Going Google across the 50 States: Texas brothers convert 30% more leads by staying on track with Google Apps

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Editor's note: Over 3 million businesses have adopted Google Apps. Today we’ll hear from David Bullock, CFO of YETI Coolers based in Austin, Texas. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google cloud calculator.

YETI Coolers, co-founded in 2005 by brothers Roy and Ryan Seiders, offers durable, super-insulated ice chests for serious outdoor enthusiasts. Roy first recognized the potential of a premium cooler during an early entrepreneurial endeavor and decided to design his own. He recruited his brother to help and the two settled on YETI for the company name – a new brand that consumers could easily associate with frigid toughness. Today, YETI coolers are “certified grizzly-proof” and distributed through over 500 dealers across the country.

When Roy and Ryan started the company, they recognized the value of Google’s free email service, Gmail, and started with one email address – yeticoolers@gmail.com. However, fast forward three years and the company had grown to 10 employees. We hit a tipping point where we needed to expand and create a more professional look with @yeticoolers.com email addresses. The question was how to retain three years of information and still offer the entire office the same easy-to-use interface and access to remotely-stored email history. The solution was Google Apps.

Soon after implementing Google Apps, we hired our first National Sales Director who resides in North Carolina. Despite the geographical barrier, Google Docs has allowed us to collaborate with him and other remote employees in real time, and has became a critical component of our sales process.

Our goal is to increase the number of dealers that sell YETI coolers but for a long time, our volume of dealer inquiries was unmanageable and we missed out on sales opportunities. This is where a Google spreadsheet saved us. We created a “Potential Dealer Tracker” to track, prioritize, and, most importantly follow up with potential YETI dealers. By capitalizing on dealer inquiries in an organized, methodical way, we’ve been able to convert 30% more leads just this year. The profit from the new accounts nearly pays our National Sales Director’s salary!

We also use Google Calendar to track internal and external meetings and even non-work events like Red Raider and Longhorn football games. More recently, we started using Google Sites and launched our company’s first intranet. We look forward to adding even richer content to the site as the company continues to expand.

Given the rapid growth we’ve experienced over the last few years, it has been extremely difficult to stay on top of all areas of the business. Google Apps has changed this, providing the tools we need to succeed. It’s low cost, secure and easy to use – from our standpoint, Google Apps is the perfect solution for any small business.

Posted by David Bullock, YETI Coolers

Google Media Solutions Series, Part 4: Google TV Ads - Tune into success

The Google Media Solutions series has been cross-posted from the Google Agency blog, as the solutions outlined there are fully applicable to small businesses.

Congratulations, you have made it to the final installment of the Google Media Solutions series! We get frequent questions about Google TV Ads; whether it's the right platform, how much it costs, how it works. Here’s your crash course.

Google TV Ads is an online marketing place that allows anyone to launch national TV campaigns and measure their success with timely reporting. Google TV Ads allows you to buy the programs that you want without bundling, pay only for impressions delivered and access viewership data from a sample of millions.

Ready to jump in? Let’s dispel a few myths that you may have heard:

• Does TV advertising fit into my marketing mix? Television advertising allows you to reach a wider audience than any other advertising medium. Generate brand awareness and demand through sight, sound and motion. It’s also a great supplement to any online strategy - read how ooVoo used TV to drive a 500% increase in site traffic.

• We want to get started, but we don’t have a commercial. Can you help? Of course! You can use the Google Ad Creation Marketplace to connect with professional ad production houses for as little as $200. Creating compelling, effective TV ads at relatively low costs has never been easier.

• But is TV Measurable? If you have a website, we recommend tracking and comparing website visits with your TV campaign metrics using Google Analytics. Google Analytics can track TV campaign metrics like TV impressions alongside daily web traffic volume.What does it take to get started? Create a video ad, log into AdWords, choose targets and shows and see your ad on TV within 48 hours! Visit the Getting Started Guide for more tips.

This post concludes our Google Media Solutions series. Over the past four weeks, we have reviewed Google AdWords, the Google Display Network, Remarketing, YouTube and Google TV Ads. Hopefully you have learned some tips and tricks along the way.

Posted by Laura Salzberg, Agency Team

YouTube’s Promoted Videos picks up steam

How do you increase sales and build your brand when you’re on a limited budget? You might consider using YouTube’s Promoted Videos. YouTube reports that it has served its 500,000,000th Promoted Video view this week and has seen a six-fold increase in clicks it has delivered to businesses such as Shopper’s Choice, Dynomighty and Orabrush. This ad product combines the branding capabilities of video with the direct response action of search advertising, allowing advertisers to promote their videos against search results or related videos on YouTube. For more information on this announcement, please visit the YouTube blog for the full story.

Posted by the YouTube Team

Google Media Solutions Series, Part 3: Re-engage your customers while they browse with remarketing and the Google Display Network

Welcome to the third installment of the Google Media Solutions series. This series has been cross-posted with the Google Agency blog, since many of them are applicable to the small business owner. In this post, we will review the Google Display Network. The Google Display Network is a large group of websites and blogs that display AdWords ads and allows advertisers to scalably reach their customers at moments of relevance. People are using it for direct response, web engagement as well as driving offline conversions.

We have rolled out many new features for the Google Display Network. One that we would like to highlight is remarketing. Google remarketing uses custom technology to reach potential customers who have previously visited your website. Implementing the remarketing tag is very easy; you simply add a pixel to your website. After adding the pixel, you can use remarketing to help capture additional sales or leads by re-targeting users who have already visited the site, and generally convert better and at a lower CPA. To learn more about remarketing and other innovative targeting options on the Google Display Network, you can check out this post from the Google Display Network blog series.

We frequently hear some common misconceptions from advertisers about the GDN that we’d like to clarify:

• I’ve tried the GDN before - what has changed?: The Google Display Network has changed a lot in the past few years. Today, the median advertiser gets approximately 20% of their conversions from the GDN at a CPA that is comparable to search.* To drive results like these, we are investing heavily in many new features that make the GDN an effective platform for advertisers with any marketing objective. Examples of features we've introduced over the years include site exclusions, above the fold targeting, frequency capping, and consolidated view-through conversion reporting.

• The Google Display Network only works for branding: Contextual targeting and remarketing are just a few examples of great tools that direct response marketers can use to reach potential customers in the later stages of the buying cycle, like consideration and decision. The Conversion Optimizer can also help you generate additional conversions at an attractive cost-per-acquisition (CPA). With powerful tools like these, you can make sure you are capturing all your potential customers as they spend time across the web.

Thanks for reading the third part of the Google Media Solutions blog series. Next, we will discuss how you can use Google TV to drive results for your clients. 

Posted by Laura Salzberg, Agency Team

*Internal analysis of North America advertisers advertising on both search and content, with conversion tracking enabled, from Dec. 2007 – Nov. 2008

Exploring Computational Thinking

Posted by Elaine Kao, Education Program Manager

Over the past year, a group of California-credentialed teachers along with our own Google engineers came together to discuss and explore ideas about how to incorporate computational thinking into the K-12 curriculum to enhance student learning and build this critical 21st century skill in everyone.

What exactly is computational thinking? Well, that would depend on who you ask as there are several existing resources on the web that may define this term slightly differently. We define computational thinking (CT) as a set of skills that software engineers use to write the programs that underlay all of the computer applications you use every day. Specific CT techniques include:

• Problem decomposition: the ability to break down a problem into sub-problems
• Pattern recognition: the ability to notice similarities, differences, properties, or trends in data
• Pattern generalization: the ability to extract out unnecessary details and generalize those that are necessary in order to define a concept or idea in general terms
• Algorithm design: the ability to build a repeatable, step-by-step process to solve a particular problem

Given the increasing prevalence of technology in our day-to-day lives and in most careers outside of computer science, we believe that it is important to raise this base level of understanding in everyone.

To this end, we’d like to introduce you to a new resource: Exploring Computational Thinking. Similar to some of our other initiatives in education, including CS4HS and Google Code University, this program is committed to providing educators with access to our curriculum models, resources, and communities to help them learn more about CT, discuss it as a strategy for teaching and understanding core curriculum, as well as easily incorporate CT into their own curriculum, whether it be in math, science, language, history or beyond. The materials developed by the team reflect both the teachers’ expertise in pedagogy and K-12 curriculum as well as our engineers’ problem-solving techniques that are critical to our industry.

Prior to launching this program, we reached out to several educators and classrooms and had them try our materials. Here’s some of the feedback we received:

• CT as a strategy for teaching and student learning works well with many subjects, and can easily be incorporated to support the existing K-12 curriculum
• Our models help to call out the specific CT techniques and provide more structure around the topics taught by educators, many of who were already unknowingly applying CT in their classrooms
• Including programming exercises in the classroom can significantly enrich a lesson by both challenging the advanced students and motivating the students who have fallen behind
• Our examples provide educators with a means of re-teaching topics that students have struggled with in the past, without simply going through the same lesson that frustrated them before

To learn more about our program or access CT curriculum materials and other resources, visit us at www.google.com/edu/ect.

Advertise your local business with Google Boost

[Cross-posted from the LatLong Blog]

As a local business owner in today’s day and age, you know that it’s important to have an online presence because that’s where your customers are. In fact, research shows that 97% of people conduct research online before buying locally. Hopefully you’ve gone to Google Places to claim your free business listing that appears on Google and Google Maps. That enables you to share accurate information about your business such as your hours of operation, photos and videos - and now you can do even more.

Today, we’re announcing the availability of a new online advertising solution to help local businesses connect with potential customers in their area. Boost enables business owners to easily create online search ads from directly within their Google Places account. No ongoing management is needed after the initial set up, and this beta is currently available to select local businesses in San Francisco, Houston and Chicago.

Boost ads are eligible to appear in the “Sponsored Links” section of Google.com and Google Maps search result pages. For example, if you’re a restaurant owner in San Francisco who has signed up for Boost, your ad may show up when someone does a related search like the one below, indicating a cuisine and location that matches yours. Beyond the basics like your company name, address, phone number and website, your ad may also include the number of reviews you’ve received, an average star rating and a link to your Place page to help potential customers find additional useful information about your business. When a map appears alongside the results, a blue pin will help folks quickly find your location on the map. Businesses using Google Tags will also see their yellow tag appear in the ad.


To create your ad, all that is required is a short business description, a web or Place page, your business categories and a monthly budget. From there, our system automatically sets up your ad campaign - figuring out the relevant keywords that will trigger your ad to appear on Google and Google Maps, and how to get the most out of the budget you allotted. You’ll only pay when a potential customer actually clicks on your ad, and you can also view basic ad performance data from your Google Places dashboard.

Here is an example of the simple sign up page within Google Places, which takes just a few minutes to complete. To make the process even easier, the “description” and “categories” fields may be pre-populated with suggestions based on the information you provided on the Place page for your business.


We hope Boost provides busy local business owners with a quick and easy way to share information about themselves with the people who look for them online. Placement in the “Sponsored Links” section of the page will, as always, depend on factors such as your ad’s relevance and quality. Boost does not affect the ranking of the free, organic business listings in any way.

As we do with all beta features, we’ll carefully review the data and effectiveness of this trial and may make changes before making decisions about any future expansion. In the meantime, business owners can sign in or claim their listing in Google Places, and select businesses in San Francisco, Houston and Chicago will see an invitation to try Boost in the account dashboard. Interested businesses outside these areas can sign up to receive notification when Boost comes to their area by filling out this form.

Posted by Kiley McEvoy, Product Manager

Going Google across the 50 States: Investment advisory firm in Illinois turns to technology to get ahead

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Editor's note: Over 3 million businesses have adopted Google Apps. Today we’ll hear from Dustin Bonnema, Portfolio Analyst and IT guru for MainStreet Advisors based in Chicago, Illinois. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google cloud calculator.

Founded in 2003 by two veteran investment professionals, MainStreet Advisors is a Chicago-based Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Registered Investment Advisor. We provide investment advisory services, portfolio management, and marketing support for our clients, and are expanding rapidly - we’ve already outgrown our current office space, two years ahead of plan.

Such fast growth prompted us to focus more on technology and find ways to remove communication barriers for all employees. So we switched to Google Apps earlier this year and are already using many of the products in the suite including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Sites. We couldn’t be happier with Google Apps, and the best part is that everything is online and all the products are easy to learn and use. We’re trying to put as much as we can into a Google spreadsheet or document.

Shared Google Calendars are used to track time-off, conferences, committee meetings, and individuals’ travel schedules. This is a critical component of our internal communication strategy since Managing Directors and other executives travel as much as 40 - 50% of the year. This same group is reliant on mobile phones, and use either iPhones or BlackBerry devices to access Gmail and other applications, while they’re on the go.

As the company grows, it has become harder to locate and share updated information and policies across all employees. Google Sites is solving this problem – we built an intranet that includes links to shared calendars, client websites, group email aliases, expense reports, gift matching instructions, and investment policies. A Google form is also embedded in the site so employees can submit vacation requests that are updated directly in our HR manager’s spreadsheet. In time, we plan to add even more to the site – we’re already showing gadgets with intra-day performance of market indexes across the world and we’d like to add a map of client locations and charts outlining our company assets over time.

Aside from helping us create more efficient business processes, Google Apps has become a key part of our business continuity plan. We have the security of knowing that if something goes wrong in the Chicago office, we’ll still be able to access our information from other places. This is critical to protecting our clients’ investments, and the future of our business.”

Posted by Dustin Bonnema, MainStreet Advisors

Google Media Solutions Series: Part 2, YouTube - Bring Creative Solutions to Your Clients

Over the next four weeks, the Google Agency Blog will be debunking common myths, passing on easy implementation tips, and sharing general how-to of Google advertising. We'll be cross-posting to this blog, since most of the tips are relevant to small businesses. You'll be able to find all the tips in one place under the label 'Google Media Solutions Series'.

Online video represents a huge opportunity to reach potential customers with new, compelling formats. YouTube is the perfect platform to reach these customers, drive sales and enhance branding initiatives.

There are many benefits to advertising on YouTube. It is a unique platform which allow you to reach potential customers who are engaging online. You can set up YouTube campaigns through the AdWords interface. With our new YouTube Video Targeting Tool, you can target specific audiences based on interest, demographic or specific video content. You can create a message and share it with consumers with their videos or display ads. Additionally, after running a campaign, you can use YouTube Insight to learn how potential customers are interacting with your videos.

There might be some confusion around YouTube ad formats, so here’s some clarification:

• I am not sure if my audience is on YouTube?: Your audience is watching YouTube videos. YouTube has users of all ages and 32% of users are between the ages of 35 and 54*. In fact, if the YouTube audience were a country, it would be the 3rd largest country in the world with over 420 million unique visitors every month.

• We don’t have video content. How can we use YouTube?: You don’t need to have video content to advertise on YouTube. You can target your audience on YouTube with display, text or video ads. Our recommendation, since YouTube is a visual medium, is to test out display ads.

• Is there professional content on YouTube?: YouTube has over 3,500 content partners, including CBS, TV Guide, Fred and JuicyStar07. Our partners are actively uploading content and the video landscape is constantly changing. As this is the case, your target audiences are returning to see new, updated content on YouTube!

Check in next week for the third post, which will be on the Google Display Network, Remarketing and great tips for reaching your customers while they browse the web!

Posted by Laura Salzberg, Agency Team
* comScore MediaMetrix, September 2009

Google at the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP '10)

Posted by Slav Petrov, Research Scientist

The Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP '10) was recently held at the MIT Stata Center in Massachusetts. Natural Language Processing is at the core of many of the things that we do here at Google. Googlers have therefore been traditionally part of this research community, participating as program committee members, paper authors and attendees.

At this year's EMNLP conference Google Fellow, Amit Singhal gave an invited keynote talk on "Challenges in running a commercial search engine" where he highlighted some of the exciting opportunities, as well as challenges, that Google is currently facing. Furthermore, Terry Koo (who recently joined Google), David Sontag (former Google PhD Fellowship recipient) and their collaborators from MIT received the Fred Jelinek Best Paper Award for their innovative work on syntactic parsing with the title "Dual Decomposition for Parsing with Non-Projective Head Automata".

Here is a complete list of the papers presented by Googlers at the conference:

• Dual Decomposition for Parsing with Non-Projective Head Automata (Fred Jelinek Best Paper Award) by Terry Koo, Alexander M. Rush, Michael Collins, Tommi Jaakkola, and David Sontag
• "Poetic" Statistical Machine Translation: Rhyme and Meter (see also here) by Dmitriy Genzel, Jakob Uszkoreit, and Franz Och
• Efficient Graph-Based Semi-Supervised Learning of Structured Tagging Models by Amarnag Subramanya, Slav Petrov, and Fernando Pereira
• Uptraining for Accurate Deterministic Question Parsing by Slav Petrov, Pi-Chuan Chang, Michael Ringgaard, and Hiyan Alshawi
• Self-training with Products of Latent Variable Grammars by Zhongqiang Huang, Mary Harper, and Slav Petrov

Google Media Solutions Series: Part 1, Back-to-Basics with Google AdWords and Search Marketing

Over the next four weeks, the Google Agency Blog will be debunking common myths, passing on easy implementation tips, and sharing general how-to of Google advertising. We'll be cross-posting to this blog, since most of the tips are relevant to small businesses. You'll be able to find all the tips in one place under the label 'Google Media Solutions Series'.

So, let's get started with Google’s search marketing product, Google AdWords. Using Google AdWords, you can target Google.com and the Google Search Network. This is a great solution to connect with potential customers who are searching for your products and services. It is flexible, measurable, and accountable. With AdWords, you can easily manage the spend of your account and control costs by setting a daily budget and maximum cost-per-click (CPC). Another benefit is that it’s easy to make changes to your ad text, as changes to ads take affect almost instantaneously. Lastly, as an added benefit, you can track the return on investment (ROI) of your account by using Conversion Tracking or Google Analytics.

There are some common myths that your clients may have heard regarding search and we want to make sure that we clarify these misconceptions:

• My website shows organically, so I don’t need to advertise: It is great to have a highly ranked organic listing; however you can’t control the message to your potential customers with organic listings in the same way that you can control it with search marketing campaigns. By advertising on Google.com and the search network, you can control the message that you share with all potential customers and determine the landing page to which you direct your potential customers after they click on the ad. These features can lead to increased sales.

In addition, organic results are likely only capturing a very small portion of the relevant traffic on Google. For example, a consumer electronics advertiser might appear high in the search results for their brand terms, or specific trademarks relevant to their company, but AdWords can expose their message on a wide variety of related terms like 'digital cameras' 'netbooks' and 'HD TVs'.

• Competitors can click on my ads maliciously: We take the security of AdWords accounts very seriously and have many resources in place to prevent your account from accruing invalid clicks. While invalid clicks occur less often than commonly perceived, we have three filters in place to protect your account: detection and filtering techniques, advanced monitoring techniques and manual reviews from our team.

Stay tuned for next week’s post on the Google Display Network, remarketing and great tips for reaching your customers while they browse the web!

Posted by Laura Salzberg, Agency Team

Going Google Across the 50 States: Google Apps strikes a chord with Premier Guitar in Iowa

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Editor’s note: Over 3 million businesses have adopted Google Apps. Today we’ll hear from Patti Sprague, Managing Director of Premier Guitar in Iowa. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google cloud calculator.

Premier Guitar is for true guitar enthusiasts, a magazine focused on guitar gear and the musicians who use it. All of our employees are passionate about music, and many play guitar or other instruments. Working with a bunch of musicians creates a fun, creative workplace, but not always a very structured environment. We needed an email system that didn’t tie our team to the office, but allowed us to work together and stay connected wherever we may be. Google Apps was the perfect solution.

In our business we have very tight deadlines. We do things a little differently than other traditional magazines. We not only publish a print version of our magazine, we make all of our content, current and archival, freely accessible over 5 different platforms. We’re able to successfully compete with some of the older print centric publications out there because we’re lean and we can get stories up quickly. That requires a lot of team work. Google Docs allows us to work on a story from wherever we are and get it published quickly. It would never be possible to work as efficiently or collectively if we had to wait for a new version of a document to be sent to us before we could publish.

Often our writers and photographers will need to drop everything to hop on a plane for a last minute factory tour, or an interview with an artist. One of the reasons we started using Google Apps is the ability to access our email and calendars on our mobile phones or anywhere with an internet connection. With Google Apps, we know where the team is and what’s due based on our shared calendars. Our company calendar and editorial calendars are kept up to date so we can get our stories out quickly. Plus, we can always just hop on Chat to ask each other questions or find out the status of a shoot or a photo shoot or piece. Being able to just ask a co-worker a quick question instead of sending them an email and waiting for a response has really helped keep projects moving along.

Apps helps us stay connected and work together, while still having fun doing what we love. For a lean team that wants to meet deadlines while writing about their passion, Google Apps was the perfect choice.

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps Team

Kuzman Ganchev Receives Presidential Award from the Republic of Bulgaria

Posted by Slav Petrov, Research Scientist

We would like to congratulate Kuzman Ganchev for being the runner-up for the John Atanasoff award from the President of the Republic of Bulgaria. Kuzman recently joined our New York office as a research scientist, after completing his doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

The John Atanasoff award was established in 2003 and is given annually to a Bulgarian scientist under 35 for scientific or practical contributions to the development of computer and information technology worldwide and significant economic or social importance for Bulgaria. Kuzman received the award for his contributions to computational linguistics and machine learning. Kuzman is the co-author of more than 20 publications that have appeared in international conferences and journals.

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

[Cross-posted from the LatLong Blog]

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.

Example of business listings displayed on google.com

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 “Fly Fishing Frankie’s Ltd.” the following would be its correct business and contact details:

Company/Organization: Fly Fishing Frankie’s Ltd.
Street Address: 88 Fish Road
City/Town and Postal Code: Fishtown, CA 90210
Main Phone: (555) 555-5555
Website: www.example_for_flyfishingfrankies.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] Professional fishing travels
  
• [Example title violation] Fly Fishing Frankie’s Ltd. - fishing, cutter travels, eating crabs
  
• [Example title violation] Fly Fishing Frankie’s Ltd. entertaining cutter travels
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] Fly Fishing Frankie’s Ltd. Fishtown
  
• [Example title violation] Fly Fishing Frankie’s 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] Fly Fishing Frankie’s Ltd. (555) 555-5555
  
• [Example title violation] Fly Fishing Frankie’s Ltd. www.example_for_fishingfreddys.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] FLY FISHING FRANKIE’S LTD.
  
• [Example title violation] **!!**Fly Fishing Frankie’s 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

Korean Voice Input -- Have you Dictated your E-Mails in Korean lately?

Posted by Mike Schuster & Kaisuke Nakajima, Google Research

Google Voice Search has been available in various flavors of English since 2008, in Mandarin and Japanese since 2009, in French, Italian, German and Spanish since June 2010 (see also in this blog post), and shortly after that in Taiwanese. On June 16th 2010, we took the next step by launching our Korean Voice Search system.

Korean Voice Search, by focusing on finding the correct web page for a spoken query, has been quite successful since launch. We have improved the acoustic models several times which resulted in significantly higher accuracy and reduced latency, and we are committed to improving it even more over time.

While voice search significantly simplifies input for search, especially for longer queries, there are numerous applications on any smartphone that could also benefit from general voice input, such as dictating an email or an SMS. Our experience with US English has taught us that voice input is as important as voice search, as the time savings from speaking rather than typing a message are substantial. Korean is the first non-English language where we are launching general voice input. This launch extends voice input to emails, SMS messages, and more on Korean Android phones. Now every text field on the phone will accept Korean speech input.

Creating a general voice input service had different requirements and technical challenges compared to voice search. While voice search was optimized to give the user the correct web page, voice input was optimized to minimize (Hangul) character error rate. Voice inputs are usually longer than searches (short full sentences or parts of sentences), and the system had to be trained differently for this type of data. The current system’s language model was trained on millions of Korean sentences that are similar to those we expect to be spoken. In addition to the queries we used for training voice search, we also used parts of web pages, selected blogs, news articles and more. Because the system expects spoken data similar to what it was trained on, it will generally work well on normal spoken sentences, but may yet have difficulty on random or rare word sequences -- we will work to keep improving on those.

Korean voice input is part of Google’s long-term goal to make speech input an acceptable and useful form of input on any mobile device. As with voice search, our cloud computing infrastructure will help us to improve quality quickly, as we work to better support all noise conditions, all Korean dialects, and all Korean users.

Clustering Related Queries Based on User Intent

Posted by Jayant Madhavan and Alon Halevy

People today use search engines for all their information needs, but when they pose a particular search query, they typically have a specific underlying intent. However, when looking at any query in isolation, it might not entirely be clear what the underlying intent is. For example, when querying for mars, a user might be looking for more information about the planet Mars, or the planets in the solar system in general, or the Mars candy bar, or Mars the Roman god of war. The ambiguity in intent is most pronounced for queries that are inherently ambiguous and for queries about prominent entities about which there are various different types of information on the Internet. Given such ambiguity, modern search engines try to complement their search results with lists of related queries that can be used to further explore a particular intent.

In a recent paper, we explored the problem of clustering the related queries as a means of understanding the different intents underlying a given user query. We propose an approach that combines an analysis of anonymized document-click logs (what results do users click on) and query-session logs (what sequences of queries do users pose in a search session). We model typical user search behavior as a traversal of a graph whose nodes are related queries and clicked documents. We propose that the nodes in the graph, when grouped based on the probability of a typical user visiting them within a single search session, yield clusters that correspond to distinct user intents.

Our results show that underlying intents (clusters of related queries) almost always correspond to well-understood, high-level concepts. For example, for mars, in addition to re-constructing each of the intents listed earlier, we also find distinct clusters grouping queries about NASA’s missions to the planet, about specific interest in life on Mars, as well as a Japanese comic series, and a grocery chain named Mars. We found that our clustering approach yields better results than earlier approaches that either only used document-click or only query-session information. More details about our proposed approach and an analysis of the resulting clusters can be found in our paper that was presented at the International World Wide Web conference earlier this year.

Getting the most out of Gmail

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Last week we posted some tips to help you move from Microsoft Outlook® and other client-based software to Google Apps. Today we’d like to share some more thoughts on making the most of Gmail.

Save time with Priority Inbox

A busy day often affords few email breaks. When you do get a chance to scan your mail, Priority Inbox helps you prioritize by identifying the messages that require your immediate attention. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most and which messages you open and reply to. The best part is it gets better the more you use it. Turn on and manage Priority Inbox in your mail Settings – and read our tips to become a real Priority Inbox whiz!

Seamless chat, video and calling

We work with people in multiple ways, and Gmail makes it easy for you to choose the most effective means to communicate: email, chat, text messaging, video chats and phone calls are all available from your inbox. For example, voice and video chat lets you have an actual conversation with someone or meet face-to-face in brilliant resolution. And for those early adopters transitioned to our new infrastructure, we recently added the ability to call phones in Gmail, so you can place phone calls from your computer to any landline or mobile phone number and receive calls as well. For phone calls and video chat, download this plugin to get started.

Get more attached to your email

Attachments in other email systems can be cumbersome; they take up space, can be hard to find and you have to open another program to take action, which slows you down. Gmail has some helpful features that let you quickly view attachments without the need to open or download them on client-side software. The Google Docs Viewer allows you to view .doc, .pdf, .ppt and other attachments in a new browser tab simply by clicking the "View" link at the bottom of a Gmail message. If you decide you want to edit the file, click "Edit online" to open it in Google Docs, or download it to your desktop.

Gmail also includes a Google Docs preview lab that lets you read the entire contents of a Google document, spreadsheet or presentation right in Gmail. Note that your administrator needs to have enabled Labs for you to access them.

Put email in context

Wouldn’t it be great if you could update a sales lead without leaving your inbox? With contextual gadgets, you can. They display information from social networks, business services, web applications and other systems, and let you interact with that data right within Gmail. Your administrator or any third-party developer can build and distribute Gmail contextual gadgets to the domain with just a few clicks via the Google Apps Marketplace, which we launched in March. To learn more, browse for apps in the Marketplace that have ‘Mail Integration’.

The keys to productivity

With Gmail, we built in keyboard shortcuts to help you get through your mail quickly and efficiently. Once you enable this feature in Settings, you can archive (e), reply (r), compose (c), delete (#) or take just about any other action with one key or a short combo. For a handy guide, type “?” while you’re in Gmail – for maximum efficiency, print it out and post it at your desk.

Experiment in our Labs

Gmail Labs give users experimental – sometimes whimsical – features to customize Gmail in a way that works best for them. Some Labs accommodate preferences, such as adding a “Send & Archive” button, while others help you communicate, such as the Google Voice player and SMS in Chat. Still others help you stay organized, like the Google Docs and Calendar gadgets. If your administrator has enabled Labs for your domain, check them out for yourself.

What’s your favorite feature in Gmail? Feel free to let us know in the comments below. Happy (productive) emailing!

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Google Apps Product Manager

Google at USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI ‘10)

Posted by Murray Stokely, Software Engineer

The 9th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI ‘10) was recently held in Vancouver, B.C. This biennial conference is one of the premiere forums for presenting innovative research in distributed systems from both academia and industry, and we were glad to be a part of it.

In addition to sponsoring this conference since 2002, Googlers contributed to the exchange of scientific ideas through authoring or co-authoring 3 published papers, organizing workshops, and serving on the program committee. A short summary of the contributions:

• Large-scale Incremental Processing Using Distributed Transactions and Notifications.
  Google replaced its batch-oriented indexing system with an incremental system, Percolator. Rather than running a series of high-latency map-reduces over large batches of documents, we now index individual documents at very low latency. The result is a 50% reduction in search result age; our paper discusses this project and the implications of the result.
• Availability in Globally Distributed Storage Systems.
  Reliable and efficient storage systems are a key component of cloud-based services. In this paper we characterize the availability properties of cloud storage systems based on extensive monitoring of Google's main storage infrastructure and present statistical models that enable further insight into the impact of multiple design choices, such as data placement and replication strategies. We demonstrate the utility of these models by computing data availability under a variety of replication schemes given the real patterns of failures observed in our fleet.
  
• Onix: A Distributed Control Platform for Large-scale Production Networks.
  There has been recent interest in a new networking paradigm called Software-Defined Networking (SDN). The crucial enabler for SDN is distributed control platform that shields developers from the details of the underlying physical infrastructure and allows them to write sophisticated control logic against a high-level API. Onix provides such a control platform for large-scale production networks.
  

In addition to the papers presented by current Googlers, we were also happy to see that the recipient of the 2009 Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Cloud Computing, Roxana Geambasu, presented her work on Comet: An active distributed key-value store.

Videos of all of the talks from OSDI are available on the conference website for attendees and current USENIX members. There is also a USENIX YouTube channel with a growing subset of the conference videos open to everyone.

Google is making substantial progress on many of the grand challenge problems in computer science and artificial intelligence as part of its mission to organize the worlds information and make it useful. Given the continuing increase in the scale of our distributed systems it’s fair to say we’ll have some other exciting new work to share at the next OSDI. Hope to see you in 2012.

Google Places and Tags Holiday Guide

As the holidays approach, we’ve put together five quick and easy ways Google Places can help your business reach customers.

But first things first: claim the Place page for your business on www.google.com/places. This unlocks your ability to take advantage of all of these useful ideas:

• Create a coupon highlighting holiday specials: Are you offering a package of products or services to your customers this holiday season? Let people know by creating a coupon for your special on your Place page. From your Places dashboard, click on the “Coupons” tab and then “Add a new Coupon.” Fill out a few details and watch your coupon go live! You can also give the coupon an expiration date, so it only runs for a set time period. Coupons are also a great way to track how many customers found you through Google Places. For more details on creating a coupon, check out our Help Center.

• Link to a menu of holiday offers and prices: Manage the holiday rush by providing a link to your menu of products and services, or even your reservation page, on your Place page. To add your link, sign in to your Places dashboard, go to your listing and click "Edit." Scroll down to "Additional Details," add a column by typing in the label “Menu,” and then enter the URL of where you host your menu! If your website also handles reservations, then you can link to “Reservations” too. Check out this example and sign in now to add your links.

• Make your business listing stand out with Google Tags: Show customers your holiday offer or menu when they search on Google and Google Maps. Tags are yellow markers that allow business owners to highlight important or unique aspects of their business, such as that coupon you’ve just created, a video, photos and more. To create a tag, go to your Places dashboard and click on “Add a tag.” Simply choose your tag type and let it run. To get you started, we’re giving business owners 30 days free!

• Update your holiday business hours: Are you extending your operating hours on some days to accommodate the holidays? Update the business hours listed on your Place page for the days you’ll be open early or late. This helps local customers, especially last-minute shoppers, who may be interested in visiting your store take advantage of your extended hours.

• Write a post to engage with your customers: Whether you’ll be closed for a certain holiday or open on days when most businesses aren’t, a post is the perfect way to let your customers know. You can also use it to tell people about your latest shipment holiday inventory. Posts are short custom messages of up to 160 characters and appear on your Place page. For more details on writing a post, check out our Help Center. You can also highlight your post with a Google Tag.

Posted by Bernadette Cay, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Making an Impact on a Thriving Speech Research Community

Posted by Vincent Vanhoucke, Google Research

While we continue to launch exciting new speech products--most recently Voice Actions and Google Search by Voice in Russian, Czech and Polish--we also strive to contribute to the academic research community by sharing both innovative techniques and experiences with large-scale systems.

This year’s gathering of the world’s experts in speech technology research, Interspeech 2010 in Makuhari, Japan, which Google co-sponsored, was a fantastic demonstration of the momentum of this community, driven by new challenges such as mobile voice communication, voice search, and the increasing international reach of speech technologies.

Googlers published papers that showcased the breadth and depth of our speech recognition research. Our work addresses both fundamental problems in acoustic and language modeling, as well as the practical issues of building scalable speech interfaces that real people use everyday to make their lives easier.

Here is a list of the papers presented by Googlers at the conference:

• Direct Construction of Compact Context-Dependency Transducers From Data, David Rybach and Michael Riley (Computer Speech & Language Best Paper Award).
• Voice Search for Development, Etienne Barnard, Johan Schalkwyk, Charl van Heerden and Pedro J. Moreno.
• Unsupervised Discovery and Training of Maximally Dissimilar Cluster Models, Françoise Beaufays, Vincent Vanhoucke and Brian Strope.
• Search by Voice in Mandarin Chinese, Jiulong Shan, Genqing Wu, Zhihong Hu, Xiliu Tang, Martin Jansche and Pedro J. Moreno.
• On-Demand Language Model Interpolation for Mobile Speech Input, Brandon Ballinger, Cyril Allauzen, Alexander Gruenstein, and Johan Schalkwyk.
• Building Transcribed Speech Corpora Quickly and Cheaply for Many Languages, Thad Hughes, Kaisuke Nakajima, Linne Ha, Atul Vasu, Pedro J. Moreno and Mike LeBeau.
• Say What? Why Users Choose to Speak their Web Queries, Maryam Kamvar and Doug Beeferman.
• Study on Interaction between Entropy Pruning and Kneser-Ney Smoothing, Ciprian Chelba, Thorsten Brants, Will Neveitt and Peng Xu.
• Decision Tree State Clustering with Word and Syllable Features, Hank Liao, Chris Alberti, Michiel Bacchiani and Olivier Siohan.

Revenue grows 48% with help from YouTube videos

Editors note: Today’s guest bloggers are Troy Olson, Digital Advertising Manager, and Jeff Loquist, Search Marketing Manager, for ShoppersChoice.com. ShoppersChoice.com owns and operates a family of web stores with a wide selection of products, from barbecue grills and accessories to patio sets.

With the tagline, “we smoke the competition,” BBQ Guys has built a hot business around home furniture, fireplaces, and kitchen cookware – but the company’s true passion is barbecuing and grills. We’ve created our own YouTube channel around all things related to outdoor cooking, from recipe how-tos to grill reviews. For us, YouTube has been a recipe for success. Visit the YouTube blog to learn more about how we’ve used Google tools to build a fun, rewarding small business.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, The YouTube Team

Going Google Across the 50 States: North Carolina based American Support relies on Docs, Sites and Chat to run its business

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Editor’s note: Over 3 million businesses have adopted Google Apps. Today we’ll hear from Matt Zemon, President of American Support, headquartered in North Carolina. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google cloud calculator.

At American Support, we provide back office services to over 400 cable, phone and internet franchises in 29 states. Our services include billing and subscriber management along with 24/7 customer care and technical support.

When I originally founded the company in 2006 we had a joint venture with a Philippines-based call center to provide customer service at a reasonable cost to our clients. In the first couple years of business it became evident that our clients and their subscribers wanted to have American-based customer service. Our clients were not happy with the off-shore customer service we were providing and we were having difficulties winning new business. As a customer service outsourcer the challenge was finding a way to provide the American customer service they desired at a price point they could afford.

To save our business we ended up rethinking our business model and looking to the cloud to drive down costs and increase our efficiency. The first change was migrating to a call center in the cloud platform which enabled us to recruit, train and route calls to rural American home-based employees who needed and wanted the work. With this technology solution in place we began bringing our call center jobs back to America. As of May of last year we are a 100% American customer service organization.

The second change was moving from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps in 2009, which allowed us to more efficiently and effectively collaborate with our employees and clients spread out across the United States.

Today we maintain a small office in North Carolina and a technical assistance center and network operations center in Montana. The rest of our management team is spread out between Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Georgia and Nebraska. Our entire customer support team works from home.

Tools that fostered collaboration were absolutely essential to running our business. Each manager and their team really live in the Google Apps environment. All of their meetings are done through Google Docs and video chats. I’ve never met 90% of our employees in person. Every meeting agenda is built off of a doc with everyone logged into the same doc at the same time, taking notes and keeping track of next steps as we move along through the meeting agenda. Plus, our clients across the country have started getting used to the value of moving away from attachments to using Google Docs. Working together internally and externally is so much easier when we’re always sure we’re looking at the most current document and you can collaborate on it in real-time.

Google Sites is also a key aspect of our business operations. We create a custom site for each of our clients that contains the most frequently asked questions, their unique policies and procedures, and other useful information for our teams. Sites allows us to keep all information in one place that everyone on the team can update and reference.

We had initially looked at Google Apps for its 25 GB of mail and shared calendars, but it’s Google Sites, Docs and Talk that allow us to communicate successfully and efficiently so that we can support customers with a team all over the country. We attribute our successful collaboration and the ability to run a coast-to-coast virtual team to our use of Google Apps.

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps Team

Bowls and Learning

Posted by Phil Long, Research Team

It is easy to find the bottom of a bowl no matter where you start -- if you toss a marble anywhere into the bowl, it will roll downhill and find its way to the bottom.

What does this have to do with Machine Learning? A natural way to try to construct an accurate classifier is to minimize the number of prediction errors the classifier makes on training data. The trouble is, even for moderate-sized data sets, minimizing the number of training errors is a computationally intractable problem. A popular way around this is to assign different training errors different costs and to minimize the total cost. If the costs are assigned in a certain way (according to a “convex loss function”), the total cost can be efficiently minimized the way a marble rolls to the bottom of a bowl.

In a recent paper, Rocco Servedio and I show that no algorithm that works this way can achieve a simple and natural theoretical noise-tolerance guarantee that can be achieved by other kinds of algorithms. A result like this is interesting for two reasons: first, it's important to understand what you cannot do with convex optimization in order to get a fuller understanding of what you can do with it. Second, this result may spur more research into noise-tolerant training algorithms using alternative approaches.

Top Tips on Cloud Computing

A far off reality only a few years ago, today cloud computing has become mainstream. However, many small business owners we meet are still unclear about what cloud computing is and, more importantly, how it can benefit their business. If you're in this camp, you're not alone. A recent survey of European IT Heads by Portio Research found that 56% were not familiar with cloud computing.

Cloud computing, or software as a service (SaaS), is when IT software and services are delivered over the web and through a browser. This transfers the responsibility for IT maintenance, software upgrades and any system issues onto the service provider, allowing enterprises like yours to focus on your core business instead of your infrastructure. That's why the cloud is especially appealing to small-to-medium sized businesses, which often have a smaller workforce and less capacity for time-consuming and expensive IT maintenance.

To help you get more familiar with this concept that can streamline and improve your business operations, we've put together the following 10 things to consider when getting started in the cloud:

• Moving to the cloud is easy: The transfer of business information into the cloud is very straightforward. There is no need to install new hardware or software as everything is run by the cloud provider.

• Cost savings could be higher than you anticipate: Businesses that move to the cloud can make savings on many different levels - IT hardware and software expenditure is cut dramatically and fewer staff or support resources are needed for IT maintenance. Last September, analyst group IDC estimated that business can instantly reduce their IT spend by approx. 54% by moving to a cloud based solution.*

• Improved productivity: One of the key benefits of cloud computing is that employees can access documents and emails whilst away from the office. If your business demands mobility and flexibility or you have staff keen to extend their use of home or remote working, the cloud could be a straightforward and affordable way of addressing these needs.
  

• Greater level of security: Cloud computing can be more secure than traditional IT. It's all about economies of scale - many established cloud suppliers employ leading security experts, invest vast amounts of money into securing their applications and develop technology beyond the means of any small business. In addition, the risk of losing confidential data on a laptop or a USB stick is also diminished, as everything is stored in the cloud and not on your devices. (Last year a survey from CREDANT Technologies found that 55,843 mobile phones and 6,193 other devices, such as laptops, had been left in the back of London black cabs over the previous six months.** In November 2009, it found that New Yorkers forget on average around 5,000 mobile phones and more than 500 other handheld devices, including iPods, laptops and memory sticks, in the back of taxis, every month.***)

• Manage the cultural adjustment: Today's employees expect to have the same technology at work that they enjoy at home. Google designs its applications with users in mind and many staff will already be familiar with Google Mail and Google Docs. However, internal communication about the change of service and in-house training sessions will help staff to feel more comfortable using the new technology.

• A more collaborative way of working: Using cloud computing applications, people can work more closely together, accessing and working in the same documents in real time - without the need for hundreds of emails with attachments. Improved knowledge sharing and communication encourages creativity amongst your employees which can help drive the business forward.

• Flexibility to scale up or scale down your business: Cloud based "pay as you go" style services allow you to easily increase your use of cloud services as your business grows, or decrease your spend if you need to temporarily scale down.

• Employees of tomorrow: Look at how teenagers interact - on Facebook, Bebo or MySpace - all cloud environments. These teenagers will soon become employees, accustomed to collaborating online and accessing their data from any mobile device at hand, not expecting to work in one location and from 9 to 5.

• Your business resiliency can be improved: Cloud computing providers should not only offer 24/7 support but also the increased resiliency and redundancy afforded by multiple data centres to ensure your information is always available. This means that you experience less downtime than when managing IT in-house, and any problems can be solved far quicker by being fixed centrally. IDC estimates that businesses operating in the cloud achieve 97% greater IT reliability.*

• More choice: In contrast to traditional IT models which can involve expensive software licenses and long lock-in contracts, the cloud model offers far more flexibility. You can switch provider far more easily and regularly in order to get the best experience and value for money. However, it is important to check with your cloud provider as to how you retrieve data from their cloud should you choose to switch in the future.

*IDC White Paper sponsored by salesforce.com, Force.com Cloud Platform Drives Huge Time To Market and Cost Savings, Doc # 219965, September 2009
** CREDANT Technologies London taxi survey 2008
*** CREDANT Technologies New York taxi survey 2009

Posted by Malgosia Rigoli, Small Business Blog Team

Poetic Machine Translation

Posted by Dmitriy Genzel, Software Engineer

Once upon a midnight dreary, long we pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of translation lore.
When our system does translation, lifeless prose is its creation;
Making verse with inspiration no machine has done before.
So we want to boldly go where no machine has gone before.
Quoth now Google, "Nevermore!"

Robert Frost once said, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” Translating poetry is a very hard task even for humans, and is clearly beyond the capability of current machine translation systems. We therefore, out of academic curiosity, set about testing the limits of translating poetry and were pleasantly surprised with the results!

We are going to present a paper on poetry translation at the EMNLP conference this year. In this paper, we investigate the purely technical challenges around generating translations with fixed rhyme and meter schemes.

The value of preserving meter and rhyme in poetic translation has been highly debated. Vladimir Nabokov famously claimed that, since it is impossible to preserve both the meaning and the form of the poem in translation, one must abandon the form altogether. Another authority (and for us computer scientists, perhaps the more familiar one), Douglas Hofstadter argues that preserving the form is very important to maintaining the feeling and the sound of a poem. It is in this spirit that we decided to experiment with translating not only poetic meaning, but form as well.

A Statistical Machine Translation system, like Google Translate, typically performs translations by searching through a multitude of possible translations, guided by a statistical model of accuracy. However, to translate poetry, we not only considered translation accuracy, but meter and rhyming schemes as well. In our paper we describe in more detail how we altered our translation model, but in general we chose to sacrifice a little of the translation’s accuracy to get the poetic form right.

As a pleasant side-effect, the system is also able to translate anything into poetry, allowing us to specify the genre (say, limericks or haikus), or letting the system pick the one it thinks fits best. At the moment, the system is too slow to be made publicly accessible, but we thought we’d share some excerpts:

A stanza from Essai monographique sur les Dianthus des Pyrénées françaises by Edouard Timbal-Lagrave and Eugène Bucquoy, translated to English as a pair of couplets in iambic tetrameter:

So here's the dear child under land,
will not reflect her beauty and
besides the Great, no alter dark,
the pure ray, fronts elected mark.

Voltaire’s La Henriade, translated as a couplet in dactylic tetrameter:

These words compassion forced the small to lift her head
gently and tell him to whisper: “I'm not dead."

Le Miroir des simples âmes, an Old French poem by Marguerite Porete, translated to Modern French by M. de Corberon, and then to haiku by us:

“Well, gentle soul”, said
Love, “say whatever you please,
for I want to hear.”

More examples and technical details can be found in our research paper (as well as clever commentary).