Toolbar, now with advanced translation

If you saw this text on a webpage, how would you figure out what it means?

Если вы читаете этот текст, вы, вероятно, уже говорите по-русски. Однако миллионы людей не знают русского и не могут прочитать миллионы русскоязычных веб-страниц.*

You would likely need to translate manually via our language tools or in Toolbar. Today we're excited to announce that translations will be even easier with the newest release of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. We have been working with the Translate team to make translations a faster and more integrated part of your browsing experience.

The Translate feature automatically detects if the language of a webpage you're on is different from your default language setting and allows you to translate it. With one click, you can now instantly translate the page and all of its text will appear in the new language.


Language detection happens only on your computer, so no information is sent to Google until you choose to translate a page. You can find more details about how the feature works in our help center.

If you go to another page in the same language, you will continue to see translations rather than have to translate one page at a time. And if the page has dynamic content, like Google Reader, you will get translations in real-time. Finally, if you frequently translate pages in the same language, Toolbar will let you translate that language automatically without any extra clicks in the future.

The new Translate feature is available in all international versions of Toolbar, including English, and the translation service supports 41 different languages: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

Download Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer to try it out for yourself. We'll add this feature to Toolbar for Firefox soon, too.

* In case you don't speak Russian, we translated the paragraph above for you using our translation engine:

If you are reading this text, you probably already speak in Russian. However, millions of people do not know Russian and cannot read the millions of Russian-language webpages.

Posted by Jerry Tang and Dick Sites, Software Engineers

New version of the AdWords API

For those of you who use the AdWords API, we are happy to announce the launch of the latest version of the API, v2009. This version offers more speed, scale, and flexibility to developers, at a lower cost. Since v2009 is a production beta, developers can sign up for access and will be whitelisted on a rolling basis. For full details on what you'll find in v2009 and how to get started, visit the AdWords API blog.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Celebrating Gay Pride 2009

All around Google, we're proud of our work, our culture and, most importantly, our people. In the spirit of celebration, this spring and summer Googlers have participated in Pride celebrations in Tel Aviv, New York, Zürich, San Francisco and many other cities around the world. Pride is a time for the LGBT* community along with families, friends and supporters to stand up for equality, and to honor those who paved the way for us to express sexual orientation and gender identity openly.

In the U.S., this year's celebration is historically important: it's the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City, a response to what was then routine police harassment of LGBT people. Some 75 Googlers, family members and friends marched with several hundred members of New York's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center. Hundreds of Googlers also joined other U.S. celebrations in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Earlier this month, around 50 Googlers and friends gathered to celebrate at Europride, Europe's best-known Gay Pride celebration. This year it was in Zürich, Switzerland. After weeks of sunshine, on the morning of the parade it began to storm, but that didn't deter our intrepid Googlers from being out at 6:30am turning a 28-ton truck into a rainbow-colored nightclub on wheels. Hundreds of nuts, bolts and gallons of helium later, the truck was transformed, the sun came out and we were ready to march through the city streets, cheered on by a crowd of 50,000.

Google is a company that supports its LGBT employees, taking a public stand on issues that are important to our community. This is not the first year that Google has supported Pride, and it will certainly not be the last. We hope you enjoy this photo album of our global celebrations.




*LGBT stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered people and is also intended to include people who identify as queer, asexual or intersexed, amongst others.

Posted by Cynthia Yeung, Partner Strategy Team

AdWords click measurements accredited by MRC

We're pleased to announce today that the click measurement systems in Google AdWords has now been accredited by the Media Rating Council (MRC). MRC accreditation certifies that Google's click measurement technology adheres to the industry standards for counting interactive advertising clicks and that its processes supporting this technology are accurate.

The industry guidelines were developed over the past three years in an effort coordinated by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the MRC. We're proud to be one of the founding members of this group, which established the first ever industry guidelines governing how interactive advertising clicks are counted and how invalid clicks are detected and handled. The audit against these guidelines was conducted by a CPA firm engaged by the MRC to perform the audit. You can view the IAB / MRC Click Measurement Guidelines here.

We look forward to continuing to work with the rest of the industry in promoting rigorous standards and practices in click measurement and analysis. As ever, our Ad Traffic Quality team continues to work hard on protecting advertiser ROI. To read more about our work in this area, please visit our Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center.

Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew

Google heads to grade school: New resources for K-12 teachers and students

We use the Internet all the time: at home, at work (especially at Google!), on the move, and, increasingly, at school. We believe that the Internet and cloud-based tools are a key part of a 21st century classroom, helping students learn and teachers teach in collaborative and innovative ways. Students use Google Docs to work on group projects; classrooms use Google Sites to show off their work; and teachers use Forms in Google Docs for instant grading and Google Calendar for lesson planning. Google Apps Education Edition is helping schools build online communities for students, teachers and parents, and we now have 4 million students using Google Apps Education around the world.

This week the Google Apps Education team is launching a few new ways to make it easier for K-12 schools to use Google Apps, and attending the National Education Computing Conference (NECC) in Washington D.C. To help address schools' email security needs, Google Message Security (GMS) will be offered free to current and new eligible primary and secondary schools globally that opt in by July of next year. GMS filters out email messaging threats, and education IT departments can customize the filtering rules and group messaging lists to suit their schools. We're also launching the Google Apps Education Community site for educators and students to share tips and ideas for using Google Apps in their classrooms, as well as the Search Education Curriculum and a Google Apps Education resource center with more than 20 classroom-ready lesson plans for teachers. We'll be adding more to these resources going forward.

If you're at NECC this year, come visit the Google team in booth #3148. If not, the teaching and learning continues with some cool presentations and lesson plans on the Google Apps Education Community site, or you can learn more at google.com/a/edu.

Posted by Dana Nguyen, Google Apps Education team

AdWords API v2009

The AdWords API team has been working on the launch of the latest version, v2009, which we're happy to announce is now in production. This version offers more speed, scale, and flexibility to developers, at a lower cost. Since this version is a production beta, developers can sign up for access and will be whitelisted on a rolling basis. For full details on what you'll find in v2009 and how to get started, visit the AdWords API blog.

Posted by Adam Wooley, Product Marketing Manager

Seminars for Success: Next stop, Edmonton

Calling all Canadian agencies (and those close to the border)! We're pleased to share that we'll be offering Google Analytics Seminars for Success in Edmonton, Canada on July 17-18, 2009.

The seminars will be led by Benjamin Mangold, an Authorized Analytics Consultant from Mangold Sengers in Australia. Day one will provide an introduction to Google Analytics, and day two will cover how to install and configure the advanced features and capabilities of Google Analytics.

For more information, and to register for one or both sessions, click here or visit the Google Analytics blog.

Posted by Eva Woo, Product Marketing Manager

Inspiration Board: Orange Citrus

Creating this board made me realize just how many shades of orange there are and how difficult of a color it is. You see, in searching for it online when you type "orange" you have both the words "orange" as in the color orange and "orange" as in the citrus, which, conveniently is also orange. Phew. 

Anyway, I realized how versatile a color orange really can be. Mix it with dark colors like browns and burgundies and you have a rich warm Fall palette. Mix it with bright hues like hot pink or kelly green and you have a very poppy bright Summer palette. Or, do as I did here and mix it with soft whites and creams to create a subdued look and orange will stand all on it's own.

What do you think?

{invitation, cupcakes, suits, oranges, centerpiece, flowers, mimosas}

Olga Kurylenko (Galeria 3)

Fotos:

Maxim y Hollywood Press

Otras fotos:
Olga Kurylenko (Galeria 1)

Olga Kurylenko (Galeria 2)

Olga Kurylenko (Galeria 4)

Quality Score fact of the week

A few months ago, we ran a series of posts on a hot topic among our agency clients: Quality Score. Due to the popularity of the series, we'll be bringing you more facts about this important metric on a weekly basis. We hope you find these useful, and here's our first installment:

A higher bid will not improve your Quality Score. Your Quality Score is determined by a number of factors, clickthrough rate (CTR) foremost amongst them, and is normalized to compensate for the higher CTR that ads in higher positions accrue. By simply increasing your bid for a keyword, you will likely increase the position of your ad on the page, but you won't be impacting the Quality Score for that keyword.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Product Marketing Manager

Media and citizens meet in the YouTube Reporters' Center

This is the first of a series of posts from YouTube's news and politics blog, Citizentube. -Ed.

YouTube is the biggest video news site on the Internet, and at no time in our site's history was that more apparent than in these last two weeks of the crisis unfolding in Iran. As hundreds of thousands of Iranian citizens took to the streets of Tehran to protest the national elections, the government kicked out foreign journalists, leaving citizens themselves as the only documentarians to the events unfolding there. We've been highlighting many of these videos and keeping track of the latest developments on our YouTube news and politics blog, Citizentube.

Though the circumstances in Iran are unique, this isn't the first time that citizens have played a crucial role in reporting on events around the world. Burmese citizens uploaded exclusive video footage to YouTube during the protests in Myanmar back in 2007; people in China's Sichuan province documented the devastating and historic 7.8-magnitude earthquake of 2008 in real-time; and eyewitnesses to the shooting of young Oscar Grant by Oakland police forces captured the event on their cell phone cameras and uploaded videos to YouTube for the world to see. Citizens are no longer merely bystanders to world events. Today, anyone can chronicle what they see and participate in the news-gathering process.

Though it's the phenomenon of citizen reporting that YouTube is probably best known for, we also have hundreds of news partners who upload thousands of videos straight to YouTube every day. You can see lots of these on our news page at youtube.com/news. Many of these organizations have used YouTube in unique ways, like asking the community to submit questions for government officials, providing a behind-the-scenes look at traveling with the Obama press corps and accepting video applications for a reporting assignment in West Africa. We believe the power of this new media landscape lies in the collaborative possibilities of amateurs and professionals working together.

And so today, we're launching a new resource on YouTube to help citizens learn more about how to report the news, straight from the experts. It's called the YouTube Reporters' Center, and it features some of the nation's top journalists sharing instructional videos with tips and advice for better reporting. Learn how to prepare for an interview; or how to be an investigative reporter from the legendary Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward; or how to report on a global humanitarian crisis from Nick Kristof of the New York Times. All of the videos are available on the YouTube Reporters' Center channel.

Posted by Olivia Ma, YouTube News and Politics

Extending Google services in Africa

At Google we seek to serve a broad base of people — not only those who can afford to access the Internet from the convenience of their workplace or with a computer at home. It's important to reach users wherever they are, with the information they need, in areas with the greatest information poverty. In many places around the world, people look to their phones, rather than their computers, to find information they need in their daily lives. This is especially true in Africa, which has the world’s highest mobile growth rate and where mobile phone penetration is six times Internet penetration. One-third of the population owns a mobile phone and many more have access to one.

Most mobile devices in Africa only have voice and SMS capabilities, and so we are focusing our technological efforts in that continent on SMS. Today, we are announcing Google SMS, a suite of mobile applications which will allow people to access information, via SMS, on a diverse number of topics including health and agriculture tips, news, local weather, sports, and more. The suite also includes Google Trader, a SMS-based “marketplace” application that helps buyers and sellers find each other. People can find, "sell" or "buy" any type of product or service, from used cars and mobile phones to crops, livestock and jobs.

We are particularly excited about Google SMS Tips, an SMS-based query-and-answer service that enables a mobile phone user to have a web search-like experience. You enter a free form text query, and Google's algorithms restructure the query to identify keywords, search a database to identify relevant answers, and return the most relevant answer.

Both Google SMS Tips and Google Trader represent the fruits of unique partnerships among Google, the Grameen Foundation, MTN Uganda and local organizations*. We worked closely together as part of Grameen Foundation's Application Laboratory to understand information needs and gaps, develop locally relevant and actionable content, rapidly test prototypes, and conduct multi-month pilots with the people who will eventually use the applications have truly been a global effort, and created with Ugandans, for Ugandans.

We're just beginning. We can do a lot more to improve search quality and the breadth — and depth — of content on Google SMS, especially on Tips and Trader. Google SMS is by no means a finished product, but that's what's both exciting and challenging about this endeavor.

Meanwhile, if you're curious about what Google is doing in Africa, learn more at the Google Africa Blog.

Update: Corrected link to YouTube video for "rapidly test prototypes".
____
*BROSDI, (Busoga Rural Open Source and Development Initiative), Straight Talk Foundation, Marie Stopes Uganda.

Posted by Joe Mucheru, Head of Google Sub-Saharan Africa, & Fiona Lee, Africa Project Manager

Inspiration Board: Lemon

Something very fun and exciting for you all; this week we've declared it FRUIT WEEK! We will post an inspiration board everyday based around a different type of fruit. So, to start us off, we have lemon with a lovely yellow and white collection of images.

Don't you love the fun, light, and summery yellow palette? So bright and cheery!

Thanks for another beautiful board, Ashley!

{lemonade, cake, invitation, shoes, lemons in vase, yellow dress, flowers via Eventfully Yours, tablescape via SD Wedding Insider, bridal dress via Kelly Oshiro Events, clutch, lemons}

So, what do you think?

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Sugey Abrego (Galeria 5)

Fotos:
Revista H para Hombres

Otras fotos:
Sugey Abrego (Galeria 1)
Sugey Abrego (Galeria 2)
Sugey Abrego (Galeria 3)
Sugey Abrego (Galeria 4)
Sugey Abrego (Galeria 6)

Update: New date for Landing Page webinar

The webinar "The Seven Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design," originally scheduled for June 24, 2009, has been rescheduled for Wednesday, July 1, 2009.

During this webinar, we'll help you ensure that your client's site makes a great impression by avoiding the major pitfalls of landing page design. Learn the "seven deadly sins" of landing page design through real-life testing scenarios. After the presentation, Tim Ash, CEO of renowned landing page optimization firm SiteTuners.com, will be available for Q&A as well.

Date: Wednesday, July 1st
Time: 10:00am PDT, 1:00pm EDT

Have your client's customer ID number handy when you register here, and for more examples of landing page improvements, see our Website Workout page.

Posted by Andrew Gomez, Marketing

Outpouring of searches for the late Michael Jackson

At Google, we are moved by the life and untimely passing of Michael Jackson. As word spread of his death, millions and millions of people from all over the world began searching for information about the pop icon. The following chart shows the meteoric rise in related searches around 3:00pm PDT:


Search volume began to increase around 2:00pm, skyrocketed by 3:00pm, and stabilized by about 8:00pm. As you can see in Google Hot Trends, many of the fastest rising search queries from yesterday and today have been about Michael Jackson's passing (others pertained to the death of another cultural icon, Farrah Fawcett). People who weren't near a computer yesterday turned to their mobile phones to check on breaking news. We saw one of the largest mobile search spikes we've ever seen, with 5 of the top 20 searches about the Moonwalker.

The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack. As a result, for about 25 minutes yesterday, when some people searched Google News they saw a "We're sorry" page before finding the articles they were looking for.

Michael Jackson led an amazing and controversial life in the public eye. Many of us have a "Michael Jackson story." Mine is that he actually taught me how to moonwalk — thanks to many an hour I spent in front of the television trying to mimic his performances. Regardless of your story or personal opinions about this astounding performer, global interest in the King of Pop is undeniable.

Posted by R.J. Pittman, Director, Product Management

We have a winner for the Google Photography Prize

Huge congratulations to Daniel Halasz from Hungary, who was awarded the Google Photography Prize this week. This was a global student competition to create themes for iGoogle. More than 3,600 students from across the world entered, and a couple of weeks ago we asked you to vote on the shortlist. The six finalists who got the most public votes were Amelia Ortúzar (Chile), Fahad AlDaajani (Saudi Arabia), Matjaz Tancic (U.K.), Mikhail Simin (U.S.) and Vesna Stojakovic (Serbia) — congratulations to all of them! From that group, a jury of respected art critics and artists chose Daniel as the winner. They also gave a special commendation prize to Aliyah Hussain from the U.K.

You can see the work Daniel and the other finalists submitted at the Saatchi Gallery in London until Sunday, June 28th. Come by if you're in town, or have a look at their photographs on google.com/photographyprize, where you can also add them to your iGoogle homepage.

Posted by Posted by Louise Rigby, Consumer Marketing Team

Inspiration Board: Mint Chocolate Chip

Here is another beautiful board Ashley made entitled "Mint Chocolate Chip." With the soft, light green color and warm chocolate tones, I think the title perfectly correlates to the board.

{cake, bride, save the date, present, dishes, bridal party, drapes, meringues, mint julep}

What do you think? Beautiful, no?

Be sure to come back next week for a week full of inspiration.

New Interface Thursday: Exploring campaign settings

A few of the changes we've made in the new AdWords interface improve how you manage your campaign settings. In today's post, we'll cover these changes.

Edit Settings for Multiple Campaigns

Have you ever wanted to quickly see which of your campaigns are running on the Google Content Network? Or compare ad scheduling settings for multiple campaigns at once?

Now you can, using the new account-level Settings tab. On the All Online Campaigns page, click the Settings tab to see the primary settings for all your campaigns in a single table.

(click for larger image)

Some settings, like campaign name or daily budget, can be changed directly in the table using in-line editing. To edit advanced settings such as location targeting and ad scheduling, simply click on the setting you'd like to change and you'll be taken directly to the Settings tab for that particular campaign.

You can also use bulk editing to change settings for multiple campaigns at once. Say, for example, you'd like to copy the Networks & Devices settings from one campaign to three others.

Simply select all four campaigns, click Edit, then use the copy-down button to copy the setting across all selected campaigns.

(click for larger image)

Better Organized Settings

We've also changed how campaign settings are grouped together within the campaign-level Settings tabs for easier navigation.

The Audience section contains settings to specify the audience you want to reach. Language, location, and demographic targeting for the Google Content Network are now grouped together in this section.

(click for larger image)

The Bidding and Budget section now contains advanced settings such as position preference and delivery method in addition to campaign mainstays like daily budget and bidding option.

(click for larger image)

Finally, you'll notice a new campaign setting in the Advanced Settings section: frequency capping, which lets you limit the number of times your ad is shown to the same unique user on the Google Content Network.

(click for larger image)

New Interface Webinars

If you want more help learning the new interface, we're holding two free webinars in the next week to help you get up to speed. During the 1-hour sessions, we'll walk you through the new interface, show you the new features, and answer your questions.

The first webinar is tomorrow, Friday, June 26th at 11 AM PDT. Following that, the next one is on July 1st at 9:30 AM PDT. You can register on our new interface webinars page.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Case study: Building success with display ads

ROI Revolution recently decreased their client's cost per conversion by 58% while increasing clickthrough rate by 392% through the use of display ads created free through AdWords Display Ad Builder. I spoke with Matt Seising, an Account Manager at the North Carolina-based search marketing and website optimization firm, to uncover how he was able to achieve these results.

Ryan Hayward: Why did you decide to start using the Display Ad Builder?

Matt Seising: We first thought of it for our client who has been successfully targeting Google Finance. We knew that taking up the entire ad space would likely boost click-through rate and in fact, we saw a 392% improvement in CTR with the new display ad. Because of this boost, clicks were 46% cheaper for the display ad, and our cost per conversion decreased by 58% as compared to text ads. Additionally, the ability to use a free tool was incredibly efficient and helped us to get a display ad up in a day for free. If the client had been paying traditional rates to start running banners, they probably wouldn't have had any interest.

RH: How does the Display Ad Builder fit with your overall client strategy?

MS: The Google Content Network has been a focus for our agency for the last year because there's a ton of available traffic, and the Placement Performance Report has helped us to make it very profitable for our clients. In addition to driving more volume at lower costs in many cases, display ads also help clients to see the unique value of content as compared to search.

RH: How have you optimized performance with the tool?

MS: After seeing the initial performance, we decided to split the display ads into new ad groups; the click-through rates were so much higher and costs per conversion were so much lower we were probably going to want to bid those up to get as much profitable traffic as possible.

To start building your ads right away, click the Display Ad Builder option when creating a new ad in your account. You can also learn more about the tool on the Display Ad Builder site. Happy building!

Posted by Ryan Hayward, Product Marketing Manager

Google Voice invites on their way

A couple of months ago we announced Google Voice, a service that gives you one phone number to link all your phones and makes voicemail as easy as email. We are happy to share that Google Voice is beginning to open up beyond former GrandCentral users. If you requested an invitation on the Google Voice site or previously on GrandCentral, keep your eye out for an invite email.

Once you receive your invitation, just click on the link and follow the instructions to setup your new Voice account. To help you find a Google number that is personalized to you, we've added a number picker that lets you search by area code and text. See if you can find a number that contains your name, a specific word or a number combination.


To learn more about Google Voice, check out the video below. If you haven't signed up for a Google Voice invite, make sure to get on the list by leaving us your email address at www.google.com/voiceinvite.



Posted by Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet, Product Managers, Google Voice

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Jennifer Lopez in Los Angeles

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Submarine Deep Flight Super Falcon

In the Bay of San Francisco passed the first test «flying» submarine Deep Flight Super Falcon. Originally Deep Flight Super Falcon submarine was designed for a millionaire Tom Perkins (Tom Perkins) Maltese Falcon by Hawkes Ocean Technologies. Noticing how interest in their development, the company Hawkes Ocean Technologies has decided to make the design of submarines in the business. In addition to the original submarine for 1.3 million dollars, Hawkes Ocean Technologies will also sell a mini-submarine version of the open booths for 350 thousand dollars. More images after the break...