Releasing the Chromium OS open source project

Friday, November 20, 2009 at 1:56 PM

This is a cross post from the Official Google Blog

In July we announced that we were working on Google Chrome OS, an open source operating system for people who spend most of their time on the web.

Today we are open-sourcing the project as Chromium OS. We are doing this early, a year before Google Chrome OS will be ready for users, because we are eager to engage with partners, the open source community and developers. As with the Google Chrome browser, development will be done in the open from this point on. This means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions. The Chromium OS project includes our current code base, user interface experiments and some initial designs for ongoing development. This is the initial sketch and we will color it in over the course of the next year.

We want to take this opportunity to explain why we're excited about the project and how it is a fundamentally different model of computing.

First, it's all about the web. All apps are web apps. The entire experience takes place within the browser and there are no conventional desktop applications. This means users do not have to deal with installing, managing and updating programs.

Second, because all apps live within the browser, there are significant benefits to security. Unlike traditional operating systems, Chrome OS doesn't trust the applications you run. Each app is contained within a security sandbox making it harder for malware and viruses to infect your computer. Furthermore, Chrome OS barely trusts itself. Every time you restart your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code. If your system has been compromised, it is designed to fix itself with a reboot. While no computer can be made completely secure, we're going to make life much harder (and less profitable) for the bad guys. If you dig security, read the Chrome OS Security Overview or watch the video.

Most of all, we are obsessed with speed. We are taking out every unnecessary process, optimizing many operations and running everything possible in parallel. This means you can go from turning on the computer to surfing the web in a few seconds. Our obsession with speed goes all the way down to the metal. We are specifying reference hardware components to create the fastest experience for Google Chrome OS.

There is still a lot of work to do, and we're excited to work with the open source community. We have benefited hugely from projects like GNU, the Linux Kernel, Moblin, Ubuntu, WebKit and many more. We will be contributing our code upstream and engaging closely with these and other open source efforts.

Google Chrome OS will be ready for consumers this time next year. Sign up here for updates or if you like building your operating system from source, get involved at chromium.org.

Lastly, here is a short video that explains why we're so excited about Google Chrome OS.



Posted by Caesar Sengupta, Group Product Manager and Matt Papakipos, Engineering Director

Making it easier to find the property you want on Google Maps

Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 2:48 PM

Around half of the Googlers in our Sydney headquarters are software engineers, working on some really cool things - Google Wave, App Engine, Google Docs, and of course, Google Maps.

Recently, some of us have been working on a particularly interesting project that combines Google Maps and search technology - we've been trying to work out if your search query in Google Maps means you're interested in having current real estate listings returned to you. It's nice to get to work on some 'search' engineering down here!

So here's what we've been cooking up - in the past, if you wanted to view real estate listings on Google Maps, your best bet was to select "Real Estate..." from the "More" menu at the top of the map.

Now, simply searching for "real estate" will return, well, real estate (try it)! You could also try "homes for sale sydney" or "homes for rent adelaide". Or while you're at it, check out "apartments for sale brisbane", or "homes for rent near perth". The idea is to make it really easy for you guys - you tell us what you want, and we get it back to you! Of course, we'll continue to work to return the best results for all your Google Maps queries, whether you're looking for local businesses, geographic features, or your perfect home.

We also wanted to tell you about the integration of real estate listings with Place Pages. Now clicking the "more info" link next to a listing takes you to a faster, easier-to-read page that gives you all of the information we have about a listing: photos, inspection times, videos, details, a Street View preview and nearby public transit information if available, allowing you to quickly find the listing you want and click through to the sources of the listing.


We hope you find these features improve your real estate search experience on Google Maps.

Posted by Jordan Bayliss-McCulloch and Ryan Williams, Software Engineers

Guinness World Record for evian's Rollerbabies ad on YouTube

Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 4:00 PM

We always knew that cooing babies were popular videos on YouTube. But apparently roller skating babies are what users around the world love to watch the most. Today, BETC and evian's 'Rollerbabies' film on YouTube were awarded an official Guinness World Record for the most viewed online ad of all time. The video has been watched a whopping 45,166,109 times and is getting more views every day. 

Don't be shy...check it out for yourself (for perhaps the second or third time):

One thing that we've learned at YouTube is that sometimes even the most creative and entertaining ads need a little help to go viral. That's why BETC and evian bought YouTube homepage ads in the UK, France, Germany, US, Japan, and Canada to promote their video around the world. These ads, combined with an innovative creative idea, also had a positive brand impact, according to research from Nielsen and YouTube. Specifically, Internet users in France experienced increased brand awareness and purchase consideration after viewing the ad. 

Posted by Jason Chuck, Marketing Team

Modifications to the Google Books settlement

Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 4:12 PM

(Editor's note: This is a cross-post from the Google Public Policy Blog)

Last year, we joined with a broad class of authors and publishers to announce a settlement agreement that would make millions of out-of-print books available to students and readers in every part of the U.S., while forging new opportunities for rightsholders to sell access to their books. Tonight we submitted an amended version of the Google Books settlement agreement to the court.

We've travelled all over the world together with the authors and publishers to talk with people about our agreement, and over the last two months, we've read the many letters and briefs written to the court. We've also had discussions with the Department of Justice about the settlement.

The changes we've made in our amended agreement address many of the concerns we've heard (particularly in limiting its international scope), while at the same time preserving the core benefits of the original agreement: opening access to millions of books while providing rightsholders with ways to sell and control their work online. You can read a summary of the changes we made here, or by reading our FAQ.

We firmly believe in the promise of the agreement, as do our many supporters. As Sergey Brin recently wrote in a recent op-ed, "even if our cultural heritage stays intact in the world’s foremost libraries, it is effectively lost if no one can access it easily."

We're disappointed that we won't be able to provide access to as many books from as many countries through the settlement as a result of our modifications, but we look forward to continuing to work with rightsholders from around the world to fulfill our longstanding mission of increasing access to all the world's books.

You can find more perspectives on the agreement from authors and publishers here and here.

Posted by Dan Clancy, Google Books Engineering Director

Two great hackfest days!

Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 3:58 PM

This is a guest cross post from blog.openaustralia.org

Last weekend, OpenAustralia held its second hackfest at Google's Sydney office. If you haven't come across OpenAustralia.org before, it's a volunteer run website which helps you to find out what your representatives get up to in parliament with the aim of bridging the growing democratic disconnect that many people feel.

This time we went all out with a two day hackfest - 10:30am till 8pm both days. That's over 18 hours of hacking! As well as the venue and a fabulous team of volunteers, which included Tim Ansell, James Polley and Pamela Fox, Google provided lunch and snacks for both days. Thank you to Google for supporting this community!

It was an amazing turnout by an incredibly talented group of people. Over 90 people took part, including a surprise group from CSIRO who happened to be wandering past and dropped in to see what we were up to. We were also delighted to have 30 people take part in the first ever retroactively-named OpenAustralia installfest - installing the development virtual machine onto their laptops, and walking through the first steps showing how they can make changes to the code, test locally, and then submit to our repository on github. During the course of the hackfest, we had half a dozen or so patches pushed to us - we're still working through the process of accepting them all! We also had 40-odd updates to bugs on our tracker.





Photos by Halans. For more fabulous photos by Halans and others see Flickr.

This hackfest was timed to coincide with the Gov2.0 Taskforce MashupAustralia competition, and we encouraged people to work on mashups for the competition, OpenAustralia itself, or any other civic-minded project.

At the same time hacking on MashupAustralia on the weekend was the #melbhack session, organised by Lonely Planet and the GovHack folks.

If people weren't in the mood for hacking, either on a mashup or OpenAustralia, we had presentations and directed hacking sessions scheduled throughout both days. Plenty for all to do.

We gave out small prizes (donated by Google) to some of our favourite mashups created over the weekend. Working demos, however rough, won out over plans, however well-formed.

Our favourite mashup, the "Suburb Matchmaker", was created over the weekend by Raul Alberto Caceres (@totocol), Daniela Fernandez (@danira_98) and Roberto Arias Alegria (@roberto8080). It was particularly impressive that this team met over lunch on the first day and decided on the spot to work together. "Suburb Matchmaker" helps you find the suburb that's right for you by answering some simple questions.



Second place went to the "Frog Census" by Simon Swain (@psi6030). See where and when different frogs have been spotted in South Australia.



The irreverant "Bouncing Teapots" by Dan Bethell (@fxmonkeydan) and Ray Haleblian (@rhaleblian) came third. The "Bouncing Teapots" simulated members of the House of Representatives as teapots falling where the more time they spoke in parliament the more bouncy they were.



We hope that one of these or one the many other projects that were worked on over the weekend will win the MashupAustralia competition!

To follow OpenAustralia's progress and find out when we'll be running the next Hackfest near you please read our blog, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or join our community mailing list on Google Groups!

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.

Guest posted by Matthew Landauer, Co-founder of OpenAustralia.org

Locking SafeSearch

at 1:40 PM

This is a cross post from the Official Google Blog

When you're searching on Google, we think you should have the choice to keep adult content out of your search results. That's why we developed SafeSearch, a feature that lets you filter sexually explicit web sites and images from your search results. While no filter is 100% accurate, SafeSearch helps you avoid content you may prefer not to see or would rather your children did not stumble across. We think it works pretty well, but we're always looking for ways to improve the feature.

Today we're launching a feature that lets you lock your SafeSearch setting to the Strict level of filtering. When you lock SafeSearch, two things will change. First, you'll need to enter your password to change the setting. Second, the Google search results page will be visibly different to indicate that SafeSearch is locked:



Even from across the room, the coloured balls give parents and teachers a clear visual cue that SafeSearch is still locked. And if you don't see them, it's quick and easy to verify and re-lock SafeSearch.

To use SafeSearch lock, go to the "Search Settings" page on Google. For detailed instructions, check out this video.



We hope you and your family find exactly what you’re looking for in Google search results — and nothing more.

Posted by Posted by Pete Lidwell, Product Manager and Aaron Arcos, Engineer

Congratulations to our 2009 Doodle 4 Google winners!

at 12:00 PM

What an amazing day we had at Google's Australia headquarters on Tuesday. Thirty-two talented young artists from every state and territory in Australia flew to join us for a day of celebrating their achievement at being selected as the winners of the 2009 Doodle 4 Google Australia competition, which asked kids to draw a Google doodle showing their 'Wish for Australia'.

From more than 5,500 individual entries, our 32 wonderful winners had first been selected as one of 320 finalists, and then impressed our judges (Ken Done, Anne Geddes, and Hugh Evans) enough to be selected to come to Sydney for a day of Googley fun.

Every one of the young artists impressed us with both their obvious artistic talent, but also their wonderful attitudes and interest and passion for Australia's future. They asked fantastic questions throughout the day, as they learned about the history of the Sydney Opera House in a fun behind-the scenes tour; heard from inspiring humanitarian Hugh Evans about his wish for Australia and the world; and saw first hand the way that Google's original doodler Dennis Hwang creates his iconic artworks.


Nearly 80,000 Australians voted for their favourite Google Doodles over the last few weeks, and we revealed the winners after a jaunty trip down from Google HQ led by gypsy band Kush.


The four national age group winners are:

• Ferryn Sutantio, Mill Park Heights Primary School, Mill Park VIC (Years 1-3)
• Jessie Du, Rydalmere East Public School, Ermington NSW (Years 4-6)
• Darcy McBean, Kormilda College, Katherine NT (Years 7-8)
• Emilie Tan, St Ursula's College, Toowoomba QLD (Years 9-10)

Then came one of the big moments of the day ... finding out which Google doodle would be seen by millions of people around Australia and the world on Australia Day next year. Dennis Hwang, selected Jessie Du's doodle "Australia Forever" to appear on the page, and he complemented her on the real warmth in her drawing. We can't wait to see it on the homepage next year in all its glory - congratulations Jessie.


To everyone who entered Doodle 4 Google Australia 2009 - thank you for sharing your talent and enthusiasm with us. Doodle 4 Google is one of the highlights of our year, and you guys really made it special for us. Keep doodling!

Posted by Leticia Lentini, Doodle 4 Google team