Trading over the Internet

Posted by Winter Casey, Senior Policy Analyst

In the Stone Age, as humans struggled to survive and build, they traded for food and tools. In the Age of Discovery, as explorers traversed the seas, they traded spices. And now in the Information Age, as the Internet becomes an increasingly robust business platform, all kinds of goods and services are traded online every day.

Thanks to the Web, trade has never been easier. Companies large and small can have easy access to a global marketplace. And in that way, the free flow of information without restriction across the Internet is contributing to growing economies across the world.

Fortunately, several countries and entities have recognized the critical role that open information flows play in trade and economic growth. Just a few weeks ago, the United States and Japan signed new information and communications technology principles which support open government and the free flow of information across national borders. That agreement comes on the heels of similar principles signed by the U.S. and EU and members of the U.S. business community last year.

We hope that more governments and industries will recognize the role that the free flow of information plays in the global economy. A consistent and transparent framework for cross-border flows of goods, services and information will help individuals and businesses around the world.

This stuff is tough

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

(Cross-posted from the Google European Public Policy Blog)

Yesterday's news that the European Commission has opened a preliminary inquiry into competition complaints from three companies has generated a lot of questions about how Google's ranking works. Here, Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow responsible for ranking, who has worked in search for almost 20 years, explains the principles behind our algorithm.

Pop quiz. Get ready. You're only going to have a few milliseconds to answer this question, so look sharp. Here goes: "know the way to San Jose?" Now display the answer on a screen that’s about 14 inches wide and 12 inches tall. Find the answer from among billions and billions of documents. Wait a second - is this for directions or are we talking about the song? Too late. Just find the answer and display it. Now on to the next question. Because you'll have to answer hundreds of millions each day to do well at this test. And in case you find yourself getting too good at it, don’t worry: at least 20% of those questions you get every day you’ll have never seen before. Sound hard? Welcome to the wild world of search at Google. More specifically, welcome to the world of ranking.

Google ranking is a collection of algorithms used to seek out relevant and useful results for a user's query. There's a ton that goes into building a state-of-the-art ranking system like ours. Our algorithms use hundreds of different signals to pick the top results for any given query. Signals are indicators of relevance, and they include items as simple as the words on a webpage or more complex calculations such as the authoritativeness of other sites linking to any given page. Those signals and our algorithms are in constant flux, and are constantly being improved. On average, we make one or two changes to them every day. Lately, I’ve been reading about whether regulators should look into dictating how search engines like Google conduct their ranking. While the debate unfolds about government-regulated search, let me provide some general thinking behind our approach to ranking. Future ranking experts (inside or outside government) might find it helpful. Our philosophy has three main elements:

1. Algorithmically-generated results.
2. No query left behind.
3. Keep it simple.

After nearly two decades, I’ve lost count of how many times I've been asked why Google chooses to generate its search results algorithmically. Here's how we see it: the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are utilizing all this human contribution through our algorithms to order and rank our results. We think that's a much better solution than a hand-arranged one. Other search engines approach this differently -- selecting some results one at a time, manually curating what you see on the page. We believe that approach which relies heavily on an individual's tastes and preferences just doesn't produce the quality and relevant ranking that our algorithms do. And given the hundreds of millions of queries we have to handle every day, it wouldn't be feasible to handle each by hand anyway.

This brings me to the next point: leaving no query behind. Usually once I've explained to people the thinking behind algorithmically-generated results, some will ask me, "But what if you do a search, and the results you see are just plain lousy? Why wouldn't you just go in there by hand and change them?" The part of this question that's valid is in terms of lousy results. It happens. It happens all the time. Every day we get the right answers for people, and every day we get stumped. And we love getting stumped. Because more often than not, a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and often for all languages around the world in over 100 countries. I should add, however, that we do have clear written policies for websites that are included in our results, and we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies or for a small number of other reasons (such as legal requirements, child porn, spam, viruses/malware, etc.). But those cases are quite different from the notion of rearranging the page you see one result at a time.

Finally, simplicity. This seems pretty obvious. Isn't it the desire of all system architects to keep their systems simple? We work very hard to keep our system simple without compromising on the quality of results. This is an ongoing effort, and a worthy one. Our commitment to simplicity has allowed us innovate quickly, and it shows.

Ultimately, search is nowhere near a solved problem. Although I've been at this for almost two decades now, I'd still guess that search isn't quite out of its infancy yet. The science is probably just about at the point where we're crawling. Soon we'll walk. I hope that in my lifetime, I'll see search enter its adolescence.

In the meantime, we're working hard at our ongoing pop quizzes. Here's one last one: "search engine." In 0.14 seconds from among a few hundred million pages, our initial results are: AltaVista, Dogpile Web Search, Bing and Ask.com. I guess I'd better get back to work.

Virtual Vint in Egypt

Posted by Susan Pointer, Director of Public Policy and Government Relations, and Maximilian Senges, Policy Analyst

(Cross-posted from the European Public Policy Blog)

It's been an exciting week here in sunny Sharm El Sheikh at the Internet Governance Forum. A highlight for us on the final day here in Egypt was when our chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cert participated via video. In his presentation, Vint emphasized how the forum brings together "a remarkable assembly of people concerned about the Internet and its use on a global scale." He spoke about the huge advantages in human knowledge fostered by the Net - and warned of the many dangers, from spam to outright fraud, that threaten to undermine its true potential.



We laid out our positive conclusion of this international gathering in a blog posted yesterday. At today's 'Taking Stock' session, the overwhelming sentiment in the room was one of strong support for continuation of this multilateral Internet stakeholder forum beyond its current 5-year term. Vint regretted for his "inability" to attend this year's meeting and forcing the delegates to "put up with Virtual Vint." But he vowed to be present in person at next year's Forum. We too are looking forward to participating in next year's Forum in Lithuania, and we commend Kenya for having offered to host a 2011 Forum.

Powerful IT for disaster relief

Posted by Jen Mazzon, Maps Community Organizer

When disaster strikes in the form of a hurricane, earthquake, famine or flood, information technology can play a crucial role in coordinating a local or global response. Earlier this month, Google hosted over 20 international humanitarian organizations in our Washington, D.C. office for a day of workshops to raise awareness and share experiences about how Google's geographic and data visualization technologies, such as Google Map Maker and the Google Data Visualization API, can aid relief efforts.

FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate kicked off the day's discussions with a talk about how agencies can leverage citizen-generated data and imagery to better coordinate response efforts, such as video from people using handheld cameras in the midst of a hurricane. He also cited Google Flu Trends as an example of how to glean public health insights from the wisdom of crowds.

After Craig spoke, the American Red Cross, World Bank and Plan International gave presentations on their own experiences using geographic and data visualization technologies in the field. American Red Cross, for example, is using Google Maps to display open shelters (left) and building damage assessments (right) on the map:

Several Google team members then led discussions and presentations on the myriad Google tools at the disposal of relief agencies: Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Map Maker and the Map Maker Data Download program for Africa, Google Labs Fusion Tables, the Google Data Visualization API and more. See, for example, how UNOSAT used Google Map Maker to aid flood relief efforts in West Africa by clearly mapping transport networks (for more examples of Map Maker in action, see here).

Below are a few photos from the event. Our next workshop, hosted in partnership with the United Nations in New York, will be held in November. If you're interested in more details, give us a shout on Twitter (we're @googlepubpolicy).

Tweeting #netneutrality

Posted by Jacob Glick, Canada Policy Counsel

This week the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission wrapped up its hearings on Internet traffic management. Earlier in the proceeding I testified on behalf of the Open Internet Coalition (of which Google is a member) to argue that "innovation without permission" requires a robust, open Internet -- a view echoed by consumer groups, Internet policy advocates, content producers and distributors.

Fittingly, tonnes of people who would normally never follow a regulatory hearing took to the web to listen to the CRTC's live audiocast, follow the live-blog from the National Post, and tweet up a storm with the tags #crtc and #netneutrality (including me, @jacobglick). Journalist Greg O'Brien (@gregobr) tweeted, "Total listeners to the #crtc proceeding Monday: 371. Highest ever group to take in a Commission webcast, they say."

This impromptu online community was an object lesson in precisely the point we made to the Commission about the power of an open Internet to share insights, test arguments, and facilitate meaningful civic engagement -- all in cool, unexpected ways.

Indonesia's search for president

Posted by Pablo Chavez, Managing Policy Counsel

Earlier this week Scott Hartley at the Berkman Center shared with me this great post he wrote about the presidential elections in Indonesia. In the post he notes that although only 5.4 percent of Indonesians have access to the Internet, search trends on Google suggested that Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (popularly known as SBY) would be re-elected:


Unofficial results from Wednesday's election indicate that Scott's analysis was correct -- President Yudhoyono won by a landslide.

Indonesian voters also discussed controversial issues on Facebook and posted videos like the one below to YouTube, urging each other to get out the vote.



If Internet patterns in Indonesia are any indication, just imagine what might happen to political participation and electoral processes around the world as Internet connectivity spreads.

British Columbia leading on open data and open government

Posted by Jacob Glick, Canada Policy Counsel

Maybe it's the clean ocean air, maybe it's the vast mountains, but there's an open government revolution afoot in British Columbia.

In May the City of Vancouver passed a motion to open its data to the public. Inspired by Washington D.C.'s open data project, the city hopes to promote civic engagement, improve decision-making, and deepen accountability.

Social media expert David Eaves has been one of the key proponents and advisers behind Vancouver's open data initiative. I recently saw David speak about his theory of the "long tail of public policy." He believes that while there's lots of expertise within government, there's also untapped expertise outside of government -- from you, me, your family, and your neighbors. This knowledge -- the long tail -- on any given public policy issue is greater than the collective knowledge within government. Policymakers therefore need to learn how to tap this know-how in order to make better decisions. Check out his presentation below:



Not to be outdone, the British Columbia provincial government has an office whose primary mandate is to improve citizen engagement and public deliberation using the collaborative tools on the Web.

While other provincial governments have banned Facebook at work, B.C. has recognized the power of social media. David Hume, Executive Director for Citizen Engagement at the B.C. Ministry of Citizen Services, has a great presentation on the inspiration for B.C.'s work in this area. Check it out:

More footage from protests in Iran on YouTube

Posted by Olivia Ma, YouTube News & Politics

(Editor's Note: Last week we blogged about researchers who had been studying online behavior prior to Iran's presidential election. This entry, cross-posted from the YouTube Blog, outlines how Iranians are using YouTube as a platform for free expression in the wake of election day.)

Last Friday marked a long-anticipated Election Day in Iran to choose the next Iranian president. While the voting process itself ran smoothly, widespread violence has since broken out in protest of current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's claim to a decisive victory over challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Mousavi supporters, who believe Ahmadinejad rigged the election results, refuse to accept the verdict and have been openly protesting since Saturday.

Video clips that capture the chaos and rioting in the streets of Iran's capital, Tehran, have been streaming into YouTube for the past four days. Even though YouTube appears to be blocked in Iran -- the site is experiencing a small fraction of the traffic levels it normally receives from Iran (around 10%) -- we continue to see videos being uploaded to the site that document city streets crowded with angry demonstrators, violent clashes between protesters and state police, and visceral scenes of mass unrest.

In essence, YouTube has become a citizen-fueled news bureau of video reports filed straight from the streets of Tehran, unfiltered. Because the Iranian government is cracking down on local and international media coverage, these citizen-generated videos are providing an exclusive look at the developing violence. Here's a collection of some of those videos. (Please use your discretion before viewing, as some of them contain disturbing images.)



We've noticed some claims going around that YouTube has been engaging in acts of censorship and removing some of these videos from the site. Unless a video clearly violates our Community Guidelines, we will not take it down. In general, we do not allow graphic or gratuitous violence on YouTube. However, we make exceptions for videos that have educational, documentary, or scientific value. The limitations being placed on mainstream media reporting from within Iran make it even more important that citizens in Iran be able to use YouTube to capture their experiences for the world to see. Given the critical role these videos are playing in reporting this story to the world, we are doing our best to leave as many of them up as we can. YouTube is, at its core, a global forum for free expression.

Take note that if you see a video that is unavailable on the site, it may be because the user decided to remove the video him or herself.

We're following what's happening in Iran on the Citizentube blog (www.citizentube.com), so stay tuned for the latest.

Street View: Exploring Europe's streets with new privacy safeguards

Posted by Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel

(Cross-posted from the European Public Policy Blog)

In 2007 we began to look at bringing the highly innovative and very popular Street View to Europe, and I highlighted the new technological challenges this would present given different privacy laws and cultural norms. We pre-empted many of the different requirements and concerns and proactively introduced privacy enhancing technologies, namely industry-leading face and license plate blurring, and made it easy to flag inappropriate images for removal. We began a dialogue with the Article 29 Working Party, which brings together representatives from all 27 European Data Protection Authorities. In turn, they have asked us to make a few additional modifications to address local specificities to ensure Street View better aligns to local interpretations of privacy requirements across the whole of Europe.

First, they have asked us to continue to provide advance notice to the public about the project before we start driving in a new country. We already got a head start on this request earlier this year, when we worked closely with the press to announce details of when and where we would be driving in new countries such as Ireland, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Poland, Czech Republic, and Switzerland. As you can probably imagine, it can be tricky at times to say exactly where our cars will be and when; we're affected by lots of things outside our control such as the weather and lighting conditions, we also rely on the local knowledge of our drivers to decide which places it is best to drive when, taking into account traffic conditions and other local factors. Nonetheless, we are committed to working within the Article 29 Working Party's guidelines on this issue.

Second, the Article 29 Working Party has asked that we set a time limit on how long we keep the unblurred copies of panoramas from Street View, in a way that appropriately balances the use of this data for legitimate purposes with the need to deal with any potential concerns from individuals who might feature incidentally on the Street View imagery. To explain the issue here, although the images you see on Street View have faces and car license plates blurred out, we have to collect an original 'unblurred' copy of that image first. We then apply our highly sophisticated blurring technology and we make sure that only the blurred copy is ever made public.

The Article 29 Working Party have, however, asked us to take some additional steps to ensure that we don't keep the original 'unblurred' copy for longer than we need to. This is a challenge, but again one we're committed to meeting not just in Europe but globally. One of the technical challenges at stake with Street View--or any service that uses image detector software --is that the software sometimes makes mistakes, labeling part of the image as containing a face or a license plate when in fact it doesn't. While we like to think we've gotten pretty good at this stuff, we still have lots of these 'false positives'.

Some of these can be pretty funny like the blurred horse shown above, but this also affects the quality of Google Maps and so in turn affects our users - for example, it'd be pretty annoying if you couldn't find the phone number of that little deli across town where you think you might have left your purse, because our software mistook the phone number for a license plate. That's why we're constantly working on ways to improve our technology, and we are constantly training it to detect more of the relevant stuff, while reducing the number of 'false positives' it creates. To do this, though, we need access to the original unblurred copies of the images. Nevertheless, we've communicated to the Article 29 Working Party that we will meet their request that long term we only keep the blurred copy of Street View panoramas, and we will work with them and our engineers to determine the shortest retention period that also allows for legitimate use under EU laws.

It's important for companies operating services across Europe to be able to follow harmonised data protection guidance, and we're grateful to the Article 29 Working Party for their advice and collaboration on Street View. It is this coordinated approach that will best enable the expansion of consumer-facing services and innovative technology across the region. Street View has proven to be extremely popular in the countries in which it has launched and with these additional privacy safeguards we plan to bring it to even more countries in the European Union, allowing people to explore their home towns, tourist attractions or cities on the other side of the world. We are already receiving many requests to come drive new areas so that imagery can be used to showcase a town, promote tourism and improve travel planning and we are of course always happy to consider these. Read about our latest addition to Street View - tourists and Mickey Mouse fans can now virtually explore the Disneyland parks in Paris.

Searching for clues on Iran's presidential election

Posted by Pablo Chavez, Managing Policy Counsel

Iranians head to the polls tomorrow to vote in their 10th post-revolution presidential election, and some observers are studying online behavior for clues on how to predict a contest that looks too close to call.

In an article in Foreign Policy, Scott Hartley asks, "Who's winning Iran's Google war?" With more than one third of Iranians now online, search data offers unique insight into what voters might be thinking. Armed with English and Farsi results from Google Insights for Search, Hartley infers that challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi's appeal is highest among urban elites in Tehran and Shiraz, while incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dominates the less-cosmopolitan cities of Qom, Karaj, and Mashhad. Hartley also points to a fascinating map of the Persian blogosphere developed by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which outlines the diversity of political viewpoints across 400,000 blogs.

How will it ultimately play out? We'll have to wait and see. But as Internet penetration increases around the world, search data and other online behavior may continue to emerge as key research tools in future elections.

A vote for keeping the Internet awesome

Posted by Jacob Glick, Canada Policy Counsel

If you've ever wondered about the power and popularity of user-generated content in Canada, consider this: if all three Canadian television networks began broadcasting Canadian content 24 hours a day, seven days a week, YouTube would still have more Canadian content than those three networks combined.

For the past several months Canada's telecom regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), has considered whether Internet content should be regulated. I'm pleased to report that the CRTC announced last week that it will continue its hands-off approach to new media. The real standout from the decision is the concurring opinion written by Commissioner Tim Denton. His concurrence is an impassioned defense of online free speech and a thoughtful reminder of the inadequacy of broadcast regulation to fully appreciate the social, political and cultural innovation made possible by the open Internet.

In our submission to the CRTC back in December, we argued that exempting new media from regulation is the best approach to "keeping the Internet awesome," noting that Canadians have uploaded hundreds of thousands of hours of video to YouTube. The CRTC's decision is great news for the millions of Canadians who use the open Internet to create, distribute, and find diverse Canadian and global content.

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

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

(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.

Introducing our European public policy blog

Posted by Bill Echikson, Senior Manager, Global Communications and Public Affairs

I'm happy to share the news that we recently launched our own continental spinoff of this blog -- the Google European Public Policy Blog. It's edited here in Brussels, the capital of the European Union, but it will draw on Google's public policy resources from across the entire continent.

Though we will continue to cross-post some news from across the Atlantic here on the Google Public Policy Blog, the European policy blog will be the best Google resource for European policymakers and other policy wonks.

Check out the welcome post from Simon Hampton and Susan Pointer, Google's Directors for European Public Policy and Government Affairs. And we hope you'll keep reading.

Encouraging European e-commerce

Posted by Simon Hampton, Director of European Public Policy and Government Relations

Europe benefits from a single currency and a single market, yet few Europeans use the Internet to shop for deals outside of their home countries. The problem isn't an aversion to e-commerce. More and more Europeans are buying online; 33% of Europeans shopped online last year, up from 27% in the previous year. Meanwhile, the figure for purchases abroad remained almost stable at a mere 7%, according to a report released today by the European Commission.

The Commission's Directorate General for "Health and Consumer's" provocative study dissects the barriers to cross-border e-commerce. The Commission found that only about a third of European consumers said they were willing to purchase goods and services in another language -- and only about two-thirds of European online merchants are prepared to sell in more than one language.

Google is working hard to help consumers and merchants overcome these language barriers. Free tools like Google Translate and Google Dictionary allow shoppers to navigate the continent's fragmented, multilingual retail universe. Google Toolbar also contains a translation feature. With a single click, these tools make foreign language websites understandable.

Merchants can use these free tools to add machine translation to their websites. This are particularly useful for small businesses, which often lack the resources to build multilingual sites and which the Commission says "appear to have been particularly reluctant to embrace the opportunities of e-commerce to sell cross-border."

Technology, of course, cannot by itself create a seamless single European online market, and language isn't the only barrier to cross-border e-commerce. As the Commission rightly notes, regulators themselves must work to end the continent's differences in consumer, copyright, and tax systems. But better information can provide a big boost. At Google, we'll continue to advance tools that connect consumers and businesses across the European Union's many languages.