Maps Just Got OCCA

Language and translation is a major focus of our work at Google because it’s so intimately connected to our mission of making the world’s information accessible to all. Australia, with its highly idiomatic local language, was found to be a perfect test bed for the next generation of language translation technology developed locally in the Sydney office. By synthesising millions of aggregated search inputs from Australians as well as scanning 23 seasons of Home and Away scripts, we are able to Optimise for Colloquial Cultural Articulation (OCCA) - which means our products can now be tailored specifically for the typical Strayan user.

To give you an example, we already know that if someone searches for ‘cricket’ in Australia they’re more likely interested in the sport than the insect. With our new OCCA framework, we can now go further and tell that if an Aussie searches on “automatic wiki”, they’re probably referring to the automatic wicket keeper common in backyard cricket and not an automatically updated bulletin board or “wiki”.

OCCA greatly reduces the latency between a user’s thought and ability to pinpoint information; a boon for local users who’d have Buckleys makin’ sense of American English.

Aussies around the country can stand tall; OCCA’d Maps are a world-first that promise to take Google Maps to the Back of Bourke and beyond.

Seeya, clear as mud driving directions, G’day, OCCA! No more argy bargy on family road trips, eh?

You never win till you have a go
As you drive across our sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, OCCA’d Maps now talks your lingo. Vote for your favourite phrases on this form. We’re open for suggestions. Tweet your new OCCA directions using #OCCAMaps (like these).

Directions
"Chucka U-ey" - Execute a U-Turn
“Hang a Right” - Make a right turn
“Fang a Left” - Make a left turn
"Hit the frog and toad" - The road
"Hoof it" - Walk
"100 Clicks" - 100 kilometres
"Not within Cooee" - Not close by
"Down the road" - Unspecified term indicating distance

Driving Styles
"Hit the anchors" - Brake, now
"Flat chat" - Going very fast
“Hoon” - Fast, irresponsible driver
"Bingle" - Car accident (not Lara)
"Bogged" - Stuck
“All over the shop” - Veering across lanes
“Rough as guts” - Car needs a tune
“Bag em up” - Smoke the tires
“Drive like my Grandma” - Going too slow
“Amber Gambler” - Runs orange lights
“Sunday Driver” - Poor driver.

Posted by Thor Mitchell, Product Manager

Eureka! New Google Australia Eureka prize for computer science

I'm excited to announce the inaugural Google Australia Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science. The $10,000 prize will be awarded annually to an individual or team of Aussies who demonstrate real innovation in computer science.

Each year, the Australian Museum Eureka Prizes reward excellence in research and innovation, science leadership, school science, and science journalism and communication. Google is delighted to sponsor a new category as part of the Eureka awards.

Here at Google we're passionately committed to innovation in computer science. We hope that by encouraging future generations to embrace the power of an IT education now, we'll foster our next generation of innovators. As part of our ongoing support, we have set up other grants including the 2010 Google Australia and New Zealand Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship which is aimed at helping Australian women become global IT leaders.

Entries in the Google Australia Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science should be cutting-edge and represent a tangible advance in their field. The winning innovation will have the potential to improve the lives of many other Australians.

You can enter as an individual or as a team, and your submission can take the form of a research contribution, commercial product or completely private work such as an open source development.

Enter online here and submit your form along with your supporting documents before midnight AEST Friday May 7, 2010.

Best of luck!

Posted by Alan Noble, Engineering Director Google Australia and New Zealand

Turn left at the chemist and I'll meet you at the ATM

In August last year, we added icons and labels of prominent businesses and places of interest directly onto Google Maps, making it easy to get to know cities when you're on holiday, find inspiration for new restaurants in unfamiliar neighbourhoods, or even just browse around an area for fun. It helps Google Maps to be even richer in information - check out how Sydney appears when you can see all of the restaurants and other places of interest in just a couple of city blocks.


Not only can you see where these places are, but you can click the icons to get a summary of what the place is about and explore further by choosing more info to see business information, reviews, photos, and more.

Today we launched another new Google Maps feature that we've been working on here in the Sydney office, that builds on this feature. Now when you visit Google Maps in Australia, it'll be easier to find some of those shops and other businesses you visit most often because when you zoom in, some businesses will be identified by a small representation of their logo. These easily recognisable logos more closely depict online what the offline world looks like, so next time you're trying to find your way on the map you can navigate more easily using these icons as landmarks. Can't remember the name of a cross street? Next time, try telling someone you'll meet them 'across the road from the ATM'!

Below you can see an example of what this will look like when zoomed in:


As well as making it easier for you to find the nearest burger joint or ATM at a single glance, this new feature helps local business owners promote their physical location on the map via an easily recognisable logo, and therefore connect with a larger audience. Advertisers will pay to have these sponsored map icons appear on the Map instead of a generic icon, helping to generate awareness of their locations among the millions of people who visit Google Maps every day. If you're an advertiser that would like to talk to us about having your business appear like this on Google Maps, please add your details to this form.

Meanwhile, I'm off to do some electronics shopping - seeing that JB Hi-Fi logo on the map reminds me that I've been promising to pick up a new webcam for months now, and I really should get onto it!

Posted by Matthew Leske, Product Manager

Be a Cluey Voter

As a South Aussie, I'm voting in the South Australian state election this Saturday, 20 March 2010. There are 74 candidates running for the 11 seats in the SA Legislative Council (upper house of Parliament).

State legislative councillors, like senators at the federal level, are elected by a preferential voting system, known as proportional representation. Like many voters, I prefer to vote "below the line", i.e., deciding on my own order of choice for all the candidates by numbering each and every box. Voting below the line gives voters more flexibility to reflect their personal preferences. But sequentially numbering each and every candidate from 1 to N (where N = 74 at this SA election) is time consuming and error prone. That's why many voters choose to vote "above the line", relying on the so-called "Group Voting Ticket" by which a party allocates its preferences.

But what if you could vote below the line easily, without the risk of mistakes? I developed a simple web application to do just this, which I've called Cluey Voter.

Just specify your level of support for each group on the ballot, and Cluey Voter numbers candidates to reflect your order. Note that numbering is automatically generated and is in no way any recommendation on how to vote!

So try it out, and be a cluey voter!

Posted by Alan Noble, Engineering Director, Google Australia and New Zealand

2010 CHOICE Best Technology Innovator

Last night I attended the inaugural CHOICE Awards and was honoured to accept on behalf of Google the award for 2010 CHOICE Best Techology Innovator.

To be recognised for innovation, value, transparency, social benefits, competition, and reliability means a great deal to all of us at Google. Our business is innovation -- we all consider ourselves innovators and our approach is to focus on the user, to bet on the web and to keep it open.

The great thing about innovation is that it has no bounds -- it's geographically blind. We’ve made the most of that here in Australia with small teams of dedicated engineers working on big projects such as Google Maps, Apps and Wave. We try to develop products for the future - not just the way people use the web right now, but the way they'll use it in five and ten years.


Thank you to Choice for the award! Next year, I promise to wear a suit.

Posted by Lars Rasmussen, Software Engineering Manager

Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship for Women in Technology

Dr. Anita Borg devoted her adult life to revolutionising the way we think about technology and dismantling barriers that keep women and minorities from entering computing and technology fields. Anita's technical expertise and fearless vision inspires and motivates women to become leaders in creating technology.

At Google, we believe that the wave of information and communications on the web is changing lives for the better and creates fantastic options for students choosing careers in technology. We want to continue Anita's vision for women and we're excited to announce the 2010 Google Australia and New Zealand Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. Through the scholarship, we aim to encourage women to excel in computing and technology and become active role models and leaders.

We're looking for women with a strong academic background who have demonstrated leadership. Each scholar recipient will receive a $5,000 scholarship towards the 2011 academic year. In addition all finalists and scholarship recipients will be invited to an expenses-paid networking retreat to be held at Google’s Sydney Engineering centre in September.

The scholarship is open for women students at an Australian or New Zealand university who have completed one or more years of a Bachelors degree with at least one year of study remaining, whether as part of a Bachelors or postgraduate degree. We're looking for women studying Computer Science, Software Engineering, Informatics, or a closely related technical field, who have maintained an excellent academic record. See full information and apply here.

Good luck!

Posted by Isa Notermans, People Programs Specialist

Google, transparency, and our not-so-secret formula

(Editor's note: This is a cross-post from our European Public Policy blog).

Recently the European Commission opened a preliminary inquiry into competition complaints. Part of the complaint alleges that Google operates without sufficient transparency into how and why web sites rank in our search results. The notion that Google isn't transparent is tough for me to swallow. Google has set the standard in how we communicate with web site publishers. Let me tell you about some of the ways we explain to sites how we rank them and why.

One of the most widely-discussed parts of Google's scoring has always been PageRank. That "secret ingredient" is hardly a secret. Here it is. That early paper not only gave the formula for PageRank, but mentioned many of the other signals in Google's ranking, including anchor text, the location of words within documents, the relative proximity of query words in a document, the size and type of fonts used, the raw HTML of each page, and capitalisation of words. Google has continued to publish literally hundreds of research papers over the years. Those papers reveal many of the "secret formulas" for how Google works and document essential infrastructure that Google uses. Some of these papers have spurred not only open-source projects but entire companies in their own right.

Academic papers are one thing, but Google also aims to engage and educate in many other ways. In 1999, Sergey Brin participated in the first Search Engine Strategies conference for webmasters. In 2001, Google became one of the first search engines to engage online at a publisher forum called WebmasterWorld. One representative (GoogleGuy) has posted over 2800 times, while another (AdWordsAdvisor) has posted almost 5000 times.

Google's efforts at transparency and communication have evolved with the web. We started blogging in May 2004 and have written thousands of posts on our official blog. Google now has over 70 official blogs, including an official webmaster blog specifically to help site owners understand how Google works and help them rank appropriately in our search results. Google publishes more blog posts than almost any other large company. We also provide extensive public documentation on our web site with advice for publishers, in dozens of different languages.

As the head of Google's webspam team (which tries to stop attempts to violate our clearly documented, public webmaster guidelines), people often ask me questions about how Google works. That's why I started my own personal blog in 2005 and have written hundreds of posts about Google. The topics range from common web site mistakes to advice for new bloggers. I've had the pleasure of speaking to web site owners or doing public web site reviews at over 30 different search conferences.

We've tried all sorts of experiments to help site owners understand how Google's search ranking works. We've done multiple live webmaster chats online with hundreds of simultaneous participants. We've experimented with tweeting. We've participated in podcasts. And here's one of my favorite ways we've helped to break out of the black box and give advice to publishers: in the past year, we've taken questions from the public and posted hundreds of video answers on a webmaster video channel. Those videos have been watched over 1.5 million times (!). We also engage online across the blogosphere to answer questions about Google's practices.

The list goes on and on. Google has reached out to other search engines on methods to make life easier for website owners. The resulting standards include specifying preferred web site url formats as well as Sitemaps, an easy way for webmasters to tell search engines about the pages on their site. Google provides a webmaster forum where both Google employees and helpful outside "superusers" hang out and answer questions about specific sites. We've run in-person website clinics to provide specific one-on-one feedback and advice in locations from San Francisco to India to Russia to virtual site clinics in Spanish. We've even confirmed ranking signals that Google doesn't use in our algorithms, such as the keywords meta tag, which saves site owners from doing needless work and helps avoid frivolous lawsuits.

The frustrating thing is that even if all 20,000 employees at Google worked full-time on answering questions from website publishers, we still couldn't talk to every site owner. Why not? Because the web has over 192 million domain names registered. That's why we introduced Google Webmaster Tools, a one-stop location to provide scalable, self-service information and to let webmasters provide us with data. Describing the powerful tools we provide to site owners for free would take an entire other blog post, but a number of the offerings include:

• Site owners can get recommendations about issues like duplicate meta descriptions or missing title tags.
• Site owners who we believe have violated our webmaster guidelines and where Google has taken corresponding action regarding their site in our index can submit a request for reconsideration.
• Site owners who have been hacked can get details about malware on their site. After they remove the hacked content, they can fetch pages from their site as Googlebot to make sure the malicious content is really gone.
• Site owners can find out about errors that Google encountered while crawling their site.

A Google employee recently blogged about using these free, public tools to diagnose an issue with his webhost where he had exceeded his bandwidth quota. Millions of webmasters have taken similar advantage of Google's free tools for site owners to get helpful information about their site.

At Google, we try to be as open as we can, even to the point of helping users export their data out of Google's products. At the same time, we don't think it's unreasonable for any business to have some trade secrets, not least because we don’t want to help spammers and crackers game our system. If people who are trying to game search rankings knew every single detail about how we rank sites, it would be easier for them to 'spam' our results with pages that are not relevant and are frustrating to users -- including porn and malware sites.

Ultimately, criticising Google for its "secret formula" is an easy claim to make, but it just isn't true. Google has worked day after day for years to be open, to educate publishers about how we rank sites, and to answer questions from both publishers and our users. So if that's how people choose to define "secret," then ours must be the worst kept secret in the world of search.

Posted by Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Search Quality Team

Victoria lands 90 new innovation starters

I'm thrilled to see a great initiative in Victoria. Premier John Brumby has announced that 90 new Victorian Government datasets have been released and set free for public access and consumption from www.data.vic.gov.au. That's 90 new ways to kick start innovation.

Premier Brumby has also launched App My State to encourage Victorians to use these 90 datasets to create new services to help Victorians. There are $100000 in prizes up for grabs, entries close on April 23rd.

At Google we're big believers that information is more powerful when it's set free. Much of the effort of the Government 2.0 Taskforce I took part in last year was put into making public sector information freely accessible to everyone. I firmly believe that there's no point keeping publicly funded, non-confidential public data (such as transit information, post box locations, recycling and waste collection information, public school catchment areas and countless others) locked up behind a Government firewall, of little use to anyone. I want to see this PSI freely available to all. It will promote great social benefits, not least the immense potential for innovative new products and services to be developed here. We saw some great mash ups come out of our Hackfest competition.

Posted by Alan Noble, Engineering Director Google Australia and New Zealand