- Introducing Google Earth Engine
- U.S. General Services Administration is going Google
- Google doodles for your phone
- Being bad to your customers is bad for business
- Ready... set... track Santa!
- Plant trees for change with Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai
(Cross-posted from the Google.org blog) Why is this important? The images of our planet from space contain a wealth of information, ready to be extracted and applied to many societal challenges. Scientific analysis can transform these images from a mere set of pixels into useful information—such as the locations and extent of global forests, detecting how our forests are changing over time, directing resources for disaster response or water resource mapping. The challenge has been to cope with the massive scale of satellite imagery archives, and the computational resources required for their analysis. As a result, many of these images have never been seen, much less analyzed. Now, scientists will be able to build applications to mine this treasure trove of data on Google Earth Engine, providing several advantages:
Deforestation releases a significant amount of carbon into the atmosphere, accounting for 12-18% of annual greenhouse gas emissions. The world loses 32 million acres of tropical forests every year, an area the size of Greece. The United Nations has proposed a framework known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) that would provide financial incentives to tropical nations to protect their forests. Reaching an agreement on early development of REDD is a key agenda item here in Cancun. Today, we announced that we are donating 10 million CPU-hours a year over the next two years on the Google Earth Engine platform, to strengthen the capacity of developing world nations to track the state of their forests, in preparation for REDD. For the least developed nations, Google Earth Engine will provide critical access to terabytes of data, a growing set of analytical tools and our high-performance processing capabilities. We believe Google Earth Engine will bring transparency and more certainty to global efforts to stop deforestation. Over the past two years, we've been working with several top scientists to fully develop this platform and integrate their desktop software to work online with the data available in Google Earth Engine. Those scientists—Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Carlos Souza of Imazon and Matt Hansen of the Geographic Information Science Center at South Dakota State University—are at the cutting edge of forest monitoring in support of climate science. In collaboration with Matt Hansen and CONAFOR, Mexico's National Forestry Commission, we've produced a forest cover and water map of Mexico. This is the finest-scale forest map produced of Mexico to date. The map required 15,000 hours of computation, but was completed in less than a day on Google Earth Engine, using 1,000 computers over more than 53,000 Landsat scenes (1984-2010). CONAFOR provided National Forest Inventory ground-sampled data to calibrate and validate the algorithm.  A forest cover and water map of Mexico (southern portion, including the Yucatan peninsula), produced in collaboration with scientist Matthew Hansen and CONAFOR.We hope that Google Earth Engine will be an important tool to help institutions around the world manage forests more wisely. As we fully develop the platform, we hope more scientists will use new Earth Engine API to integrate their applications online—for deforestation, disease mitigation, disaster response, water resource mapping and other beneficial uses. If you're interested in partnering with us, we want to hear from you—visit our website! We look forward to seeing what's possible when scientists, governments, NGO's, universities, and others gain access to data and computing resources to collaborate online to help protect the earth's environment.      |
(Cross-posted on the Google Enterprise Blog) GSA's decision to switch to Google Apps resulted from a competitive request for proposal (RFP) process that took place over the past six months, during which the agency evaluated multiple proposals for replacing their existing on-premises email system. GSA selected Google partner Unisys as the prime contractor to migrate all employees in 17 locations around the world to an integrated, flexible and robust email and collaboration service in 2011. By making this switch, GSA will benefit in a number of ways. Modern email and collaboration tools will help make employees more efficient and effective. Google Apps will bring GSA a continual stream of new and innovative features, helping the agency keep pace with advances in technology in the years ahead. And taxpayers will benefit too—by reducing the burden of in-house maintenance and eliminating the need to replace hardware to host its email systems, GSA expects to lower costs by 50 percent over the next five years. Earlier this year, Google Apps became the first suite of cloud computing email and collaboration applications to receive Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification, enabling agencies to compare the security features of Google Apps to that of existing systems. GSA is leading the way in embracing the federal government's "cloud first" policy, under which agencies should opt for hosted applications when secure, reliable, cost-effective options are available. We are thrilled that GSA has chosen to move to the cloud with Google and look forward to expanding our productive partnership with them.     |
(Cross-posted from the Google Mobile Blog) While we've had oodles of Google doodles on our desktop homepage since Larry and Sergey created our very first in 1998, doodles on our mobile homepage have been few and far between. Today, we're happy to announce that we're bringing more doodles to your phone, beginning with Android 2.0+ and iOS 3+ devices worldwide. In fact, almost all of the doodles we show on our desktop homepage will now have corresponding mobile versions on these phones. When the doodles are available, just go to google.com in your mobile browser to see them.  Want your doodles within easy reach? You can get to google.com quickly by adding a shortcut to your home screen.     |
A recent article by the New York Times related a disturbing story. By treating your customers badly, one merchant told the paper, you can generate complaints and negative reviews that translate to more links to your site; which, in turn, make it more prominent in search engines. The main premise of the article was that being bad on the web can be good for business. We were horrified to read about Ms. Rodriguez's dreadful experience. Even though our initial analysis pointed to this being an edge case and not a widespread problem in our search results, we immediately convened a team that looked carefully at the issue. That team developed an initial algorithmic solution, implemented it, and the solution is already live. I am here to tell you that being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google's search results. As always, we learned a lot from this experience, and we wanted to share some of that with you. Consider the obvious responses we could have tried to fix the problem:
We can't say for sure that no one will ever find a loophole in our ranking algorithms in the future. We know that people will keep trying: attempts to game Google's ranking, like the ones mentioned in the article, go on 24 hours a day, every single day. That's why we cannot reveal the details of our solution—the underlying signals, data sources, and how we combined them to improve our rankings—beyond what we've already said. We can say with reasonable confidence that being bad to customers is bad for business on Google. And we will continue to work hard towards a better search.     |
From feasting on a turkey dinner to singing carols around the fire, there are certainly plenty of traditions to enjoy during the holiday season. Much to the delight of the child in each of us, the ritual of gift-giving continues today, and I know I still find cheer at the bottom of my stocking every Christmas morning. Another tradition that brings joy to youngsters everywhere is the one started in 1955 by NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which every year counts down to Christmas Eve and tracks Santa's whereabouts as he delivers presents across the globe. Google similarly started tracking Santa in 2004 and has been partnering with NORAD on this fun project since 2007. Keeping the tradition alive, today marks the kick-off of this year's countdown at www.noradsanta.org. On the NORAD website, kids can play holiday-themed games (a new one is released each day) and get updates from the North Pole as Santa prepares for his big sleigh ride. If you haven't tracked Santa in years past, we hope this is the year you'll start a new tradition of visiting www.noradsanta.org and following Santa's journey all around the world. Starting at 2 a.m. EST on December 24, you'll be able to track him in real-time on Google Maps from your computer or phone as well as on Google Earth with the plug-in by searching for [santa]. So this year, along with my family's usual tradition of gathering around to hear my mum read "Twas the night before Christmas," we'll gather around the computer to see when Santa might be coming to our neighborhood. In honor of the occasion, I wrote a new opening verse: 'Twas the night before Christmas, and Santa was nearHappy holidays to all, and to tide you over till Christmas Eve, enjoy this video with highlights from Santa's journey last year!     |
(Cross-posted from the LatLong Blog) Occasionally, we invite distinguished guests to contribute to our blogs and we're very happy to have Wangari Maathai share her perspective here. In collaboration with Wangari Maathai's Green Belt Movement and several other partners, the Google Earth Outreach team has created several narrated tours on the topic of climate change in preparation for the UNFCCC's COP16 Climate Summit 2010 in Cancun, Mexico. Fly underwater to learn about the effects of ocean acidification on sea life with Oceana. Zoom around Mexican mangroves in 3D and learn about the importance of this biodiverse habitat... and what must be done to protect it for future generations. Visit google.com/landing/cop16/climatetours.html to experience these tours. -Ed. Ask most people what trees mean to them and the first thing that comes to mind is the tree outside their bedroom window or the forest where they played as a child. Trees do occupy a powerful place in our emotions, but the most powerful argument to protect our world's trees is not based on sentiment. There is a vital interdependency between communities and the trees they rely on for survival. Trees are our watersheds, protectors of the natural environment, and sources of food. Remove the trees from the equation and the community feels the impact. I came to this realization in the 1970s in Kenya. I was talking to women in my community about their problems: hunger, access to water, poverty, wood fuel. I saw a link between their needs and the condition of the land and thought, "Why not plant trees to address these issues?" Trees hold the soil to the ground so that we can grow food in it, they protect watersheds and facilitate harvesting of rain water, fruits trees supplement food and trees give us domestic energy and wood with which to build our shelters. So while still working at the University of Nairobi, I established a tree nursery in my backyard, planted seven trees at a public park and founded the Green Belt Movement. The organization works to empower communities, to build their capacity to restore Africa's forests and put an end to the problems that deforestation and other forms of environmental degradation cause. As a result of this idea, more than 40 million trees have been planted to restore the environment and improve the lives of the people who are linked to the land. When we were offered a unique opportunity to partner with the Google Earth Outreach team on a project using new Google Earth technology to visualize trees in 3D, we were thrilled. For accuracy and integrity we worked very closely with Google, advising them on the modeling of unique African trees like the broad-leaved Croton, the Nile tulip tree and the East African Cordia. These tree models illustrate the biodiversity in our tree planting sites, especially in the forests, and how we carefully select trees that are indigenous and sustainable to the natural surroundings.  Broad-leaved Croton, the Nile tulip tree and the East African Cordia (from left to right) We then used data from real planting locations to "plant" the tree models in Google Earth and create 3D visualizations. Now, for the first time in Google Earth, people from all over the world will be able to virtually visit these planting sites, explore the 3D trees and connect with the work that we are doing.  Green Belt Movement planting site in 3D on Google Earth Tree planting is a simple activity with tangible results, and anyone can participate. It helps people come together to address common problems and work collectively towards community improvement and sustainability. I hope that seeing our beautiful tree planting sites in 3D on Google Earth will be a source of inspiration for people to engage, plant trees and organize planting activities in their own communities. Taking charge of our lives and the environment around us can help ensure a lasting legacy and healthy future for our children. Learn more about the Green Belt Movement and support our work at http://www.greenbeltmovement.org.     |
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