...and that's great news any way you say it. Language is one of the biggest challenges we have in making information universally accessible. As part of the machine translation team within Google Research, I'm happy to report we've been hard at work to overcome this challenge. We've recently added translation capabilities for 10 new languages to Google Translate, bringing the total to 23 languages. The newly featured languages include Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish.
In addition, you can now translate text and web pages as well as perform cross-language searches between any two languages that we offer. For example, we now support Chinese translation to/from any of our languages (e.g., Chinese to French). So for those of you who will be following or attending the Olympics in Beijing this fall, you'll be able to more easily find and access content from local sources.
We've also added a 'Detect Language' option to help you automatically identify the language of the text you're trying to translate. Keep in mind that the longer the text, the more accurate it will be. And for those of you who have embedded the Google Translate My Page gadget in your website to give it global reach, these new languages will automatically appear. Developers can also take advantage of these new languages in our AJAX language API.
While our system is quite good, we know it's not perfect. Machine translation is a hard problem, but it plays an important role in helping people access content they might otherwise be unable to read. We’re constantly working to improve the quality, so if you find a translation that’s not quite right, let us know by using our 'Suggest a better translation” feature.
When we first announced YouTube Insight, our free video analytics tool for YouTube, we were excited to see just how users, partners, and advertisers might creatively use information about the viewing trends of their videos. We've since learned that some users and partners are modifying their upload schedules based on when they know their audience is tuning in, and advertisers are studying geographic traffic patterns to assess the effectiveness of regional ad campaigns.
Today we've added some new features to Insight. One is a new demographics tab that displays view count information broken down by age group (such as ages 18-24), gender, or a combination of the two, to help you get a better understanding of the makeup of your YouTube audience. We show you general information about your viewers in anonymous and aggregate form, based on the birth date and gender information that users share with us when they create YouTube accounts. This means that individual users can't be personally identified.
Insight now also displays statistics based on the combined total views of all the videos you've uploaded. Just as you can explore the view counts and popularity of individual videos, with this feature you can see your account's total number of views, and your relative popularity on YouTube compared to other users, based on geographic location.
As with Insight's other features, we hope this new information helps you learn how to create more compelling content that best engages the audiences you want to reach. You can find these new metrics under the 'Demographics' tab within the Insight dashboard. Click on the 'Insight' button under 'Account > My Videos.'
As we noted earlier, our Conference on Scalability is taking place in Seattle on Saturday, June 14. And now registration is open until June 6.
We have some great talks lined up from industry and academia, covering everything from scalability of storage, communication and transactions to scaling applications into the mobile space or, in one case, under water. Space is limited, so do sign up now.
We're excited to bring together so many talented people from the Seattle area. Looking forward to seeing you there!
Posted by Chris Busselle, Investments Manager and Kevin Chen, Green Energy Strategy
Today we are pleased to announce our participation in BrightSource Energy's $115 million venture financing with a $10 million equity investment as part of Google's RE>C initiative.
Solar thermal energy generation is one of the key emerging industries addressing the changing global climate and we are excited about both of our current investments in solar thermal technology -- BrightSource Energy and eSolar.
In addition to making investments in renewable energy startups, we plan to make grants to support the research and development of enabling technologies to help the solar thermal industry achieve larger scale and lower costs. We believe that by supporting researchers and entrepreneurs taking different, ambitious approaches and risks to generate clean energy, we can help to accelerate progress and increase the collective economic value of these new clean energy industries.
We are also looking for a Head of Renewable Energy to run our internal R&D effort, which is focused initially on solar thermal power, advanced wind technologies, and enhanced geothermal systems.
Posted by Lorenzo Colitti, Network Engineer, and Erik Kline, IPv6 Evangelist
We care a lot about the health of the Internet. Recently, we've become increasingly concerned that IPv4 addresses — the numbers that computers use to connect to the Internet — are running out. Current projections place IPv4 address space exhaustion somewhere in late 2011, and while technologies such as Network Address Translation (NAT) can offer temporary respite, they complicate the Internet's architecture, pose barriers to the development of new applications, and run contrary to network openness principles.
That's why we're pleased to let you know that Google search is also available over IPv6 at ipv6.google.com (you'll need an IPv6 connection to view it). While IPv4 provides about four billion IP addresses — not enough to assign one to every one of Earth's more than six billion inhabitants — IPv6 provides enough address space to assign almost three million networks to every person on the planet. We hope that by allowing every computer and mobile device on the network to talk to each other directly — an idea known as the 'end-to-end principle' that was crucial to the original design of the Internet — IPv6 will allow the continued growth of the Internet and enable new applications yet to be invented.
With current operating systems such as Windows Vista, Mac OS X, and Linux providing high-quality support for IPv6, we hope it's only a matter of time before IPv6 is widely deployed. We will be doing our part.
Have you ever wished you could share information and interact with friends while visiting some of your favorite websites? There are a number of great social networking sites out there that let you stay connected, but the rest of the web typically hasn't been social. Yet.
Site owners have been saying for a while that they would love to provide this functionality, but, frankly, it's been too hard to add social features. A lot of code has to be written to create a site where visitors can sign up and bring their friends along, form new friendships, and do engaging things together. And not to mention that if you're a site visitor, it's pretty inconvenient to create a new account and try to rebuild a network of friends each time you visit a site.
Enter Google Friend Connect. This new service, announced as a preview release tonight at Campfire One, lets non-technical site owners sprinkle social features throughout their websites, so visitors will easily be able to join with their AOL, Google, OpenID, and Yahoo! credentials. You'll be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web like Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, LinkedIn, orkut, Plaxo, and others. And quite simply, you'll be able to do things together. Having faces show up at a site is not enough. Friend Connect lets site owners include OpenSocial apps made by a world of developers. We're providing a few apps, such as posts and ratings, to get the ball rolling. And many more will be provided by the OpenSocial community.
With this functionality, there's no end to the possibilities. A small site dedicated to mountain biking in Moab, for example, would be able to have members who could exchange maps, tips, and pictures of their latest rides. A stroke victims support site could help grieving family members assist one another by sharing advice. A politician's site could enable supporters to advocate their viewpoints. A musician's site could give fans the chance to interact full tilt with the band and one another.
Take a look at a few white-listed sites using Google Friend Connect: Ingrid Michaelson's official website, which includes the iLike music application, and Bible Apps, owned by an OpenSocial developer fully dedicated to his 'Verses' application -- where people can post prayers and test their knowledge of the Bible as a quiz game with their friends.
If you run a website and would like to add social features, you can now sign up for the wait list and learn more by visiting www.google.com/friendconnect. We're going to keep things pretty limited at first so we can gather feedback from site owners, developers, and users, but, in the weeks ahead, we'll be reaching out to more site owners and adding more social apps to the gallery.
You can also learn more about Google Friend Connect, OpenSocial, and other social initiatives at Google I/O, a two-day developer gathering about building the next generation of web applications. It takes place May 28-29 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Register now for Google I/O at http://code.google.com/events/io/.
All of the major search engines use auctions to price ads. The reason is simple: there are millions of keywords that need to be priced and it would be impossible to set all those prices by hand.
Using an auction removes the burden of having to do this: the prices are determined by the auction participants. These auctions run every time a user enters a query, so they always reflect the current values that advertisers place on keywords.
The outcome of the ad auction is efficient in the sense that the available ad slots are awarded to those who value them mostly highly. The outcome is also equitable in that the price an advertiser has to pay is determined by the other advertisers -- those with whom it has to compete for slots.
But how do they actually work? There are several steps in the process.
1) Each advertiser enters a list of keywords, ads, and bids.
2) When a user enters a query, Google compiles a list of all the ads whose keywords match that query.
3) The list of ads is then ordered based on the bids and the Ad Quality Scores, which measure the relevance of the ad to the user.
4) The highest ranked ad is displayed in the most prominent position, the second highest ranked ad gets the second most prominent position, and so on.
5) If the user clicks on an ad, the advertiser is charged a price that depends on the bid and Quality Score of the advertiser below it. The price charged is the minimum necessary to retain the advertiser's position in the list.
A simple example is when all ads have the same Quality Score. In this case, the ads will be ranked by bids and the price an advertiser pays per click will just be the bid of advertiser below it in the ranking. Hence the amount that advertisers pay is no more than what they bid and typically less.
In the general case, where ad qualities differ, the price an advertiser pays for a click will depend on its Quality Score relative to the quality of the ad below it in the auction. Roughly speaking, an ad that has twice the quality of another ad will tend to get about twice as many clicks, and will only have to pay half as much per click as the competing ad.
Where does this Ad Quality Score come from? It was originally determined by historical click through rates but has been refined over the years using sophisticated statistical models. Using ad quality as a factor in ranking ads provides strong incentives to advertisers to make sure that they provide relevant ads to end users.
There are many additional tweaks on top of this basic design. For example, Google actually runs two auctions: one for ads at the top of the page, and one for ads on the side of the page. Only ads with particularly high quality are eligible to compete in the top-ad auction. Ads that have particularly low quality may be disabled, and not shown at all. Advertisers also can set and adjust their daily and monthly budget so as to cap their maximum spend.
But the essential structure is that outlined above: advertisers bid for position and pay just enough to beat their runner-up. Prices for keywords are, ultimately, determined by the advertisers.
Posted by Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, and Dennis Hwang, Webmaster Manager and Chief Doodler
A couple of months ago, we announced the Doodle 4 Google art competition and invited students in grades K-12 across the U.S. to redesign our logo around the theme 'What if...?'.
Since then, more than 16,000 kids across the country have been busy creating their doodles. It's been a lot of fun for us and the kids (see for yourself in this video):
Today we're excited to announce the state finalists and 40 regional winners. The thousands of wonderful entries made judging difficult, but with the help of experts at Young Audiences, Teach for America and reporters from across the country, we've managed to narrow the field to the very best.
Now it's your turn. Starting today, you can vote for your favorite doodle. Your votes will determine the four national finalists. Just make sure to vote soon: you only have until May 18th. The national winner will be announced and the winning doodle will replace our usual logo on the Google homepage on May 22nd.
Today at our Mountain View headquarters we're celebrating the one-year anniversary of an important project: our organic garden. Not only does it provide a stunning centerpiece for the central campus; it yields produce and herbs that are used daily in the cafes on campus. Although many Googlers would like to think of themselves as Renaissance men and women, a green thumb didn't exactly come as easily to some as C++ development might. Fortunately, the garden wasn't just an ambitious 20% project but rather, an initiative that we took on with the partnership of The Growing Connection.
The Growing Connection is a grassroots project of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The work of the Growing Connection originates with a humble earth box, a patented growing system that helps growers to cultivate produce with limited space and water. The project really has two parts: teaching people around the world, especially kids, how to cultivate their own food, and giving them a hands-on lesson in nutrition. The latter entails connecting growers so that kids growing corn on rooftops in Harlem can share their experiences with students planting earth boxes in Ghana.
To earmark today's anniversary, we had a little get-together at the Googleplex, complete with cucumber and lemon verbena infused waters, organic snacks and a few words from Robert Patterson, Senior Liaison Officer at FAO. 'Like Google, Growing Connections combines growth and information,' he observes. 'So coming to Google has been a natural fit. We work from kids from all over--Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States. They learn to like each other through food and realize that they're part of an actual solution for hunger and poverty.'
Posted by Katie Hotchkiss, Online Sales and Operations Manager
Last week at the annual meeting of our Online Sales and Operations (OSO) organization, a group of us (1,211 Googlers from around the world, to be exact) made an attempt to set a new Guinness World Record for the 'largest cake decorating lesson.' This isn't the first time we've taken our culinary talents to great heights, but it is the first time we've attempted to bake our way to a new record.
The event brought our teams together, united around something we all love: good food. We decorated a total of 171 cakes, using 800 pounds of butter cream and 500 pounds of fondant along the way. In addition to this fun foray into the sugar arts, the two-day conference featured a keynote speech by Al Gore, workshops with faculty from the Harvard Business School, and several panels on industry trends, including one on bloggers moderated by Kara Swisher.
Check out this video of the day:
We'll report back if (and hopefully when) we hear the news from Guinness.
Protecting employees from Internet threats is tough enough when they're at work, much less when they're on the road. Off-network users are particularly vulnerable to web threats because they must remember to connect via VPN for protection when they're away from the office.
Today we're making Internet security easier for people, wherever they may be working. Google Web Security for Enterprise, powered by Postini, provides real-time malware protection and URL filtering with policy enforcement and reporting. An additional feature extends the same protections to users working remotely on laptops in hotels, cafes, and even guest networks without requiring any action on their part.
As you may have read, Google, Comcast, Intel Capital, Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks and Trilogy Equity Partners have entered into an agreement to invest $3.2 billion in a new wireless broadband company. The new company will combine Clearwire's existing consumer WiMAX business with Sprint's broadband infrastructure and 2.5 GHz spectrum to create a new nationwide wireless broadband network. In addition to our $500 million contribution as part of the investment group, we will provide search and applications to the network's users, and will work with Clearwire to offer additional services and applications. This will include jointly creating an open Internet protocol to work with mobile broadband devices (including Android-powered devices) and implementing other open network practices and policies.
We believe that the new network will provide wireless consumers with real choices for the software applications, content and handsets that they desire. Such freedom will mirror the openness principles underlying the Internet and enable users to get the most out of their wireless broadband experience. As we've supported open standards for spectrum and wireless handsets, we're especially excited that Clearwire intends to build and maintain a network that will embrace important openness features. In particular, the network will: (1) expand advanced high speed wireless Internet access in the U.S., (2) allow consumers to utilize any lawful applications, content and devices without blocking, degrading or impairing Internet traffic and (3) engage in reasonable and competitively-neutral network management.
We're looking forward to seeing the Clearwire network take shape and begin to deliver benefits to users, and we will continue to look for new partners to promote openness and bring compelling applications and services to end users. There's more information on Clearwire and the transaction on Clearwire's site.
Over the past few days, we've followed the devastation left in the wake of Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar (Burma). News reports have tallied more than 22,000 dead with another 41,000 missing. We're extremely saddened by the loss of life due to this cyclone, and hope you'd like to help assist with the relief effort.
To help visualize the damage, there are Google Earth layers showing an animation of the cyclone's path (using satellite imagery from the Naval Research Laboratory) and the extent of the flooding using data from the UN Institute for Training and Research Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT). We'll keep posting information to the Lat-Long Blog as more data comes available.
There are also several Google Grants non-profits working to provide relief to those affected. Save the Children currently has a 500-person staff in the area, while Oxfam America has committed $800,000 to help NGOs meet the immediate needs of people. World Vision and Doctors Without Borders are also taking action with two of the most vulnerable populations in the crisis: children and the injured. We are pleased to be working with and supporting these organizations that are contributing directly to cyclone relief. We encourage you to visit them and consider lending them your support, too. For more details on these organizations and other non-profits providing support for the victims of the disaster, visit the Google Grants blog.
Posted by Cristin Frodella, Product Marketing Manager
Thanks to Eleanor Roosevelt, who in the 1950s persuaded Congress to recognize the importance of teachers with a celebratory day, today is set aside in the U.S. to honor our educators and acknowledge the contributions they make. I know that I speak for everyone at Google when I say that none of us would be where we are today without our teachers. On National Teacher Day, we salute you, the dedicated men and women who taught us much of what we know.
And we invite you to join us, too, at the next installment of the Google Teacher Academy at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California on June 25th. Back by popular demand, the GTA is an intensive one-day professional development event designed to help K-12 teachers get immersed in innovative technologies. Teachers near and far are invited to apply to spend the day with us getting your hands on tools like Google Earth, Google Docs and the entire Google Apps suite. Come, sit in classes, learn some new stuff, and rub elbows with some of your most creative contemporaries who, like you, are changing the world one student and one classroom at a time.
Today, Google for Educators is also pleased to announce the launch of the new Geo Education website, where you'll find oodles of information about Google Earth, Maps, Sky and SketchUp. In addition to spotlighting inspiring lessons from some pioneering teachers, we are also sharing quick tips and ideas for easy ways get started using geo tools in your classroom. Among other things, you'll learn how to take flyover tours of peaks, valleys and gorges, how to view constellations - even in the daytime - and how to make a 3D model of your very own school.
And last but not least, awhile back, we asked teachers to share stories about using Google Docs in the classroom. You told us about your students' collaborative writing projects, about class presentations where kids were engaged in dialog using the 'chat' box throughout, and you mentioned being able to be involved in the creative process early on, instead of only seeing the final product. While we were reading, we realized that Docs can be somewhat intimidating to the uninitiated, so we created a getting started document specifically educators -- with tips for signing up, logging in, and working your way through a document -- both in-class and outside.
So happy Teacher Day! We hope you have an enjoyable day during which you get a hundred shiny apples and maybe even a hug from a kid who knows how much you do every day. And we hope to see you at the Googleplex in June, too.
Posted by Naren Manappa, Software Engineer, and Melchi Sundararaj, Member of Technical Team
We have come a long way from our first Indic transliteration release to our current support for transliteration in 5 languages -- Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu -- for a broader set of Google products. We are also happy to release our very first English to Hindi translation service. Read on to understand how you can use these services to create, communicate and search in your language, and more.
You can now also try out our brand new English to Hindi translation service, and the translated searchfeature that lets you query in Hindi, obtain search results for the translated query in English, and then see the Hindi translations of these results.
Posted by Mark Davis, Senior International Software Architect
Google has just begun supporting Unicode 5.1, less than one month after it was released. It's now available in search, so people speaking languages such as Malayalam can now search for words containing the new characters in Unicode 5.1.
Web pages can use a variety of different character encodings, like ASCII, Latin-1, or Windows 1252, or Unicode. Most encodings can only represent a few languages, but Unicode will handle anything from Chinese to French to Arabic. We have long used Unicode as the internal format for all the text we search: any other encoding is first converted to Unicode for processing. So we regularly update to each new version of Unicode (and relevant related standards like CLDR and BCP 47) to make sure we are current. Thus Unicode plays a key role in our mission.
Uptick in native Unicode webpages
Just last December there was an interesting milestone on the web. For the first time, we found that Unicode was the most frequent encoding found on web pages, overtaking both ASCII and Western European encodings—and by coincidence, within 10 days of one another. What's more impressive than simply overtaking them is the speed with which this happened; take a look at the blue line in this graph.
You can see a long-term decline in pages encoded in ASCII (unaccented letters A through Z). More recently, there's been a significant drop in the use of encodings covering only Western European letters (ASCII and a few accented letters like Ä, Ç, and Ø). We're seeing similar declines in other language-specific encodings. Unicode, on the other hand, is showing a sharp increase in usage.
This is based on our indexing of web pages, and thus may vary somewhat from what other search engines find. However, the trends are pretty clear, and the continued rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the processing for the many languages that we cover.
Posted by Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior VP, Product Management
This week Israel observed Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Remembrance Day, a holiday inaugurated in 1959 to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. This is an especially important day to Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem-based center for remembering the Holocaust's victims and survivors. I was fortunate to tour Yad Vashem's New Museum with my family last summer, and was moved and inspired by the experience. Our guide told us an anecdote about a visitor, a survivor of the camps, who recognized an item in one exhibit and was able to explain its context to museum curators and fellow visitors. This is why Yad Vashem is so important: it's a place that preserves the horrible history of the Holocaust and puts it in context for all of us.
But a lot of people, including many survivors, aren't able to visit Yad Vashem. How can they discover and share stories? How can they see an artifact or a photo and say, I recognize that item or person because I was there? The answer, of course, is the Internet.
We're proud to report that Yad Vashem has just launched two new YouTube channels, one in English, the other in Arabic. They feature testimonies from Holocaust survivors, historians' lectures on key issues related to the Holocaust, and footage of events big and small (Pope John Paul II's visit in 2000, a touching family reunion). More importantly, they are a way for Yad Vashem to surpass its physical boundaries and reach out to an audience worldwide. This is the promise the Internet holds: to inform and connect the globe, to remember stories, to teach us. As Elie Wiesel said in his speech at the opening of the museum: 'If we decided to tell the tale, it is because we wanted the world to be a better world, just a better world, and learn and remember.'
Posted by Jordan Bookey, Diversity Programs Manager
In 2003 we established the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship to honor the work of Dr. Anita Borg, a computer scientist who dedicated her professional career to increasing the participation of women and other under-represented minorities in the field of technology. In her memory, we're pleased to announce the fifth class of Anita Borg Scholars in the U.S., and our first class of scholars in Canada.
The U.S. program awards $10,000 academic scholarships to 23 outstanding female leaders in technology, and $1,000 scholarships to 32 finalists. In Canada, 4 women will receive $5,000 scholarship awards, and 13 finalists will receive $1,000 scholarships. These undergraduate and graduate women are completing degrees in computer science and related fields. Each of these award recipients has demonstrated a commitment to advancing women in technology. We congratulate these leaders on their accomplishments.
The U.S. scholars and finalists recently visited the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA as part of the annual all-expenses-paid Google Scholars' Retreat. Students attended technical workshops and discussions with Google engineers and executives, and heard first-hand about the life and work of Anita Borg from Telle Whitney, President of the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology. The retreat enables these scholars to meet each other and create a network of future leaders in computer science. The 2008 recipients of the Google United Negro College Fund Scholarship and Hispanic College Fund Scholarship also attended.
The 17 Canada Anita Borg Scholars and Finalists will attend a Scholars' Retreat for their inaugural class this Thursday and Friday at our engineering office in New York.
Visit our scholarships page to learn more about our programs. The Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship is also available to female computer science students in Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
The 2008 Anita Borg Scholars ($10,000 winners)
Allison Park Heath - Rice University, PhD Computer Science
Amy Hurst - Carnegie Mellon University, Ph Human Computer Interaction
Betsy Nora DiSalvo - Georgia Institute of Technology, PhD Human Centered Computing
Diane Marie Budzik - University of California, Los Angeles, PhD Electrical Engineering
Elizabeth Arrowsmith Bales - University of California, San Diego, PhD Computer Science
Emily Anne Fortuna -Rice University, B.S. Computer Science
Erika Shehan Poole - Georgia Institute of Technology, PhD Human Centered Computing
Gabriela Marcu - University of California, Irvine, B.S. Informatics
Ghinwa Fakhri Choueiter - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, PhD Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Gina-Maria Pomann - The College of New Jersey, B.A. Math
Jennifer C. Stoll - Georgia Institute of Technology, PhD Human Centered Computing
Jennifer Denise Tam - Carnegie Mellon University, PhD Computer Science
Jill Patrice Dimond - Georgia Institute of Technology, PhD Human Centered Computing
Julie Maureen Letchner - University of Washington, PhD Computer Science
Katherine Mary Everitt - University of Washington, PhD Computer Science
Nancy Dougherty - Stanford University, B.S. Electrical Engineering Raluca Ada Popa - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, B.S. Computer Science
Sally Kadry Wahba - Clemson University, PhD Computer Science
Sarita Ann Yardi - Georgia Institute of Technology, PhD Human Centered Computing
Silvia Lindtner - University of California, Irvine, PhD Information & Computer Science
Svetlana Yarosh - Georgia Institute of Technology, PhD Human Centered Computing
Tammara Massey - University of California, Los Angeles, PhD Computer Science
Yvon Hall Feaster - Clemson University, B.S. Computer Information Systems
The 2008 Anita Borg Finalists ($1,000 winners)
Aditi Suhas Pendharkar - Carnegie Mellon University, M.S. Information Networking
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience
Did you notice the chrome tulips on Google's homepage today? They are part of a special Google doodle done by renowned artist Jeff Koons. And that isn't the only art appearing anew on Google today. As part of our iGoogle Artists project, we have collaborated with almost 70 artists in 17 countries on 6 continents to create special iGoogle themes -- works of art that appeal to all ages and interests. Artists, designers and other notables involved include Jeff Koons, Dale Chihuly, Coldplay, Diane von Furstenberg, Dolce&Gabbana, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Michael Graves, Phillipe Starck, Bob Mankoff, Mark Morris, Oscar de la Renta, Anne Geddes and Tory Burch. While the list of those who have contributed themes is impressive (I've only listed 1/5th(!) of the artists here), even more impressive is the art itself - it's spectacularly beautiful!
Until now, iGoogle has been about getting the content you want on your homepage. The iGoogle artist themes take personalization to the next level -- allowing you to select world-class art that really reflects their personality for their pages. It's what happens when great art meets technology.
As part of our launch, we will be holding an outdoor art gallery this weekend in New York's Meatpacking District, where on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights the art from the iGoogle artists project will be projected on the buildings, sidewalks, and streets. This is a map of where you can find the display. We will post video of the event on YouTube.
Check it out - the art speaks for itself - select your iGoogle artist theme today at www.google.com/artistthemes!
Posted by Ian Fette, Google Security Team This post is one of a series devoted to online security. - Ed.
Millions of people have gotten 'urgent' emails asking them to take immediate action to prevent some impending disaster. 'Our bank has a new security system. Update your information now or you won't be able to access your account,' or 'We couldn't verify your information; click here to update your account.' Sometimes the email claims that something awful will happen to the sender (or a third party), as in 'The sum of $30,000,000 is going to go to the Government unless you help me transfer it to your bank account.'
People who click on the links in these emails may see a web page that looks like a legitimate site they've visited before. Because the page looks familiar, these people enter their username, password, or other private information on the site. What they've actually done is given an unknown third party all the information needed to hijack their account, steal their money, or open up new lines of credit in their name. They just fell for a phishing attack.
The concept behind such an attack is pretty simple: Someone masquerades as someone else in an effort to fool you into sharing personal or other sensitive information with them. Phishers can masquerade as just about anyone, including banks, email and application providers, online merchants, online payment services, and even governments. And while some of these attacks are crude and easy to spot, many of them are sophisticated and well constructed. That fake email from 'your bank' can look very real; the bogus 'login page' you're redirected to can seem completely legitimate.
The good news is there are things you can do to steer clear of phishing attacks:
Be careful about responding to emails that ask you for sensitive information. You should be wary of clicking on links in emails or responding to emails that are asking for things like account numbers, user names and passwords, or other personal information such as social security numbers. Most legitimate businesses will never ask for this information via email. Google doesn't.
Go to the site yourself, rather than clicking on links in suspicious emails. If you receive a communication asking for sensitive information but think it could be legitimate, open a new browser window and go to the organization's website as you normally would (for instance, by using a bookmark or by typing out the address of the organization's website). This will improve the chances that you're dealing with the organization's website rather than with a phisher's website, and if there's actually something you need to do, there will usually be a notification on the site. Also, if you're not sure about a request you've received, don't be afraid to contact the organization directly to ask. It takes just a few minutes to go to the organization's website, find an email address or phone number for customer support, and reach out to confirm whether the request is legitimate.
If you're on a site that's asking you to enter sensitive information, check for signs of anything suspicious. If you're on a site that's asking for sensitive information -- no matter how you got there -- check for the signs that it's really the official website for the organization. For example, check the URL to make sure the page is actually part of the organization's website, and not a fraudulent page on a different domain (such as mybankk.com or g00gle.com.) If you're on a page that should be secured (like one asking you to enter in your credit card information) look for 'https' at the beginning of the URL and the padlock icon in the browser. (In Firefox and Internet Explorer 6, the padlock appears in the bottom right-hand corner, while in Internet Explorer 7 the padlock appears on the right-hand side of the address bar.) These signs aren't infallible, but they're a good place to start.
Be wary of the 'fabulous offers' and 'fantastic prizes' that you'll sometimes come across on the web. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is, and it could be a phisher trying to steal your information. Whenever you come across an offer online that requires you to share personal or other sensitive information to take advantage of it, be sure to ask lots of questions and check the site asking for your information for signs of anything suspicious.
Use a browser that has a phishing filter. The latest versions of most browsers -- including Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera -- include phishing filters that can help you spot potential phishing attacks.
All fairly simple, right? What it all comes down to is if someone asks you to share personal or other sensitive information online, take a moment to think through the request carefully. Doing so will help you stay safe online, and help us all put phishers out of business.
