Celebrating free expression 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall became a striking symbol for free expression far beyond the borders of Germany. Just 20 years later, Iranian citizens used online tools like YouTube and Twitter to share firsthand accounts of the brutal government crackdown waged against protesters disputing the country's election results. Many Iranians risked their lives to document the violence, despite the government's attempts to expel journalists and stifle any voices of dissent.

The democratizing power of the Internet has enabled individuals to share their stories with a global audience in ways never before possible, and given a voice to those who wouldn't otherwise be heard.

To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we're launching a YouTube channel — youtube.com/GoogleFreeExpression — to highlight and celebrate free expression around the world, and we want to hear from you.

This channel is designed to feature your stories and reflections on free expression. Tell us about how you or someone you know has taken a stand for free expression. Perhaps you've protested against something you didn't agree with, taken action when someone else's free speech was being suppressed or been inspired by someone who has stood up for the right to speak out. Make a short video sharing your experience, upload it to YouTube, and add it as a reply to this one:



We'll be featuring the best submissions on the Google Free Expression channel, so be sure to check back in the weeks to come. We look forward to hearing from you.

Posted by Annette Kroeber-Riel, Senior European Policy Counsel

Happy 10th birthday, Blogger

Much has changed since Blogger was released in August of 1999. Writing about Blogger's founding in his book Say Everything, Scott Rosenberg describes the effect of Blogger simply: "It cleared the obstacles from the path between brain and Web page." As the phenomenon of blogging has grown and evolved over the past ten years, so too has Blogger, adapting to a world of fast-paced communication and allowing millions to tell their stories. When Google acquired Blogger in February of 2003, about 250,000 people visited Blogger per month. Today, that number is more than 300 million.

In our announcement about the Blogger acquisition, we said (somewhat ironically, not in a blog post — the Official Google Blog was still more than a year away): "Blogs are a global self-publishing phenomenon that connect Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation." We're proud that Blogger continues to be a force for free expression worldwide and that it is growing quickly despite its maturity. In the past two years alone, the number of people contributing to a blog has more than doubled, and every second of every day, a new blog is created on Blogger.

To commemorate Blogger's 10th birthday, we've been releasing birthday presents as our way of saying thanks to the millions of users who have made Blogger what it is today. So far, we have released 5 presents and today we're announcing 2 more, courtesy of two Blogger partners:

• Socialvibe: When Socialvibe approached us about finding a way to empower the Blogger community to help raise funds for charities, we couldn't pass up the opportunity to leverage Blogger's reach to do some good. Starting this week, Blogger users can show their support for charities and raise funds by adding a gadget to their blog. The Socialvibe team has challenged us to raise $50,000 for charity by the end of the year, and we're pretty confident we can beat that.
• InfoThinker: If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch and a Blogger blog, you're in luck. The team at InfoThinker (makers of the iPhone app BlogPress) was eager to help celebrate Blogger's birthday. Earlier this week they submitted a free version of BlogPress that works only on Blogger to the iPhone App Store. Blogging on the go has never been so easy! Keep an eye out for the app.

Here is the full list of presents. We have more in store over the next couple weeks, and we're just as excited about a number of developments planned for later in the year. With thanks to Blogger founders Meg, Paul and Ev without whom we wouldn't have a 10th birthday to celebrate, and to the millions of people around the world who rely on Blogger to tell their story every day, here's to our next decade.

Posted by Rick Klau, Product Manager

Extending Google services in Africa

At Google we seek to serve a broad base of people — not only those who can afford to access the Internet from the convenience of their workplace or with a computer at home. It's important to reach users wherever they are, with the information they need, in areas with the greatest information poverty. In many places around the world, people look to their phones, rather than their computers, to find information they need in their daily lives. This is especially true in Africa, which has the world’s highest mobile growth rate and where mobile phone penetration is six times Internet penetration. One-third of the population owns a mobile phone and many more have access to one.

Most mobile devices in Africa only have voice and SMS capabilities, and so we are focusing our technological efforts in that continent on SMS. Today, we are announcing Google SMS, a suite of mobile applications which will allow people to access information, via SMS, on a diverse number of topics including health and agriculture tips, news, local weather, sports, and more. The suite also includes Google Trader, a SMS-based “marketplace” application that helps buyers and sellers find each other. People can find, "sell" or "buy" any type of product or service, from used cars and mobile phones to crops, livestock and jobs.

We are particularly excited about Google SMS Tips, an SMS-based query-and-answer service that enables a mobile phone user to have a web search-like experience. You enter a free form text query, and Google's algorithms restructure the query to identify keywords, search a database to identify relevant answers, and return the most relevant answer.

Both Google SMS Tips and Google Trader represent the fruits of unique partnerships among Google, the Grameen Foundation, MTN Uganda and local organizations*. We worked closely together as part of Grameen Foundation's Application Laboratory to understand information needs and gaps, develop locally relevant and actionable content, rapidly test prototypes, and conduct multi-month pilots with the people who will eventually use the applications have truly been a global effort, and created with Ugandans, for Ugandans.

We're just beginning. We can do a lot more to improve search quality and the breadth — and depth — of content on Google SMS, especially on Tips and Trader. Google SMS is by no means a finished product, but that's what's both exciting and challenging about this endeavor.

Meanwhile, if you're curious about what Google is doing in Africa, learn more at the Google Africa Blog.

Update: Corrected link to YouTube video for "rapidly test prototypes".
____
*BROSDI, (Busoga Rural Open Source and Development Initiative), Straight Talk Foundation, Marie Stopes Uganda.

Posted by Joe Mucheru, Head of Google Sub-Saharan Africa, & Fiona Lee, Africa Project Manager

Google translates Persian

Today, we added Persian (Farsi) to Google Translate. This means you can now translate any text from Persian into English and from English into Persian — whether it's a news story, a website, a blog, an email, a tweet or a Facebook message. The service is available free at http://translate.google.com.

We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran. Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa — increasing everyone's access to information.

As with all machine translation, it's not perfect yet. And we're launching this service quickly, so it may perform slowly at times. We'll keep a close watch and if it breaks, we'll restore service as quickly as we can.

We've optimized this service for translation between Persian and English. But we're working hard to improve Persian translation for the additional 40 languages available via Google Translate. If you see something you think is incorrectly translated, we invite you to click on the "contribute a better translation" link and we'll learn from your correction.

The web provides many new channels of communication that enable us to see events unfold in real-time around the world. We hope that Google Translate helps make all that information accessible to you — no matter what language you speak. So please visit Google Translate and try it out.

Posted by Franz Och, Principal Scientist

Citizentube: Watching video change our world

As you might have noticed, there's a lot of fascinating stuff that happens on YouTube every day. For example, did you know that a nine-year-old recently used YouTube to successfully campaign to save his local kickball lot? Have you seen the video of a Guatemalan lawyer who predicted his own assassination on YouTube moments before it happened? Or did you know that YouTube and Google have launched a new technology platform for political debates, which allows you to submit and vote on the most important issues you want to discuss with political candidates?

These are the sorts of things you can stay on top of with Citizentube, a special YouTube blog devoted to chronicling the way that people are using video to change the world. If you've followed news and politics on YouTube, you might have noticed that we started Citizentube as a video channel on the site a few years back, but we soon realized that keeping track of all the phenomenal uses of YouTube by posting our own videos just wasn't fast enough — so now we're blogging, too. We generally focus on two types of posts: the compelling political and social uses of YouTube that we see the community bubble up every day, and our own programming initiatives and partnerships in the political, news, and nonprofit arenas.

Our team creates opportunities for you to engage with content that goes beyond the humorous or even the educational — content that changes the way you interact with your communities, institutions, and leaders. The first initiative we launched in this space was the You Choose '08 platform and the CNN/YouTube Debates in 2007. Since then we've expanded our programming to the fields of government, activism, and news & information. On the blog, we'll post an occasional series that gives a bigger picture perspective of what's happening in the worlds of news reporting, government, and social change on YouTube.

So be sure to check out www.citizentube.com and subscribe to our RSS feed (we're on Twitter, too: @citizentube). With more than 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, our blog helps provide you with a filter that you can use to see the way that video is changing our world.

Posted by Steve Grove, YouTube News and Politics

The 2008 Founders' Letter

Posted by Sergey Brin, Co-founder & President, Technology

Every year our founders take turns writing a letter that is included in our annual report. We originally published the 2008 Founders' Letter on our Investor Relations site. Since today is the annual Stockholders' Meeting at our Mountain View headquarters, we wanted to make it more widely available. We welcome you to have a read, and you can also check out the webcast of the Stockholders' Meeting, beginning at 2 p.m. PT today. – Ed.

Introduction

Since 2004, when Google began to have annual reports, Larry and I have taken turns writing an annual letter. I never imagined I would be writing one in the midst of an economic crisis unlike any we have seen in decades. As I write this, search queries are reflecting economic hardship, the major market indexes are one half of what they were less than 18 months ago, and unemployment is at record levels.

Nonetheless, I am optimistic about the future, because I believe scarcity breeds clarity: it focuses minds, forcing people to think creatively and rise to the challenge. While much smaller in scale than today's global collapse, the dot-com bust of 2000-2002 pushed Google and others in the industry to take some tough decisions — and we all emerged stronger as a result.

This new crisis punctuates the end of our first decade as a company, a decade that has brought great change to Google, the web and the Internet as a whole. As I reflect on this short time period, our accomplishments and our shortcomings, I am very excited about what the next ten years may bring.

But let me start a little farther back — in 1990, the very first web page was created at http://info.cern.ch/. By late 1992, there were only 26 websites in the world so there was not much need for a search engine. When NCSA Mosaic (the first widely used web browser) came out in 1993, every new website that was created would get posted to its "What's New" page at a rate of about one a day: http://www.dejavu.org/prep_whatsnew.htm. Just five years later, in 1998, web pages numbered in the tens of millions, and search became crucial. At this point, Google was a small research project at Stanford; later that year it became a tiny startup. The search index sat on a small number of disk drives enclosed within Lego-like blocks. Perhaps a few thousand people, mostly academics, used the service.

Fast-forward to today, the changes in scale are striking. The web itself has grown by about a factor of 10,000, as has our search index. The number of people who use Google's services every day is now in the hundreds of millions. More importantly, billions of people now have access to the Internet via computers and mobile phones. Like many other web companies, the vast majority of our services are available worldwide and free to users because they are supported by ads. So a child in an Internet cafe in a developing nation can use the same online tools as the wealthiest person in the world. I am proud of the small role Google has played in the democratization of information, but there is much more left to do.

Search

Search remains at the very core of what we do at Google, just as it has been from our earliest days. As the scale has changed dramatically over the years, the presentation and quality of our search results have also undergone many changes since 1998. In the past year alone we have made 359 changes to our web search — nearly one per day. Some are not easy to spot, such as changes in ranking based on personalization (launched broadly in 2005) but they are important in getting the most relevant search results. Others are very easy to see and improve search efficiency in a very clear way, such as spelling correction, annotations, and suggestions.

While I am proud of what has been accomplished in search over the past decade, there are important areas in which I wish we had made more progress. Perfect search requires human-level artificial intelligence, which many of us believe is still quite distant. However, I think it will soon be possible to have a search engine that "understands" more of the queries and documents than we do today. Others claim to have accomplished this, and Google's systems have more smarts behind the curtains than may be apparent from the outside, but the field as a whole is still shy of where I would have expected it to be. Part of the reason is the dramatic growth of the web — for any particular query, it is likely there are many documents on the topic using the exact same vocabulary. And as the web grows, so does the breadth and depth of the curiosity of those searching. I expect our search engine to become much "smarter" in the coming decade.

So too will the interfaces by which users look for and receive information. While many things have changed, the basic structure of Google search results today is fairly similar to how it was ten years ago. This is partly because of the benefits of simplicity; in fact, the Google homepage has become increasingly simple over the years: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-04-21-n63.html. But we are starting to see more significant changes in search interfaces. Today you can search from your cell phone by just speaking into it and Google Reader can suggest interesting blogs without any query at all. It is my expectation that in the next decade our searches and results will look very different than they do today.

One of the most striking changes that has happened in the past few years is that search results are no longer just web pages. They include images, videos, books, maps, and more. From the outset, we realized that to have comprehensive search we would have to venture beyond web pages. In 2001, we launched Google Image Search and via Google Groups we made available and searchable the most comprehensive archive of Usenet postings ever assembled (800 million messages dating back to 1981).

Just this past fall we expanded Image Search to include the LIFE Magazine photo archive. This is a collection of 10 million photos, more than 95 percent of which have never been seen before, and includes historical pictures such as the Skylab space station orbiting above Earth and Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. Integrating images into search remains a challenge, primarily because we are so reliant on the surrounding text to gauge a picture's relevance. In the future, using enhanced computer vision technology, we hope to be able to understand what's depicted in the image itself.

YouTube

Video is often thought of as an entertainment medium, but it is also a very important source of high-quality information. Some queries seem like natural choices to show video results, such as for sports and travel destinations. Yet videos are also great resources for topics such as computer hardware and software (I bought my last RAID based on a video review), scientific experiments, and education such as courses on quantum mechanics.

Google Video was first launched in 2005 as a search service for television content because TV close-captioning made search possible and user-generated video had yet to take off. But it subsequently evolved to a site where individuals and corporations alike could post their own videos. Today Google Video searches many different video hosting sites, the largest of which is YouTube, which we acquired in 2006.

Every minute, 15 hours worth of video are uploaded to YouTube — the equivalent of 86,000 new full length movies every week. YouTube channels now include world leaders (the President of the United States and prime ministers of Japan, the UK and Australia), royalty (the Queen of England and Queen Rania of Jordan), religious leaders (the Pope), and those seeking free expression (when Venezuelan broadcaster El Observador was shut down by the government, it started broadcasting on YouTube).

When it began, online video was associated with small fuzzy images. Today, many of our uploads are in HD quality (720 rows and greater) and can be streamed to computers, televisions, and mobile phones with increasing fidelity (thanks to improvements in video compression). In the future, vast libraries of movie-theater-quality video (4000+ columns) will be available instantly on any device.

Books

Books are one of the greatest sources of information in the world and from the earliest days of Google we hoped to eventually incorporate them into our search corpus. Within a couple of years, Larry was experimenting with digitizing books using a jury-rigged contraption in our office. By 2003, we launched Google Print, now called Google Book Search. Today, we are able to search the full text of almost 10 million books. Moreover, in October we reached a landmark agreement with a broad class of authors and publishers, including the Authors' Guild and the Association of American Publishers. If approved by the Court, this deal will make millions of in-copyright, out-of-print books available for U.S. readers to search, preview, and buy online — something that has been simply unavailable to date. Many of these books are difficult, if not impossible, to find because they are not sold through bookstores or held on most library shelves; yet they make up the vast majority of books in existence. The agreement also provides other important public benefits, including increased access to users with disabilities, the creation of a non-profit registry to help others license these books, the creation of a corpus to promote basic research, and free access to full texts at a kiosk in every public library in the United States.

Geo

While digitizing all the world's books is an ambitious project, digitizing the world is even more challenging. Beginning with our acquisition of Keyhole (the basis of Google Earth) in October 2004, it has been our goal to provide high-quality information for geographic needs. By offering both Google Earth and Google Maps, we aim to provide a comprehensive world model encompassing all geographic information including imagery, topography, road, buildings, and annotations. Today we stitch together images from satellites, airplanes, cars, and user uploads, as well as collect important data, such as roads, from numerous different sources including governments, companies, and directly from users. After the launch of Google Map Maker in Pakistan, users mapped 25,000 kilometers of uncharted road in just two months.

Ads

We always believed that we could have an advertising system that would add value not only to our bottom line but also to the quality of our search result pages. Rather than relying on distracting flashy ads, we developed relevant, clearly marked text-based ads above and to the right of our search results. After a number of early experiments, the first self-service system known as AdWords launched in 2000 starting with 350 advertisers. While these ads yielded small amounts of money compared to banner ads at the time, as the dot-com bubble burst, this system became our life preserver. As we syndicated it to EarthLink and then AOL, it became an important source of revenue for other companies as well.

Today, AdWords has grown beyond just being a feature of Google. It is a vast ecosystem that provides valuable traffic and leads to hundreds of thousands of businesses: indeed in many ways it has helped democratize access to advertising, by creating an open marketplace where small business and start-ups can compete with well-established, well-funded companies. AdWords is also an important source of revenue for websites that create the content that we all search. Last year, AdSense (our publisher-facing program) generated more than $5 billion dollars of revenue for our many publishing partners.

Also in the last year we ventured further into other advertising formats with the acquisition of DoubleClick. This may seem at odds with the value we place on relevant text-based ads. However, we have found that richer ad formats have their place such as video ads within YouTube and dynamic ads on game websites. In fact, we also now serve video ads on television with our AdSense for TV product. Our goal is to match advertisers and publishers using the formats and mediums most appropriate to their goals and audience.

Despite the progress in our advertising systems and the growth of our base of advertisers, I believe there are significant improvements still to be made. While our ad system has powerful features, it is also complex, and can confuse many small and local advertisers whose products and services could be very useful to our users. Furthermore, the presentation formats of our advertisements are not the optimal way to peruse through large numbers of products. In the next decade, I hope we can more effectively incorporate commercial offerings from the tens of millions of businesses worldwide and present them to consumers when and where they are most useful.

Apps

Within a couple of years of our founding, a number of colleagues and I were starting to hit the limitations of our traditional email clients. Our mailboxes were too big for them to handle speedily and reliably. It was challenging or impossible to have email available and synchronized when switching between different computers and platforms. Furthermore, email access required VPN (virtual private networks) so everyone was always VPN'ing, thereby creating extra security risks. Searching mail was slow, awkward, and cumbersome.

By the end of 2001 we had a prototype of Gmail that was used internally. Like several existing services at the time, it was web-based. But unlike those services it was designed for power users with high volumes of email. While our initial focus was on internal usage, it soon became clear we had something of value for the whole world. When Gmail was launched externally, in 2004, other top webmail sites offered 2MB and 4MB mailboxes, less than the size of a single attachment I might find in a message today. Gmail offered 1 Gigabyte at launch, included full-text search, and a host of other features not previously found in webmail. Since then Gmail has continued to push the envelope of email systems, including functionality such as instant messaging, video-conferencing, and offline access (launched in Gmail Labs this past January). Today some Googlers have more than 25 gigabytes of email going back nearly 10 years that they can search through in seconds. By the time you read this, you should be able to receive emails written in French and read them in English.

The benefits of web-based services, also known as cloud computing, are clear. There is no installation. All data is stored safely in a data center (no worries if your hard drive crashes). It can be accessed anytime, anywhere there is a working web browser and Internet connection (and sometimes even if there is not one — see below).

Perhaps even more importantly, new forms of communication and collaboration become possible. I am writing this letter using Google Docs. There are several other people helping me edit it simultaneously. Moments ago I stepped away and worked on it on a laptop. Without having to hit save or manage any synchronization all the changes appeared in seconds on the desktop that I am back to using now. In fact, today I have worked on this document using three different operating systems and two different web browsers, all without any special software or complex logistics.

In addition to Gmail and Google Docs, the Google Apps suite of products now includes Spreadsheets, Calendar, Sites, and more. It is also now available to companies, universities, and other organizations. In fact, more than 1 million organizations use Google Apps today, including Genentech, the Washington D.C. city government, the University of Arizona, and Gothenburg University in Sweden.

Because tens of millions of consumers already use our products, it is easy for organizations — from businesses to non-profits — to adopt them. Very little training is required and the passionate Google users already in these organizations are usually excited to help those who need a hand. In many ways, Google Apps are even more powerful in a business or group than they are for individuals because Apps can change the way businesses operate and the speed at which they move. For example, with Google Apps Web Forms we innovated by addressing the key problem of distributed data collection, making it incredibly simple to collect survey data from within the enterprise — a critical feature for collecting internal feedback we use extensively when "dogfooding" all of our products.

There are a number of things we could improve about these web services. For example, since they have arisen from different groups and acquisitions, there is less uniformity across them than there should be. For example, they can have different sharing models and chat capabilities. We are working to shift all of our applications to a common infrastructure. I believe we will achieve this soon, creating greater uniformity and capability across all of them.

Chrome

We have found the web-based service model to have significant advantages. But it also comes with its own set of challenges, primarily related to web browsers, which can be slow, unreliable, and unable to function offline. Rather than accept these shortcomings, we have sought to remedy them in a number of ways. We have contributed code and generated revenue for several existing web browsers like Mozilla Firefox, enabling them to invest more in their software. We have also developed extensions such as Google Gears, which allows a browser to function offline.

In the past couple of years, however, we decided that we wanted to make some substantial architectural changes to how web browsers work. For example, we felt that different tabs should be segregated into separate sandboxes so that one poorly functioning website does not take down the whole browser. We also felt that for us to continue to build great web services we needed much faster Javascript performance than current browsers offered.

To address these issues we have created a new browser, called Google Chrome. It has a multiprocess model and a very fast JavaScript engine we call V8. There are many other notable features, so I invite you to try it out for yourself. Chrome is not yet available on Mac and Linux so many of us, myself included, are not able to use it on a regular basis. If all goes well, this should be addressed later this year. Of course, this is just the start, and Chrome will continue to evolve. Furthermore, other web browsers have been spurred on by Chrome in areas such as JavaScript performance, making everyone better off.

Android

We first created mobile search for Google back in 2000 and then we started to create progressively more tailored and complex mobile offerings. Today, the phone I carry in my pocket is more powerful than the desktop computer I used in 1998. It is possible that this year, more Internet-capable smartphones will ship than desktop PCs. In fact, your most "personal" computer, the one that you carry with you in your pocket, is the smartphone. Today, almost a third of all Google searches in Japan are coming from mobile devices — a leading indicator of where the rest of the world will soon be.

However, mobile software development has been challenging. There are different mobile platforms, customized differently to each device and carrier combination. Furthermore, deploying mobile applications can require separate business arrangements with individual carriers and manufacturers. While the rise of app stores from Apple, Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, and others as well as the adoption of HTML 5 on mobile platforms have helped, it is still very difficult to provide a service to the largest group of network-connected people in the world.

We acquired the startup Android in 2005 and set about the ambitious goal of creating a new mobile operating system that would allow open interoperation across carriers and manufacturers. Last year, after a lot of hard work, we released Android to the world. As it is open source, anyone is free to use it and modify it. We look forward to seeing how this open platform will spur greater innovation. Furthermore, Android allows for easy creation of applications which can be deployed on any Android device. To date, more than 1000 apps have been uploaded to the Android Market including Shop Savvy (which reads bar codes and then compares prices), our own Latitude, and Guitar Hero World Tour.

AI

The past decade has seen tremendous changes in computing power amplified by the continued growth of Google's data centers. It has enabled the growth and processing of increasingly large data sets such as the web, the world's books, and video. This in turn has allowed problems once considered to be in the fantasy realm of artificial intelligence to come closer to reality.

Google Translate supports automatic machine translation between 1640 language pairs. This is made possible by large computer clusters and vast repositories of monolingual and multilingual texts: http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/faq_translation.html. This technology also allows us to support translated search where the query gets translated to another language and the results get translated back.

While the earliest Google Voice Search ran as a crude demo in 2001, today our own speech recognition technology powers GOOG411, the voice search feature of the Google Mobile App, and Google Voice. It, too, takes advantage of large training sets and significant computing capability. Last year, PicasaWeb, our photo hosting site, released face recognition, bringing a technology that is on the cutting edge of computer science to a consumer web service.

Just a few months ago we released Google Flu Trends, a service that uses our logs data (without revealing personally identifiable information) to predict flu incidence weeks ahead of estimates by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). It is amazing how an existing data set typically used for improving search quality can be brought to bear on a seemingly unrelated issue and can help to save lives. I believe this sort of approach can do even more — going beyond monitoring to inferring potential causes and cures of disease. This is just one example of how large data sets such as search logs coupled with powerful data mining can improve the world while safe guarding privacy.

Conclusion

Given the tremendous pace of technology, it is impossible to predict far into the future. However, I think the past decade tells us some things to expect in the next. Computers will be 100 times faster still and storage will be 100 times cheaper. Many of the problems that we call artificial intelligence today will become accepted as standard computational capabilities, including image processing, speech recognition, and natural language processing. New and amazing computational capabilities will be born that we cannot even imagine today.

While about half the people in the world are online today via computers and mobile phones, the Internet will reach billions more in the coming decade. I expect that by using simple yet powerful models of computing such as web services, everyone will be more productive. These tools enable individuals, small groups, and small businesses to accomplish tasks that only large corporations could achieve before, whether it is making and releasing a movie, marketing a product, or reporting on a war.

When I was a child, researching anything involved a long trip to the local library and good deal of luck that one of the books there would be about the subject of interest. I could not have imagined that today anyone would be able to research any topic in seconds. The dark clouds currently looming over the world economy are a hardship for us all, but by the time today's children grow up, this recession will be a footnote in history. Yet the technologies that we create between now and then will define their way of life.

India's 15th general election: tools for citizen empowerment

(Cross-posted from the Google India Blog)

At Google, we believe information is fundamentally empowering. While all of our technologies demonstrate a commitment to this guiding principle, information is especially important when a society comes together to participate in democratic elections. Beginning ten days from today, more than 700 million eligible voters in India will over the course of four weeks have the opportunity to participate in the largest democratic event in human history — India's 15th general election.

Today, along with a wide range of partners, we are happy to announce the launch of the Google India Elections Centre — available in English and in Hindi.

People from across India can use the centre to do the following:

• Confirm their voter registration status
• Discover their polling location
• View their constituency on a map
• Consume relevant election-related news, blogs, videos, and quotations
• Evaluate the status of development in their constituency across a range of indicators
• Learn about the background of their Member of Parliament and this year's candidates

With still more features to be added during the election, we hope the site will be an ongoing resource for analysis, governance, and democracy in India after the election.

This project would not have been possible without the shared vision of a broad coalition of partners: the Association for Democratic Reforms, HT Media Limited, Indicus Analytics, the Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, the Liberty Institute, and PRS Legislative Services. These groups are the true champions of promoting a more transparent democracy, and we're privileged to be able to shine a light on their work on the occasion of India's 15th Lok Sabha polls.

We're hopeful not only that the elections centre will further a culture that seeks access to information, but that it will also yield positive changes in voting patterns during the upcoming polls.

Please visit the site, select your constituency, and get started! Spread the word about what you learn and, of course, don't forget to visit the polls.

Posted by Rishi Jaitly, Senior Policy Analyst, and Sanjay Jain, Product Manager

New steps to protect free expression and privacy around the world

In a world where governments all too often censor what their citizens can see and do on the Internet, Google has from the start promoted global free expression and taken the lead in being transparent with our users. We've pressed governments around the world to stop limiting free speech and made it possible for dissidents, bloggers and others to have their voices heard.

As part of those ongoing efforts to promote free expression and protect our users' privacy, today we're announcing Google's participation as a founding company member of a new program called the Global Network Initiative.

This initiative is the result of two years of discussions with other leading technology companies, human rights organizations, socially responsible investors and academic institutions. Thanks to hard work and cooperation from all parties, the Initiative sets the kinds of standards and practices that all companies and groups should use when governments threaten internationally recognized rights to free expression and privacy.

The Global Network Initiative also offers an important commitment from all parties to take action together to promote free expression and protect privacy in the use of all information and communication technologies. We know that common action by these diverse groups is more likely to bring about change in government policies than the efforts of any one company or group acting alone.

Companies that join the Initiative commit to putting into effect procedures that will protect their users by:

• Evaluating against international standards government requests to censor content or access user information
• Providing greater transparency
• Assessing human rights risks when entering new markets or introducing new products
• Instituting employee training and oversight programs

These are things that Google does now, but joining the Initiative will help us refine our methods and maintain our leadership position. Down the road companies will be assessed on how they're doing in implementing the principles and the Initiative will report those results.

This Initiative is by no means a silver bullet or the last word, but it does represent a concrete step toward promoting freedom of expression and protecting users' privacy in the 60th anniversary year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Now we're actively recruiting more companies and groups to join the Initiative and advance these critical human rights around the world.

Posted by Andrew McLaughlin, Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs

High-powered search for Arabic-speaking engineers

When I first started working at Google in 2006 I was amazed to see that the fabled 20% time really existed, and that it was up to me to decide how to use it. Being of Egyptian descent and having lived in Canada and the U.S., I became increasingly interested in Google's international work. Based on my interests and background, I helped assemble a team of Arabic-speaking engineers and we began to spend 20% of our time on developing Arabic-language products. Over time this has become a more formal effort, so I'm really happy to tell you that today we're stepping up our commitment to users in the Middle East by hiring full-time engineers familiar with the Arabic language and its engineering challenges.

The reality is that in many countries across Middle East and North Africa (MENA) there is only single-digit Internet penetration rate. On the other hand, there are over 330 million Arabic speakers worldwide, many of them hungry for the information, interactivity, and opportunities that the Internet can provide. As more Arabic speaking people come online -- the vast majority via mobile phones -- our team wants to help provide effective and useful products in their native language. For example, despite the fact that there are millions of Arabic speakers worldwide, only approximately 1% of all of the content online is in Arabic. We want to build tools to make content creation even easier for our Arabic-speaking users, encouraging them to connect, share and interact with each other, and with other users around the world.

This isn't easy. Creating an Arabic-language product is actually significantly harder than for most other languages. As mentioned in a previous post about our 40 language initiative, Arabic is written from right to left. An Arabic speaker searching for [Ramadan TV series schedule 2008] (a very popular query during Ramadan) would type [مواعيد مسلسلات رمضان 2008]. Part of the query will be written from right to left in Arabic while the numbers will be written left to right. Sometimes the right-to-left difference can mean having to change the entire layout of a page, as with Gmail.

As you can see, just delivering products in Arabic is challenging, but we also believe the differences mean that the capabilities of the products can be different. There are a large number of new, innovative features and products that need to be created to properly serve the Arabic markets, many of which have fundamental computer science challenges.

Intrigued? Google is looking for the best Arabic engineer minds to join the first dedicated team focused on tackling these engineering challenges. Our goal is to put together a top-notch Arabic engineering team. I am passionate about building an exceptional global team of engineers whose job it will be to design and develop innovative products and features that meet the needs of our Arabic speaking users. I was initially attracted to this challenge because I knew that my work at Google could easily have an impact on tens of millions of people around the world. It especially excites me that for a language that has been underserved to date, we'll be making product innovations that can have a material effect on the future of the region.

Google has been formally recognized in the UK and in the U.S. and publicized worldwide for our unique work environment. The first question I always get from people after they find out I work here is, "Is what we've heard about Google really true?" The short answer: Yes. Two of our offices have slides, and one actually has a firepole between floors. We have numerous gourmet cafes that are free. We have massage therapists available in many locations. And the list goes on. It is truly a fun and rewarding place to work. But what I think what is most exceptional about Google is that we bring our own unique culture to every country we open an office in, and blend it with the uniqueness of the local culture.

Interested in joining our effort? Well if you've heard anything about our interview process, you probably know that simply put, it's tough, but for good reason. When I interviewed two years ago I went through many intense interviews. You're expected to be well versed in areas such as coding, data structures, algorithms, designing large scale systems and, depending on the role, you might be asked leadership questions. Having a Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science definitely helped, but it was still grueling. The interview process was less about what I had memorized from the past (fact-based questions) but instead included questions that showed my ability to apply what I had learned to problem sets that I had never encountered before. I came out of the interview with a deep respect for this style because Google hires the best of the best, and it shows in the rigor of the hiring process.

Are you a great engineer familiar with Arabic speaking skills? We're looking for engineers with the regional knowledge and Arabic language expertise to make Google products more relevant to this important population and to build new products for the global market. If you're interested, please visit our job center and apply for one of the open positions. You could be a part of a team that will positively affect the lives of millions of Arabic users around the world.

Some of our engineers working on Arabic products (L to R):
Mohamed Elfeky, Adel Youssef, Amgad Zeitoun, Ahmad Hamzawi.

Posted by Ahmad Hamzawi, Engineering Manager, MENA

Information poverty

Today is Blog Action Day, an annual event that rallies blogs around the world to post about a common cause. This year's issue up for discussion is poverty, so we wanted to take a look at the relationship between access to information and social and economic development. The right information at the right time in the hands of people has enormous power. As someone who works for Google, I see evidence of this everyday as people search and find information they need to create knowledge, grow their business, or access essential services. But that applies primarily to the rich world, where economies are built on knowledge and presume access to information. What about the poor and developing countries where people are offline more than online? How do they benefit from the power of information?

In much of Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, rates of economic growth over the last decade have exceeded 5% every year. Despite this trend, poverty in many countries has remained constant. In Kenya, for example, the official poverty rate was 48% in 1981 (World Bank, June 2008). According to the Kenya Poverty and Inequality Assessment released by the World Bank this year, 17 million Kenyans or 47% of the population were unable to meet the costs of food sufficient to fulfill basic daily caloric requirements. The vast majority of these people live in rural areas and have even less access to the information that impacts their daily life. Data on water quality, education and health budgets, and agricultural prices are nearly impossible to access.

Despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent each year on providing basic public services like primary education, health, water, and sanitation to poor communities, poverty in much of Sub-Saharan Africa persists. Where does this money go, who gets it, and what are the results of the resources invested? That’s where we find a big black hole of information and a lack of basic accountability. How do inputs (dollars spent) turn into outputs (schools, clinics, and wells), and, more importantly, how do outputs translate into results (literate and healthy children, clean water, etc.)?

We simply don’t know the answers to most of these basic questions. But what if we could? What if a mother could find out how much money was budgeted for her daughter's school each year and how much of it was received? What if she and other parents could report how often teachers are absent from school or whether health clinics have the medicines they are supposed to carry? What if citizens could access and report on basic information to determine value for money as tax payers?

The work of The Social Development Network (SODNET) in Kenya is illustrative. They are developing a simple budget-tracking tool that allows citizens to track the allocation, use, and ultimate result of government funds earmarked for infrastructure projects in their districts. The tool is intended to create transparency in the use of tax revenues and answer the simple question: Are resources reaching their intended beneficiaries? Using tools like maps, they are able to overlay information that begins to tell a compelling story.

Google.org’s role, through our partners in East Africa and India, is to support, catalyze, and widely disseminate this kind of information to public, private, and civil society stakeholders that can use it to see more clearly what’s working, what’s broken and what are potential solutions. Leveraging platforms like Google Earth and Google Maps can help organizations disseminate their content widely and let people see and understand what was once invisible. Once information is visible, widely known, and easy to understand, we are betting that governments and citizens will pay more attention to leakages in the service delivery pipeline and feel empowered to propose solutions.

You can’t change what you can’t see. The power to know plus the power to act on what you know is the surest way to achieve positive social change from the bottom up. And when we consider the magnitude of resources invested in delivering public services each year, a 10% improvement globally would exceed the value of all foreign aid. We believe that is a bet worth making.

(Cross-posted from the Google.org blog)

Posted by Aleem Walji, Head of Global Development Initiatives, Google.org

The ONE News YouTube Election Debate in New Zealand

Over the course of the long U.S. Presidential election campaign, millions of people have checked out the candidates' YouTube Channels on our You Choose '08 platform, and communicated directly with all those running for President. Thousands more submitted questions for candidates in the CNN/YouTube debates, participated in our You Choose '08 Spotlight, or made videos for the Democratic and Republican conventions. Outside the U.S., YouTube has also become an important part of leveling the political playing field. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, the 2008 New Zealand general elections were called, with Kiwis going to the polls in early November.

Now, we're thrilled to announce the ONE News YouTube Election Debate between Helen Clark and John Key, a history-making initiative with New Zealand's public broadcaster, TVNZ. This marks the first time the head of a national government and a challenger will face YouTube video questions in an official live TV debate. The debate will be broadcast live on TV ONE on October 14.



If you're a Kiwi, head on over to the YouTube New Zealand blog for details on how to submit your own questions.

Posted by Steve Grove, YouTube News & Politics