We’ve moved!

Check us out on the brand new Google and Your Business blog.

Why the move? After being around for a couple years, we thought the phrase “small business” didn’t quite capture everything we were trying to say. It’s really about bringing you the stories, best practices and updates that can help you make the web work for business — large and small. Read the full announcement here, and be sure to update your bookmarks and subscribe to the new blog for updates.

Posted by Vicky Tait, Google and Your Business Blog Team

Help Desk Hangout: Learn about Google Earth Pro

Editor’s note: Each week on the Google+ Your Business page, we’re putting you in touch with Googlers and users who can help you as a business owner get the most out of our products and features.

In our latest Help Desk Hangout On Air, Google Earth experts +Dan Cohen and +Alex Kain taught us how your business can use Earth Pro to help you visualize your company’s data. Missed it? You can watch the full hour-long Hangout on the Google Business YouTube channel (look for the minute-by-minute breakdown in the description so you can easily skip around):

Here are a few of the questions you asked us to answer during the Hangout:

What is Google Earth?
Google Earth’s client software that's used primarily as a visualization tool. You may have even used it once or twice to swoop in to the globe and check out your house! And Earth Pro is a professional product with a few additional features you can use, which we dive deeper into during the Hangout.

What are some features of Earth Pro that can help my business?

A ton! Let’s break this down into the highlights:

• Advanced measuring tools: Quickly and easily measure and stylize complex polygons. Property developers and building designers can quickly estimate the area and perimeter of a property. Afterward, they can quickly stylize the polygon so it’s easily seen on their map.
• Save premium imagery: Save premium images of the maps you create in Earth Pro for inclusion in your business materials. Save a premium image of all your customer locations to share with your investors.
• Bulk data import: Import and stylize CSV files (with address or lat/long data), GIS shapefiles, or GPS data to include in the maps you create. Real estate agents quickly upload and locate all the properties in their portfolios by importing CSV files containing the addresses of their properties.
• U.S. premium data layers: Take advantage of the robust U.S. Demographic, Parcel and Traffic Count data layers that are a part of the Earth Pro package. Architects fly to the location of their next project, use the parcel data layer to find the parcel number, and use the parcel number to find the zoning restrictions for the property they’ll be working on.
• Movie Maker: Quickly and easily create high-definition movies. Nature touring companies create high-definition videos using Earth Pro that take you along the path of their tours.

Do I have to commit to buying Earth Pro upfront? 
Nope — just sign up for a free seven-day trial to see how you like it.

To learn more about how to get started with Google Earth Pro, check out our overview site (FAQs, customer stories, and more!). And remember to tune in to the live stream of our next Hangout at 11 a.m. PT Wednesday May 30 when we teach you more about AdWords.

Posted by Vanessa Schneider, Google Places community manager

Small businesses talk about growing online

With so much advice about what businesses should be doing online and not always enough time to sort through it all, sometimes the most useful thing is to hear from someone that’s doing it right.

Recently in Detroit, Accelerate with Google was proud to take the stage with several local small business leaders for a panel discussion on growing businesses and relationships online. Joined by 80 other Detroit-area businesses at the Michigan Minority Procurement Conference, the panelists shared stories of their successes and challenges forming relationships in the digital age.

Google has worked with these businesses to help them grow their presence online, and they’ve really embraced a digital-first strategy to finding new customers. Here are some of their tips:

Amy Courter, Chief Information Officer, VisionIT
“A good starting point is to first define and align your strategy for being online. Determine your goals, audience, message and interaction. For VisionIT, our roots were in web development and part of this industry requires us to continually evaluate our online presence. The new age of marketing is about building brand, interest and awareness through customer loyalty and adding value for the consumer. As traditional models lose their efficacy, and inbound marketing gains popularity, we learn that it’s more important to earn people’s interest, instead of buying and forcing it.”

Leah Fairman, Director of Sales, Corporate Snobs
“Having an online presence has opened many doors for our company. We have been able to capture a particular market share in our business that our local competitors haven't due to a lack of their online presence. Getting noticed when your customers are looking for your products and services speaks volumes for your company. It sends the message that you are serious about your business, trustworthy and in tune with current technology. This makes you a serious player in your industry.”

Linzie Venegas, Chief Marketing Officer, Ideal Shield
“The most important thing that I have learned since I have moved to online space is that you must put someone in charge; this person must continuously evaluate your website as well as website presence. I have also learned that it is important to adapt to new technology. For instance, we are looking to move to Google Apps for Business, and this will save our company money and allow our IT people to work more efficiently.”

Later this week, another group of entrepreneurs we admire – some of the startup founders from the NewMe Accelerator – will sit down at Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Conference and share their wisdom on growing their internet businesses. Google will also be there to share classroom-style workshops staffed by our team on how to grow and promote your business online, and mastering search engine strategies. The Entrepreneurs Conference has been a great venue every year for entrepreneurs to network and find successful strategies for growth, and we are looking forward to meeting some of you there!

Posted by Chris Genteel, Business Development Manager - Global Diversity

Introducing the Webmaster Academy

As more and more customers are searching for products and services online, it’s important for businesses to have an established presence on the Internet. We’ve heard a lot of business owners say they’d like to learn how to do this, so we are excited to announce Webmaster Academy. Webmaster Academy will walk you through the information you need to get your site up and running with Google in easy to understand steps.

For example, the Academy has information about how Google Search works and how to create a great website for your users, along with information on how to use great (and free!) diagnostic tools such as Webmaster Tools. It’s divided up into easy, short lessons so you can track your progress. At the end of every lesson you’ll be one step closer to having a great website.

Stay tuned here for upcoming posts from the Webmaster Academy, including topics like:

• An explanation of how Google Search works (get a sneak peek by watching this video)
• How best to represent a brick and mortar business online
• An introduction to Search Engine Optimization

We’re excited to share more with business owners of all sizes. Be sure to check out the Webmaster Academy and spend some time exploring!

Posted by Garen Checkly, Search Quality Team

Measuring what matters for your small business

Editor's Note: The SMB Blog team wants to wish everyone a Happy National Small Business Week! To kick off the week, we're continuing a new series we're calling Measurement Mondays. Stay tuned to the hashtag #MeasurementMondays on Google+ for ongoing tips and thoughts to help businesses measure the things that matter.

As a business owner, there are many different metrics that are important to you - like what were my sales this month, and how many new employees can I hire this year? Similarly, there are important things that you should be measuring for your online marketing efforts which can help you improve your customer experience and potentially drive more sales.

Here are five things that every business should consider:

• Start by identifying the right goals for you: Think about the business objectives of your website and marketing efforts, and identify specific customer actions that represent success. For instance, maybe your goal is to drive foot traffic to your store or to boost requests for an online quote. Other goals like signing up for a newsletter, viewing an important page on your site, or filling out an inquiry form can also be important indicators. Just as every business is unique, the metrics that signal success will vary. But it’s crucial for every business to know what matters to you so that you can make the most of your marketing efforts.
• Understand how to measure ad effectiveness: Once you’ve identified your goals, it’s time to create ads that drive people to your store or site to achieve those goals. The most basic measure of your online ad effectiveness is your clickthrough rate (or CTR) which is the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown (called impressions). CTR shows you how often the people who see your ad end up clicking on it, and a high CTR signals that users find your ads helpful and relevant.
• See whether clicks are leading to conversions: It can also be important to see whether those ad clicks actually led someone to buy from you. To do this, you can use tools like AdWords Conversion Tracking, which is a free tool in AdWords that shows you what happens after a customer clicks on your ad. Did they ultimately buy something from your site or sign up for an email newsletter? By looking at how your ads impact conversions on your site, you’ll learn which keywords and ads are effective at bringing valuable customers which can help you invest more wisely.
• Examine how online efforts are driving offline customers: For some businesses, driving traffic or calls to your brick and mortar store can be more valuable than a website visit. When people search for local products and services on their mobile phones, like a nearby hardware store or a local restaurant, they often prefer to call the business directly. With click-to-call ads, mobile shoppers can easily call your business directly from an ad that they see. Within your ad reports you can see the number of calls that were driven by your ad campaigns. Asking your customers at checkout how they heard about your company can also be an easy way to keep track of what is really bringing them through your door.
• Keep measuring, keep experimenting: Businesses these days have no shortage of data available to them, and I know that it can sometimes feel overwhelming. The important thing about measurement for every business is to just get started and keep experimenting. Your customers and your business are constantly evolving, so remember not to set it and forget it. There often isn’t a right or wrong answer, but the data can reveal insights that help you win the moments that matter with your customers.

I hope these tips have given you some food for thought about how measurement can help you reach more customers and drive more sales. Stay tuned for an upcoming post on how you can take your website measurement to the next level. Happy measuring!

Posted by Francoise Brougher, Vice President of SMB Sales and Operations

From Words to Concepts and Back: Dictionaries for Linking Text, Entities and Ideas

Posted by Valentin Spitkovsky and Peter Norvig, Research Team

Yet in each word some concept there must be...

— from Goethe's Faust (Part I, Scene III)

Human language is both rich and ambiguous. When we hear or read words, we resolve meanings to mental representations, for example recognizing and linking names to the intended persons, locations or organizations. Bridging words and meaning — from turning search queries into relevant results to suggesting targeted keywords for advertisers — is also Google's core competency, and important for many other tasks in information retrieval and natural language processing. We are happy to release a resource, spanning 7,560,141 concepts and 175,100,788 unique text strings, that we hope will help everyone working in these areas.

How do we represent concepts? Our approach piggybacks on the unique titles of entries from an encyclopedia, which are mostly proper and common noun phrases. We consider each individual Wikipedia articleas representing a concept (an entity or an idea), identified by its URL. Text strings that refer to concepts were collected using the publicly available hypertext of anchors (the text you click on in a web link) that point to each Wikipedia page, thus drawing on the vast link structure of the web. For every English article we harvested the strings associated with its incoming hyperlinks from the rest of Wikipedia, the greater web, and also anchors of parallel, non-English Wikipedia pages. Our dictionaries are cross-lingual, and any concept deemed too fine can be broadened to a desired level of generality using Wikipedia's groupings of articles into hierarchical categories.

The data set contains triples, each consisting of (i) text, a short, raw natural language string; (ii) url, a related concept, represented by an English Wikipedia article's canonical location; and (iii) count, an integer indicating the number of times text has been observed connected with the concept's url. Our database thus includes weights that measure degrees of association. For example, the top two entries for football indicate that it is an ambiguous term, which is almost twice as likely to refer to what we in the US call soccer:

text=football	url	count
1.	Association football	44,984
2.	American football	23,373
⋮

An inverted index can be used to perform reverse look-ups, identifying salient terms for each concept. Some of the highest-scoring strings — including synonyms and translations — for both sports, are listed below:

concept: “soccer” football and Football Soccer and soccer Association football fútbol and Fútbol footballer Futbol and futbol Fußball futebol futbolista サッカー 축구 footballeur Fußballspieler sepak bola 足球 فوتبال футболист כדורגל piłkarz voetbalclub ฟุตบอล bóng đá voetbal Foutbaal futebolista لعبة كرة القدم fotbal

concept: “football” American football football and Football fútbol americano football américain アメリカンフットボール American football rules futebol americano فوتبال آمریکایی 美式足球 football americano Amerikan futbolu Le Football Américain football field อเมริกันฟุตบอล פוטבול كرة القدم الأمريكية Futbol amerykański 미식축구 futbolu amerykańskiego football team американского футбола Amerikai futball sepak bola Amerika football player američki fudbal 反則 كرة القدم الأميركية

Associated counts can easily be turned into percentages. The following table illustrates the concept-to-words dictionary direction — which may be useful for paraphrasing, summarization and topic modeling — for the idea of soft drink, restricted to English (and normalized for punctuation, pluralization and capitalization differences):

url=Soft_drink	text		%
1.	soft drink	(and soft-drinks)	28.6
2.	soda	(and sodas)	5.5
3.	soda pop		0.9
4.	fizzy drinks		0.6
5.	carbonated beverages	(and beverage)	0.3
6.	non-alcoholic		0.2
7.	soft		0.1
8.	pop		0.1
9.	carbonated soft drink	(and drinks)	0.1
10.	aerated water		0.1
11.	non-alcoholic drinks	(and drink)	0.1
12.	soft drink controversy		0.0
13.	citrus-flavored soda		0.0
14.	carbonated		0.0
15.	soft drink topics		0.0
⋮

The words-to-concepts dictionary direction can disambiguate senses and link entities, which are often highly ambiguous, since people, places and organizations can (nearly) all be named after each other. The next table shows the top concepts meant by the string Stanford, which refers to all three (and other) types:

text=Stanford	url	%	type
1.	Stanford University	50.3	ORGANIZATION
2.	Stanford (disambiguation)	7.7	a disambiguation page
3.	Stanford, California	7.5	LOCATION
4.	Stanford Cardinal football	5.7	ORGANIZATION
5.	Stanford Cardinal	4.1	multiple athletic programs
6.	Stanford Cardinal men's basketball	2.0	ORGANIZATION
7.	Stanford prison experiment	2.0	a famous psychology experiment
8.	Stanford, Kentucky	1.7	LOCATION
9.	Stanford, Norfolk	1.0	LOCATION
10.	Bank of the West Classic	1.0	a recurring sporting event
11.	Stanford, Illinois	0.9	LOCATION
12.	Leland Stanford	0.9	PERSON
13.	Charles Villiers Stanford	0.8	PERSON
14.	Stanford, New York	0.8	LOCATION
15.	Stanford, Bedfordshire	0.8	LOCATION
⋮

The database that we are providing was designed for recall. It is large and noisy, incorporating 297,073,139 distinct string-concept pairs, aggregated over 3,152,091,432 individual links, many of them referencing non-existent articles. For technical details, see our paper(to be presented at LREC 2012) and the README file accompanying the data.

We hope that this release will fuel numerous creative applications that haven't been previously thought of!

---

Produced by Angel X. Changand Valentin I. Spitkovsky; parts of this work are descended from an earlier collaboration between University of Basque Country's Ixa Group's Eneko Agirreand Stanford's NLP Group, including Eric Yeh, presently of SRI International, and our Ph.D. advisors, Christopher D. Manningand Daniel Jurafsky.

---

Help Desk Hangouts: Getting to know Chromebooks, Part II

Editor’s note: Each week on the Google+ Your Business page, we’re putting you in touch with Googlers and users who can help you as a business owner get the most out of our products and features.

In our latest Help Desk Hangout On Air, we continued our conversation about Chromebooks for your business (if you missed the first one, check out our recap). Chrome product manager Glenn Wilson and Will Paulus walked us through the management console, which allows you to oversee your fleet of Chromebooks in a low-touch, scalable way. Miss the event? You can watch the whole thing on the Google and Your Business YouTube channel. And, if you’re interested in learning more about Chromebooks, fill out this form (http://goo.gl/pP0mg) to stay up to date on all the latest news and product announcements.

Check out the video description on the YouTube page for a minute-by-minute breakdown.

Some of the questions we answered during the Hangout:

What can I do with the Chromebooks management console?

Quite a bit! The typical actions include:

• Setting configuration settings for your managed (enrolled) devices, like turning off Guest mode.
• Setting configuration settings for users on your domain, like force-installing certain extensions.
• Tracking device state, like when a device was last used, or what version of the OS it is running.

What about user login tracking? I want to know who the last person to use a Chromebook was.

We’ve heard this request a lot recently — it’s on our to-do list.

Will there be remote wipe available if the Chromebook is lost or stolen? Similar to the mobile policy in the management console.

First, it’s important to note that every Chromebook encrypts all user data, so even if it is stolen, there’s no way for anyone to get to your data without your password. Remote Wipe is on our list.

Can you block based on content type? Like block gaming and adult sites?

We don’t have content type filter in the management console; however, most administrators use a third-party filtering service to do this. You would simply set your devices and users to use the proxy setting the third-party service gives you. If you are interested in finding which filtering services work well with Chromebooks, please contact sales.

Be sure to join us for next week’s Hangout at 11 a.m. PDT Wednesday May 2, when we discuss Google Earth Pro. We’ll be collecting your Earth questions early next week on the Google+ Your Business page.

Posted by Toby Stein, Google+ community manager

Announcing the next series of Learn with Google webinars!

Earlier this year, we introduced the Learn with Google webinar program, and we were delighted to see thousands of you show up to learn about a variety of Google advertising products and solutions. Today, weíre happy to announce the continuation of our series with 10 new webinars over the next few months. During each webinar weíll share tips and how-toís to help make the web work for your business.

Check out our upcoming live webinars below:

• May 23 at 10am PDT: Getting Started with Google Analytics
• May 24 at 9am PDT: Building Blocks of Digital Attribution
• May 31 at 10am PDT: Introduction to TrueView for YouTube
• June 5 at 10am PDT: GoMo: Mobilize your Site with Quick and Easy New Tools
• June 6 at 10am PDT: Our Mobile Planet: Understanding U.S. Smartphone Consumers
• June 7 at 10am PDT: Introducing Mobile Apps Inventory in AdWords
• June 12 at 10am PDT: Get Local with ZIP Code Targeting to Increase Sales/Leads
• June 14 at 10am PDT: Search Optimization: Tips, Tricks, and Tools
• June 19 at 10am PDT: Bringing the Power and Control of Search to Display
• July 10 at 10am PDT: Account Management Tools for Large Advertisers and Agencies

Visit our webinar page to register for any of the sessions and to access past webinars on-demand. Weíll be adding new webinars as theyíre scheduled, so check back regularly for updates. You can also stay up-to-date on the schedule by downloading our Learn with Google Webinar calendar to automatically see upcoming webinars in your Google Calendar.

Whether your goal is to engage the right customers in the moments that matter, make better decisions, or go bigger, faster, we hope that youíll use these best practices and how-toís to maximize the impact of digital and grow your business. Weíre looking forward to having you at an upcoming Learn with Google webinar!

Posted by Erin Green, Marketing Coordinator

Smart Pricing may increase average publisher revenue

Posted by Guy Calvert, AdSense Sales

Online publisher networks, such as Google’s AdSense or the Yahoo! Publisher Network, enable advertisers to simultaneously contest click auctions for thousands - even millions - of web publisher ad slots, all with a single max CPC bid. Recognizing that different publishers deliver disparate performance for advertisers, some networks feature automated systems to help advertisers bid more efficiently with that single bid - effectively discounting click prices on publishers according to the relative value of clicks on each publisher’s ad slots. Google, for example, applies Smart Pricing (SP) for this purpose to appropriately discount advertiser bids on the Google Display Network. 

It is widely accepted that a well-executed system like SP enhances advertiser value. Whether SP also improves network revenue - and hence, via publisher revenue sharing agreements - average publisher revenue, remains a matter of some dispute. While it is clear that higher performing publishers will do better than lower performing publishers, opinion is divided as to whether publishers are on average better or worse off with SP.

Skepticism is understandable - the system by its very nature entails discounting advertiser bids. But if advertisers indeed get more value from a smart-priced network then we would expect them to bid higher because of that feature. The key question is whether the network revenue produced by their SP-discounted higher bids is more, less, or the same as the revenue produced by their undiscounted regular bids. In other words, does Smart Pricing grow the revenue pie?

In this paper, I develop a simple and tractable model of an auction-based publisher click network, replete with an idealized version of SP and profit-maximizing advertisers, and use it to derive insights into the revenue effects of systems like SP. While there is no claim here with regard to the revenue impact of SP-like systems on any actual publisher network, it is hoped that the arguments in the paper will help guide intuition and shape realistic expectations for publishers. And the main implication of this analysis is good news for networks and publishers alike - under reasonable conditions Smart Pricing, and its non-Google analogs, can significantly grow the pie.

Is beautiful usable? What is the influence of beauty and usability on reactions to a product?

Posted by Javier Bargas-Avila, Senior User Experience Researcher at YouTube UX Research

Did you ever come across a product that looked beautiful but was awful to use? Or stumbled over something that was not nice to look at but did exactly what you wanted?

Product usability and aesthetics are coexistent, but they are not identical. To understand how usability and aesthetics influence reactions to a product, we conducted an experimental lab study with 80 participants. We created four versions of an online clothing shop varying in beauty (high vs. low) and usability (high vs. low). Participants had to find a number of items in one of those shops and buy them. To understand how the factors of beauty and usability influence final users happiness, we measured how they much they liked the shop before and after interaction.

The results showed that the beauty of the interface did not affect how users perceived the usability of the shops: Participants (or Users) were capable of distinguishing if a product was usable or not, no matter how nice it looked. However, the experiment showed that the usability of the shops influenced how users rated the products' beauty. Participants using shops with bad usability rated the shops as less beautiful after using the shops. We showed that poor usability lead to frustration, which put the users in a bad mood and made them rate the product as less beautiful than before interacting with the shop.

Successful products should be beautiful and usable. Our data provide insight into how these factors work together.

Google Apps brings Brazos Bookstore into the 21st Century

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Enterprise Blog.)

Editor’s Note: Today’s guest blogger is Jeremy Ellis, General Manager of Brazos Bookstore, a neighborhood institution based in Houston, Texas.

Brazos Bookstore has been part of the Houston literary community since 1974. In addition to selling a diverse collection of books, we pride ourselves in connecting our community with authors from our area and around the globe. When the store’s ownership changed in 2006 and the possibility of shutting down became known, the community of Brazos fans petitioned to keep our doors open. Thanks to them, we’ve been able to continue our long-standing tradition where we host author events, readings and exhibitions from writers such as Walter Cronkite, Julia Child, Kofi Annan, and P. J. O’Rourke, to name a few.

                                                      

When I joined the staff in September 2011, Brazos was still operating in many ways as it did in the 70s and 80s. Employees would schedule the author series on a single paper calendar, and only one of our computers had email set up. All of our software was outdated, and the programs that were available ended up causing more roadblocks than value.

We needed a system that could better manage our day-to-day operations. Since I was already familiar with Google from personal use, moving the bookstore to Google Apps for Business was a natural transition. Today, all seven of our employees are able to access their email and calendars from any computer in the store, at home, and on their smartphones. This accessibility not only eases communication between the staff, but also keeps everyone up to speed on events, shipments and other activities at the shop.

Scheduling author visits on Google Calendar is easy, instant, and live, and it’s saved us from double-booking authors. I’m now able to easily collaborate with our buyer when we’re planning in-store events, which has streamlined the process for ordering books and helps me track book sales from author readings.

Google Apps has given us the organizational tools we need to continue serving Houston’s literary and arts culture. Our vision over the past forty years hasn’t changed, and now we have the technology to support our store for the future.

Posted by Jeremy Ellis, General Manager, Brazos Bookstore

Using multiple subversion trees with Gource

This is a follow up on my previous post on Gource last week.

Gource supports Subversion out of the box. Just start Gource.exe from a Subversion controlled directory, and Gource will download the change logs automatically, convert them to the internal Gource format, and show the visualization.

In some situations, it can be useful to do these steps manually. For example, when you want to show the visualization based on multiple source trees.

This can be done by following these steps:

• Download the change logs from your version control system.  
• The command to do this can be obtained from Gource by executing, from the directory:
  gource.exe --log-command svn
  This gives this output:
  svn log -r 1:HEAD --xml --verbose --quiet
• Run this command, and store the output in a file:
  svn log -r 1:HEAD --xml --verbose --quiet > c:\temp\log-source-1.txt
• Repeat this for the other source trees that you want to visualize
• Convert the Subversion change log files to the Gource format. This can be done in one step using a Powershell command:
  Get-ChildItem  log-source-*.txt | foreach { .\Gource\gource.exe --log-format svn --output-custom-log "$_-gource.txt" "$_" }
  (or using a similar command using e.g. bash).
  This creates the files "log-source-*.txt-gource.txt"
• Merge the Gource log files into one big file, and order on the timestamp.  For this, I used FxGqlC:
  select * into [log-source-merged.txt] from [log-source-*.txt-gource.txt] order by matchregex(*, '^(\d+)|')
• Now you can run Gource on the merged changelog file:
  .\Gource\gource.exe log-source-merged.txt

The procedure above can easily be changed for any version control system, like GIT or Mercurial. Even the ones which Gource doesn't support, like Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. In that case, you can transform the TFS changeset history into the Gource internal format using a Powershell or FxGqlC script.

Help Desk Hangouts: Connect with customers using Hangouts On Air

Editor’s note: Each week on the Google+ Your Business page, we’re putting you in touch with Googlers and users who can help you as a business owner get the most out of our products and features.

In our latest Help Desk Hangout On Air, the lovely Amanda Rosenberg showed us how to use a Hangout On Air - the ability to broadcast a Hangout to the world - and heard some tips and tricks from two power users, pio dal cin and Dan McDermott. Missed it? You can watch the full hour-long Hangout on the Google Business YouTube channel (check out the video description for a minute-by-minute breakdown):

Here are a few of the questions you asked us to answer during the Hangout:

What kind of technical setup should I have for something like this?
You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on fancy equipment, but many users have found having a dedicated microphone and webcam, plus an ethernet connection, make for a much smoother experience. Dan and Pio make some specific hardware recommendations during the Hangout.

What should I talk about in my Hangout?
Get creative! Make an announcement to your customers, or demo a new product. Invite a panel of experts in your field on to discuss topics, and take questions from users via your Google+ page. Own a bakery? Show viewers how to make a certain recipe. Book store? Host a live author reading. There’s really no end to the possibilities. We see users come up with new uses every day — kick around your ideas with other Google+ users to hone in on something you’d like to try.

Who can join the Hangout, and who can watch it? Can I broadcast to a select group?
When you hit broadcast, Hangouts On Air are public for the world to watch live. A member of that “public,” however, can not join the Hangout; they can only watch it. To get people in the Hangout, you as the Hangout owner need to invite them.

Where does the recording of the Hangout live?
The recording will be uploaded to your YouTube account (if you’re hosting the Hangout from a Google+ page, the video will live in the account of whoever’s admin’ing the page at the time of the Hangout). After the Hangout, visit your YouTube Video Manager to see your video and make edits if you need to. Note: This video will upload to your account as a Public video; you can change the video at any time to “private” or “unlisted” via the Video Manager.

Why do I need to verify my YouTube account?
In order to record YouTube videos longer than 15 minutes, you’ll need to verify your account.

Anything else I should keep in mind?
Posting a recording of a particularly long Hangout? List a minute-by-minute breakdown (timestamps like 1:36, 5:47) in the video’s description so that users can jump to different parts of the video (like this). Also, practice makes perfect: None of us gets it 100% right the first time, but in no time at all, you’ll soon be a Hangouts pro.

Who has access to Hangouts On Air?
We’re rolling this functionality out gradually over the next several weeks. Keep your eyes peeled!

To learn more about how to get started with Hangouts On Air, check out this detailed technical guide, and if you still have questions, drop in to the Google+ discussion forum. And remember to tune in to the live stream of our next Hangout at 11 a.m. PT Wednesday May 16 when we dive deeper into the world of Chromebooks (read up on our first Chromebooks Hangout).

Posted by Toby Stein, Google+ Community Manager

Google Sites and Bing Webmaster Tools ownership verification

When registering your Google Sites site in Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools, you get 3 options to proof your ownership of the site. The easiest way is to choose for option 2 with the <meta>-tag.  The meta tag is similar to this:
<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" />
Bing asks you to add the <meta>-tag to the <head> section of your website.

In your Google Sites site, go to the site settings ("Manage Site") and click "General" on the left column.  One of the settings is "Google Webmaster Tools".  Copy paste the <meta> tag above to the "Google Webmaster Tools" setting.  When you click "Save", and inspect the source of your Google Sites site, you will find the <meta>-tag, but for some reason, the name is changed from "msvalidate.01" to "msvalidate01" (without the dot). Consequently, Bing Webmaster Tools tells that the <meta>-tag is missing, and they could net verify your ownership of the site.

A workaround for this problem is to use "msvalidate-01" (with a hyphen) instead of "msvalidate.01". The hyphen is correctly displayed in the source of the website, and Bing Webmaster Tools succesfully validates your ownership of the site.

Connecting to a Cisco VPN from Linux

On Windows, you can use the Cisco AnyConnect VPN client to connect to a Cisco VPN.

The alternative on Linux to connect to a Cisco VPN is to install the package "openconnect".
You can do this by opening a console window (Ctrl-Alt-T) and run this command: (Ubuntu)
sudo apt-get install openconnect

To set up the VPN to server MyServer on port 12000, run this command:
sudo openconnect MyServer:12000
The openconnect executable stays running.

Before you can use the remote network, you probably need to add an IP route. When the remote network is 192.168.2.0 with network mask 255.255.255.0, you can execute this command (in a new terminal window):
sudo route add -net 192.168.2.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 tun0

To disconnect the VPN connection, press Ctrl-C to terminate openconnect (or kill this process).

Graphically visualize software development with Gource

Gource is a very cool open source visualization tool to get a graphical view on the check-ins of source code in a version control system like GIT, SubVersion, CVS, ...

http://code.google.com/p/gource/

This is a video of the development of FxGqlC 2.x, generated with Gource:



It is very easy to generate a video like this based on your source control system. In the explanation below I used Windows, but all the tools were originally developed for Unix.

• Local snapshot of the source code
  (You can skip this step if you already have a local copy of a source controlled project in GIT, SubVersion,...)
  I started from a local snapshot of the last version of the source code. The FxGqlC source code is hosted on GitHub, a public GIT version control repository. 

• You first need to install the client of the version control system. In this case: the GIT client the GIT client for Windows.
  http://git-scm.com/downloads
• Install to the default location "c:\Program Files" (or "c:\program files (x86)" on 64-bit Windows) 
• Open the GIT-console (bash) from the start menu, and execute these commands to get a local copy of the source code:
  $ mkdir ~/Documents/FxGqlC-Source
  $ cd ~/Documents/FxGqlC-Source
  $ git clone https://github.com/WimObiwan/FxGqlC.git
• Set up Gource and run Gource
• Download gource from http://code.google.com/p/gource/ (I used the Windows build of version 0.38, posted on 2012-04-23)
• Unzip to c:\temp\gource
• Open a command prompt to start Gource:
  cd %userprofile%\Documents\FxGqlC-Source\FxGqlC
  SET PATH=%PATH%;c:\program files\git\bin
  On 64-bit Windows, use instead:
  SET PATH=%PATH%;c:\program files (x86)\git\bin
  c:\temp\gource\gource.exe
• Gource gets the necessary information from the GIT-server, and the video is played.
• To generate the video in WMV format:
• First generate the video in PPM format with this command:
  .\Gource\gource.exe -o fxgqlc-gource.ppm
• Download ffmpeg: http://www.videohelp.com/tools/ffmpeg
• Unzip to c:\temp
• Cd c:\temp
• ffmpeg.exe -y -r 25 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i fxgqlc-gource.ppm -vcodec wmv1 -r 25 -sameq fxgqlc-gource.wmv
• The video fxgqlc-gource.wmv can be played with a media player or uploaded to YouTube.
• On YouTube, you find several Gource videos of big open-source projects:
• Linux: http://youtu.be/ntTpM8hfl_E
• MySQL: http://youtu.be/s98-5rZIVyk
• Python: http://youtu.be/aPk1BqK8zzI
• Perl: http://youtu.be/jl9HVEJl_-w
• PHP: http://youtu.be/jhbzEwxbCfI

Update: have a look at "http://mycomputeradventures.blogspot.be/2012/07/gource-video-of-fxgqlc-22.html" on how to create a gource video on Ubuntu.

Manage multiple locations more easily with a new tool for Google Places

Businesses with multiple locations have a big task in front of them when trying to manage their online presence. How can they connect their customers with the locations closest to them? How can they make data changes to a group of their locations all at once? The challenges of managing multiple businesses in the real world can sometimes carry over online.

We’ve heard plenty of feedback about how you want to manage your listings on Google, which is why we’re excited today to announce an upgraded bulk listing management tool for Google Places for business.

We’ve made many improvements and now enable the following actions:

• Edit one or more of your listings’ data at once
• Search through your listings, filtering by specific information or for listings with errors
• Upload new listings using a data file or by adding them individually within the interface
• Tell us how we can improve this new interface by clicking the “Give Feedback” link

Before you get started with the new bulk management tool, watch the video tutorial that’s relevant to you or visit our Help Center for more information:   

New user? Learn how to manage multiple locations.

Already managing verified listings? Here's what's new.

Starting today, you’ll be routed to the new interface whenever you click to upload or edit a data file via the Places dashboard, or by visiting https://places.google.com/manage directly. You’ll still use the Places dashboard to see your listing analytics and to perform PIN verification on single locations. Remember that your updates will still take a few days to appear on Google Maps.

We hope the new tool makes managing your business on Google Places much easier. We look forward to hearing your feedback and seeing your listings up on Google Maps!

Posted by Derek Wetzel, Consumer Experience Specialist, Google Places

GoMo: Mark your calendar to ‘Hangout on Air’ and learn how to build a mobile site in minutes

Did you know that 40% of mobile web users reported that they’ve turned to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile experience1? With about half of all Americans now owning a smartphone2, it’s time for businesses to meet user expectations by delivering a mobile experience as good as the desktop experience. In short, it’s time to step up to the plate and build a site optimized for the mobile web.              
                          

Google can help. We recently teamed up with DudaMobile to release a free mobile site builder.  In three easy steps you’re able to get started with mobile: (1) enter your site’s URL, (2) customize your site and (3) redirect mobile users automatically to the new mobile-friendly version.  It’s free and takes just a few minutes to complete!

Join us on Thursday, May 10th at 1pm EST/10am PST and watch as Google showcases how two businesses, Top Mast Resort in Massachusetts and Sava’s Restaurant in Michigan, go mobile and build mobile-friendly sites--live on air.

You’ll see how Top Mast is preparing to take advantage of mobile travel purchase intent - which is five times higher than online travel purchase intent, according to InsightExpress.  You’ll also see Sava’s move ahead of 95% of restaurants that do not have mobile-friendly sites, according to a study by Restaurant Science.

Finally, you’ll hear from the CMO of Dudamobile, Dennis Mink; he’ll talk about best practices when using the mobile site builder and walk through important questions to ask yourself when building a mobile-friendly site.

Details on how to tune in:

• Sign into Google+ on Thursday, May 10 at 1 p.m. EST/10 a.m. PST
• Go to the Think with Google Google+ page
• Look for the stream post and click to enter the live stream  

Be sure to set a reminder in your calendar! If you have questions before or during the Hangout, post them with the hashtag #GoMoSite as a comment on the Google+ page.

Posted by Suzanne Mumford, Google Mobile Ads Marketing

Source: (1) Gomez 2011 (2) Nielsen February 2012

FxGqlC: Obtain the minutes that have the most log lines

When you have a (big) log file, and you need to know which minutes generated the most lines, you can use a GQL query like this:
FxGqlC> select top 100 left($line, 16), count(1) into [logfile_linespermin.txt] from [logfile.txt] group by left($line, 16) order by 2 desc
In this example, the first 16 characters of every line contain the date and time up till the minutes.

When the date/time is somewhere in the middle of the line, a regular expression can be used:
FxGqlC> select top 100 matchregex($line, '(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2} \d{2}\:\d{2})\:\d{2}'), count(1) into [logfile_linespermin.txt] from [logfile.txt] group by matchregex($line, '(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2} \d{2}\:\d{2})\:\d{2}') order by 2 desc

And if you need to get the total number of lines per minute, totaled over all the hours, you can run:
FxGqlC> select matchregex($line, '\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2} \d{2}\:(\d{2})\:\d{2}'), count(1) into [logfile_linespermin.txt] from [logfile.txt] group by matchregex($line, '\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2} \d{2}\:(\d{2})\:\d{2}') order by 2 desc

More information on: https://sites.google.com/site/fxgqlc

Google+ stories: Meet Best Made Company (again)

Editor’s Note: This is the final installment in a series of posts about small businesses on Google+ and their tips and tricks for managing a great page. Visit our YouTube channel to see all the videos in this series and join the discussion on the Google+ Your Business page. Thanks for following along!

Millions of businesses are now using Google+ to better connect with their customers. Since the launch of Google+ pages last November, we’ve watched as page owners hosted Hangouts with clients, announced news and deals in the Stream, and shared exclusive photos and videos. We’ve loved all the creativity out there and hope that this series has given you a few new tips for engaging with your customers on Google.

Over the last several months, we introduced you to some cool small businesses who had recently joined Google+, both here on the SMB Blog and on the Google+ Your Business page. The first company we introduced back in February was Best Made Company, a group of outdoor enthusiasts that specializes in designing and handcrafting wilderness supplies. We wanted to take one more look at their story as a final farewell to this series. Watch on as they create a magic moment for a very special pair of customers.

Want to learn more? Visit the Google+ Your Business site. And remember to visit all of our special guests in this small business series below at their +Pages and say hello!

• Best Made Company
• North Bowl 
• King Arthur Flour
• Loluma
• Birds Barbershop
• CoffeeCake KC
• Pablove Foundation (non-profit)

Thanks for being a part of the journey, and be sure to share your own on the Google+ Your Business page.

Posted by Evelyn Lee, Google+ Pages Associate Product Marketing Manager

FxGqlC: Skip the first lines of every file

Sometimes a text files contains "header lines" that you want to skip when scanning the files using FxGqlC.
A new FROM-clause option "-skip=n" has been added to skip the first n lines of the input files.  When the input files are multiple files (e.g. when using a zip file containing multiple files, or when using a wildcard like "*.txt"), the first n lines are skipped in every file. This feature is added in version 2.1.

Example:
select distinct * from ['Tennis-ATP-2011.csv' -skip=1]

More information on: https://sites.google.com/site/fxgqlc

FxGqlC: Define the columns of an input text file using a regular expression

An input text file can be parsed into columns using a regular expression, using the new FROM-clause option " -Columns='<regular expression>' ".  The input line is matched against the regular expression.  If there is no match, the line is ignored. If the line matches, the first match is used, and the columns are filled with the named "capture groups" of the regulare expression.  The syntax to define a capture group in .net regular expressions is: "(?<MyColumnName>MyFilter)".  For example: "(?<Count>\d+)". The column name can then be used in any expression like the WHERE-clause.  This feature is added in version 2.1.

Example:
select distinct [Tournament] from ['Tennis-ATP-2011.csv' -columns='^(?<ATP>.*?)\t(?<Location>.*?)\t(?<Tournament>.*?)\t.*?$']

More information on using regular expressions, can be found on this site: http://www.regular-expressions.info/ .
For the usage of "Capture Groups", see the section "Named Capture with .NET’s System.Text.RegularExpressions" on this link: http://www.regular-expressions.info/named.html

More information on: https://sites.google.com/site/fxgqlc

Google, the World Wide Web and WWW conference: years of progress, prosperity and innovation

Posted by Prabhakar Raghavan, Vice President of Engineering

More than forty members of Google’s technical staff gathered in Lyon, France in April to participate in the global dialogue around the state of the web at the World Wide Web conference (WWW) 2012. A decade ago, Larry Page and Sergey Brin applied their research to an information retrieval problem and their work—presented at WWW in 1998—led to the invention of today’s most popular search engine.

As I've watched the WWW conference series evolve over the years, a couple of larger trends struck me in this year's edition. First, there seems to be more of a Mobile Web presence in the technical program, relative to recent years. The refereed program included several interesting Mobile papers, including the Best Student Paper Awardee from Stanford University researchers: Who Killed My Battery: Analyzing Mobile Browser Energy Consumption, Narendran Thiagarajan, Gaurav Aggarwal, Angela Nicoara, Dan Boneh, Jatinder Singh.

Second, one gets the sense that the WWW community is moving from the classic "bag of words" view of web pages, to an entity-centric view. There were a number of papers on identifying and using entities in Web pages. While I'm loathe to view this as a vindication of "the Semantic Web" (mainly because this has become an overloaded phrase that people elect to interpret as suits them), the technical capability to get at entities is clearly here. The question is -- what is the killer application? Finally, it’s nice to see that recommendation systems are becoming a major topic of focus at WWW. This paper was a personal favorite: Build Your Own Music Recommender by Modeling Internet Radio Streams, Natalie Aizenberg, Yehuda Koren, Oren Somekh.

In keeping with tradition, Google was a major supporter, sponsoring the conference, the Best Paper Award (Counting beyond a Yottabyte, or how SPARQL 1.1 Property Paths will prevent adoption of the standard, Marcelo Arenas, Sebastián Conca and Jorge Pérez) and four PhD student travel grants. We chatted with hundreds of attendees who hung out with us at the Google booth to chat and see demos about the latest Google product and research developments (see full schedule of booth talks).

Googlers were also active member of the vibrant research community at WWW:

David Assouline delivered the keynote for the Demo Track -- to a standing-room-only crowd -- on the Google Art Project, which uses a combination of various Google technologies and expert information provided by our museum partners to create a unique online art experience. Googler Alon Halevy served as a program committee member. Googlers were also co-authors of the following papers:

• Risk-Aware Revenue Maximization in Display Advertising by Ana Radovanovic and William Heavlin (Googlers)
• SessionJuggler: Secure Web Login From an Untrusted Terminal Using Session Hijacking by Elie Bursztein (Googler), Chinmay Soman, Dan Boneh and John Mitchell
• Spotting Fake Reviewer Groups in Consumer Reviews by Arjun Murkherjee, Bing Liu, and Natalie Glance (Googler)
• Your Two Weeks of Fame and Your Grandmother’s by James Cook, Atish Das Sarma, Alexander Fabrikant and Andrew Tomkins (Googlers)
• YouTube Around the World: Geographic Popularity of Videos by Mirjam Wattenhofer (Googler), Anders Brodersen (Googler), and Salvatore Scellato
• Who Killed My Battery: Analyzing Mobile Browser Energy Consumption by Narendran Thiagarajan, Gaurav Aggarwal (Googler), Angela Nicoara, Dan Boneh and Jatinder Singh
• A Multimodal Search Engine based on Rich Unified Content Description by Thomas Steiner (Googler), Lorenzo Sutton, Sabine Spiller, Marilena Lazzaro, Francesco Saverio Nucci, Vincenzo Croce, Alberto Massari, Antonio Camurri, Anne Verroust-Blondet, Laurent Joyeux
• Enabling on-the-fly Video Shot Detection on YouTube by Thomas Steiner (Googler), Ruben Verborgh, Joaquim Gabarro, Michael Hausenblas, Raphael Troncy and Rik Van De Walle
  
• Fixing the Web one page at a time, or actually implementing xkcd #37 by Thomas Steiner (Googler), Ruben Verborgh, and Rik Van de Valle
  

Googlers co-organized three workshops:

• Appification of the Web by Ed Chi (Googler), Brian Davison, and Evgeniy Gabrilovich (Googler)
• Extracting Unambiguous Keywords from Microposts Using Web and Query Logs Data, as part of the Making Sense of Microsposts workshop by Davi Reis, Felipe Portavales Goldstein, and Fred Quintao (Googlers)
• Human Computation Must Be Reproducible, as part of the CrowdSearch: Crowdsourcing Web search workshop by Praveen Paritosh (Googler)
• WebQuality 2012: The Anti-Social Web by Zoltan Gyongyi (Googler), Carlos Castillo, Adam Jatowt, and Katsumi Tanaka

Additionally, a Googler led a tutorial:

• The Role of Human-Generated and Automatically-Extracted Lexico-Semantic Resources in Web Search by Marius Pasca (Googler)

Googlers presented a poster:

• Google Image Swirl by Yushi Jing, Henry Rowley, Jingbin Wang, David Tsai, Chuck Rosenberg, Michele Covell (Googlers)

At the conference, we also paid homage to the founding of the World Wide Web and the strong community and enterprise it’s created since the 1990s, seen in the Euronews report: Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee on imagining worlds. Through our products and support of WWW in 2013, we look forward to continuing to nurture the world wide web’s open ecosystem of knowledge, innovation and progress.

Add Research at Google to your circles on G+ to learn more about our academic conference involvement, view pictures from events, and hear about upcoming programming and presence at conferences

Exclude your own visits to your website from Google Analytics

When you have a small website, your own visits to your site can count for a substantial part in the total statistics of Google Analytics.

There are different ways to exclude yourself from your own statistics.  E.g. by changing the javascript code that invokes Google Analytics / Urchin, or by installing a custom cookie and filtering out the visits containing the cookie.

By far the easiest way exclude yourself from your statistics, is by installing a browser add-on that doesn't invoke Google Analytics.  Google developed an add-in for all mainstream browsers that make you "opt-out" of Google Analytics: "Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on (BETA)"
https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout

My favorite is an add-in that let's you configure for which individual sites (e.g, your own ones) that you want to turn off Google Analytics: "Block Yourself from Analytics"
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fadgflmigmogfionelcpalhohefbnehm

Chrome: What content is secure?

When browsing to a secure site, you can get a warning about insecure content being shown.  In Chrome, this is indicated by a padlock with a yellow triangle.  When clicking this icon, you get information about the certificate being used, with this warning message: (in this example for gmail)

Your connection to mail.google.com is encrypted with 128-bit encryption. However, this page includes other resources which are not secure. These resources can be viewed by others while in transit and can be modified by an attacker to change the look of the page.

To know what content is secure or insecure on a website, you can install the free Google Chrome extension "Secure or not".

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hfoeodccbohfpgkldfcdknmlbbgmdcle 

On the right side of the Chrome address bar, a button is added containing a padlock with a question mark. When pressing the button, all secure content is surrounded with a green dashed line, and all insecure content with a red dashed line.

Video Stabilization on YouTube

Posted by Matthias Grundmann, Vivek Kwatra, and Irfan Essa, Research at Google

One thing we have been working on within Research at Google is developing methods for making casual videos look more professional, thereby providing users with a better viewing experience. Professional videos have several characteristics that differentiate them from casually shot videos. For example, in order to tell a story, cinematographers carefully control lighting and exposure and use specialized equipment to plan camera movement.

We have developed a technique that mimics professional camera moves and applies them to videos recorded by hand-held devices. Cinematographers use specialized equipment such as tripods and dollies to plan their camera paths and hold them steady. In contrast, think of a video you shot using a mobile phone camera. How steady was your hand and were you able to anticipate an interesting moment and smoothly pan the camera to capture that moment? To bridge these differences, we propose an algorithm that automatically determines the best camera path and recasts the video as if it were filmed using stabilization equipment. Specifically, we divide the original, shaky camera path into a set of segments, each approximated by either a constant, linear or parabolic motion of the camera. Our optimization finds the best of all possible partitions using a computationally efficient and stable algorithm. For details, check out our earlier blog post or read our paper, Auto-Directed Video Stabilization with Robust L1 Optimal Camera Paths, published in IEEE CVPR 2011.

The next time you upload your videos to YouTube, try stabilizing them by going to the YouTube editor or directly from the video manager by clicking on Edit->Enhancements. For even more convenience, YouTube will automatically detect if your video needs stabilization and offer to do it for you. Many videos on YouTube have already been enhanced using this technology.

More recently, we have been working on a related problem common in videos shot from mobile phones. The camera sensors in these phones contain what is known as an electronic rolling shutter. When taking a picture with a rolling shutter camera, the image is not captured instantaneously. Instead, the camera captures the image one row of pixels at a time, with a small delay when going from one row to the next. Consequently, if the camera moves during capture, it will cause image distortions ranging from shear in the case of low-frequency motions (for instance an image captured from a driving car) to wobbly distortions in the case of high-frequency perturbations (think of a person walking while recording video). These distortions are especially noticeable in videos where the camera shake is independent across frames. For example, take a look at the video below.

Original video with rolling shutter distortions

In our recent paper titled Calibration-Free Rolling Shutter Removal, which was awarded the best paper at IEEE ICCP 2012, we demonstrate a solution to correct these rolling shutter distortions in videos. A significant feature of our approach is that it does not require any knowledge of the camera used to shoot the video. The time delay in capturing two consecutive rows that we mention above is in fact different for every camera and affects the extent of distortions. Having knowledge of this delay parameter can be useful, but difficult to obtain or estimate via calibration. Imagine a video that is already uploaded to YouTube -- it will be challenging to obtain this parameter! Instead, we show that just the visual data in the video has enough information to appropriately describe and compensate for the distortions caused by the camera motion, even in the presence of a rolling shutter. For more information, see the narrated video description of our paper.

This technique is already integrated with the YouTube stabilizer. Starting today, if you stabilize a video from a mobile phone or other rolling shutter cameras, we will also automatically compensate for rolling shutter distortions. To see our technique in action, check out the video below, obtained after applying rolling shutter compensation and stabilization to the one above.

After stabilization and rolling shutter removal

An Experiment in Music and Crowd-Sourcing

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

The Bodleian Library is the main research library at the University of Oxford. It is also one of the oldest libraries in the world, dating back to the 14th century. But the staff of the Bodleian operates very much in the 21st century, using the latest technology to solve their unique problems.

A few years ago, the library acquired a set of 4,000 popular piano pieces from the mid-Victorian period. There’s very little information available on these pieces, so Bodleian staff decided to use crowdsourcing to collect information on this corpus of music. Through a Google Focused Award, they have digitized and made the entire set of music available online.

By visiting the What’s-the-Score website, which opened yesterday, ‘citizen librarians’ can help by describing the scores and contributing to the creation of an online catalogue. They can also include links to audio or video recordings. This is the first time the Bodleian has used this approach to collect catalog information. Typically, a large group of researchers are required to find this information.

Martin Holmes, Alfred Brendel Curator of Music at the Bodleian Libraries, commented: ‘In making the scores available online, they will not only be accessible for academic study and research but will also be there to enjoy for anyone who is interested in various aspects of Victorian music, culture and society.’

The Bodleian Library is one of dozens of recipients of Google Focused Awards. These awards are for research in areas of study that are of key interest to Google as well as the research community. These unrestricted gifts are for two to three years, and the recipients have the advantage of access to Google tools, technologies, and expertise. The Bodleian’s experiment in crowdsourcing to build up data on a specialized collection is timely and interesting, given the number of such collections becoming available on the web.

Help Desk Hangouts: Display Network Advertising with Google AdWords

Editor’s note: Each week on the Google+ Your Business page, we’re putting you in touch with Googlers and users who can help you as a business owner get the most out of our products and features.

In our latest Help Desk Hangout On Air, we discussed advertising on the Google Display Network with Googlers Dori Storbeck, Courtney Pannell, Joanna Kim, Neil Mendelowitz, and two Top Contributors from the AdWords Community — Kim Clinkunbroomer and Theresa Zook. The group shared tips and tricks for the Display Network, and the TCs shared some of their personal experiences. If you missed it, you can watch the full hour-long Hangout on the Google Business YouTube channel (check out the video description for a minute-by-minute breakdown):

Here are a few of the questions you asked us to answer during the Hangout:

Can independent consultants take advantage of the Display Network? 
Yes, anyone can utilize the Display Network for advertising their products and services; however, whether it is right for you may depend on your specific business and your advertising goals.

Where is the Display Network available?
The Display Network is available in all countries that AdWords serves.

Which clicks are more likely to become conversions search or display?
Search and display perform very differently, depending on your overall campaign goals.

What’s more effective: automatic placements or manual?
If you’re trying to reach a specific audience or target users who demonstrate a particular interest and you have an idea of some Display Network websites where you want your ads to appear, managed placements are probably the best bet for you. If you’re just starting out with Display, we would suggest opting into automatic placements at first and then reviewing the domains you show on to further refine and optimize.

If in your industry search approximate cpc is = to display approximate cpc why would you do display?(Besides the obvious increase in potential traffic.)
The Display Network is a great way to find customers that may not be actively searching for your product. Other than potentially increasing traffic to your website, you can potentially grow your customer base and get more conversions.

Tips on how to get JPEG ads approved quickly?
Our ad review turn around time is usually 1-3 business days. If your ads are under review for more than 3 business days, please get in touch with us or submit your ads directly to our review team.

For remarketing, how do I set the ad up to show people the products they viewed but not purchased?
You can create different audience lists so that you create an audience for users who visited your product pages and users who completed a purchase. You can then create a “custom combination” list to subtract those who purchased from those who visited your pages and did not purchase.

What is the difference between topics and interest categories? How are these compiled?
Topic targeting allows you to place ads on pages directly related to the topic you've selected, whereas interest categories allow you to reach users across the Display Network who have shown specific interests, regardless of the page they're currently on.

For remarketing, would you suggest using just one method per ad group, i.e., contextual, topic, interest, managed placements, or is it OK to mix them?
Remarketing operates by showing your ads to users on your audience list, so within your ad group, the audience list should be the only targeting you have set up.

If you could only choose between search and display and the approximate cpc was the same. Which would you chose and why?
This question really depends on your business and your advertising goals. In general, we tend to see advertisers looking for more direct response focus on the Search Network, while those who are interested in branding and remarketing might want to focus on the Display Network.

Of course, if you’re interested in both, we’d recommend creating a specific campaign to target each network individually.

Any suggestions on frequency capping numbers?
When you turn on frequency capping for a campaign, you can set a limit for the number of impressions you allow an individual user to have per day, per week, or per month, and you can choose whether this is applicable to each ad, ad group, or campaign. So ultimately, the frequency capping number you select depends on your goals and the size of your advertising endeavor. Kim and Theresa suggested numbers around 5-15 impressions per day for an individual user.

I know there is a placement tool in AdWords - however it doesn’t seem to show "all" of the websites available in the network. I have found sites displaying relevant ads, but I did not find it in tool. Is there another way to identify these potential sites?
Yes! In addition to our Placement Tool, you can check the DoubleClick Ad Planner for other sites that are in the Display Network.

To learn more about how to get started with the Display Network, visit our Help Center or check out the AdWords Community forum. And remember to tune in to the live stream of our next Hangout at 11 a.m. PT Wednesday May 9 — topic to be announced on the Google+ Your Business page early next week!

Posted by Dori Storbeck and Courtney Pannell, Global Online Advertising Associates