- Inform, engage and mobilize voters with YouTube and Google Campaign Toolkits
- Announcing our European Scholarship for Students with Disabilities awardees
- Searching for the 2010 Stanley Cup
- Freeze frame!
(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog) It's no secret that any successful 21st century political campaign must have a robust online strategy to succeed. But elected officials and candidates need more than just a website and a YouTube channel to engage voters: from President Obama's YouTube interview to Senator Scott Brown's campaign team's use of Google Docs to Congressman Scott Murphy's "Google blast" ad strategy, we're seeing politicians use more and more of our products and platforms to interact with voters, share information and keep their campaigns organized. We want to do our part to make sure candidates and campaigns have the tools to stay close to voters, who now expect to hear and see much more from their elected officials than ever before. So today, we're launching YouTube's You Choose 2010 Campaign Toolkit and a new and improved Google Campaign Toolkit. Both help candidates make their organizations more effective and deliver their messages more directly. On YouTube, campaigns will have access to features like a Politician channel (which allows campaigns to brand their channel and upload longer videos), Google Moderator, our free analytics tool YouTube Insight, and information about running paid advertising campaigns—using formats like in-stream ads and Promoted Videos—to reach viewers with political ads, just like on TV. And our Google toolkit demonstrates how Google Apps can keep staff and volunteers connected, how search ads can grow your email list and provides other helpful tools. We hope campaigns in both national and local contests will use these toolkits to engage and inform voters on important issues in 2010. As access to information online is increasingly important in elections, we're pleased to continue developing useful tools for voters and candidates.      |
Creating products, applications and services which benefit millions of users means looking at the world from a variety of perspectives. Envisioning and realizing the next generation of technology requires a diverse pool of creative and motivated engineers from all backgrounds. To that end, we're very pleased to announce the winners of our first annual European Scholarship for Students with Disabilities. This scholarship recognizes outstanding scientific contributions from students with disabilities who are pursuing university degrees in the field of computer science at a university in the European Union, Switzerland or Israel. Scholarships will be granted for the 2010–2011 academic year, and recipients will be invited to attend an all-expenses-paid retreat at the Googleplex in Zurich in June 2010. Congratulations to our scholars! Andrei George Petraru, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi, Romania Conrad Hochberg, Technische Universität München, Germany Dave Todd, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland Fabio De Dominicis, University of Naples Federico II, Italy Igor Gonopolskiy, Ben Gurion University, Israel Jordi Sanchez-Riera, INRIA Grenoble Rhône-Alpes, France Wanda Diaz-Merced, University of Glasgow, Scotland For complete details, see www.google.com/studentswithdisabilities-europe. To learn more about scholarships, grants and other opportunities for students in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, visit www.google.com/university/emea.     |
Although it feels like summer in many parts of the world, this week much of the North American sports community is focused squarely on ice hockey. That's because the Stanley Cup Finals between the Chicago Blackhawks and Philadelphia Flyers kicked off over the weekend. Today, the series shifts to Philadelphia, and the Flyers look to even the series. We've always shared the world's interest in ice hockey, and have expressed that through our 2010 Olympic Ice Hockey doodle, NHL scores in search results and our content partnership with the NHL on YouTube. And this year a few Googlers in Chicago tried to grow their own playoff beards to get in the spirit of the games. We see a surge of search queries related to the Stanley Cup every May, and this year is no exception. As each of the two teams get closer to hoisting Lord Stanley's cup, we're taking a look at what people from Chicago and Philadelphia as well as around the world are searching for related to the Cup. Globally, searches for [blackhawks] trump searches for [flyers] in the sports category although both are experiencing an unprecedented spike compared to past years.  In both Philadelphia and Chicago, the [blackhawks] and [flyers] were top of mind last week:  Top sports searches in Philadelphia  Top sports searches in Chicago Searches for [patrick kane] of the Chicago Blackhawks lead the way among searches for players involved in the Stanley Cup Finals.  After each goal scored in Chicago, the Blackhawks play the song "Chelsea Dagger" by the Fratellis. Accordingly, searches for [chelsea dagger] are surging, with Google users in Illinois topping the list and sparking a resurgence of the song across America.  With Googlers in our offices in both Illinois and Pennsylvania, we'll be watching like the rest of the world to see who wins the greatest trophy in sports. Just make sure you don't touch the Cup until you actually win it!      |
Posted: 02 Jun 2010 12:24 PM PDT From iGoogle's debut in 2005 to our more recent launch of stars in search in March, we've enjoyed making your search experience more relevant, useful and fun through personalization. Today, we're introducing a new feature that brings a whole new level of personalization to Google by letting you add a favorite photo or image to the background of the Google homepage. You can choose a photo from your computer, your own Picasa Web Album or a public gallery hosted by Picasa which includes a selection of beautiful photos.  An example homepage featuring artwork by Jeff Koons, photographed by Sandy Volz  A second example page, featuring artwork by Tom Otterness, photographed by Cesar Perez We are beginning to roll out this new feature to users in the U.S. over the next few days, so if you don't see a link in the lower left-hand corner of Google.com now, check back soon. For those of you outside of the U.S., you can expect to see this new feature in the coming days as we roll it out internationally to offer similar, consistent experiences globally. And if you've customized your look with a fun personal photo we'd love to see what your new homepage looks like. Tweet a picture of your page with the hashtag #myGooglepage and share it with us! We hope you enjoy this fun new feature and that it makes Google search more your own.     |
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