Julia meets HTML 5

Posted by Daniel Wolf, Software Engineer

Today, we launched Julia Map on Google Labs, a fractal renderer in HTML 5. Julia sets are fractals that were studied by the French mathematician Gaston Julia in the early 1920s. Fifty years later, Benoît Mandelbrot studied the set z2 − c and popularized it by generating the first computer visualisation. Generating these images requires heavy computation resources. Modern browsers have optimized JavaScript execution up to the point where it is now possible to render in a browser fractals like Julia sets almost instantly.

Julia Map uses the Google Maps API to zoom and pan into the fractals. The images are computed with HTML 5 canvas. Each image generally requires millions of floating point operations. Web workers spread the heavy calculations on all cores of the machine.

We hope you will enjoy exploring the different Julia sets, and share the URLs of the most artistic images you discovered. See what others have posted on Twitter under hashtag #juliamap. Click on the images below to dive in to infinity!

Google at NIPS 2010

Posted by Slav Petrov, Doug Aberdeen, and Lisa McCracken, Google Research

The machine learning community met in Vancouver in December for the 24th Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NIPS). As always, the single-track program of the main conference featured a number of outstanding talks, followed by interesting late night poster sessions. A record number of workshops covered a wide variety of topics, while allocating sufficient time for skiing in Whistler - after all, many of the most interesting research conversations happen while riding the lift in-between ski runs. This year’s conference also featured a symposium dedicated to Sam Roweis, providing a retrospective on Sam’s life and work. Sam, a fellow Googler and professor at NYU, was at the heart of the NIPS community and is terribly missed.

As always, Google was involved in various ways with NIPS. Here at Google, we take a data-driven approach when solving problems. Therefore, Machine Learning is in one way or another at the core of most of the things that we do. It is therefore unsurprising that many Googlers helped shape the program of the conference or were in the audience. This year, three Googlers served as area chairs and even more were reviewers. Googlers also co-authored the following papers:

• Label Embedding Trees for Large Multi-Class Tasks by Samy Bengio and Jason Weston
• Learning Bounds for Importance Weighting by Corinna Cortes, Yishay Mansour, and Mehryar Mohri
• Online Learning in the Manifold of Low-Rank Matrices by Uri Shalit, Daphna Weinshall, and Gal Chechik
• Deterministic Single–Pass Algorithm for LDA by Issei Sato, Kenichi Kurihara, and Hiroshi Nakagawa
• Distributed Dual Averaging In Networks by John Duchi, Alekh Agarwal, and Martin Wainwright

Additionally, Googlers co-organized three well attended workshops:

• Coarse–to–Fine Learning and Inference by Ben Taskar, David Weiss, Benjamin Sapp, and Slav Petrov
• Low–rank Methods for Large–scale Machine Learning by Arthur Gretton, Michael Mahoney, Mehryar Mohri, and Ameet Talwalkar
• Learning on Cores, Clusters, and Clouds by John Duchi, Ofer Dekel, John Langford, Lawrence Cayton, and Alekh Agarwal

Finally, Yoram Singer gave a great talk on Learning Structural Sparsity at the Sam Roweis symposium and Googlers presented the following talks during the workshops:

• Online Learning in the Manifold of Low–Rank Matrices by Uri Shalit, Daphna Weinshall, and Gal Chechik
• Distributed MAP Inference for Undirected Graphical Models by Sameer Singh, Amar Subramanya, Fernando Pereira, and Andrew McCallum
• MapReduce/Bigtable for Distributed Optimization by Keith Hall, Scott Gilpin and Gideon Mann
• Self-Pruning Prediction Trees by Sally Goldman
• Web Scale Image Annotation: Learning to Rank with Joint Word-Image Embeddings by Jason Weston, Samy Bengio, and Nicolas Usunier
• Coarse–to–fine Decoding for Parsing and Machine Translation by Slav Petrov

Overall, it was a very successful conference and it was good to be back in Vancouver one last time. This coming year NIPS 2011 will be in Granada, Spain. Hasta luego!

Tips for creating a free business listing in Google Places: Adding useful descriptions and relevant categories

(Cross-posted from LatLong)

With this blog post, we’re concluding our three part series about the Google Places quality guidelines. Today, we’ll discuss how to choose the best fitting categories for your business listing as well as how to provide a useful description. In case you missed the first two blog posts, you can find here the first post about business titles and here the second part about business types.

Adding useful descriptions

As a business owner, we encourage you to add a specific description of your business in the “description” field. This gives potential clients more information to understand what your business is about and see if your business matches what they are seeking. You can also use this field to provide further guidance about the location of your business which might be useful in some cases where it is hard to find, e.g. if the entrance of your business is only accessible via the rear.

Keep the description clean and concise, so it is helpful to users and catches their attention. A series of repeated keywords or categories may turn off potential customers, but a crisp and catchy summary of the services you offer help users determine if your business is right for them.

Choosing relevant categories

If you provide appropriate and accurate categories, we can better match your business listing to relevant user searches. We recommend choosing specific categories that describe the core of your business well instead of broad ones. A good way to find representative categories for your business is asking yourself the question “What is my business?” Be sure to capture what your business is as opposed to what it offers or sells - in that sense, “bakery” would be a good category as opposed to “cakes” or “bread”.

Also, do not include location information in the categories field. If you would like to provide such additional information about your business, you can use the description field and, if appropriate, the service areas feature.

You will be asked to choose at least one category from our standard list - just start typing in the categories field to see what is available via the auto-suggestions.

We recommend always choosing the best matching and most specific category for your business - for any specific category, Google will be able to automatically determine the more generic category as well. That means, if you are a Mexican restaurant, you should go for ‘Mexican Restaurant’ and not ‘Restaurant’ - Google then automatically knows that if you are a Mexican restaurant, you are also a restaurant.

You can provide up to five categories for your business listing. After picking a standard category, you can add up to four customized categories. To add another category, just click on ‘Add another category’ and an additional field will be triggered. Put only one category per entry field. Entering more than one category into a category field is not compliant with our quality guidelines and could result in your listing being suspended and not appearing in Google Places. In case you find it difficult to find an appropriate standard category to start with, just pick a category that fits best and add more specific custom categories. If you are uncertain about categorizing your business, you can also ask for advice in the Google Places help forum and discuss with other business owners.

We hope that this information helps you add a concise description and accurate categories to your business listing in Google Places. This gives potential clients more information to determine if your business matches what they are seeking. For further questions you can visit our Google Places help forum.

Posted by Sabine Borsay, Consumer Operations

More Google Contributions to the Broader Scientific Community

Posted by Corinna Cortes and Alfred Spector, Google Research

Googlers actively engage with the scientific community by publishing technical papers, contributing open-source packages, working on standards, introducing new APIs and tools, giving talks and presentations, participating in ongoing technical debates, and much more. Our publications offer technical and algorithmic advances, demonstrate things we learn as we develop novel products and services, and shed light on some of the technical challenges we face at Google.

In an effort to highlight some of our work, we periodically select a number of publications to be featured on this site. We first posted a set of papers on this blog in mid-2010 and subsequently discussed them in more detail in the following blog postings. This blog posting highlights a few new noteworthy papers authored or co-authored by Googlers from the later half of 2010. In the coming weeks we will be offering a more in-depth look at these publications, but here are some summaries:

Algorithms and Electronic Commerce

Robust Mechanisms for Risk-Averse Sellers
ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC)

Mukund Sundararajan and Qiqi Yan, Stanford University

In his seminal Nobel prize-winning work, Roger Myerson identified the revenue-maximizing auction for a risk-neutral auctioneer. In contrast, this work identifies good mechanisms for risk-averse auctioneers. These mechanisms trade a little revenue for better certainty, in the best possible way. We expect this work will help guide reserve-price selection in auctions where auctioneers/sellers want better control over their revenue.

Monitoring Algorithms for Negative Feedback Systems
World Wide Web Conference (WWW)

Mark Sandler and S. Muthukrishnan

In negative feedback systems, users report abusive content at a site to its owner for consideration or removal, but the users might not be honest. For the site owners, this represents a trade-off between vetting such user reports by humans vs. accepting them without vetting. This paper presents a mathematical framework for design and analysis of such systems and presents algorithms with provably good trade-offs against malicious users.

HCI

Children's Roles Using Keyword Search Interfaces in the Home
Computer Human Interactions (CHI)

Allison Druin, University of Maryland, Elizabeth Foss, University of Maryland, Hilary Hutchinson, Evan Golub, University of Maryland, and Leshell Hatley, University of Maryland

In this paper, we describe seven search roles children display as information seekers using Internet keyword interfaces, based on a home study of 83 children ages 7, 9, and 11.

Machine Learning

Large Scale Image Annotation: Learning to Rank with Joint Word-Image Embeddings

European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML) Best Paper

Jason Weston, Samy Bengio, and Nicolas Usunier, Universite Paris 6 - LIP6

In this paper, we introduce a generic framework to find a joint representation of images and their labels, which can then be used for various tasks, including image ranking and image annotation. We simultaneously propose an efficient training algorithm that scales to tens of millions of images and hundreds of thousands of labels, while focusing training on making good predictions at the top of the ranked list. The models are both fast at prediction time and have low memory usage making it possible to house such systems on a laptop or mobile device.

Overlapping Experiment Infrastructure: More, Better

Faster Experimentation, Knowledge Discovery and Datamining (KDD)

Diane Tang, Ashish Agarwal, Deirdre O'Brien, and Mike Meyer

Google's data driven culture requires running a large number of live traffic experiments. This paper describes Google's overlapping experimental infrastructure where a single event (e.g. a web search) can be assigned to multiple simultaneous large experiments. The infrastructure and supporting tools provide a framework that enables running experiments from design to decision making and launch, and can be generalized to many other web applications.

NLP

Products of Random Latent Variable Grammars

North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL)

Slav Petrov

It is well known that the Expectation Maximization algorithm can converge to widely varying local maxima. This paper shows that this can be advantageous when learning latent variable grammars for syntactic parsing. By combining multiple state-of-the-art individual grammars into an unweighted product model, parsing accuracy can be improved from 90.2% to 91.8% for English, and from 80.3% to 84.5% for German.

Software Engineering

Contention Aware Execution: Online Contention Detection and Response

International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO)

Jason Mars, University of Virginia, Neil Vachharajani, Robert Hundt, Mary Lou Soffa, University of Virginia

This paper makes a big step forward in addressing an important and pressing problem in the field of Computer Science today. This work presents a lightweight runtime solution that significantly improves the utilization of datacenter servers by up to 58% on average. This work also received the CGO 2010 Best Presentation Award.

Speech

Say What? Why users choose to speak their web queries

Interspeech

Maryam Kamvar and Doug Beeferman

Say What? Have you been speaking your search queries into your mobile device rather than typing them? Spoken search is available on Android, iPhone and Blackberry devices and we see an increasing numbers of searches coming in by voice on these phones. In our paper “Say What: Why users choose to speak their web queries” we investigate, on an aggregate level, what factors are most predictive of spoken queries. Understanding context in which a speech-driven search is used (or conversely not used) can be used to improve recognition engines and spoken interface design. So, save keystrokes and say your query!

Query Language Modeling for Voice Search

IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology

Ciprian Chelba, Johan Schalkwyk, Thorsten Brants, Vida Ha, Boulos Harb, Will Neveitt, Carolina Parada*, Johns Hopkins University, and Peng Xu

The paper describes language modeling for google.com query data, and its application to speech recognition for Google Voice Search.
Our empirical findings include:

• 10% relative gains in WER from large scale modeling,
• a less known yet potentially quite detrimental interaction between Kneser-Ney smoothing and entropy pruning (approx. 10% relative increase in WER)
• evidence that hints at non-stationarity of the query stream, and
• surprisingly strong dependence across three English locales---USA, Britain and Australia.

Structured Data

Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets

Very Large Data Bases (VLDB)

Sergey Melnik, Andrey Gubarev, Jing Jing Long, Geoffrey Romer, Shiva Shivakumar, Matt Tolton, and Theo Vassilakis, Google Inc.

Dremel is a scalable, interactive ad-hoc query system. By combining multi-level execution trees and columnar data layout, it is capable of running aggregation queries over trillion-row tables in seconds. The system is widely used at Google and serves as the foundational technology behind BigQuery, a product launched in limited preview mode.

Systems and Infrastructure

Large-scale Incremental Processing Using Distributed Transactions and Notifications

USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI)

Daniel Peng and Frank Dabek

In the past, Google accumulated a whole day’s worth of changes to the web and ran a series of enormous MapReduces to apply this batch of changes to our index of the web. This system led to a delay of several days between crawling a document and presenting it to users in search results. To meet our goal of reducing the indexing delay to minutes, we needed to update the index as each individual document was crawled, rather than in daily batches. No existing infrastructure supported this kind of incremental transformation at web scale, so we built Percolator: a framework for transforming a large repository using small ACID transactions.

Availability in Globally Distributed Storage Systems

USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI)

Daniel Ford, Francois Labelle, Florentina Popovici, Murray Stokely, Van-Anh Truong*, Columbia University, Luiz Barroso, Carrie Grimes, and Sean Quinlan

In our paper, we characterize the availability of cloud storage systems, based on extensive monitoring of Google's main storage infrastructure, and the sources of failure which affect availability. We also present statistical models for reasoning about the impact of design choices such as data placement, recovery speed, and replication strategies, including replication across multiple data centers.

Vision

Improved Consistent Sampling, Weighted Minhash and L1 Sketching

IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM)

Sergey Ioffe

With the huge amounts of very high-dimensional data, such as images and videos, we frequently need to "sketch" the data -- that is, represent it in a much more compact form, while still allowing us to accurately determine how different any two images or videos are. In this paper, we describe a sketching method for L1, one of the most common distance measures. It works by first hashing the data with a new algorithm, and then compressing each hash to a small number of bits, which is learned from data. This method is fast and allows the distances to be estimated accurately, while reducing the storage requirements by a factor of 100.

*) work carried out while at Google

Google Boost: Now Appearing On Mobile Phones

(Cross-posted from LatLong)

Back in October we announced Google Boost, a new advertising solution to help local businesses connect with potential customers in their area. Today we are excited to announce that Boost ads can appear on Google Search results pages on Android and iPhone devices.

Consumers increasingly use mobile devices to search for products and services, and Boost will give advertisers the opportunity to reach these customers exactly when they are looking for local businesses on their phones. This feature will automatically take effect for current and future Boost advertisers.

In case you aren’t familiar with Boost, it’s Google's new advertising product that helps business owners quickly create an online advertising campaign that targets local customers. Using information from the business’s free Google Places listing, Boost automatically suggests and creates text ads that appear on Google Search and Google Maps results pages.

Google Boost is now available in all U.S. cities to select business types. To find out if your business is eligible, sign in to your Places account (or create a free one if you haven’t yet) and visit the Dashboard. If Boost is not currently available to your business, fill out this short form and we’ll notify you when it is.

Posted by Kiley McEvoy, Product Manager

Google Apps for Business now available for Verizon customers

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Editor's Note: We're excited that beginning today Google Apps for Business is available through Verizon. We've asked Monte Beck, Vice President of Small Business Marketing for Verizon to share more details.

At Verizon we make it easy for companies to get online and be productive in the office or while on the move. We do this by offering business owners a bundled solution of essential services to fit their particular needs.

Beginning today, our small- and medium-sized business customers will also be able to access the same applications that come with Google Apps for Business: Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Video, and more.

Most of Verizon’s service offerings are in the cloud and delivered to any business connected to the Internet with a click of the mouse. So it makes sense for us to offer Google Apps for Verizon to allow businesses to communicate and collaborate in the office or on the go.

Google Apps for Verizon – with three free user accounts – is available to business customers that subscribe to a bundle consisting of Verizon Internet service and either Verizon voice or TV service or both. Customers have the option to buy additional accounts. Also included is a domain name free for one year (i.e. yourbusiness.com).

Other small business essentials provided in Verizon’s bundled solutions include an easy do-it-yourself “kit” to develop your business’ professional website, Internet security, online backup, and more. Most importantly, we offer WiFi access – a necessity today to quickly respond to customers and access programs and files while out of the office.

Verizon’s business bundled solutions are available in parts of 12 states (CA, CT, DE, FL, MD, MA, NJ, NY, PA, RI, TX, and VA) and Washington, D.C. Those who just need Apps can subscribe to Google Apps for Verizon for $3.99/user/month.

To better help and inform small businesses, my team also developed the Verizon Small Business Center, a one-stop online portal with free resources, industry news, expert advice delivered through free webinars, networking opportunities, discounts, and much more. In combining these free resources with cloud products and services, we’re helping small businesses gain a competitive edge. Even the smallest companies now have access to technology that’s being used by larger businesses at minimal cost.

Google Apps for Verizon helps Verizon’s business customers harness the power of the web in new and exciting ways.

Posted by Monte Beck, Vice President of Small Business Marketing, Verizon

Our big gift for small businesses

To kick off 2011, we wanted to thank a few small businesses for taking the first step toward enhancing their online presence—and to provide additional resources for achieving this goal. So over the holiday season, we paid a surprise visit to five small businesses who recently started advertising their businesses online: Create A Cook and Twinkle Star in Massachusetts, Ramy’s Garage and Atlas Flooring in Texas, and Cloud 9 Frozen Yogurt in Georgia. These small businesses span several industries, but their founders share one common goal: to expand beyond their brick-and-mortar storefronts and into the world of e-commerce.

To help, we gave them each of them $100,000 in AdWords spend for 2011 as well as free consultations with AdWords representatives. Because we know online presence means more than just AdWords, we’ll also be providing them with web consultations, wireless service for the year as well as a few other little surprises. See footage from our surprise visit below:

We’re looking forward to making big investments in small businesses far beyond these lucky five. Small businesses have long benefited from Google products and services; now our hope is that all small business owners can have greater access to the tools and training they need to develop a cohesive strategy for doing more business online. We started last year by creating the Google Small Business Center and asking small business owners about their biggest wishes for 2011. We received an overwhelming response from business owners who, like the owners of these shops, want to do more business online in 2011.

The Google Small Business Team surprises Atlas Flooring in Texas.

We’re thrilled to help these five small business owners find online success in 2011 and we think we have a lot to learn from their experiences. We’ll check in on them from time to time and report on their successes as well as their growing pains.

In the meantime, check the Google Small Business Blog for updates, and if you’re a business owner, visit the Google Small Business Center for information on how you can bring your business online in 2011.

Posted by James Croom, Product Marketing Manager, Google Small Business Team

Supporting computer science education with CS4HS

Posted by Terry Ednacot, Education Program Manager

Recent statistics have shown a decline in the number of U.S. students taking computer science AP classes, which also leads to a decline in students declaring computer science as their majors—a concerning trend in the U.S. as we try to remain competitive in the global economy. With programs like Computer Science for High School (CS4HS), we hope to increase the number of CS majors —and therefore the number of people entering into careers in CS—by promoting computer science curriculum at the high school level.

For the fourth consecutive year, we’re funding CS4HS to invest in the next generation of computer scientists and engineers. CS4HS is a workshop for high school and middle school computer science teachers that introduces new and emerging concepts in computing and provides tips, tools and guidance on how to teach them. The ultimate goals are to “train the trainer,” develop a thriving community of high school CS teachers and spread the word about the awe and beauty of computing.

In 2011 we’re expanding the program considerably and hope to double the number of schools we funded in 2010. If you’re a university, community college, or technical School in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Middle East or Africa and are interested in hosting a workshop at your institution, please visit www.cs4hs.com to submit an application for grant funding. Applications will be accepted between January 18, 2011 and February 18, 2011.

In addition to submitting your application, on the CS4HS website you’ll find info on how to organize a workshop, as well as websites and agendas from last year’s participants to give you an idea of how the workshops were structured in the past. There’s also a collection of CS4HS curriculum modules that previous participating schools have shared for future organizers to use in their own program.

Previous organizers have told us that teachers have left their workshops excited about the new materials they learned and the innovative ideas they’ve discussed with other teachers. We’re hopeful that they’ll pass on to their students not only the skills that they learned but also that passion.

Now available: Google Places with Hotpot for iPhone

[Cross-posted from the Hotpot Community blog]

We recently released Google Places with Hotpot in Google Maps for Android, and starting now, you can have that same great experience as an iPhone app. We realize the importance of finding places you’ll love while you’re out and about, no matter what mobile device you use. And Places with Hotpot not only helps you find places near where you are, it gives you the best places to go for you by personalizing your search results.

In case you aren’t familiar with Google Places, it lets you quickly search for places nearby and personalizes the results based on places you’ve rated. We get you started with a few popular search categories, but you can also tailor the list by adding your own favorite searches. This makes it fast and easy to find the best places for you with little fuss.

Use a default search category, save your own, or rate the nearest place quickly.

It can be pretty rewarding to discover a new place you love, but we also realize that there are some experiences you just can’t wait to share. So Places makes it super simple to rate a place with your iPhone while you’re there. Just fire up the app and hit “Rate now.” It will use your location to guess your current place and let you post a Hotpot review right from your phone. But it’s not just about getting to say what you think—the more you rate places, the more you’re sharing about your tastes and the more we can give you personally tailored recommendations.

Give your star rating and add optional details or a review so Hotpot knows your taste.

If you want to make things even tastier, just visit google.com/hotpot from your desktop computer. Here you can add friends to the mix and quickly rate all the places you already know. Once you’ve added friends, you’ll find your results seasoned not just with reviews from around the web and recommendations based on your own personal taste, but also with your friends’ opinions too.

Once you start rating and add friends, Places can give you personalized recommendations.

Get the Places app on your iPhone now by searching for Google Places in the App Store or going here.

This first version of Places is available for all iOS devices in English only. However, expect more features and improvements to roll out soon, including localization in many new languages. We’re hard at work to make Places with Hotpot more and more delicious.

Posted by Greg Blevins, Software Engineer, Google Hotpot team

Introducing Google Engage for Agencies in US and UK

[Cross-posted from the Agency Ad Solutions Blog]

Are you a US or UK based Webmaster? WebDesigner? SEO? Marketing Consultant? Freelancer? or offering web related services to Small Medium Businesses? then keep on reading...

At Google, we’re committed to the success of the digital economy and we believe that helping small business get online and thrive is fundamental to that success.

We recognize that many SMBs rely on freelancers and small agencies to create and manage their online presence as well as help them with their online marketing. To make the jobs of these agencies easier, we’ve launched a new training and incentives program called Google Engage for Agencies.



Google Engage participants will receive free access to educational resources dedicated for them and more incentives to grow their own and their clients’ businesses.

We hope Engage will help businesses that offer web services in attracting new clients and in adding value to existing clients. Check out Google Engage today and learn about the benefits the program can offer your business and the SMBs you support.

If you’re a webmaster, web-designer, digital agency, freelancer, SEO, IT consultant, or provide any other web services to US or UK based small businesses, you can apply to join the program starting today.

Please see links below for information on participation for US and UK-based agencies:
Google Engage for US Businesses
Google Engage for UK Businesses

Posted by: Alon Chen & Esra Guler, Product Marketing

Hotpot Goes Barhopping

[Cross-posted from the Google Places Community Blog.]

Editor’s Note: While we’re in Portland over the next few weeks, we wanted to bring some local flavor to the blog by asking writers who live in the area to contribute Hotpot-style city guides: recommendations on where to eat, where to shop, where to hang. Below, locally based writer Geoff Kleinman shares how Hotpot recommendations guided him through a night of Portland barhopping. Be sure to join the conversation in the comments below.

One of the things I love about Hotpot is the way it uses my ratings and my friends' ratings to point me toward places that are the best match for me and my tastes. While I've discovered some great businesses in my Google searches using Hotpot from the comfort of my home’s desktop computer, I thought it would be fun to take Hotpot on the road using my Android phone, acting as my “person in the know” on a recent Portland barhop.

First stop: Irving Street Kitchen.

For the first stop, I wanted to find a place that was known both for its good food and good drinks. Irving St. Kitchen was recommended to me on Hotpot because I had rated Beaker & Flask 5 stars and my Hotpot friends had rated Irving St. Kitchen highly.

The Place page for Irving St. Kitchen had several Best Ever awards and most of them talked about the amazing drinks and bartenders such as Brandon Wise and Allison Webber. It seemed a perfect place to start our hop.

Allison Webber whips up something tasty.

When we arrived at Irving St. Kitchen and took a seat at the bar, Allison made us a few great classic cocktails. My favorite was a variation of the Negroni — a White Negroni that was flavorful, balanced and a perfect before-dinner drink.

White Negroni at Irving Street Kitchen.

Allison made some food recommendations including a beet salad with truffles, fresh salmon over lentils, and our favorite dish of the evening, a shrimp and crab fusion dish served over a savory bread pudding.

Shrimp, crab and bread pudding - True Fusion at Irving Street Kitchen.

We probably could have spent the entire evening sitting at Irving Street’s bar, but we were on a mission to hop with Hotpot. Using the Rate Places widget for Android, we gave Irving St. Kitchen a glowing rating, then used the Android Places app to look for other bars nearby that friends had recommended. Clyde Common came right up. It was just down the street and recommended by our friend Jennifer Heigl on Hotpot.

Second stop: Clyde Common.

Checking out Clyde’s Place page, we read that the restaurant is the home bar for noted bartender and blogger Jeffrey Morgenthaler. Several of the reviews referred to the barrel-aged cocktails, so when we sat at the bar we immediately ordered one.

Jeffrey Morgenthaler's famous barrel-aged cocktails.

Jeffrey wasn't behind the bar that night, but Andrew Volk was, and in addition to mixing up a few barrel-aged drinks for us, he also made an original Islay scotch cocktail that simply blew us away.

Andrew Volk works the Clyde Common bar.

Clyde Common is a little bit of a way station bar, and we found that our group grew a bit as we headed along to our next stop. This time around, instead of looking for a nearby bar, we wanted to see what would happen if we just asked the Places app to search for the "best cocktails."

Third and final stop: Teardrop Lounge.

So far Google Places with Hotpot hadn't steered us wrong, and it was doing a great job of being the “person in the know.” Teardrop Lounge came up on the list and it was just around the corner, so we made our way over. Many of the reviews on Teardrop’s Place page talked about its classic cocktails, so we sat at the bar and checked out the massive cocktail menu, which has close to 30 different drinks listed. A little daunted with the menu, we got help from bartender Brian Gilbert, who spent a lot of time with our group getting to know what kinds of things we drink.

Brian Gilbert helps us decide what drinks to order at Teardrop.

I ended up with a drink called “Unfinished Business,” which was served in a very cool antique glass with a huge block of ice.

One of Teardrop's many cocktail options, "Unfinished Business."

Having Hotpot recommendations as our guide for the evening took a lot of the guess work out of figuring out what to do and where to go. Even more helpful were the reviews and tips left by my Hotpot friends, so I knew exactly what to order.

Using Hotpot on your hops and crawls? Share your stories in the comments below.

Posted by Geoff Kleinman. Geoff is the editor of DrinkSpirits.com, a national blog helping people figure out what to drink, and OnPDX.com, helping people figure out what to do in Portland.