Official Google India Blog: 2010

YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011: The Shortlist Is In, Let The Voting Begin

December 10, 2010

Musicians from Finland to New Zealand, from Austria to Vietnam, have done their bit - submitting their audition videos for the chance to be part of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011 at Sydney Opera House. Now, with 336 finalists from 46 countries including India, it’s your turn to play your part: voting is open for who you think should make up the orchestra.Your votes at youtube.com/symphony over the next seven days will help decide which of these talented musicians will be packing up their trombones, violas, and timpani and heading to Sydney Opera House from March 14-20, 2011, to perform together for a global audience.

You can vote once per video, per day, until 23:59 EST on December 17 to help YouTube Symphony Orchestra Artistic Advisor Michael Tilson Thomas boil the 300 shortlisted hopefuls down to the final 96. Your votes are also needed to help choose four solo improvisers.“Mothership” composer, Mason Bates, will be using your input to choose from 36 soloists, including show-stopping performances on instruments like the guzheng, the musical saw and… the udderbot.Congratulations to those in the running, and to all of those who submitted an audition -- thank you for your hard work. We've been blown away by your talent and determination.Check out the channel now and vote for your favourites.
Posted by Jamie Dolling, Marketing Manager

An update on Chrome, the Web Store and Chrome OS

December 8, 2010

(Cross-posted from the Google Chrome Blog)

On the Chrome team, we’re constantly amazed by the speed of innovation on the web. We designed Chrome to make the web shine, and we hope our upcoming efforts will help support this vibrant ecosystem even more. By making the web faster, helping people discover great apps, and making computers more fun to use, the next year of computing should be even more exciting than the last one.

Chrome

This year, the number of people using Chrome has tripled from 40 to 120 million. Speed is what people love most about Chrome, and we’re always working to make the browser even faster. Therefore we’re bringing Google Instant to the Omnibox, showing search results and loading web pages as you type. We’ve also overhauled V8, Chrome’s JavaScript engine. It now runs complex JavaScript programs up to twice as fast as before. These two features are available in our early access channels and will be rolling out to all users soon.

Chrome Web Store

Today the Chrome Web Store is open for business. Developers have already started uploading apps, and we expect the number to grow over time. Right now the store is only available in the U.S., but will expand to many countries and currencies early next year. The store will be featured prominently in Chrome, helping people discover great apps and developers reach millions of users around the world.

Chrome OS

Last year, we announced our effort to design an operating system that is built and optimized for the web. Many people already spend all their time in a web browser, and by building an operating system that is essentially a browser, we can make computers faster, much simpler and fundamentally more secure.

We’re not done yet, but Chrome OS is at the stage where we need feedback from real users. Some of the features of Chrome OS require new hardware, but we didn’t want to sell pre-beta computers. Instead we’re launching a pilot program where we will give test notebooks to qualified users, developers, schools and businesses. We're starting with the U.S. and will expand to other countries once we get the necessary certifications. To participate in the pilot program, visit theChrome notebook website.

The test notebooks exist only to test the software—they are black, have no branding, no logos, no stickers, nothing. They do have 12.1 inch screens, full-sized keyboards and touch pads, integrated 3G from Verizon, eight hours of battery life and eight days of standby time. Chrome notebooks are designed to reach the web instantly, are easy to share among friends and family, and simply by logging in, all of your apps, bookmarks and other browser settings are there. Setting up a new machine takes less than a minute. And even at this early stage, we feel there is no consumer or business operating system that is more secure.

In the first half of next year Chrome notebooks will be available for sale from Acer and Samsung. More manufacturers will follow. Also, Chrome OS is designed to work across a wide range of screen sizes and form factors, enabling our partners to deliver computing devices beyond notebooks.

We’re excited to get Chrome notebooks into the hands of users. The data from our test pilots is key to building something wonderful. We look forward to working together to make computers better.

Posted by Linus Upson, VP Engineering and Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management

AdWords Turns Ten and also Launches new Initiatives for Small-Medium Businesses in India

November 18, 2010

This month, Google AdWords celebrated our 10th birthday! Over the years, many businesses in India have embraced AdWords and gained from the immense power of search engine advertising. We felt the best way to mark our birthday was to applaud and honour AdWords advertisers by sharing their stories and successes with the world. This December, we’ll be publishing a global map featuring businesses who are happy to tell their stories. If you’re an AdWords advertiser, please join us by submitting a short (three minutes or less) YouTube video or written piece (750 characters or less) telling us your story: who you are, what your business is about, how it’s grown, and the role AdWords has played in your success.

Partnering with small and medium businesses in India has always been particularly important to us, and we’re constantly looking for new ways to better serve the market. Recently, we’ve expanded our efforts with two new initiatives. First, we’ve launched a new AdWords call center in Hyderabad to provide regional language support to businesses that wish to grow with online advertising. Our new call center will offer entrepreneurs assistance in Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam and will manage both inbound and out bound calls. Businesses can learn how to manage online advertising campaigns effectively and also receive free advice on how to attract new customers with our powerful AdWords platform.

Second, we’ve launched a new training and incentives program called ‘Google Engage’. The program is specially designed to help grow local individuals and businesses that offer web-related services to clients in India.

Google Engage participants can receive free access to educational resources, live events, training materials, and a select number of AdWords promotional vouchers. The additional expertise gained through the program should help participants become more attractive to potential clients and more valuable to their existing ones. If you’re a web-master, digital agency, IT consultant, or any other web-services business in India, we encourage you to apply today!

Posted by Jon Stona, Product Marketing Manager, Global Acquisitions

Tips for creating a free business listing in Google Places: Business listing titles

November 17, 2010

Users search on Google.com and Google Maps because they’re looking for relevant, high-quality content that answers a question or fulfills a need. This useful information often appears in the form of business listings on the search results page, and these free listings are an important way for local business owners to connect with potential customers. We want to help you make the most of your business listing, so this is the first post in three-part blog series about how to set up a clear and effective business listing via Google Places. This first installment delves into the specific topic of business listing titles — also known as your company or organization name — and highlights some of the common issues business owners encounter when creating a listing.

Accurately list your basic business information

If you already have a business listing and want to tweak it, or if you haven’t yet claimed your business listing, sign in or visit Google Places here. The “Company/Organization” field will also serve as your business listing title, so you’ll want to enter in the exact name of your business. For example, for a business called “ Harry’s Cotton Textile Ltd.” the following would be its correct business and contact details:

Company/Organization: Harry’s Cotton Textile Ltd.

Street Address: Shop No 137 Bunny Road, Begumpally

City/Town and Postal Code: Musterabad, AP 700046

Main Phone: (070) 55557777

Website: www.example_harryscottontextiles.com

A clean, easy-to-read title

The title of your business listing should reflect the exact name of your company or organization as it’s used in the real world. While it’s acceptable to leave off company extensions like Ltd, GmbH or Inc, since those identifiers aren’t helpful to users, be sure to avoid adding any descriptions that aren’t part of the official business name or making any modifications to the official name. Your business listing title must match the business name you use in the real world (e.g. on signage, letterheads or business cards) in order to comply with our Google Places quality guidelines. Listings that are in violation of these guidelines may be suspended and won’t appear in Google search results.

Here are some additional reminders about business titles based on some of the offending listings we see and have to suspend. We also let you know how and where to include specific information you want to provide potential customers, while complying with our quality guidelines.

Descriptors and keywords — The following are common examples of modified business titles. These are instances in which either descriptive phrases are used in lieu of the correct business name, or additional keywords and phrases have been added to the business name. These examples are not in accordance with our quality guidelines:

[Example title violation] Retail Cotton Textiles
[Example title violation] Harry’s Cotton Textile Ltd. - Handicrafts, Clothing, Saree’s,
[Example title violation] Harry’s Cotton Textile Ltd. Designer clothing and ethnic wear

Note: While the “Company/Organization” field may only contain the name of your business, if you’d like to provide more information about your business’s classification or industry, you can do this by selecting the appropriate categories. You can also provide a more detailed description of your business - such as what you do and the the services you provide - in the “Description” field or on your company website.

Location names — Unless the official name of your business includes the name of your city, town or other geographic indicator, adding superfluous location terms to the business title violates our guidelines:

[Example title violation] Harry’s Cotton Textile Ltd. Musterabad
[Example title violation] Harry’s Cotton Textile Ltd. in Market Place Shopping Mall

Note: To indicate the location of your business, please use the appropriate fields marked “Street Address,” “City/Town” and “Postal Code.” Adding location-specific information in the title of your listing is not necessary since our system automatically uses your address details to determine the search queries for which your listings would be geographically relevant. If you’re concerned that your business is difficult to find or part of a shopping mall or complex, you can provide users with further guidance about where to find you by adding that information in the “Description” field.

Phone numbers and websites — Phone numbers and website URLs should not appear in your business title. These details should only be entered into their respective fields in your Google Places listing. The following examples of titles violate our quality guidelines:

[Example title violation] Harry’s Cotton Textile Ltd. (070) 55557777
[Example title violation] Harry’s Cotton Textile Ltd. www.example_harryscottontextiles.com

Capitalization and Punctuation — Some users may be tempted to use special characters or excessive capitalization in the business title to draw attention to their listing. However, this practice is not compliant with our quality guidelines:

[Example title violation] HARRYS COTTON TEXTILES LTD.
[Example title violation] ##!!Harry’s Cotton Textile Ltd.!!##

Note: In order to ensure that the Google Places business listing results are useful and easy to read, please refrain from using visual gimmicks. Business titles, as well as addresses, should always use standard capitalization and punctuation.The above examples may not cover all cases of business title violations, but we hope we were able to highlight some of the common mistakes we’ve seen. By avoiding these errors when setting up your business listing title, as well as reading through the rest of our Google Places quality guidelines, you should be in good shape to create an optimal and compliant listing.

If you realize that your existing listing is not compliant with our quality guidelines, we encourage you to sign in to your Google Places account to make the required changes and avoid getting temporarily suspended for violating the guidelines.

We hope you find this information helpful, and if you have further questions about business listing titles, visit our Google Places help forum.

Posted by Claudia Pfalzer, Local Search Quality

14 year old from Mangalore wins the 2nd Doodle4Google Competition

November 14, 2010

Technically and Naturally Growing IndiaDoodle4Google has become a global platform giving young children an opportunity to showcase their talent globally. In India, this year’s competition noticed great enthusiasm from kids around the country, as the entries crossed the 100,000 mark from just 4500 entries we got last year. What is also interesting to note is that we saw participation not just from the metros but children from smaller cities also participated in large numbers, indicating that Internet today has become a mainstream medium for students all across the countryNikhil Rungta Country Marketing Manager for Google Indiawww.google.co.in/doodle4googlePosted by Gaurav Bhaskar , Global Communications & Public Affairs Manager

Taking the bus becomes easier with BMTC routes on Google Maps

October 28, 2010

I travel at least once in a month and have always wanted to take a bus to the airport. It’s hard to keep track of the schedules, find which bus to take and which bus-stop to board from. Starting today, commuters can find out bus schedules and routes for Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) Vajra, Vayu Vajra and Big10 buses that ply across Bengaluru via Google Maps on desktop and mobile. The easy access of this service takes the uncertainty away and helps commuters find their way around the city using buses. As an example, here is the route from Airport to JP Nagar.

With a daily ridership of approximately 4.2 million passengers, BMTC is the first Indian Bus service to launch on Google Maps. BMTC and Google worked together closely to get the bus routes formatted in the General Transit Feed Specification and also align the bus routes to the actual roads on the map thereby delivering a better experience to users

Transit is now launched in over 500 cities around the world including Delhi where we partnered with Delhi Metro Rail Corporation earlier this year to launch Delhi Metro routes on Google Maps.

So, next time you want to plan your trip about town whether from Yelahanka to Cubbon Park or from Electronic city to Brigade road, you can now easily explore taking the bus instead.

Posted by :

Kiran Bapna, New Business Development &

Manik Gupta, Product Manager, Google Maps & Local Search, Google India

Introducing Google Music Search (India) at Labs

October 22, 2010

Bollywood music is innate part of our life both online and offline. That’s why, every day, millions of users in India use Google to search for their favorite Bollywood songs - latest or classic. Users not only search for songs but also spend quite a bit of time to explore and discover new music on Internet. However this search and exploration has never been an easy thing.

Today, we're starting a trial to help you search and explore music across thousands of Hindi Bollywood songs at Google Music Search (India) Labs (http://google.co.in/music). You can find the latest Hindi songs, restrict your search to songs from 1980s, listen to songs sung by Kishore Kumar or Shreya Ghoshal or just all songs from the movie Buddha Mil Gaya.

Besides this, when you enter any music-related query (such as the name of a song, artist or album) at Google Search — your search results will provide you a single click access to your songs. You can stream these songs unlimited number of times on your computer. Please note that songs will be streamed directly by our partners to your computer.

We think this will make your search and exploration for music content faster so that you spend more time enjoying music and less time in finding it. Above all, this streaming will be fully legal as Google Music Search (India) Labs offers music from partners who have legal permission to stream online. We have cataloged songs from SaReGaMa, In.Com and Saavn.com. We’re rolling this out as a labs product and look forward to your feedback so we can improve the offering. So try this product and roll yourself into the world of Bollywood music.

Posted by: Tarkeshwar T, Deepak L, Aravind M, Vinodh Kumar R (Software Engineers), Alok Goel (Product Manager)

Introducing the Japan & Asia-Pacific Conversion Room

October 8, 2010

Over the last two years we have seen a tremendous uptake of Google’s conversion products in India, celebrated many success stories with users, and witnessed the development of local expertise.

With growing popularity of products like Google Website Optimiser, Search Funnels and AdWords Conversion Tracking, we realize the need for having central resource to share best practices and simple tips to help you to maximize your returns on investment.

Our latest Japan and Asia-Pacific (JAPAC) Conversion Room and Blog is designed to serve the exact same need. The JAPAC Conversion Room aims to inspire JAPAC (and global) online marketers towards maximising conversions through sharing success stories and expert tips from this region. If your site exists to share information, generate leads or to make sales and you are drawn to digital marketing, optimizing for conversions, and have an interest in the Japan and Asia-Pacific region, then head on over to the site now and subscribe to all the latest articles.

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Google Analytics Solutions Consultant

Google Instant- Now in India

October 7, 2010

A few weeks ago we introduced a new way of searching that makes search more interactive and helps you find information more quickly and easily. We called it Google Instant, and today we are excited to be rolling out Instant in India.

Google Instant combines three core features -- dynamic results, Autocomplete predictions, and ‘scroll-to-search’ functionality -- to deliver smart, predictive results as you type. You can watch the video below that explains Google Instant in greater depth.

In the month since our initial release, we extended Instant to Google Books, Videos, Blogs and Updates, and launched keyboard shortcuts to help you navigate through search results. We have also learned more about how people are using Instant, and although it is still early days, we wanted to share some of those findings.

People are learning to use Instant. In just two weeks, we saw an increase in the fraction of searches performed without hitting enter or clicking search. People are used to searching on Google by hitting enter or clicking “search,” but we’ve been happy to see that people are quickly adjusting to the new experience.

Search is getting more interactive. We’ve seen about a 7% increase in on-the-fly editing of search queries. Instant isn’t just about time savings, it’s also a new, more fluid way to search. We’ve seen people reformulating their queries more. As you type, you see search results, and often those results can inspire you to type better search terms.

People are making the extra effort to use Instant. In just one week, we saw an increase in the relative number of search sessions starting on the Google homepage, likely because they want to use Instant. Google Instant currently only works on the Google homepage and results page, not in other places such as browser search boxes, the Google Toolbar, and the Chrome Omnibox. As people have learned about Google Instant, many seem to be searching more on the homepage in order to use the feature.

We are thrilled to be bringing Google Instant to India, and we look forward to hearing what you think.

Posted by Vinay Goel Product Management Director, Google India

Google India Celebrates Diversity

September 16, 2010

Never judge a search engine by its interface. Behind that simple search window is one of the most complex technology infrastructures in the world, and it’s run by an equally diverse group of people. At Google, we don’t just accept difference – we thrive on it, we celebrate it, and we support it for the benefit of our employees, our products, and our community. Google aspires to be an organization that reflects the globally diverse audience that our search engine and tools serve.

In striving towards this mission, the Google India Women in Engineering Awards was instituted in 2008 to recognize and reward deserving women students in Computer Science and related majors, and inspire them to become active participants and leaders in creating technology. We had 8 award recipients in 2010, 9 in 2009 and 16 in 2008. The initiative has been positively and enthusiastically received by both the students and colleges alike, lauded by the corporates and is now an established entity in the student community.

With three successful editions behind us, we are pleased to return with the Google India Women in Engineering Award 2011. This year, the award will open for applications on September 15, 2010, and is open to any woman student of Computer Science, in an under-graduate, post-graduate or doctoral program, that meets the application criteria. Applications remain open till October 31, 2010.

Aspirants to the award will be assessed on their academic excellence, passion for Computer Science and demonstrated leadership and the awardees will each receive a sum of INR 1,00,000. The winners will be announced in February, 2011. We look forward to inviting the winners for a conclave at the Google India engineering office.

In the words of an award recipient from 2009, Amisha Khera (Jaypee Institute of Information Technology) :

"Computer science has given me an opportunity to conceive, believe and achieve my ideas, by opening the door to an astounding world of innovations. Technology may have limitations on what it can accomplish but on the contrary, we as budding engineers do not."

We couldn’t agree more! With the institution of this award, we hope to recognize women students who have made a mark in the field of Computer Science and hope it inspires many more to take up studies in this field and pursue it as a career.

Posted by Keerthana Mohan, Diversity and Talent Inclusion Manager, APAC, Google

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