For the first time ever young Australians have the opportunity to vote in a simulated federal election and have their opinions heard. Today Google announced Student Voice 2010 - the federal election as voted for by under-18s.
We’re inviting 15 - 17 year-old students across Australia to vote in a simulated online federal election between 9 - 12 August. We’ve adopted standards and processes from the Australian Electoral Commission to make this as real an experience as possible.
We hope that this will be an exciting opportunity to educate young Australians about a fundamental democratic process and unveil to politicians the voice of the next generation.
Young Australians, all parties are keen for you to be involved, to get your vote and hear your voice! Here is a YouTube address from Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Leader of the Greens Senator Bob Brown.
Also launched today by Aussie Googlers in their 20% time, google.com.au/election2010, to connect Australians with information about the election, parties, and political issues. You can explore electoral information on a Google Map and access up-to-date insights and search trends on the hot political topics that Australians are searching for in the lead up to the election.
Happy Voting!
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Friday, July 23, 2010
Guest post: Arthur Boyd honoured with a Google Doodle
(Editor's note: This is a guest post by Deborah Ely, Chief Executive Officer of the Bundanon Trust).
Arthur Boyd, one of Australia’s most famous artists, would have been celebrating his 90th birthday on Saturday 24 July 2010.
Arthur, who died in 1999, left a legacy that is recognised in Australia and internationally. He is survived by his wife, Yvonne, and his three children and several grandchildren, all of whom are involved in the arts.
His incredible generosity will be remembered by his “gift to the nation”: Bundanon, a property of 1100 hectares of pristine bush land overlooking the Shoalhaven River in NSW.
Boyd believed "you can't own a landscape" and it was his wish that others could share the place that inspired him so much. The properties known collectively as Bundanon, now managed by the Bundanon Trust, provide access to Bundanon Homestead, his Studio and the Shoalhaven River, and encourage an appreciation and understanding of the importance of the landscape in the lives of Australians.
Arthur’s 90th birthday marks a special point in the Trust’s history. He was a visionary and very forward looking in all things to do with the environment, and the importance of creativity in the development of healthy individuals and a healthy society. Boyd’s vision is now, more than ever, coming to fruition.
Bundanon operates a residential education program for children and adults and presents a dynamic, on-site, public program, including concerts and special events, open days and group visits, allowing thousands of people to experience Bundanon every year.
We believe Arthur would have been honoured with a Google Doodle on his birthday, and we hope all Australians will take pride having his artwork on their computer screens.
Arthur Boyd, one of Australia’s most famous artists, would have been celebrating his 90th birthday on Saturday 24 July 2010.
Arthur, who died in 1999, left a legacy that is recognised in Australia and internationally. He is survived by his wife, Yvonne, and his three children and several grandchildren, all of whom are involved in the arts.
His incredible generosity will be remembered by his “gift to the nation”: Bundanon, a property of 1100 hectares of pristine bush land overlooking the Shoalhaven River in NSW.
Boyd believed "you can't own a landscape" and it was his wish that others could share the place that inspired him so much. The properties known collectively as Bundanon, now managed by the Bundanon Trust, provide access to Bundanon Homestead, his Studio and the Shoalhaven River, and encourage an appreciation and understanding of the importance of the landscape in the lives of Australians.
Arthur’s 90th birthday marks a special point in the Trust’s history. He was a visionary and very forward looking in all things to do with the environment, and the importance of creativity in the development of healthy individuals and a healthy society. Boyd’s vision is now, more than ever, coming to fruition.
Bundanon operates a residential education program for children and adults and presents a dynamic, on-site, public program, including concerts and special events, open days and group visits, allowing thousands of people to experience Bundanon every year.
We believe Arthur would have been honoured with a Google Doodle on his birthday, and we hope all Australians will take pride having his artwork on their computer screens.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
DevFest AU: A week in recap
Over the five days from June 28th-July 2nd, we welcomed more than 300 developers, representing around 150 companies and universities, through our doors for DevFest AU 2010. We learned about what they're working on, and talked to them about what we do day to day here at Google.
The week started with a Wave day on Monday - chock full of talks on the Wave product, platform, and protocol. Dan Peterson, a product manager on Wave, gave a recap of the last year, and then I continued on to provide an overview of the Wave APIs, with a deep dive on Robots and Gadgets. Greg D'alesandre ( known as "Dr. Wave") and Alan Green gave a reprise of their popular I/O talk on Wave and Enterprise. After lunch, gave a demo of a non-AppEngine robot, running off a slicehost server and using the Django framework. Seth Covitz, visiting from the Mountain View office, talked about the Wave Media APIs, showing off the very cool "Wave->PowerPoint->Wave" demo. I then showed WaveThis, and demonstrated using it on then Blogger, Posterous, and Wordpress platforms. Dhanji Prasanna, a Sydney engineer known for his popular Guice framework, talked about the Embed API, and then gave a sneak preview of WaveLite, an alternative client for Google Wave that is built entirely on our Wave Data APIs. He finished his deep dive of WaveLite by whipping together an iPad-friendly UI for the client, and running it all on AppEngine. We expect to open-source WaveLite soon, so that developers can run it themselves. We finished off the talks with a focus on open-source and federation, with UNSW grad Alex North talking about Operational Transforms, and Anthony Baxter discussing the current state of the open-sourced code in the wave-protocol project. We spent the final hours of the day hacking, and saw some cool demos from developers - a pure-HTML wave client written in Perl with goals of accessibility, a real-estate listings robot, "Dr. Evil" bot, and a geo-semantic analysis bot.
Greg D'alesandre AKA Dr Wave presenting at DevFest AU 2010
On Tuesday we brought together a large crowd of developers interested in Apps and App Engine. Don Dodge, well known for his work in the startup scene, kicked off the day talking about the Google Apps Marketplace. Shihab Hamid, an engineer from Atlassian (just down the footbridge from us), showed off their integration of JIRA, an issue tracking tool, into Google Apps marketplace. Geoff McQueen, the CEO of Hiive Systems, explained why and how their product AffinityLive is integrating with Apps Marketplace, and discussed what they learned about Google APIs from the integration. Check out his guest post on the Google Australia blog for more info. After lunch, Patrick Chanezon, who's worked in developer relations since before it even existed, talked about App Engine for Business, Google Storage, and the BigTable and Prediction APIs, showing a cool demo of using the prediction API with his delicious bookmark data to predict the tags he'd choose for a particular webpage. We spent the next few hours hacking on Python and Java App Engine codelabs, and watched as developers showed off what they've done in App Engine - like evonyurl.com, shoutmessage.appspot.com, and beste.st. We hope to see more Aussie developers trying out App Engine for their cloud computing needs, and integrating their business apps with Apps Marketplace - if you do, let us know!
Developer advocate Don Dodge flew down from the US for the event
Wednesday was all about developing for Chrome and modern browsers in general, using HTML5 and other up-and-coming standards. Eric Bidelman started off the day with a whirlwind intro to the current state of the web, and then Jeremy Orlow, a Chrome engineer and Webkit committer from the London office, talked through the interactive HTML5 slides deck. After lunch, Eric gave an intro to developing Chrome extensions, and then welcomed Sputnik agency, a local web development house, to talk about three extensions they created: MenuLog, LastTix, and Qantas Frequent Flyers. Menulog wrote here about the experiences. Eric finished up the talks with a discussion of the various techniques and tools for making web apps faster, like Closure Tools, Chrome Frame, and Native Client. As with the previous days, we then spent a few hours hacking, with many developers trying their hand at using the video tag in the Video app codelab. At the end of hacking, we saw demos from developers of "anything they'd made that had to do with HTML5 or Chrome" - like a webcam HTML5 calibration app, a localStorage-based expanding rectangle demo, and a Chrome extension for reloading webpages at specified intervals - all very cool stuff.
Thursday was Social day and we tried out a different format, with talks in the morning and a full five hours of hacking in the afternoon. Timothy Jordan and Will Norris spent the morning talking through the Buzz APIs and the open standards they're based on, like Activity Streams, Salmon Protocol, and PubSubHubBub. In the afternoon, they introduced starter projects - a Python App Engine app for displaying a twitter stream, and a PHP app for doing the same. Then a room full of developers got to hacking, many on the starter projects, and many on projects of their own invention. After a round of drinks, it was finally time for demo time, and we were super impressed with what developers had come up with in the relatively short amount of time - a Buzz stream -> jQuery lightbox viewer, a real estate Buzz stream complete with maps and photos, an iPhone-compatible "iBuzzLightyear" search app, a PHP app showing the top "Buzz words" in the world cities, a Python app that performed a topic cluster analysis on Buzz streams and automatic tag cloud generation, and more.
For our final day on Friday, all about Maps API v3, we followed a similar format. In the morning, Luke Mahe and Daniels Lee started off with an awesome tag-team presentation that walked through the steps of creating a coffee-locating map in Sydney, from a simple map to a geo-located App Engine app. Jaidev Soin, from local Sydney startup Travellr, presented a talk about their geo-located questions and answers site, and their own use of Maps API v3. Then David Day and Jez Fletcher, two Sydney engineers on the Maps API team, reprised their popular I/O talk on customizing maps, from custom zombie markers to the new and very cool map styling options. After lunch, Daniels introduced three codelabs, and the room full of developers (and MANY power plugs) got to hacking. Halfway through hacking, Sydney engineer James McGill gave a talk about Google Fusion Tables, a new way to upload geographic data to Google and easily visualize it on a map. At demo time, developers showed us they were paying attention to all the new features talked about in the morning, as each demo played with one of our recently announced features - we saw a McDonalds-styled map plotting a round trip of all the Maccas in Australia, a map visualising the travel times from a point of origin using the directions API, a historical map stylised to look, well, more historical, a map visualizing the depth of bores in Victoria using the Circle class, and a v3 port of the popular TrendsMap.com.
All in all, it was an awesome week, and it was great to meet so many developers doing so many different things. If you're a developer in Australia and want to keep up-to-date with future Google developer events, subscribe to our mailing list. We look forward to seeing more of you in the future! And thank you Halans for your wonderful photos.
All in all, it was an awesome week, and it was great to meet so many developers doing so many different things. If you're a developer in Australia and want to keep up-to-date with future Google developer events, subscribe to our mailing list. We look forward to seeing more of you in the future! And thank you Halans for your wonderful photos.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Inaugural AIME National Hoodie Day
(Editor's note: The is a guest post from Jack Manning Bancroft who is speaking at Google's office in Sydney this morning to welcome the inaugural AIME National Hoodie Day).
It’s not every day you get to launch a national day…My name is Jack Manning Bancroft and I am the founder and CEO of the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME). In 2005 when I was at Uni, I started AIME to mentor Indigenous high school students through school and I can't believe how far it's come… We started with 25 kids in Redfern and are now working with 1000 kids across the East Coast of Australia… From the streets of Sydney we have risen with the goodwill and desire of everyday Australians who have stepped up to walk with AIME. And today, on July 21, we turn to the nation to launch AIME National Hoodie Day.
We are asking the Australian community to don a limited edition Red AIME Hoodie and say to the next generation who are stepping up - "We will walk with you." By doing this, you will be supporting all of our Indigenous kids to finish school at the same rate as their fellow Australians.
Several key Australians such as Ian Thorpe, Andrew Forrest, Tania Major and Libby Trickett are already 'walking with us' and showing their support for AIME National Hoodie Day, check it out:
Come and meet the people of AIME and GenerationOne who will be at the Sydney Opera House steps from 12:00pm-1:30pm to raise awareness of this initiative.
Outside Sydney, mining magnate Andrew Forrest is getting a photo taken with his wife Nicola in Perth and acclaimed director Warwick Thornton is getting a pic up in the Alice, and there are already heaps of pics online. Send us your hoodie photos to pics@nationalhoodieday.com.
Let us all celebrate a new day for the nation that connects all Australians to Indigenous Australia with an eye to the future.
Welcome to AIME National Hoodie Day.
Posted by Jack Manning Bancroft, AIME CEO
It’s not every day you get to launch a national day…My name is Jack Manning Bancroft and I am the founder and CEO of the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME). In 2005 when I was at Uni, I started AIME to mentor Indigenous high school students through school and I can't believe how far it's come… We started with 25 kids in Redfern and are now working with 1000 kids across the East Coast of Australia… From the streets of Sydney we have risen with the goodwill and desire of everyday Australians who have stepped up to walk with AIME. And today, on July 21, we turn to the nation to launch AIME National Hoodie Day.
We are asking the Australian community to don a limited edition Red AIME Hoodie and say to the next generation who are stepping up - "We will walk with you." By doing this, you will be supporting all of our Indigenous kids to finish school at the same rate as their fellow Australians.
Several key Australians such as Ian Thorpe, Andrew Forrest, Tania Major and Libby Trickett are already 'walking with us' and showing their support for AIME National Hoodie Day, check it out:
Come and meet the people of AIME and GenerationOne who will be at the Sydney Opera House steps from 12:00pm-1:30pm to raise awareness of this initiative.
Outside Sydney, mining magnate Andrew Forrest is getting a photo taken with his wife Nicola in Perth and acclaimed director Warwick Thornton is getting a pic up in the Alice, and there are already heaps of pics online. Send us your hoodie photos to pics@nationalhoodieday.com.
Let us all celebrate a new day for the nation that connects all Australians to Indigenous Australia with an eye to the future.
Welcome to AIME National Hoodie Day.
Posted by Jack Manning Bancroft, AIME CEO
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Preparing to film your Life in a Day
With Life in a Day just five days away, it’s time to start pre-production.
This coming Saturday (July 24), you’ll have 24 hours to capture a few minutes of your life on camera and upload it to YouTube for consideration by Oscar winning directors Kevin Macdonald and Ridley Scott for inclusion in the first ever feature-length film to be created from YouTube content.
To help you get in touch with you inner director, we’ve pulled together a few tips to help you create your Life in a Day submission.
Shoot your own life
Go out and film very personal and very creative footage about your own life. Specific is better than general. Show the world what it is like to be you. For more guidance on what to shoot, Kevin MacDonald is asking participants to answer the following four questions through their videos:
The videos will eventually be edited into a feature film, so higher resolution will look better on the big screen. That being said, users with mobile phones are equally capable of capturing riveting footage, so don’t hold back if you don’t have access to high-quality equipment.
No music, but good sound is a must
Don’t use music in the background of your clips. Instead concentrate on getting the best sound possible from your camera. Beware of background noise and wind, and don’t touch the microphone. Use the video camera’s internal mic only if the subject is three feet away. A few video clips on producing better sound on your videos can be found here and here.
Don’t worry about editing
The directors want to see raw footage when they pick the best clips so don’t spend too much time editing your footage. If you need to trim or combine clips, you can use YouTube’s online Video Editor.
Make it social
Plan a “film up” on July 24, during which you and your friends can meet up and film together. Before that, see what other users around the world are planning by subscribing to the Life In A Day channel. Make videos about what you plan to film, and post them to your own YouTube channel to get feedback.
More tips from Kevin MacDonald and Ridley Scott can be found on the Guidelines page of the Life in a Day Channel. And you can also check out this video by Australia’s own Fully Sick Rapper to see how he interpreted the theme and presented a day in his life.
Posted by Ernesto Soriano, YouTube Team
This coming Saturday (July 24), you’ll have 24 hours to capture a few minutes of your life on camera and upload it to YouTube for consideration by Oscar winning directors Kevin Macdonald and Ridley Scott for inclusion in the first ever feature-length film to be created from YouTube content.
To help you get in touch with you inner director, we’ve pulled together a few tips to help you create your Life in a Day submission.
Shoot your own life
Go out and film very personal and very creative footage about your own life. Specific is better than general. Show the world what it is like to be you. For more guidance on what to shoot, Kevin MacDonald is asking participants to answer the following four questions through their videos:
- What are you afraid of?
- What do you love?
- What makes you laugh?
- What’s in your pockets?
The videos will eventually be edited into a feature film, so higher resolution will look better on the big screen. That being said, users with mobile phones are equally capable of capturing riveting footage, so don’t hold back if you don’t have access to high-quality equipment.
No music, but good sound is a must
Don’t use music in the background of your clips. Instead concentrate on getting the best sound possible from your camera. Beware of background noise and wind, and don’t touch the microphone. Use the video camera’s internal mic only if the subject is three feet away. A few video clips on producing better sound on your videos can be found here and here.
Don’t worry about editing
The directors want to see raw footage when they pick the best clips so don’t spend too much time editing your footage. If you need to trim or combine clips, you can use YouTube’s online Video Editor.
Make it social
Plan a “film up” on July 24, during which you and your friends can meet up and film together. Before that, see what other users around the world are planning by subscribing to the Life In A Day channel. Make videos about what you plan to film, and post them to your own YouTube channel to get feedback.
More tips from Kevin MacDonald and Ridley Scott can be found on the Guidelines page of the Life in a Day Channel. And you can also check out this video by Australia’s own Fully Sick Rapper to see how he interpreted the theme and presented a day in his life.
Posted by Ernesto Soriano, YouTube Team
Thursday, July 8, 2010
We’re sorry
A couple of years ago, Google started collecting WiFi network information via our Street View cars to improve location-based services like search and maps. In May, we announced that we had also mistakenly been collecting publicly broadcast payload data (information sent over the network). To be clear, we did not want and have never used any payload data in our products or services--and as soon as we discovered our error, we announced that we would stop collecting all WiFi data via our Street View vehicles and removed all WiFi reception equipment from them.
In Australia, we have been working with the Privacy Commissioner to support her investigation into what happened. We welcome today’s conclusion of this investigation, and as a result we have committed to working even more closely with them going forward on the privacy implications of our product launches.
We want to reiterate to Australians that this was a mistake for which we are sincerely sorry. Maintaining people’s trust is crucial to everything we do and we have to earn that trust every single day. We are acutely aware that we failed badly here.
In Australia, we have been working with the Privacy Commissioner to support her investigation into what happened. We welcome today’s conclusion of this investigation, and as a result we have committed to working even more closely with them going forward on the privacy implications of our product launches.
We want to reiterate to Australians that this was a mistake for which we are sincerely sorry. Maintaining people’s trust is crucial to everything we do and we have to earn that trust every single day. We are acutely aware that we failed badly here.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Guest post: Fully Sick Rapper's Life in a Day
(Editor's note: The is a guest post by The Fully Sick Rapper about his involvement in YouTube's special Life in a Day project, announced today).
Life in a Day is a unique collaboration between YouTube, Hollywood (director Kevin Macdonald, producer Ridley Scott) and the YouTube community, to create a documentary that will capture one day in the life of thousands around the world - July 24, 2010.
After being asked to help out, I have submitted a video to help promote the launch of this global collaboration, by capturing one day in my own life, and showing YouTube users an example of the kind of thing that they might like to submit.
I suppose my experience as a YouTube user is a unique one, so I tried to capture that with this particular video. For the first six months of this year, I have been living within an isolated negative pressure room in a Sydney Hospital, and have been using social media to stay connected to the world. A large part of this has been through YouTube, as The Fully Sick Rapper. This started as a way to give a few mates a laugh, and keep myself busy, but it fast became a way for me to keep myself distracted from the health issues I have been facing, share my experience with the world, bounce positive energy off people going through similar circumstances, and escape the four walls of my quarantined room. Over the six months I spent in hospital, I posted about 12 videos that racked up around 1.5million views on YouTube alone.
My videos before this one have all been comedic, and have been made just as much for my own laughs, as for the laughs of viewers. However, this particular project made me think about what it would be like to show people what a real day in my life involves. Yes, I have fun, and I dress up funny, and try to make myself and others laugh, but that wears off very quickly, and in the times when I'm not dancing around in front of the camera, there is a lot of very quiet, very lonely, me time. I believe that I used this time as best I could for self-reflection and personal development, and I feel as if I have come out the other side of this time in hospital having grown a lot as a man, but it hasn't been easy, and there has been times throughout my stay that I have looked at myself in the mirror and thought that I couldn't handle it any more.
This video captures my 180th day in quarantine, and is set to a poem and a piece of backing music that I wrote and recorded, from within my isolated hospital room. At the stage I made this, I had no clear picture of when I might be going home, and in fact it was only three days later that I was told the wonderful news that I could return home and spend a couple of weeks in isolation within the comfort of my own home, before being able to return to the community.
I have had some awesome support from YouTube viewers, and I plan to continue making videos to share online. In my time in hospital, I have also been working hard on a web-series called the "Fully Sick and the Side Effect Project" with my brother, which we plan to launch on YouTube soon.
Life in a Day is a unique collaboration between YouTube, Hollywood (director Kevin Macdonald, producer Ridley Scott) and the YouTube community, to create a documentary that will capture one day in the life of thousands around the world - July 24, 2010.
After being asked to help out, I have submitted a video to help promote the launch of this global collaboration, by capturing one day in my own life, and showing YouTube users an example of the kind of thing that they might like to submit.
I suppose my experience as a YouTube user is a unique one, so I tried to capture that with this particular video. For the first six months of this year, I have been living within an isolated negative pressure room in a Sydney Hospital, and have been using social media to stay connected to the world. A large part of this has been through YouTube, as The Fully Sick Rapper. This started as a way to give a few mates a laugh, and keep myself busy, but it fast became a way for me to keep myself distracted from the health issues I have been facing, share my experience with the world, bounce positive energy off people going through similar circumstances, and escape the four walls of my quarantined room. Over the six months I spent in hospital, I posted about 12 videos that racked up around 1.5million views on YouTube alone.
My videos before this one have all been comedic, and have been made just as much for my own laughs, as for the laughs of viewers. However, this particular project made me think about what it would be like to show people what a real day in my life involves. Yes, I have fun, and I dress up funny, and try to make myself and others laugh, but that wears off very quickly, and in the times when I'm not dancing around in front of the camera, there is a lot of very quiet, very lonely, me time. I believe that I used this time as best I could for self-reflection and personal development, and I feel as if I have come out the other side of this time in hospital having grown a lot as a man, but it hasn't been easy, and there has been times throughout my stay that I have looked at myself in the mirror and thought that I couldn't handle it any more.
This video captures my 180th day in quarantine, and is set to a poem and a piece of backing music that I wrote and recorded, from within my isolated hospital room. At the stage I made this, I had no clear picture of when I might be going home, and in fact it was only three days later that I was told the wonderful news that I could return home and spend a couple of weeks in isolation within the comfort of my own home, before being able to return to the community.
I have had some awesome support from YouTube viewers, and I plan to continue making videos to share online. In my time in hospital, I have also been working hard on a web-series called the "Fully Sick and the Side Effect Project" with my brother, which we plan to launch on YouTube soon.
Google Commerce Search offered to Australian retailers
The last things I bought online were a Nexus One phone charger and a bike cover. And I’m currently in the market for a new netbook, so I’m spending a lot of time reading reviews and forums about them.
I’m one of a growing number of Australians who are doing their shopping and researching on the web, because of the convenience it offers, and the ability to research and compare products to make sure I’m getting the right product at the right price. Our data shows that retail-related searches on google.com.au are up around 40% year on year, so this is a trend that can’t be ignored.
However, if you’re a regular online shopper like me, I think you’ll agree that it’s not always easy to find what you’re looking for online. It’s frustrating when I know that a site should have what I want to buy ... if only I could find it - the online version of being ignored by a sales assistant in the offline world. Maybe I’m spelling the word wrong - maybe I’m not searching for it in the way that the company describes the product. Either way, it’s disappointing, and it means Australian retailers are missing out on sales - both offline and online.
Today we’re announcing Google Commerce Search for Australian online retailers, and we’re hoping this product will address that challenge. Commerce Search helps visitors to retail sites browse, navigate, and search in the way they’re used to with Google search - enjoying many of the latest search innovations like Google Suggest. It’s more than 10 years of Google search innovation and R&D, with the power of cloud computing behind it, applied to e-commerce site search. Commerce Search can improve the performance of sites with e-commerce checkout options, and those that simply allow people to browse and compare, all in a very cost effective way.
We first launched Commerce Search to online retailers in the US and UK in November of last year, and retailers that have put it on their site are reporting increased conversions, sales, time on site, average order size, and improved loyalty and satisfaction.
We hope that making our infrastructure, skills and experience available will help boost Australia’s important retail sector, making it even easier for Aussies to find what they’re looking for and shop online, and leaving retailers free to focus on what they do best - retailing.
If you’re interested in finding out more about Google Commerce Search, contact your Google account manager, fill in this form, or reach out to local Google resellers HEDLOC or Neon Stingray.
I’m one of a growing number of Australians who are doing their shopping and researching on the web, because of the convenience it offers, and the ability to research and compare products to make sure I’m getting the right product at the right price. Our data shows that retail-related searches on google.com.au are up around 40% year on year, so this is a trend that can’t be ignored.
However, if you’re a regular online shopper like me, I think you’ll agree that it’s not always easy to find what you’re looking for online. It’s frustrating when I know that a site should have what I want to buy ... if only I could find it - the online version of being ignored by a sales assistant in the offline world. Maybe I’m spelling the word wrong - maybe I’m not searching for it in the way that the company describes the product. Either way, it’s disappointing, and it means Australian retailers are missing out on sales - both offline and online.
Today we’re announcing Google Commerce Search for Australian online retailers, and we’re hoping this product will address that challenge. Commerce Search helps visitors to retail sites browse, navigate, and search in the way they’re used to with Google search - enjoying many of the latest search innovations like Google Suggest. It’s more than 10 years of Google search innovation and R&D, with the power of cloud computing behind it, applied to e-commerce site search. Commerce Search can improve the performance of sites with e-commerce checkout options, and those that simply allow people to browse and compare, all in a very cost effective way.
We first launched Commerce Search to online retailers in the US and UK in November of last year, and retailers that have put it on their site are reporting increased conversions, sales, time on site, average order size, and improved loyalty and satisfaction.
We hope that making our infrastructure, skills and experience available will help boost Australia’s important retail sector, making it even easier for Aussies to find what they’re looking for and shop online, and leaving retailers free to focus on what they do best - retailing.
If you’re interested in finding out more about Google Commerce Search, contact your Google account manager, fill in this form, or reach out to local Google resellers HEDLOC or Neon Stingray.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Follow le Tour with SBS and YouTube
The peloton is off! As a keen amateur cyclist, the 21 days of the Tour de France is one of my favourite sporting events - brilliance, agony, and drama every year. I’ll be watching the HTC team especially closely - my new bike is the same as that team rides.
There’s a difference in how I’ll follow the race this year - SBS have set up a dedicated Tour de France YouTube channel. It features specially produced content which shows the guts and glory of the champions, the best finishes, profiles of past winners, videos about our very own Cadel Evans and Stuart O’Grady, and of course, highlights so you can catch up with this year’s race if you miss the nightly coverage on SBS.
Go the Aussie riders, and check out SBS’s new channel for another perspective on the Tour.
There’s a difference in how I’ll follow the race this year - SBS have set up a dedicated Tour de France YouTube channel. It features specially produced content which shows the guts and glory of the champions, the best finishes, profiles of past winners, videos about our very own Cadel Evans and Stuart O’Grady, and of course, highlights so you can catch up with this year’s race if you miss the nightly coverage on SBS.
Go the Aussie riders, and check out SBS’s new channel for another perspective on the Tour.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Guest post: Travellr.com talks about building your own location matcher
(Editor's note: The final post in our guest blogger series for DevFest AU 2010 is from Michael Shaw, Travellr.com's Senior Architect responsible for Travellr's core technology stack. Michael works on Travellr.com's real-time Q&A recommendation engine, natural language processor, and location database. Michael's in-house research also includes performance scalability and reputations systems. Outside of work, Michael is a self-confessed "foodie" and an expert locator of amazing restaurants. Warning: this post is highly technical, it's for the experts only ... but it's such a cool technical achievement, we wanted to share more widely ).
Google Maps provide a really handy geocoding API which can be used to extract locations from text input, for example - "Byron Bay, Australia". However the Google Maps geocoding API expects an "address" to geocode, so what do you do if you have a complex sentence like "Where is a nice beach near Byron Bay to go surfing?". In this case, the geocoding API returns zero results, and you can't find a match. It's time to roll up your sleeves and build your own location extractor!
With a little help from some open-source natural language processing (NLP) toolkits you can extract locations from text input and be on your merry way to mapping them on Google Maps. And we're going to show you how!
Location extraction in a nutshell
We developed a practical NLP based solution for Travellr.com using OpenNLP, an open-source natural language processing library. OpenNLP provides many language processing tools, including a Sentence Detector, Tokenizer, Part of Speech Tagger and a Chunker. We used these tools to construct a Named Entity Recognizer (NER) to match locations in free-form text. (We chose to build our own named entity recogniser over existing libraries so we could tailor it to casual internet text as well as use our location database).
Our approach is to find words that might be the name of a location, match them against our locations, and then rank the results to determine the most probable match.
The process of our location extractor is illustrated below:
Here are our steps detailed a little more:
Step 1. Using a sentence detector and a tokenizer, we break the text into individual words. While it seems simple at first, simply splitting sentences based on punctuation can lead to problems; the sentence "Where's the best place to buy bike for less than $200.00 in Sydney?" would be split on the full stop in "$200.00" if we didn't use a smarter sentence detector.
Step 2. We then tag each of the words (tokens) with what's called a "Part of Speech". Parts of speech are similar to the categories nouns/verbs/adjectives/adverbs etc. but are finer grained categories based on semantic distinctions. This helps to highlight proper nouns (which can often be location names), as well as prepositions which are often used when talking about location centric content.
Step 3. We then use a "Chunker" to identify and group short phrases together. This can be extremely useful in identifying multi-word location names, as in our example of "Byron Bay".
Step 4. We then give each of the words a numeric score based on the likelihood that they're part of a location name.
The following features are examined to calculate a score for each word:
- How common the word is (i.e. 'it', 'and' are common)
- Current word part of speech (i.e. 'proper noun' is a positive indicator)
- Previous word part of speech
- Is the current phrase/chunk preceded by a preposition (i.e. 'surfing in Sydney'?)
- Capitalisation (i.e. 'orange' vs 'Orange')
- Chunk labels (locations are often in noun phrases, ie: 'Byron Bay', 'Las Vegas' )
- Proximity of predictive words (nearby words that can help denote the presence of a location name, i.e. 'in', 'to', 'near')
Step 5. Once we calculate the words scores, we search for the words with high scores against our location database. We also have a second pass which helps identify which is the best match. The second pass involves things such as the word "Australia" when near "Sydney" reinforces that we might be talking about "Sydney, Australia" instead of "Sydney, Canada", as well as typo/spelling correction.
Mapping locations on World Nomads Journals
We decided to put our location extractor to the test on more than 37,000 blog entries hosted on World Nomads' Journals, a free travel blogging service provided by WorldNomads.com. We plotted the results on Google Earth and the results were amazing - we were able to map blog content to exact locations on the globe. In the example below, we matched the blog text "At Leigh Creek we came across the huge open cut coal mine" to Leigh Creek in South Australia. This is good example of what you can achieve with your own location extractor and Google's mapping tools.
Try it out yourself
You can try out Travellr's location extractor using our online location web service, which also includes some debugging information about the word scoring. Travellr's location extractor is provided as a REST web service built on Scala + Step and deployed on Jetty.
Further reading and tools:
If you'd like to learn more about natural language processing, check out the following resources:
Learning Resources:
- NLTK Book (free & open, companion of the Natural Language Toolkit, an awesome introduction to NLP)
- Foundations for Statistical Natural Language Processing (Manning & Schuetze)
Libraries:
- OpenNLP (java, MaxEnt based, thread safe, what we presently use for sentence detection, tokenization, tagging and chunking)
- Stanford NLP Tools (java based, not thread safe)
Google Maps provide a really handy geocoding API which can be used to extract locations from text input, for example - "Byron Bay, Australia". However the Google Maps geocoding API expects an "address" to geocode, so what do you do if you have a complex sentence like "Where is a nice beach near Byron Bay to go surfing?". In this case, the geocoding API returns zero results, and you can't find a match. It's time to roll up your sleeves and build your own location extractor!
With a little help from some open-source natural language processing (NLP) toolkits you can extract locations from text input and be on your merry way to mapping them on Google Maps. And we're going to show you how!
Location extraction in a nutshell
We developed a practical NLP based solution for Travellr.com using OpenNLP, an open-source natural language processing library. OpenNLP provides many language processing tools, including a Sentence Detector, Tokenizer, Part of Speech Tagger and a Chunker. We used these tools to construct a Named Entity Recognizer (NER) to match locations in free-form text. (We chose to build our own named entity recogniser over existing libraries so we could tailor it to casual internet text as well as use our location database).
Our approach is to find words that might be the name of a location, match them against our locations, and then rank the results to determine the most probable match.
The process of our location extractor is illustrated below:
Here are our steps detailed a little more:Step 1. Using a sentence detector and a tokenizer, we break the text into individual words. While it seems simple at first, simply splitting sentences based on punctuation can lead to problems; the sentence "Where's the best place to buy bike for less than $200.00 in Sydney?" would be split on the full stop in "$200.00" if we didn't use a smarter sentence detector.
Step 2. We then tag each of the words (tokens) with what's called a "Part of Speech". Parts of speech are similar to the categories nouns/verbs/adjectives/adverbs etc. but are finer grained categories based on semantic distinctions. This helps to highlight proper nouns (which can often be location names), as well as prepositions which are often used when talking about location centric content.
Step 3. We then use a "Chunker" to identify and group short phrases together. This can be extremely useful in identifying multi-word location names, as in our example of "Byron Bay".
Step 4. We then give each of the words a numeric score based on the likelihood that they're part of a location name.
The following features are examined to calculate a score for each word:
- How common the word is (i.e. 'it', 'and' are common)
- Current word part of speech (i.e. 'proper noun' is a positive indicator)
- Previous word part of speech
- Is the current phrase/chunk preceded by a preposition (i.e. 'surfing in Sydney'?)
- Capitalisation (i.e. 'orange' vs 'Orange')
- Chunk labels (locations are often in noun phrases, ie: 'Byron Bay', 'Las Vegas' )
- Proximity of predictive words (nearby words that can help denote the presence of a location name, i.e. 'in', 'to', 'near')
Step 5. Once we calculate the words scores, we search for the words with high scores against our location database. We also have a second pass which helps identify which is the best match. The second pass involves things such as the word "Australia" when near "Sydney" reinforces that we might be talking about "Sydney, Australia" instead of "Sydney, Canada", as well as typo/spelling correction.
Mapping locations on World Nomads Journals
We decided to put our location extractor to the test on more than 37,000 blog entries hosted on World Nomads' Journals, a free travel blogging service provided by WorldNomads.com. We plotted the results on Google Earth and the results were amazing - we were able to map blog content to exact locations on the globe. In the example below, we matched the blog text "At Leigh Creek we came across the huge open cut coal mine" to Leigh Creek in South Australia. This is good example of what you can achieve with your own location extractor and Google's mapping tools.
You can try out Travellr's location extractor using our online location web service, which also includes some debugging information about the word scoring. Travellr's location extractor is provided as a REST web service built on Scala + Step and deployed on Jetty.
Further reading and tools:
If you'd like to learn more about natural language processing, check out the following resources:
Learning Resources:
- NLTK Book (free & open, companion of the Natural Language Toolkit, an awesome introduction to NLP)
- Foundations for Statistical Natural Language Processing (Manning & Schuetze)
Libraries:
- OpenNLP (java, MaxEnt based, thread safe, what we presently use for sentence detection, tokenization, tagging and chunking)
- Stanford NLP Tools (java based, not thread safe)
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