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When the first ball of this year’s Indian Premier League cricket season is bowled, fans across the planet will have a front row seat in the world’s biggest online sports stadium. Tonight the Deccan Chargers and Kolkata Knight Riders will face off in Mumbai at 8pm IST, and the YouTube global community will be able to tune in to the IPL’s YouTube Channel (www.youtube.com/ipl) for streaming and on-demand access to witness the start of what promises to be one of the most widely-distributed sporting events in history. Fans can watch matches, highlight videos, player interviews and much more all on the IPL’s YouTube channel.

Named by Forbes as the “hottest sports league in the world” with revenues comparable to the world’s most popular leagues, the IPL season is a 60-match, 43-day tournament that features some of the best talent in cricket today. You can come to YouTube and keep up with the action any time, anywhere and connect with fans across the globe. Watch as the match happens, or if you missed a match, tune in later to see what happened. The entire season will be streamed around the world on YouTube, except in the US, where matches will be time-delayed and made available 15 minutes after the match ends.

On the IPL Channel, you’ll see three tabs:

• Today’s Matches: This is where you can watch streamed matches as they happen. (Note that the stream will be delayed by a few minutes.) Click through at any time to see the match scorecard.
• Recent Matches: Catch up any time on the full action of matches that have already happened. Watch Sachin cream the ball through the covers, Warney taking his latest wicket and more.
• Highlights: If you’re short on time, check in here for short videos of player interviews, match highlights, greatest plays and more.

And for all of you who want to cheer or commiserate with others, check out our Twitter gadget on the channel page to be part of the conversation. You can keep up with the discussion on Twitter with the YouTube IPL hashtag (#youtube_ipl). Share, rate and comment on videos throughout the channel, or upload your own video responses to the action. There’s also a link so you can join the Official DLF IPL community on Orkut (www.orkut.com/ipl).

We’ll be watching the donkey drops, the five-fers, the flippers and floaters, the half-yorkers and slow sweeps — and cheering alongside you!

* A googly is a kind of pitch similar to a baseball pitch or a bowling throw in the game cricket; a wicked googly would be a really good pitch.

Excerpt from:
Indian Premier League bowls wicked googly* to the world on YouTube

If you’re reading this, then you’re probably on the Internet — via your laptop, your mobile phone or other handheld device, or maybe even through your television. But in 2010, millions of Americans still do not have access to the wealth of information made available on the Web. Even though the Internet was invented in the U.S. over 20 years ago, many Americans lag behind in both access to the Internet and speed of connections, which is why the Federal Communications Commission (or the FCC, the federal agency that oversees the U.S. communications industry) is launching its much-anticipated National Broadband Plan next Tuesday, to lay out its strategy for connecting all Americans to fast, affordable high-speed Internet.

After this plan is announced, you have the opportunity to interview FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in the second of a series of in-person YouTube interviews with government leaders. (Our first, with U.S. President Barack Obama, took place last month.) Go to CitizenTube today to submit your video or text question via Google Moderator, and vote on your favorites; we’ll bring a selection of the top-voted questions to Chairman Genachowski in our interview next Tuesday, March 16. The deadline for submission is Sunday night, March 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT.

To help structure our conversation with the Chairman, we’ve broken the interview down into seven topics. To learn more about what the FCC is doing in each area, click on the links for each topic below. Then submit your question on CitizenTube under one of the topic headings.

• Access and Affordability
• Mobile and Wireless
• Security and Privacy
• Digital Economy
• Internet in Schools
• Open Internet/Network Neutrality
• Others (learn more at Broadband.gov)

Access to the Internet has transformed almost every aspect of our economy and society. This is your chance to press the FCC on how the National Broadband Plan will work, and ask your questions about improving the Internet in America. We’re looking forward to seeing your questions and hearing what the Chairman has to say.

Posted by Steve Grove, Head of News and Politics, YouTube

Read the rest here:
The Internet in America: A YouTube Interview with the FCC

Whenever I meet someone who finds out that I work on the directions team for Google Maps, the first question I’m asked is often “So when’s Google Maps going to add biking directions?” We’re big biking fans too, so we’ve been itching to give you a concrete answer. I don’t want to keep the good news a secret any longer, so the answer is: right now!

Today we’ve added biking directions and extensive bike trail data to Google Maps for the U.S. My team has been keeping close tabs on all the public support for biking directions that’s been steadily coming in, but we knew that when we added the feature, we wanted to do it right: we wanted to include as much bike trail data as possible, provide efficient routes, allow riders to customize their trip, make use of bike lanes, calculate rider-friendly routes that avoid big hills and customize the look of the map for cycling to encourage folks to hop on their bikes. So that’s exactly what we’ve done.

Let’s say you want to bike to work, or maybe you want to drive less and spend more time outdoors. Biking directions can help you find a convenient and efficient route that makes use of dedicated bike trails or lanes and avoids hills whenever possible. To find biking directions, select “Bicycling” from the drop-down menu when you do a directions search:

So, how does it work? Well, I’m based in Seattle, along with the rest of the biking directions team. The city is notoriously hilly, but also has some great trails and a strong cycling community. Let’s say I’m trying to get from Golden Gardens to a friend’s house in Montlake:

This route avoids hills (phew!) and puts me on the Burke-Gilman trail for most of the journey. When I need to get off the trail to cross town, biking directions makes sure to keep me on bike-friendly roads and avoid some of the city’s busiest intersections. The time estimate for the route is based on a complex set of variables accounting for the type of road, terrain and turns over the course of my ride. If I decide that I want to stop at Woodland Park Zoo along the way, I can click on the blue path and drag it to my desired route — just like with driving directions — and we’ll still customize the journey for cycling suitability. Over on the Lat Long Blog, you can read more about all the unique tweaks and calculations factored into our routing algorithm.

We’ve also added information about bike trails, lanes and recommended roads directly onto the map. This can help you get a better sense of your route, or let you find trails nearby for a recreational ride. When you’re zoomed into a city, click on the “More” button at the top of the map to turn on the “Bicycling” layer. You’ll see three types of lines appear on the map:

• Dark green indicates a dedicated bike-only trail;
• Light green indicates a dedicated bike lane along a road;
• Dashed green indicates roads that are designated as preferred for bicycling, but without dedicated lanes

Thanks primarily to our partnership with the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, we now have more than 12,000 miles of trails included in biking directions and outlined directly on the map. We also have data on bike lanes and recommended streets for 150 cities across the country. We’ll continue to add new trail information and encourage riders to send feedback (biking directions is in beta, after all) and route information for inclusion via the “Report a Problem” tool. When Map Maker is available in the U.S., all riders will be able to directly contribute their local knowledge about trails, bike lanes and suggested routes.

We know that many of you have been anxiously awaiting this feature, so head over to http://maps.google.com/biking to try it for yourself and then hop on your bike!

Posted by Shannon Guymon, Product Manager

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Biking directions added to Google Maps

(Cross-posted with the YouTube Biz Blog)

Mobile phones are rapidly becoming essential tools for surfing the web, connecting with friends, and sharing and watching video online, and we’re seeing these effects at YouTube. The YouTube mobile site is more popular than ever: site traffic grew by over 160% in 2009, and now millions of people all over the world are streaming tens of millions of videos every day on their mobile phones. The mobile space moves fast, so we’ve been working hard to roll out new features and functionality quickly, especially as more and more people adopt YouTube-capable phones.

The increased usage of high-end devices like the iPhone and Android is also making mobile advertising easier and more effective for advertisers. So today, we’re launching ads on the home, search and browse pages of the American and Japanese YouTube mobile websites (m.youtube.com from your mobile browser). This is a great way for advertisers to reach YouTube viewers across multiple platforms. In fact, at launch YouTube will immediately provide one of the largest audiences for a mobile ad campaign anywhere on the mobile web. And because YouTube mobile attracts early adopters, the site can deliver to advertisers a coveted demographic of tech savvy trendsetters. We’ve already seen some early campaigns run on YouTube’s mobile site by advertisers like Sony (for the DVD release of “District 9″) and Kia, both of whom were able to easily reach their target audience, no matter where they were looking for video.

Our first tests of YouTube mobile ads — with brands ranging from L’Oreal to Land Rover — showed strong results related to click-throughs, user experience and brand awareness, and we’ve learned a lot in the months since then. As a result, ads on the YouTube mobile website will be banner ads sold on a full-day basis (like with the YouTube homepage on the web), making a mobile buy an easy and valuable addition to any YouTube campaign. For example, today Mazda is running a homepage ad on YouTube.com, and extended their campaign to run ads on our mobile site as well.

If you’re interested in learning more, reach out to your YouTube or Google sales rep, or visit youtube.com/advertise.

Posted by Taylor Cascino, Strategic Partner Development Manager

See the original post here:
YouTube calling: Now serving ads on the YouTube mobile site

The Oscars®: glitz, glamor, gossip, gold statuettes, much fanfare — and for many fans, Google search is increasingly a part of watching this live TV experience. Before and during the Academy Awards® broadcast in the U.S., we saw related queries on Google dominating the hot searches list on Google Trends. People searched for the TV schedule, printable ballots for voting on favorites, streaming video sites, nominee and film information, celebrity chatter and whatever else caught your attention. Here’s a snapshot:

Fashion
Everyone knows the red carpet is all about the gowns. So which actresses made the best (or worst!) dressed list in search? Zoe Saldana’s purple Givenchy haute couture gown won the day in searches, with just a few more queries than runner up Miley Cyrus, who walked down the carpet in one of Jenny Packham’s finest. Both beat searches for Sandra Bullock’s dress (Marchesa) by large margins. Sarah Jessica Parker, always the fashionista, ranked a distant fourth in Chanel. Certain designers were also popular in search, thanks to the stars who wore (and name-dropped) them. Elie Saab (worn by Anna Kendrick), Armani Prive (Amanda Seyfried, Jennifer Lopez) and Marchesa (Sandra Bullock, Vera Farmiga) were all rising trends.

Winners
Throughout the night Oscar®-related searches rose and fell as nominations were introduced and winners announced. Avatar had the most searches before the ceremony, but as The Hurt Locker received more awards, searches for that film exceeded all others and peaked when it won Best Picture. Precious also had a good run throughout the night. Its peak matched that of “Avatar” during the ceremony:

The awards for best actor, best actress and best director are some of the most-anticipated in the program. There was a considerable amount of buzz about Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock and Kathryn Bigelow before last night, and considerable spikes in search volume when they each won. Here’s a look at a few of the star searches last night:

Finally, the evening wasn’t all about big wins. The awards help expose more obscure films — shorts, documentaries and foreign-language — to a much larger audience. Searches for these titles typically went up tenfold during the evening, and if they took home a gold statue, search volume spiked as much as 100 times higher. Music by Prudence, Logorama, Food, Inc., The Cove and The Secrets in their Eyes all experienced an exponential explosion of queries.

Gossip and memorable moments
People are always eager for more information about the Hollywood stars — personal stats like age, height, family and dating status. During this year’s Oscar® ceremonies, Kathryn Bigelow’s height and Miley Cyrus’s mother’s tattoos were hot topics. Whose girlfriend was most searched for? Easy. George Clooney’s (Elisabetta Canalis).

So what were the most memorable moments of the broadcast? When George Clooney wandered off the red carpet to greet the crowd, queries on [clooney] shot through the roof. Ben Stiller’s appearance as a Na’vi was another draw, and queries on him were high during his spoof. Molly Ringwald and Matthew Broderick’s John Hughes tribute triggered a flood of nostalgia; Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Home Alone all saw huge query spikes as well. During the memorial portion of the show, queries surged for those in the industry who passed away in the last year, including Ron Silver, Natasha Richardson, Patrick Swayze and Brittany Murphy. On a lighter note, Sandra Bullock set off a frenetic amount of searches when she mentioned a Meryl Streep kiss in her acceptance speech.

As we’ve seen in presidential debates, unusual words also generate great interest. The Oscars led to spikes in searches for [catharsis] (from Robert Downey Jr.’s presentation with Tina Fey) and [spooning] (Colin Farrell talking about Jeremy Renner).

We hope you enjoyed the evening, and want to thank everyone for turning to Google search to see the latest. And our parents deserve huge thanks, and our agent… oh, they’re telling me to wrap it up…!

Posted by Qing Wu, Senior Economics Analyst

Credit:
And the searches go to…

Last year, we released a public data search feature that enables people to quickly find useful statistics in search. More recently, we expanded this service to include information from the World Bank, such as population data for every region in the world. More and more public agencies, non-profits and other organizations are looking for ways to open up their data and expand global access to this kind of information. We want to help keep that momentum going, so today we’re sharing a snapshot of some of the most popular public data search topics on Google. We’re also launching the Google Public Data Explorer, an experimental visualization tool in Google Labs.

Popular public data topics on Google
We know people want to be able to find reliable data and statistics on a variety of subjects. But what kind of statistics are they looking for most? To help us better prioritize which data sets to include in our public data search feature, we’ve analyzed anonymous search logs to find patterns in the kinds of searches people are doing, similar to the patterns you can find on Google Trends and Insights for Search. Some public data providers have asked us to share what we’ve learned, so we decided to put together an approximate list of the 80 most popular data and statistics search topics.

You can read the complete list at this link (PDF), but here’s the top 20 to get you started:

1. School comparisons
2. Unemployment
3. Population
4. Sales tax
5. Salaries
6. Exchange rates
7. Crime statistics
8. Health statistics (health conditions)
9. Disaster statistics
10. Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
11. Last names
12. Poverty
13. Oil price
14. Minimum wage
15. Consumer price index, inflation
16. Mortality
17. Cost of living
18. Election results
19. First names
20. Accidents, traffic violations

You’ll notice some interesting entries in the list. For example, we were surprised by how many people search for data about popular first and last names. Perhaps people are trying to decide what to name a new baby boy or girl? As it turns out, people are interested in a wide range of statistical information.

To build the list, we looked at the aggregation of billions of queries people typed into Google search, using data from multiple sources, including Insights for Search, Google Trends and internal data tools — similar to what we do for our annual Zeitgeist. We combined search terms into groups, filtering out spam and repeats, to prepare a list reflecting the most popular public data topics. As a statistician, it’s important for me to note that the data only covers one week’s worth of searches in the U.S., so there could be seasonal and other confounding factors (perhaps there was an election that week). In addition, preparing a study like this requires a fair amount of manual grouping of similar queries into topics, which is fairly subjective and prone to human error. While imperfect, we still think the list is helpful to consider.

The Public Data Explorer
As you can see, people are interested in a wide variety of data and statistics, but this information is only useful if it’s easy to access, understand and communicate. That’s why today we’re also releasing the Google Public Data Explorer in Labs, a new experimental product designed to help people comprehend data and statistics through rich visualizations. With the Data Explorer, you can mash up data using line graphs, bar graphs, maps and bubble charts. The visualizations are dynamic, so you can watch them move over time, change topics, highlight different entries and change the scale. Once you have a chart ready, you can easily share it with friends or even embed it on your own website or blog. We’ve embedded the following chart using the new feature as an example:

This chart compares life expectancy and the number of births per woman over the last 47 years for most economies of the world. The bubble sizes show population, and colors represent different geographic regions. Press the play button to see the dramatic changes over time. Click “explore data” to dig deeper.

Animated charts can bring data to life. Click the play button in the chart to watch life expectancy increase while fertility rates fall around the world. The bubble colors make it quick and easy to see clusters of countries along these variables (e.g., in 1960 the European and Central Asian countries were in the lower right and Sub-Saharan Africa in the upper left). The bubble sizes help you follow the most populous countries, such as India and China. These charts are based on the Trendalyzer technology we acquired from the Gapminder Foundation, which we’ve previously made available in the Motion Chart in Google Spreadsheets and the Visualization API.

With a handful of data providers, there are already billions of possible charts to explore. We currently provide data from the same three providers currently available in our search feature: the World Bank, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, we’ve added five new data providers: the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), the California Department of Education, Eurostat, the U.S. Center for Disease Control, and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. We’re excited that all around the world new data providers are deciding to make their information freely available on the Internet, enabling innovators to create interesting applications, mash up the data in new ways and discover profound meaning behind the numbers.

We hope our list and new tool help demonstrate both the public demand for more data and the potential for new applications to enlighten it. We want to hear from you, so please share your feedback in our discussion forum. If you’re a data provider interested in becoming a part of the Public Data Explorer, contact us.

Posted by Jürgen Schwärzler, Statistician, Public Data team

Originally posted here:
Statistics for a changing world: Google Public Data Explorer in Labs

We’ve long believed that personalization makes search more relevant and fun. For nearly five years, we’ve been tailoring results with personalized search. Today we’re announcing a new feature in search that makes it easier for you to mark and rediscover your favorite web content — stars.

With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant. That means if you star the official websites for your favorite football teams, you might see those results right at the top of your next search for [nfl]. Here’s what the new “Starred results” feature looks like:

The great thing about stars is that you don’t have to keep track of them. You don’t even have to remember whether or not you starred something. Simply perform a search and you’ll rediscover your starred items right when you need them. Stars sync with your Google Bookmarks and the Google Toolbar, so you can always see your list of starred items in one place and easily organize them. Even beyond the results page, while browsing the web you can quickly click the star icon in Toolbar to create a bookmark, and those pages will start showing up in the new stars feature.

Stars in search replace SearchWiki. In our testing, we learned that people really liked the idea of marking a website for future reference, but they didn’t like changing the order of Google’s organic search results. With stars, we’ve created a lightweight and flexible way for people to mark and rediscover web content. For people who like annotations, we have Sidewiki, a more powerful way for people to contribute and discover helpful information next to pages across the Internet. All your existing SearchWiki edits will be preserved with your Google Account. You can learn more on our help center.

Stars in search are rolling out in the next couple days and will be available globally for all signed-in users.

Posted by Cedric Dupont, Product Manager and Matthew Watson, Software Engineer

See the original post here:
Stars make search more personal

Social Bookmarking

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New OK Go Video Actually Tops Their Treadmill Video

As thousands of Mac fans and developers gather in San Francisco for this week’s Macworld conference, we’re particularly delighted to announce a new beta release of Chrome for Mac. Today’s release includes some of our most requested features from the Mac community, including extensions and bookmark sync.

You can read more about these features on the Google Chrome blog, or you can try it out directly by downloading the Google Chrome Beta for Mac. If you’re already using Chrome, you should be automatically updated to the new beta within the next day.

Downloading Google Chrome will give your mouse pointer a new reason to get excited:

Posted by Mark Mentovai, Software Engineer, Google Chrome

Here is the original:
Bringing extensions to Google Chrome for Mac

Posted by Jamie Davidson, Associate Product Manager

Here is the original:
Safety Mode: giving you more control on YouTube

We all know that Google makes a lot of money from ads, but it’s not very often that Google spends a lot of money on ads. The Web powerhouse has been chugging along for years on market dominance and word-of-mouth, but that changed on Sunday night.

During the third quarter of the Super Bowl, Google dove into the world’s biggest ad showcase. While the ad has had its critics (BNet rips it here), some sites ranked it as one of the best ads of the night (like Entertainment Weekly).

But whether or not you liked the aesthetics, approach or politics of Google’s ad, the bottom line was that the search giant got in front of the largest audience in television history to show what it thought was important.

Microsoft upped the ante when Bing launched, putting on an $80 million ad campaign in their attempt to pull casual users from Google . By comparison, Google spent only $5 million, according to the Guardian, on Sunday’s Super Bowl ad.

The ad mattered because of what it told the public about what mattered to Google and because of what it featured. One of those things was YouTube.  Google  featured the ad as part of a series of promotional  online videos for three months prior to game time, essentially crowdsourcing  the ad. Crowdsourcing was exactly the kind of stunt Google would pull that Microsoft would never do, preferring to rely on ad agency think.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Super Bowl placement also signaled a significant change in tactics, as Danny Sullivan, Editor of SearchEngineLand, said, “This pretty much confirms that Google is absolutely feeling the pressure from Bing. The company has never, ever seriously advertised its core search offerings before in this manner.”

Or summed up succinctly by Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt’s tweet, “Hell has indeed frozen over.”

Instead of generic series of Google searches, this ad was a glimpse at features that casual users of the site might not know about.

• The ad stressed maps and business listings: This is a place where Google is making a big move, crafting what looks to be the world’s biggest business directory, with exterior maps (and rumored interior maps of stores), aggregated along with reviews.
• The ad stressed translation: One-click translation of foreign sites is another tool Google is attempting to leverage against a global audience it’s still looking to penetrate. Google is still looking at footholds in the emerging markets, so English-to-another language is as powerful, if not more so than another language-to-English.
• Finally, the ad stressed shortcuts. Google is emphasizing speed to search answers and tools that will be displayed on the top of search pages, so airline flight status and dictionary definitions are great examples of that.

Google is such a big part of everyone’s Web experience that it’s impressive to see them go from passive to active in their marketing. Doing it on such a large stage will have an impact and resonate with their users.

See more here:

If you watched the Super Bowl this evening you’ll have seen a video from Google called “Parisian Love“. In fact you might have watched it before, because it’s been on YouTube for over three months. We didn’t set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search. Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact. But we liked this video so much, and it’s had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience.

If you like it too, we hope you’ll watch the others. Enjoy.

Posted by Eric Schmidt, CEO

Read the original here:
Love and the Super Bowl

Apple has undoubtedly created a new frontier for mobile marketing that will see advertisers leap at the opportunity to reach customers in a brand new way.

Apple’s unveiling of their newest gadget created a ripple of excitement and few signs of skepticism as techies awed at its design while others saw it more as an oversized iPod. The new device – approximately 9 times the size of an iPod – offers users a media-consuming touch screen device that is set to compete with a variety of different products already available on the market.

For the critics that believe this is simply a large-scale iPod, there are a variety of functions and applications that are fundamentally changing the way we consume new and old media.

Of all media, book publishers had the most vested interests in the interface and capabilities of the iPad. Set to be a direct competitor with Amazon’s Kindle, the e-book experience that Apple is creating is far beyond the simplicity of reading an e-book. The “sexiness” of the page turning and high-resolution screen partnered with the Apple brand add tangible and intangible value respectively to what Amazon could never match.

Along with gaming and visual media such as movies and television, the iPad’s screen allows users to dive into a growing variety of products available through iTunes.

But the noticeable technical and visual aspects of the iPad are not what strike us the most. With the iPad, Apple has created a new platform that presents an assortment of content in a more personal way. This new frontier has created a dynamic market of mobile marketing possibilities that advertisers are drooling over.

It is no coincidence that Apple recently acquired Quattro Wireless – a specialist in mobile advertising. The potential gains for mobile marketing is massive and with devices like the iPad carving out new opportunities, Apple has set themselves up for huge future returns. And since the iPad does not support Adobe Flash, marketers are being forced to develop new kinds of ads, rather than adapting Web ads.

As such, an entirely different approach to mobile ads could come sooner than expected. The mobile platform offers advertisers the same tracking and reporting that comes with traditional Internet ads, and it reaches their audience wherever they are, given they have access to an internet connection – something that is becoming the norm in most major metropolitan cities.

Windsor Holden, a principal analyst at Juniper Research, predicts worldwide mobile ad spending will quadruple to $6 billion or more, by 2014.

The opportunity is significant, and the only question that remains is: How will advertisers integrate their offers into the platform that match the needs of their target audiences?

Original post:
Apple Unveils iPad and New Approach to Mobile Advertising

Today, we’re excited to announce our third annual Doodle 4 Google contest in the U.S. Google doodles, created by our talented team of doodlers, have helped us celebrate events and anniversaries from Van Gogh’s birthday to Valentine’s Day. And since 2008, Doodle 4 Google has given K-12 kids the opportunity to create their own logo and have it displayed on the Google homepage for hundreds of millions of users to enjoy for a day.

In addition to the winner’s art appearing on Google.com on May 27, 2010, they’ll also receive a $15,000 college scholarship, a laptop computer and a $25,000 technology grant for their school.

This year’s theme is “If I Could Do Anything, I Would…” and it’s all about pushing the limits, dreaming big, and seeing what you can accomplish in life. When coming up with inspiration for this year’s contest, we turned to some of our very own Googlers, including Ed Lu, a former astronaut.

Ed typifies this year’s theme in action, and shares an inspiring anecdote:

On my first mission STS-84, one of my crewmates and I were having dinner aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis. After all our work for the day was done, we decided to eat “upside down” on the ceiling, gazing out at the Earth moving by below our feet. As we flew around the Earth, watching the continents go by, my crewmate remarked how amazingly large the Earth really is. But at that same time, it also felt small to us. There we were, flying at 18,000 miles per hour around the Earth in a machine built by humans, with a crew made up of astronauts from all over the world. Both of our observations were true at the same time. The world is indeed a big place with many challenges. But by using science, technology and the power of people working together, nearly anything is possible.

So dream big! If you could do anything, what would you do?

For even more inspiration, you can see last year’s winner, Christin Engelberth, a sixth grader at Bernard Harris Middle School in San Antonio, Texas. She titled her doodle “A New Beginning” to express her wish that “out of the current crisis, discoveries will be found to help the Earth prosper once more.”

We’re happy to let you know that this year, we’ve also assembled a panel of well-known “Expert Jurors,” including creative directors, cartoonists and famous animators ranging from Sesame Workshop to Pixar Animation Studios. Our Expert Jurors will help us narrow down the cream of the crop to 40 regional finalists, who will come to the Google office in New York City on May 26, 2010. For the second year, we’ll also be partnering with the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, where the top 40 regional finalists will get to have their artwork displayed in a national exhibit. And for the first time this year, we’ll give out eight Technology Booster awards to schools that submit maximum number of doodles per school by March 10th and have students in our 400 State Finalists.

Please visit the official competition website for a full listing of all contest rules and requirements. Only students from registered schools can enter, so be sure your school is registered by March 17, 2010. All doodles must be submitted by March 31, 2010.

We hope you’re as excited about this year’s contest as we are. Good luck!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience and Ed Lu, Program Manager, Advanced Projects

Go here to see the original:

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. – Ed.

From Google Squared enhancements to search becoming more social, this week brought a slew of exciting and (we hope) useful search feature releases:

Social Search
Sometimes, there might be relevant content on the web from people in your social circle. For example, learning what your friend thinks about the latest gadget or exotic travel location (e.g. in his or her blog) can help enhance your search experience. Until recently, there was no easy way to find this type of content published by your friends. Last October, we launched Social Search in Google labs to help solve this problem.

After a large number of users opted in and tried out the feature, Social Search has graduated and is available in beta for all signed-in users on google.com in English. We also added this feature to Google Images and gave you a way to visualize your social circle. To learn more about Social Search and how to get better social search results check out this post or this video.

Google Squared single item landing page
Last year we launched Google Squared, an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet. For categorical searches like [us presidents] or [dog breeds], Google Squared produces the type of extracted facts you might be interested in, and presents them in a meaningful way. Starting this week, Google Squared has a new design to better handle queries looking for a single thing, like a specific president or a particular breed of dog. The page is now easier to read and includes multiple images, and you can still add, remove or change the type of facts that are visible.

Example searches: [barack obama] and [boston terrier]

Better labels for Time/LIFE images
In late 2008, we worked with Time/LIFE to digitize several million archival images never been seen before, and made them available in Image Search. At that time, many images in the collection had descriptions and labels and were easy to search for. But some had less descriptive information, making them more difficult to find. Now it’s possible for knowledgeable users to label images and enrich the collection. Over time, we hope the Google community will make the quality of image search better than ever before.

Example: [Cincinnati baseball]. Note the “labels” in the bottom righthand corner.

We hope you enjoy the variety of new features this week.

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search

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This week in search 1/31/10