problems, but video distribution ain't one

Posted by Jon Steinback, Product Marketing Manager

A little more than 25 years ago, MTV launched in northern New Jersey, where a few thousand people on one cable system were able to watch "Video Killed the Radio Star." My, how times have changed: with an entire collection of networks (including Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and VH1), today MTV can be seen just about anywhere there is a TV.

But these days, people aren't only getting video from their TV -- plenty are watching online. And where do they watch this great content? Anywhere they can find it. That's why we've teamed up with MTV to make its quality content available to our vast network of AdSense sites.

So now when you visit places like BabyNames.com and Fan-Sites.org, you may see clips you can play from MTV, VH1, LOGO, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central - clips that these sites' visitors would be most interested in. If you're a site owner, stay tuned as we expand this program. And if you like video, go get your MTV. It's fresh, and it's free.

How to move Ramses II

Posted by Sherif Iskander, Business Manager, Egypt

As a teen in Cairo, I grew up knowing the area called Ramses Square. At that time the statue of Ramses II could be seen from miles away and was one of the city center's attractions. Over the years the king became surrounded by fly-overs, steel walkways and an underground station.

It got to the point where you really had to know where the statue was to see it. A year ago scaffolding appeared around the statue and rumors abounded that the statue was suffering from the pollution and was being restored. The rumors turned out false -- the granite statue was going to be RELOCATED. What?! How?! Just getting the statue out of the labyrinth of bridges and walkways would be a feat of engineering.

Turns out some smart engineers work for the transportation contractor: they used Google Earth to plan the route, made the decision to move the 3200+ year-old statue -- and will do so this Friday, August 25, 2006. Walkways, cables, fences and road dividers are being brought down to make way! Trials and tests have been done to ensure the roads can handle the load, and now Ramses II will embark on what is most probably his last journey. Seeing is believing, so I got together with the Earth team and came up with this KML overlay showing the complete route of the journey from downtown Cairo to the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) out by the Pyramids.

Coalition against child pornography

Posted by Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel

Previously, I've shared with you Google's commitment to protecting children online. As part of these efforts, we've joined two recently-formed industry initiatives to combat child pornography and child exploitation on the Internet. No group can keep the Internet safe by itself. We're excited about the promise of collaborating with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and other companies to advance this important mission.

Here's the NCMEC release announcing our participation in the Technology Coalition and the Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography.

Worldcon beckons

Posted by Tom Galloway, Technical Writer

In response to our attending the Star Trek convention in Las Vegas last week, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch commented, "Of course, going to WorldCon in LA (ahem, actually Anaheim in beautiful Orange County) later this month would be nice."

Wouldn't it, though? After all, in addition to Scotty and Spock, many Googlers have been influenced by Isaac Asimov's Dr. Susan Calvin, Robert Heinlein's HOLMES-IV (a.k.a. Mike/Mycroft/Michelle), Arthur C. Clarke's HAL 9000, and Douglas Adams' Marvin the Paranoid Android, and the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy itself, as well as many other science fiction characters, stories, and novels both classic and recent.

So we are in fact throwing a party at this week's World Science Fiction Convention, LACon IV -- on Wednesday evening, in the main party area on the fifth floor of the Anaheim Hilton. Convention attendees are welcome to drop by to talk with Googlers from the Mountain View and Santa Monica offices and see some things that I'm sure Serenity's engineer Kaylee Frye would consider worthy of a "Shiny!"

If you think Google might be a good fit for you, stop by the party or head over to our jobs site.

System maintenance this week

Here's a quick heads up from our tech team on system maintenance this week:

Starting at 4am PDT tomorrow, August 23, the AdWords video ad upload tool will be down for maintenance for approximately 48 hours. During this time you will not be able to upload or modify click-to-play video ads in your AdWords account. However, if you've already created a video ad, it will continue to run normally during this time.

Then, on Saturday, August 26th, the AdWords system will be temporarily unavailable from approximately 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. PDT due to system maintenance. As with the case mentioned above, though you won't be able to log in or make any changes to your account during this time, your ads will continue to run as normal.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this system maintenance may cause.

Posted by Sarah, Inside AdWords crew

Exploring the scholarly neighborhood

Posted by Luiz Barroso, Distinguished Engineer

Searching for scientific articles on Google Scholar works especially well when I can find the search terms that are specific enough to narrow down to the subject I'm interested in and yet general enough to not miss relevant articles. When authors use different terminology to refer to the same thing --- which often happens when a field is very young -- this can be less effective. In fact, I've found cases where the seminal paper for a topic does not even use the key terms that are later used to describe it. For example, John Nash's papers that helped define the area of game theory don't refer to the area as game theory.

Now there's an additional way to find related work in Google Scholar, which should be helpful in such situations. For every Google Scholar search result, we try to automatically determine which articles in our repository are most closely related to it. You can see a list of these articles by clicking the "Related Articles" link that appears next to each result. The list of related articles is ranked primarily by how similar these articles are to the original result, but also takes into account the relevance of each paper. To go back to the game theory example, clicking on the Related Articles link for the first result for game theory enables users to discover several of Nash's seminal articles.

Finding sets of related papers and books is often a great way for novices to get acquainted with a topic. However, we've found that even experts can sometimes be surprised to discover related work in their area of expertise.

Think of it as a way to hop from one giant's shoulder to the next!

School's in

Posted by Dror Shimshowitz, Product Marketing Manager

Getting ready for the new school year? There's a back-to-school shopping offer at Google Checkout.

Campaign ended?

Here's another question (slightly edited for length) sent to us by our colleagues on the AdWords Help forum. Since the question comes up a fair amount, they thought it might help a lot of folks if it we answered it here in the blog:

My campaign was going along just fine, but all of a sudden in the Status column, it says something like "Ended July 31, 2006". Why is that? I didn't do anything, and haven't even made any changes at all for at least a couple of weeks. And even more important, how do I get it running again? I'm losing business, and want to get my ads running again!

This occurs when an advertiser has set an 'end date' for their campaign, and then forgets that they have done so. This happens more often than you might expect, but no worries -- the solution is extremely straightforward. You can get re-started in very short order by following the steps right here.

Tip: When you set an end date for a campaign, you may want to make a note of this on your calendar, perhaps a few days in advance of the actual date. This will remind you to reset the end date to a point in the future, if you wish, before your ads come to a screeching halt.

Posted by Blake, Inside AdWords crew

The multilingual Desktop

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

No matter what language you speak, you shouldn't have to hunt around for stuff on your computer. That's why there's Google Desktop 4, now out of beta in -- count 'em -- 26 languages (hello, Romanian), plus a Japanese beta version.

Thanks also to everyone who submitted a gadget for the contest. We'll announce the winners on September 5th. Read more about this on the Google Desktop Blog.

Stardate 0817.06

Posted by Tom Galloway, Technical Writer

Starbase 24 Commander's personal log.
I find myself looking forward to my upcoming trip to Earth, specifically Las Vegas...

Did you ever realize that among many other things, Star Trek predicted blogs? Think about it -- all those "Captain's log" and "personal log" entries that Kirk would make. He was definitely a blogger. And of course the communicator-inspired cell phone design. And the crew was constantly asking the ship's computer for information...sort of like Google.

Of course, Scotty and Spock, the engineer and the scientist, certainly were childhood inspirations to many Googlers. Now we've (somewhat) grown up, and often work on things that seem right out of the show: Being able to ask a computer to research a topic and present relevant results. Putting maps, both human-drawn and photos taken from space, on a personal communicator (OK, cell phone). Creating 3-D structures and objects and putting them in a shared warehouse for everyone to use (we're still working on making them into solid holograms for a Holodeck). And I'm convinced we've got replicators that restock the snacks in our micro-kitchens.

So it all stands to reason that we're hosting a booth at the 5th annual Official Star Trek Convention (which celebrates 40 years of the whole enterprise) in Las Vegas. It starts today and runs through Sunday. If you're at the con, please stop by for demos of some of our latest product releases, including a few new ones, often with a particular sci-fi spin. We're also looking for applicants to "Google Academy," so please speak up if you'd like to work here. After all -- today is a good day to code.

More ways to connect and share with Google Talk

Posted by Mike Jazayeri, Google Talk Product Manager

Millions of you use Google Talk every day to connect with friends, family, and colleagues via chat and calls. Today we're releasing a new version of Google Talk that introduces several more ways to share and connect. You can download it here.

File transfer - This has consistently been the top requested feature, and we've worked hard to make the experience simple, fast, and fun. You can share any type of file, several at a time if you like. We think the photo sharing experience is especially fun.

Voicemail - The name of this feature doesn't do it justice. Yes, you can now leave voicemails for any of your Google Talk contacts when they don't answer a call, but I think the coolest thing is that you can easily record voice notes and send them to anyone you know by just adding their email address to your contact list -- they don't even have to be running Google Talk. This is a fun and easy way to just say hello, send someone a reminder, or even sing your mom happy birthday! Also, our friends on the Gmail team have added a slick voicemail playback experience within Gmail.

Music status sharing - Show your friends what music you listen to and discover new music that your friends are into (or discover that they spend their entire day listening to Barry Manilow... hmm). We also thought it would be fun for you to see the musical tastes of the broader community. So you now have the option of sharing your music listening history with Google, to be included in the rankings of our new Google Labs project called Music Trends.

Finally, we have some updates targeted at developers such as support for a new voice codec which we'll talk about in an upcoming post. And now, I'm off to record that message for my mom...

Free citywide WiFi in Mountain View

Posted by Minnie Ingersoll, Product Manager

Today, Google launched a WiFi network in our hometown of Mountain View. Radios hanging on lampposts throughout the city are now broadcasting a "GoogleWiFi" wireless (802.11b/g) signal that brings wireless Internet access to the city's residents, businesses, and visitors. All anyone needs is a laptop or other wireless-enabled device and a web browser to get online. Then Mountain View users can select the "GoogleWiFi" signal, open their web browser and sign in with a free Google Account. To learn more about the network's coverage area and the location of the WiFi radios, we've published a map.

This network is a way for us to give back to and engage with the community where our headquarters are. As the product manager for Google WiFi, it has been has been tremendously rewarding to partner with the local government, the schools, the library, the neighborhood associations, and all of our trusted testers to introduce the power of free, wireless Internet connectivity to the city. I look forward to meeting with more members of the community at upcoming training sessions and ice cream socials :-).

Another goal of this network is to promote alternative access technologies by using Mountain View as an example for organizations considering investments in the WiFi arena. We think successful mesh wireless deployments will promote competition, create cheaper access alternatives, and (if done correctly) foster open, standards-compliant platforms for content and service providers to showcase their applications without the hassle of the traditional walled-garden approach.

For additional information about Google WiFi, please see our Frequently Asked Questions. If you're in the neighborhood, please stop by and give the network a try, or RSVP to attend our community training session on August 23. Finally, our special thanks to the city of Mountain View for being such a great partner.

Printable coupons for local businesses

Do you own a local business? If so, Rob from the Coupons team has news you'll want to hear:

Whether you own a day spa, hardware store, or dry cleaner, there's a good chance that customers in your neighborhood are looking for you on Google. Now you can take advantage of this opportunity by reaching new customers and retaining existing business, at no cost to you.

Through printable coupons on Google Maps, you can offer customers discounts or promotions at the moment they're looking for you. Customers can print out the coupons they find on your business listing page and redeem them at your physical store location.



How do you set-up a coupon? Any local business, including those run by AdWords advertisers, can create and offer coupons for free through the Local Business Center. First, you need to create and update your business listing, as it would appear on Google Maps, to ensure that people know how to reach you by phone, email, or online. Once your listing has been verified, you can login to your Local Business Center account and create, edit, and manage coupons for free.

This is a great way to get your business in front of your customers as they browse Google Maps - if you'd like additional information, take a minute to learn more about adding your business and coupons.

Posted by Sarah, Inside AdWords crew

Map Search gadget for the homepage

Posted by Tom Stocky, Product Manager

We just released a Google Map Search gadget for the personalized homepage -- an easy way do local searches and then quickly scroll through the results on a map. You programmers might like to know that this makes use of three Google APIs at the same time: the Google AJAX Search API, the Google Maps API, and the Google Gadgets API. The next challenge? Let's go for four...

A better way to organize photos?

Posted by Adrian Graham, Picasa Product Manager

It's not always easy to search through your personal photos, and it's certainly a lot harder than searching the web. Unless you take the time to label and organize all your pictures (and I'll freely admit that I don't), chances are it can be pretty hard to find that photo you just know is hidden somewhere deep inside your computer.

We've been working to make Picasa (Google's free photo-organizing software) even better when it comes to searching for your own photos—to make finding them be as easy as finding stuff on the web. Luckily we've found some people who share this goal, and are excited that the Neven Vision team is now part of Google.

Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects. This technology just may make it a lot easier for you to organize and find the photos you care about. We don't have any specific features to show off today, but we're looking forward to having more to share with you soon.

Scheduled reports in your account's local time zone

Here's a quick update from the AdWords Report Center team:

Scheduled reports now begin running (at 1 a.m.) in the local time zone you set for your AdWords account. In addition, for those using an MCC account, scheduled MCC reports begin running (at 5 a.m.) in the local time zone of your MCC account.

Please note that if you did not adjust your account's local time zone, your scheduled reports will continue to run just as they have in the past, in Pacific Time.

Posted by Judy, Inside AdWords crew

Code your way to Gotham

Posted by Craig Nevill-Manning, Engineering Director

New York, New York -- A place so nice, we're holding the Google Code Jam finals here! I'm excited to tell you about our fourth annual competition, the 2006 Google International Code Jam. This year the last round will be held at our second-largest development center, right in downtown Manhattan. The best coders in the world (and that includes you, if you're up for the challenge) compete on speed and accuracy to solve challenging problems with only their brains, fingers, and a computer. If this is your idea of fun, then sign up -- registration opens today. We'll fly the best 100 coders to New York in October, all expenses paid, for the final competition, to meet Google software engineers and to experience Manhattan. First prize is $10,000; all finalists are guaranteed a minimum prize of $750.

Of course, we'll be on the lookout for future Googlers -- those who love solving tricky coding challenges, and are excited about solving the Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal of organizing the world's information.

Registration opens today, so sign up, test your mettle, and we'll save you a place in New York!

Google in the ATL

Posted by Bruce Johnson, Engineering Manager, Google Atlanta Team

Check it out: Google's quiet presence in Atlanta is becoming less so, since our engineering and sales teams in Atlanta have recently teamed up. We couldn't be more excited about our brand new (and very Googly) Midtown office. The Atlanta sales team is in its sixth year and continues to grow. The newer engineering team has been hard at work developing the Google Web Toolkit, which launched recently at JavaOne.



When it comes to recruiting great people, Google doesn't let a silly little thing like geography get in the way. In addition to Mountain View, New York, Sydney, Kirkland, Santa Monica, Dublin, Zurich, London, Belo Horizonte, Trondheim, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Tokyo, now you too can be a Googler in Atlanta.

Midtown Atlanta is an exciting place to be these days, so it's no coincidence that we set up shop next door to Georgia Tech, Technology Square, and Atlantic Station. Oh, and of course, The Varsity — because who can resist a naked dog walking?

We're hiring, so please let us know if you're interested in becoming an Atlanta Googler in engineering or sales.

I scream for (Google) ice cream

Posted by Hunter Walk, Business Product Manager


The Google campus wasn't spared from the recent California heat wave, but we did have a secret weapon to beat back the sun - specially-made Google ice cream desserts from IT'S IT. If you're not from the Bay Area you might be tempted to call an It's It just another ice cream sandwich. But you'd be oh, so wrong. A scoop of ice cream between two old-fashioned oatmeal cookies dipped in chocolate? This is no ordinary dessert.

And indeed the Google version is no ordinary IT'S IT. Google chef Nate Keller worked with the fine folks at IT'S IT to produce a natural, locally sourced, trans-fat-free rendition of their excellent treat. Served only in our Mountain View cafe, it's even got a Google logo on the wrapper. Now, if I could only figure out how to keep a few from melting on my drive home to San Francisco.

The new Google Checkout blog

A few weeks ago, we introduced Google Checkout on the Inside AdWords blog. Now, Marianna M. from the Checkout team, has news about a related resource:

The new Google Checkout blog for sellers is a way to help you get the most out of Google Checkout. We'll be sharing information on feature enhancements, product updates, Q&A from the customer support team, and useful tips.

For those of you unfamiliar with Google Checkout, it's a new checkout process that makes searching and buying faster and easier. For shoppers, a special Google Checkout shopping cart icon identifies participating merchants and makes it easier to buy from them through a single login--shoppers don't have to re-enter purchasing information every time a purchase is made. For sellers, it helps you sell more online and process $10 in sales for free for every dollar you spend on AdWords advertising.

So, if you're already using Google Checkout, be sure to take a look at the new blog. If you don't have a Checkout account and would like one, you can sign up here.

Posted by Sarah & Vivian, Inside AdWords crew

Now playing: Movie trailers

Posted by Matthias Ruhl, Research Scientist (& Google Movies 20%-er)

Are the special effects in Pirates of the Caribbean any good? Is Tom Hanks' haircut really that bad in The Da Vinci Code? Should you take your grandparents to see Clerks II? Will you be able to sleep after watching The Descent?

The best way to get your summer movie questions answered is to watch the trailers using the Google Movies onebox. Just search for the movie name and your Zip/city on Google.com, and the first result will include a link to the trailer, as well as critics' reviews and showtimes for your local movie theater. To get showtimes for The Descent in San Francisco, for instance, search for [the descent san francisco ca].

Some homepage revisions

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience

You may have noticed the Google homepage feels a little different today. That's because we've reorganized our tabs, or "top links" -- the blue links to Images, News, Maps, etc.). In this iteration, you'll see that Google Video is now featured on the homepage. And we've grouped into a More>> dropdown some other services like Books, Groups, and Froogle.

Search has always been a fundamental paradigm here, so we're constantly working to integrate more services into the main search experience. So while you can go to specific search services directly through the More>> dropdown, you'll also find great results from Books, Groups, and Froogle by just searching Google. As our product line evolves, we're also finding that we have a few destinations that people need to get to directly -- sometimes because the user experience relies heavily on browsing (News, Video) or because there's a different way of searching (Maps).

We'll be making more changes to the organization of our services over the next few months, so let us know what you think and we'll try and incorporate it in our next iteration.

Custom map icons in local business ads

We've posted before about how you can use local business ads to promote your business on Google Maps. Here's Dominic P. from the Local Business Ads team with an update about a new feature:

You may already know that Local Business Ads allow you to create an enhanced text ad with photos and icons that will give you greater visibility when potential customers search for your business on Google Maps (see screenshot below). In addition, we'll even show a regular text version of your local business ad when users in your area are searching for your business on Google.com.

To enhance local business ads, we've recently introduced the ability to use your own icon as the marker on the Google Map. The icon is 16 pixels by 16 pixels and is similar to a favicon that you see in your favorite web browser. (We've highlighted the custom map marker icons in red in the screenshot below.)

To recap, local business ads are priced the same way as standard keyword-targeted ads -- that is, you only pay when a user clicks on the ad to get to your your webpage from Google Maps, Google.com, or one of our partners on the Google search network. You can use local business ads to promote business locations in the US, Canada or the UK. To get started with local business ads, just follow the steps listed here.

Posted by Vivian, Inside AdWords crew

Thanks for checking out Google Checkout

Posted by Dror Shimshowitz, Product Marketing Manager

People always ask, what makes Google tick? There are two key elements: our ongoing commitment to building great technology that empowers people like you -- and of course our passion for free T-shirts. Today, to thank everyone using Google Checkout to buy stuff online, we thought we'd combine the two. Everyone who buys something for $20 or more through Google Checkout all day today gets a free T-shirt. So find something you want to buy, enjoy faster checkout online -- and make room in the drawer for your new apparel.

Anita Borg Scholarships now open in Australia

Posted by Neetu Vacin, Global University Programs

For three years, we've sponsored a scholarship program with the Anita Borg Institute for women studying computer science and related fields in the U.S. Now we're expanding this program to Australia, where we're very pleased to offer an opportunity to both undergraduate students and postgraduates, who may apply for AUD$5,000 scholarships.

Tell your friends, or apply yourself -- the AU program deadline is September 15th.

Welcome to the University of California libraries

Posted by John Wilkin, Interim Co-University Librarian, University of Michigan

The University of Michigan is excited that the University of California is joining with us, the New York Public Library, Stanford, Harvard and Oxford universities in our partnership with Google.

The UC libraries are a great public system of academic libraries. They bring a wealth of new resources and titles to this partnership. We are thrilled at the idea that another public academic library recognizes the importance of making its great collection discoverable by all who search on the web. The UC libraries have chosen, like us, to incorporate all works within their library, not just titles in the public domain. In making their vast collections more discoverable, these great libraries are making a significant contribution to the dissemination of knowledge worldwide.

We began working with Google on the library project in 2004. They have been a terrific partner in this endeavor. We know that the University of California will also enjoy a productive relationship with the Google library team. We welcome the UC libraries to the partnership, and look forward to working alongside them on this important initiative.

Our analysis of click fraud detection

Posted by Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety

A team of our engineers who specialize in detecting click fraud have analyzed various reports our advertisers have sent in from several consulting firms -- reports that claim a high incidence of click fraud on Google. I encourage you to read more about our findings on the Inside AdWords Blog, and you can see our full 17 page analysis here (PDF).

Troubling findings on how some third parties detect click fraud

Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety, returns today with important information regarding third party detection of click fraud:

A rigorous technical analysis by Google engineers has found fundamental flaws in the work of several click fraud consultants – flaws that help explain why widely quoted estimates of the size of the click fraud problem are exaggerated. We would like to share this research so that advertisers can be aware of these problems and so these consultants can use the information to improve their services.

We provide detailed analysis and explanation of this work here. Two key findings are below, which explain the fundamental flaw we have seen in all of the reports we examined – fictitious clicks: events which are reported as fraudulent, but are never recorded or charged as ad clicks by Google:

• Fictitious ad clicks because of mischaracterizing events. This finding may be the most significant flaw responsible for exaggerated click fraud claims. The problem lies in the fact that many click fraud consultants don’t count actual ad clicks. Rather, to determine the number of ad clicks, they use a number of other signals, including counting visits to a particular webpage. As a result, the consultants count page reloads and subsequent visits on an advertiser’s site as multiple clicks on the advertiser’s Google ad. This generates fictitious ad clicks in the consultant’s reports. For example, if a user browses deeper into an advertiser’s site, then hits the back button, this causes a potential reload of the original landing page, which a consultant would record as an additional ad click – even though no Google ad click actually occurred.
  
  
• Fictitious ad clicks due to conflation across advertisers and ad networks. Some consultants “cookie” users and track their activity across their network of client advertisers. One often-used consultant implements the cookie in such a way that clicks on Yahoo ads can be counted as clicks on Google ads, and vice versa.

These kinds of flaws in methodology cause click counts in consultant reports to be artificially inflated. One clear indication that the consultants’ results are flawed: they’re not even getting the total number of clicks correct. We have seen some instances of reports showing 1.5 times the number of clicks in our logs – for example, in one case 1,278 clicks were claimed as being “fraudulent” by the consultant while only 850 actually even appeared as clicks in Google’s logs.

More evidence of the consultants’ defective methodology is revealed when looking at conversion rates. We found clicks identified as “fraudulent” in reports often converted at nearly the same rate (and in some cases better) compared to other clicks. In one case, “fraudulent clicks” converted 5.1% of the time — only a bit less than the advertiser’s overall conversion rate of 5.8%.

Our report provides detailed case studies for three third-party auditing firms – AdWatcher, ClickFacts, and Click Forensics – which represent the vast majority of the last 100 reports advertisers have submitted to us. All of the reports we’ve seen from these consultants exhibit the serious problems we have described above. The pervasiveness of these problems concerns us, especially because advertisers may be hurting their businesses by changing their campaign settings based on erroneous information. We will continue to devote attention to this issue to keep our advertisers well-informed, and perhaps help third-party auditing firms improve their methods so that they can provide value to advertisers.

If you would like to know more about the general issue of invalid clicks and how we manage them, we have posted previously here and here. If you would like to learn more about how to track invalid clicks in your account, you can find information about our Invalid Clicks reporting feature here.

Posted by Blake, Inside AdWords crew

Related Links, now with video

Posted by Bryan Chen, Software Engineer

Earlier this year, we released Google Related Links, designed to deliver fresh content to websites through an easy-to-add module. With it, you can show your users related news, web pages and searches complementing the information on your pages.

In our quest to enrich what can be offered via Related Links, we've added another tab to the mix: now you can show videos in the Related Links box. Result: visitors have access to relevant quality video content, and you add more interactivity to your site. Learn more here.

Here comes acronym week

Posted by Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, and Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist

If you happen to be in the Northern California city of San Jose next week, you may find yourself overhearing an enormous number of potentially cryptic-but-important acronyms like CTR, SEM, ROI, 301, and SES. That last one stands for Search Engine Strategies, one of the largest global conferences catering to webmasters, online marketers and advertisers, and the people (and companies) who love them. As luck would have it, SES is happening in San Jose Monday through Thursday next week. Google's very own (CEO) Eric Schmidt will participate in a discussion with conference organizer Danny Sullivan, and many other Googlers will be speaking at SES throughout the week as well:

Monday, Aug 7th

12:30 - 2:00 Lunch with the Google Sitemaps team
2:00 - 3:30 Social Search: Up Close With Google, Shashi Seth, Product Manager
4:00 - 5:30 The Search Laboratories, Peter Norvig, Director of Research
4:00 - 5:30 Domaining & Address Bar-Driven Traffic, Hal Bailey, Strategic Partner Manager

Tuesday, Aug 8th

9:00 - 10:15 Auditing Paid Listings & Click Fraud Issues, Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager, Trust & Safety
11:15 - 12:30 Search Arbitrage Issues, Kim Malone, Director of Online Sales & Operations, Google AdSense
11:15 - 12:30 Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues, Matt Cutts, Software Engineer
1:15 - 2:45 The Bot Obedience Course, Vanessa Fox, Product Manager
3:30 - 5:00 Meet The Search Ad Networks, Emily White, Online Sales and Operations Director

Wednesday, Aug 9th

10:00 - 10:45 A Conversation With Google CEO Eric Schmidt
11:00 - 12:15 Speaking Unofficially: Search Engine Bloggers, Matt Cutts, Software Engineer

Thursday, Aug 10th

9:00 - 10:15 Meet The Crawlers, Shiva Shivakumar, Distinguished Entrepreneur
9:00 - 10:15 Search APIs, Mark Lucovsky, Technical Director and Rohit Dhawan, Product Manager
10:45 - 12:00 Search Engine Q&A On Links, Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist
10:45 - 12:00 Vendor Chat On Measuring Success, Brett Crosby, Product Marketing Manager, Google Analytics

We hope those of you attending the conference will check out some of these panels and also stop by the Google booth in the expo hall. Googlers there will be eager to hear your feedback, answer your questions, or even just chat about the world's most colorful search engine. If you come to SES, one thing not to miss is our annual Google Dance, where SES attendees test drive some of our latest creations when they're not shaking their booties or dunking GoogleGuy (hey, it could happen). See you there?

Saved locations on Google Maps

Posted by Thai Tran, Product Manager

One of the most common requests we've received is for the ability to store a list of personal addresses on Google Maps -- and now you can. To get started, click on the "Saved Locations" link in the upper right corner of the site and sign in to your Google Account. If you're already signed in, this link will take you to your saved locations list -- Google Maps will automatically save every location you search for. You can also go to the Saved Locations list to disable auto-saving of locations or to add, modify, or delete previously-saved locations.

From here, you can also add a label (your choice of an easy-to-remember name, e.g."home") to any of your saved locations. The next time you start entering an address or a label into Google Maps, we'll offer to auto-complete it for you if it's in your saved locations. Auto-completion is also available when you're searching for businesses. If you've labeled the address "1600 Amphitheatre Pky, Mountain View, CA" as "work" (as some Googlers would), when you start typing [pizza near work], we'll offer to auto-complete it as [pizza near 1600 Amphitheatre Pky, Mountain View, CA].

Here’s a tip: When a list of auto-completions is offered, you can hit the Tab key to select the first one.

Cliche or gem?

Today we offer a really short and sweet tip, which just may be one of the more important things you can do to be successful with AdWords. It reads just like a cliche, but I'd call it a gem:

From time to time, take off your business owner hat -- and put on your customer hat.

Almost certainly, you are an expert at your business -- so much so that you may have forgotten what it's like to be a less knowledgeable customer for the product or service you offer. This tip proposes that you temporarily forget everything you know about your business and your needs as the business owner, and concentrate instead on what your potential customer needs, wants, and expects. Not to mention what factors might lead them to buy.

You might begin by asking yourself these questions:

• If you were the customer, what would be most important to you as you shop online?
  
• What keywords would you search on to find your product or service?
  
• What ad copy would absolutely capture your attention and motivate you to click your ad?

Next, take a look at your website -- stop for a moment and ask yourself:

• What page on the website offers the most relevant information and makes it easiest for you to purchase the product or service offered? Is this the page that you're using as the landing page of your ad?
  
• Would you trust this website with your credit card number, and rely on the company to deliver, based purely on what you see there?

Here's our challenge to you today: pick an important Ad Group, put on your customer hat, and then evaluate everything you do as an advertiser from that perspective.

You might be surprised by what you'll see. And you may also pick up a new idea or two on how to enhance your advertising success.

Posted by Blake, Inside AdWords crew

It's all about the photos...on a Mac

Posted by Ted Bonkenburg, Software Engineer, Infrastructure

I'm happy to tell you about the release of Picasa Web Albums Uploaders (beta, of course) for Mac OS X. Picasa Web Albums makes it simple to share photos with friends and family, and now we've made it even easier on the Mac. This new download comes with two handy tools for uploading photos: There's a plug-in for uploading your pics within iPhoto. If you don't use iPhoto, or just want to upload the occasional picture, just drag your photos into the provided standalone app and click Upload. Either way, I can't wait for my fellow Mac users to showcase their talents.

Normally I work on search engine infrastructure. I love my work on web search, but as a change of pace I decided to use my 20 percent time to make Picasa Web Albums better for Mac users. Fortunately, I was not alone. The Picasa and Mac development teams embraced the project and provided great assistance. Greg Robbins, a co-conspirator in the famous graphing calculator story, worked to refine the user interface. Later, another one of our Mac engineers, Mike Morton (I’m OK, mentor), took over as project lead, made quick work of creating the iPhoto export plug-in, and became the one responsible for incorporating feedback and finishing up the application and plug-in.

For me this has been a great opportunity to meet and work with new people, explore new technologies, and help create something that I hope the Mac community will find useful. So, please sign up for Picasa Web Albums, download the uploaders, and show the world some beautiful photos.

Creating standards for clicks

Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety, is back with a quick update on invalid clicks:

Those of you following AdWords may have noticed that we've been trying to tell advertisers more and show them more about invalid clicks. We also think there is more the industry as a whole can do to promote transparency on the issue, which is why we're participating in the Industry-wide Click Measurement Working Group. The effort is coordinated by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Media Rating Council (MRC) with a goal of developing "a detailed definition of a 'click' and the standard against which clicks are measured and counted including the identification of invalid clicks and/or fraudulent clicks."

More information about the announcement can be found in the press release from the IAB.

Posted by Sarah, Inside AdWords crew

Learn more about AdWords at SES in San Jose

Are you coming to San Jose next week for the annual Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference? Hosted by Danny Sullivan, this four day conference (from August 7th-10th) will once again feature an agenda packed with presentations, panel discussions, and a trade expo, all of which cover a range of topics that may be of interest to AdWords advertisers. You can also catch Google CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt delivering the keynote on Wednesday, August 9 -- as well as meet up with AdWords specialists who can assist you with personalized account tips.

Thanks to our friends over in Google Analytics, we're happy to offer advertisers a promotional "Priority" code for 20% off when you buy a Conference or Day pass to SES San Jose. The Priority code is 20GOO2 (two-zero-gee-oh-oh-two). To redeem the Priority code and purchase a pass, go here or follow the link below:


If past conferences are anything to go by, this should be a fun and educational event for all - with lots of folks to meet, contacts to make, and tips and tricks to learn and apply. We hope you'll consider it.

Posted by Sarah, Inside AdWords crew