Google gets to talking

Posted by David Bau, Google Talk software engineer

Google has a friendly talk-in-the-hallway kind of culture that I love, but Google engineers seem to be everywhere now, from Bangalore to Tokyo to Dublin to Zurich. I work on a team that's in Mountain View, Kirkland, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. We like to talk about the projects we're working on, but a hallway is hard to come by. So we've put together a gadget that keeps us talking, even when we're on different sides of the planet.

It's called Google Talk — a small program that lets you call and IM other Google Talk friends over the Internet for free. We're releasing it in beta today for all Gmail users (once you sign on, you can start inviting any of your friends to try it too).

The sound is great — usually much better than a regular phone — and it's a perfect way to use that computer microphone you never realized you had. My laptop with its built-in mic makes a superb speakerphone. Google Talk also works great with just about any standard mic or headset you can plug in to a computer.

We're already finding that Google Talk is pretty useful, as it's great to be able to see when friends are awake and online in London, Tokyo, or the exotic Kirkland Public Library. And of course it's wonderful to be able to ring friends on a whim, without having to dial all those pesky country codes.

Geeks in particular might notice that the Google Talk service runs on the open XMPP protocol. So even though many people will log on using Google Talk, you can also use iChat, GAIM, Trillian, Adium, Psi, or another one of the many great XMPP clients out there.

There's a reason for that openness. We believe Internet communication networks should openly interoperate, and that they should include IM and voice. The openness of the Google Talk service to XMPP clients is just a start. We like SIP too, and we want to also federate between servers. We've already started working with our friends at EarthLink and Sipphone to federate our respective real-time communications services so all our users can talk to each other for free. If you're interested in federating with us or would like to interoperate in a way that we have not yet implemented, let us know.

Introducing Desktop 2

Posted by Michael Krantz, Google Blog Team

At Google we’re never satisfied. Last fall we released Google Desktop Search, which finds reams of information of all kinds on your computer with Google-fast speed and accuracy. But then our product people got to thinking: what about when you’re feeling kind of lazy? Wouldn’t it be cool if your information could come to you, both from the web and from your own computer?

So today we’re pleased to introduce Google Desktop 2, whose new features include:

-- Sidebar, an intelligent desktop panel that gives you continually updated personalized info like your email, photos, stock prices, weather, RSS and Atom feeds, and so on. All of it is automatically customized for you, and ever-more-precisely tailored to your own interests based on how you use your computer. Think of Sidebar as an information valet who’s really resourceful, conscientious and insightful (and whose salary is zero).

-- Expanded and improved desktop search. If it’s on your hard drive and we can’t find it, you might want to ask yourself whether you really need it - and if you do, you might want to download a plug-in, or build one yourself.

-- Quick Find, which lets you search your hard drive to find files and launch applications as fast as you can type.

-- Outlook search and integration. If you’re an Outlook user, this is probably your dream come true.

You can learn more about Desktop 2 here. Enjoy.

The machines do the translating

Posted by Franz Och, Research Scientist

This year, Google entered the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Machine Translation evaluation, an event that has taken place annually since 2001 to support research in this area and to improve the state of the art. Participants included university labs, industrial labs, government labs and commercial machine translation companies from all over the world.

Our approach was to use statistical translation models learned from parallel text, that is, sets of documents and their translations. The system learns a model automatically from the parallel data. This approach differs from the rule-based approach used by many existing commercial machine translation companies which is based on large sets of handwritten translation rules.

We're very pleased with the results of this evaluation. Our computing infrastructure allows us to do a lot of experiments and work with huge data sets very easily.

The linguasphere at large

Posted by Enrique Muñoz Torres, International Product Manager

Since part of our mission is making the world's information universally accessible and useful, we strive to offer our services in as many languages as we can.

Today we're happy to announce the launch of Google in Cambodian, Corsican, Kazakh, Lingala, Pashto, Quechua, Shona, Tajik, Tatar, Tonga, and Yoruba. This launch raises the count of Google languages to 116.

We would like to extend our thanks to the volunteers who have translated Google into these languages. If you can't find it yet in your own lingua franca (please note: we do already offer Swedish Chef, Hacker, and Klingon) consider becoming a volunteer translator through the Google in Your Language program.

That's so random

Posted by Matthew Vosburgh, Google Video Software Engineer

The cool thing about Google Video is that anyone, anywhere can send us their videos, and then everyone in the world can see them. Summer intern Nestor Hernandez wanted to make sure every video had a chance to be seen, so he came up with a page that displays a grid of random video links. We all liked this idea so much (if it wasn't for this new feature, for instance, I never might have found my current favorite) that along with launching a new random video page, we also now have 3 random video links right on the Google Video front page. Every time you refresh either page you'll see different links, so enjoy, and visit us often.

Brazilian Model Gisele Bundchen

Born July 20th, 1980, in Horizontina, Rio Grande de Sul, Brazil. Gisele is a supermodel beauty. Gisele, raised in Horizontina, a small town of less then 20,000 people located in the southern part of Brazil. With six daughters in the family, her five other sisters are all natural phenomenons. Raquel, Graziela, Gabriela, Patricia, and Rafaela are all aspiring models.

As a school girl, she was taunted with the nickname Olive Oil, the waif thin girl friend of Popeye the Sailor in cartoons. Her career as a model started when Gisele was on a school trip to Sao Paulo in 1995 when she was only 15 years old. While grabbing a Big Mac in a shopping mall, she was seen by a modeling agent who approached her and asked if she had any interest in becoming a model. Despite her father's lack of approval of the career choice, he allowed her to move to Sao Paulo and she entered the Elite Look Modeling Competition, and her career took off.

Gisele has modeled for all the major fashion houses such as Ralph Lauren, Versace, Valentino and Chloe. She also has appeared on several magazine covers such as Vogue, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar and Rolling Stone.

Gisele has recently signed a multimillion-dollar contract with North American lingerie firm, Victoria's Secret. As a result, the Brazilian beauty will appear in several of their lingerie, beauty and hosiery campaigns for television and print, as well as in their point-of-sale materials. According to rumors that circulated amongst the fashion crowd during New York Fashion Week, Gisele will receive a cool 20 million US dollars for the job.

Gisele currently lives in Los Angeles, an apartment in New York and a house out in the country in up-state New York. She has had her belly-button pierced and has a tattoo of a star drawn on the inside of her left wrist. It is nice to see that Gisele, albeit a young, rich and famous model, still maintains her naturalness and a down-to-earth personality.

Courts signal that Google's keyword policy is lawful

Posted by David Drummond, VP and General Counsel

There have been a few erroneous reports suggesting that a judge ruled against Google in a case involving GEICO. It's actually the reverse of that, so we thought we'd clarify a few things about that decision.

Last December, the judge in the case ruled decisively in our favor on the issue of keywords. In her oral ruling, she stated that GEICO had failed to prove that using "GEICO" as a keyword to trigger ads was likely to confuse consumers. Then, earlier this month, she issued a written ruling explaining the reasoning behind the December ruling.

In her written ruling, she stated that GEICO's own evidence "refutes the allegation that the use of the trademark as a keyword, without more, causes a likelihood of confusion." That is a clear signal that Google's policy on trademarks and keywords is lawful.

What has generated the confusion is another part of the ruling, of little significance to Google, that relates to the use of "GEICO" in ad text. Google already has a policy that prohibits advertisers from using someone else's trademark in their ad text when the trademark owner objects. Our policy on that is here.

It's been our longstanding policy -- dating back to well before GEICO filed its lawsuit against us -- to block use of a trademark in ad text when the trademark owner objects. GEICO said that there were instances when their trademark appeared in competitors' ads even after GEICO objected. In her December oral ruling, the judge called this a "narrow issue," and said that Google and GEICO should "see whether or not there can be a resolution of what is left in the case." In the recent written decision, she reiterated these points, and explained that while she thought that the ads with "GEICO" in the ad text were confusing, she hadn't decided whether Google was liable for that.

Judge Brinkema's decision is consistent with several other court opinions. A court in Austria recently ruled in our favor, concluding that the use of a trademark to trigger ads isn't likely to confuse consumers. A German court has also ruled in our favor on this issue. And in a case not involving Google, a federal appeals court in the United States recently reached the same result in a keyword-triggered ad case.

We're very pleased with Judge Brinkema's decision, which tracks our AdWords trademark policy. The decision is a victory for consumers.

Finally, even though we believe our current policy strikes a good balance between advertisers, users and trademark owners, don't be surprised if our policy evolves over time. We believe it is possible for an advertiser to create an ad that uses a trademark in a legal and non-confusing way - after all that is what comparative advertising is all about.