Official Google India Blog: September 2010

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

Introducing Google certified ‘Advance Online advertising program’ with NIIT

September 14, 2010

Marketing professionals looking to learn and demonstrate proficiency in online advertising have a new avenue to get the necessary training. Google India in association NIIT, leading Global Talent Development Corporation and Asia’s largest IT trainer, today introduced a special ‘Advanced Online Advertising’ program. As part of this initiative, NIIT will offer a specially designed training program in online advertising which will be certified by Google.

The training program in online advertising has been designed and customized to equip the Indian advertising and marketing professional with better understanding of Google’s global advertising program Google ‘AdWords’. The program content and module outline has been designed by experts from Google and will cover all aspects of search engine marketing, measuring and optimising online campaigns. As a unique feature, the professionals will be pre-allotted advertising budget to formulate live campaigns, so that they have a rich hands- on experience even while they are undergoing training.

The program will be delivered by NIIT Imperia using Synchronous Learning Technology. The four months program, certified by Google, will be spread across 13 weeks for smooth learning and better retention of concepts. The program offered by NIIT will equip marketers with the capability to use the right tools to maximise their brand’s visibility and assess the effectiveness of their online campaigns.

In the first phase the program, Graduates in any discipline with minimum of 2 years of experience will be eligible to apply for the program. After the successful completion of the program, candidates will be awarded with a Google -NIIT Imperia certification.

The program will be available across 17 centres of NIIT across India and will commence on 5^th Oct, 2010.

Program Highlights:

Learn how to maximize your brand’s visibility on SEM.
Acquire the capability to assess the effectiveness of your online marketing plans.
Understand basics of AdWords and Online Advertising.
Acquire hands-on experience of running a campaign with pre-allotted advertising budget.
Understand CPC (Cost-per-click) and CPM (Cost-per-impression) advertising models.
Master the art of optimizing campaigns.
Basic understanding of other Online Advertising products.
Acquire joint Google NIIT Imperia Certification.

More details on the program can be found at NIIT Imperia website.

Posted by Nikhil Rungta, Country Marketing Manager, Google India

Search: Now faster than the speed of type

September 9, 2010

(Cross-posted from the Google Blog )

Search as you type. It’s a simple and straightforward idea—people can get results as they type their queries. Imagining the future of search, the idea of being able to search for partial queries or provide some interactive feedback while searching has come up more than a few times. Along the way, we’ve even built quite a few demos (notably, Amit Patel in 1999 and Nikhil Bhatla in 2003). Our search-as-you-type demos were thought-provoking—fun, fast and interactive—but fundamentally flawed. Why? Because you don’t really want search-as-you-type (no one wants search results for [bike h] in the process of searching for [bike helmets]). You really want search-before-you-type—that is, you want results for the most likely search given what you have already typed.

As you can imagine, searching even before someone types isn’t easy—which is why we are so excited today to be unveiling Google Instant. Google Instant is search-before-you-type. Instant takes what you have typed already, predicts the most likely completion and streams results in real-time for those predictions—yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive, predictive and powerful.

Here are a few of the core features in Google Instant:

Dynamic Results - Google dynamically displays relevant search results as you type so you can quickly interact and click through to the web content you need.
Predictions - One of the key technologies in Google Instant is that we predict the rest of your query (in light gray text) before you finish typing. See what you need? Stop typing, look down and find what you’re looking for.
Scroll to search - Scroll through predictions and see results instantly for each as you arrow down.

Here’s a video that explains Google Instant in greater depth:

To bring Google Instant to life, we needed a host of new technologies including new caching systems, the ability to adaptively control the rate at which we show results pages and an optimization of page-rendering JavaScript to help web browsers keep up with the rest of the system. In the end, we needed to produce a system that was able to scale while searching as fast as people can type and think—all while maintaining the relevance and simplicity people expect from Google.

The user benefits of Google Instant are many—but the primary one is time saved. Our testing has shown that Google Instant saves the average searcher two to five seconds per search. That may not seem like a lot at first, but it adds up. With Google Instant, we estimate that we’ll save our users 11 hours with each passing second!

As part of our current rollout, Google Instant will become the core search experience on Google.com for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE 8. We’ll also be offering Google Instant to our users in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and the U.K. who are signed in and have Instant-capable browsers. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll work to roll out Google Instant to all geographies and platforms.

We’re very excited about today’s announcement and hope that you are too. Give Google Instant a try and let us know what you think!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

Inviting all children to ‘Doodle’ their dreams for India

September 2, 2010

At Google we love to play! We keep redesigning our corporate logo to celebrate scientific and artistic achievements, festivals and historic events. In this spirit, we are happy to announce the launch of our second Doodle 4 Google competition in India to celebrate the Children’s Day on 14 November , 2010.We are inviting all children in India to participate in this exciting 'doodling' competition and get a chance to feature their ‘doodle’ on 14 November on www.google.co.in. The competition is open for all children from 5 to 16 years across India. This year, our chosen theme is ‘My dream for India’ encouraging young doodlers to imagine what India would be like in two decades from now and capture those images in color and paper.In addition to the winner's doodle appearing on Google.co.in on November 14, 2010, the star Doodler will receive a technology starter package including a laptop, a year’s Internet connection and a Rs 2,00,000 technology grant for the school that he or she will represent.Just like last year, the participants will be clubbed in three different categories- Class 1 to 3 , Class 4 to 6 and Class 7 to 10. JJ School of Arts will select the top 200 entries from each category which will be reviewed by a panel of judges. The judges will then shortlist 15 doodles from each category, bringing it down to a total of 45 final Doodles. All the final entries will be exhibited for public voting and based on the number of votes, one winner from each category will be selected. Each of these winners will receive a laptop. Dennis Hwang, the original Google Doodler, will then choose the final winning Doodle from the total 45 finalists.
Participating in the competition is simple:

Children studying in Class 1 to 10 can participate in the competition. These will be divided into three categories- Class 1 to 3 ; Class 4 to 6 and ; Class 7 to 10.

All participants must register on the website (www.google.co.in/doodle4google). The submission may be either individually or through the school. The school route is valid only if the school is organizing to collect and submit the doodles on behalf of their students.

Last date for submissions is 25 September, 2010

JJ School of Arts will select the top 600 Doodles which will enter the Semi- Final round.

After a series of elimination by celebrity panel of judges, 45 best Doodles will be displayed on the gallery (www.google.co.in/doodle4google). These entries will be open for public voting allowing users to vote for their favorite Doodle in each category.

This year we will have 4 winners in total. 3 Winners from each category selected from the basis of vote and the final winner will be selected by Dennis Hwang, the original Doodler for Google.

Winning Doodle will be uploaded on the Google.co.in homepage on 14 November, Children’s Day and all the winners will get a Technology Starter Package.

So gather those art supplies. All it takes to enter is a drawing on paper using your favorite medium (crayons, markers, colored pencils, whatever) –For information about the contest and to download/print material for use, log onto:www.google.co.in/doodle4google
Posted by Nikhil Rungta, Country Marketing Manager, Google India

Health Speaks begins pilots in Arabic, Hindi and Swahili

September 1, 2010

(Cross-posted from the Google Org Blog )

Here in the U.S. I often take for granted the ability to immediately find information on if I might have a cold versus the flu or what vaccinations are recommended prior to traveling abroad. Like a lot of Americans, I often consult health information on the Internet in addition to talking with a medical professional. This information makes me more informed about my own health and more confident in making healthy decisions.

In most parts of the world, however, quality information that would help people improve their health is not available online in local languages. In fact, a 2004 Lancet article (.pdf) described the lack of access to health information as a “major barrier to knowledge-based health care in developing countries.” The authors noted that “among currently available technologies, only the Internet has the potential to deliver universal access to up-to-date health care information.”

To tackle this issue, we're introducing a new initiative called Health Speaks which aims to help increase the amount of high-quality online health information in local languages. Today we are beginning pilot projects to support community-based, crowd-sourced translation of health information from English into Arabic, Hindi and Swahili.

We encourage anyone with health knowledge who is bilingual in English and either Arabic, Hindi or Swahili to take part in the pilot projects for Health Speaks. We have chosen hundreds of good quality English language health articles from Wikipedia that we hope will be translated with the assistance of Google Translator Toolkit, made locally relevant, reviewed and then published to the corresponding local language Wikipedia site. To further show our commitment to this cause, we have funded the professional translation of a small subset of these articles.

We are additionally providing a donation incentive to encourage community translators to participate. For the first 60 days, we will donate 3 cents (US) for each English word translated to the Children's Cancer Hospital Egypt 57357, the Public Health Foundation of India and theAfrican Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) for the pilots in Arabic, Hindi and Swahili, respectively, up to $50,000 each. This means that community translators will help their friends and neighbors access quality health information in a local language, while also supporting a local non-profit organization working in health or health education.

We will undoubtedly learn from these three pilots and iterate on our approach as we learn how best to engage volunteers and provide tools that allow for easy and accurate translation. We hope to one day expand the Health Speaks initiative to include high-quality health content from other publishers and other languages that suffer from a lack of health information online.

According to UNESCO, 90% of the content on the Internet exists in only 12 languages. Language should not be the barrier that denies millions of people worldwide the opportunity to improve their health with valuable health information. Please join us in the effort to break down part of that barrier.

Posted by Jennifer Haroon, Manager, Health Initiatives, Google.org

India Blog

Google India Celebrates Diversity

Introducing Google certified ‘Advance Online advertising program’ with NIIT

Search: Now faster than the speed of type

Inviting all children to ‘Doodle’ their dreams for India

Health Speaks begins pilots in Arabic, Hindi and Swahili

Labels

Archive

More Information

Subscribe via Email