Google introduces Search Appliance version 7.0 for enterprises

Jordan Kahn

On the Google Enterprise blog today, General Manager of Enterprise Search Matthew Eichner introduced the latest version of the yellow “Google in a box” search solution for enterprises. GSA 7.0 brings new features nearly 10 years after first introducing the appliance, including: Google-quality search for SharePoint 2010, better smartphone and tablet integration, and refined speed and relevance with assisted navigation and Entity Recognition:

The GSA 7.0 helps you find information stored anywhere in your organization, whether you’re using a desktop, smartphone or tablet. Administrators can easily add content sources from secure storage, cloud services or the public web and social networking sites. GSA 7.0 also provides Google-quality search for SharePoint 2010, making for a more simple and intuitive, all-in-one search experience.

Google described of the other new features in GSA 7.0 including document preview, Google translate, support for more languages, and an improved UI: Read more

A look at how Google builds accurate maps with ‘Ground Truth’ data

Jordan Kahn

Google’s map offerings build in the human intelligence on the front end, and that’s what allows its computers to tell you the best route from San Francisco to Boston.

In an exclusive story by the Senior Editor at The Atlantic, Alexis C. Madrigal, Google for the first time gives us a look at “Ground Truth”. It is a project described by Madrigal as a secretive, complex internal map that contains data, such as “no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions,” necessary to help users navigate through Google Maps:

I was slated to meet with Gupta and the engineering ringleader on his team, former NASA engineer Michael Weiss-Malik, who’d spent his 20 percent time working on Google Mars, and Nick Volmar, an “operator” who actually massages map data. 

“So you want to make a map,” Weiss-Malik tells me as we sit down in front of a massive monitor. “There are a couple of steps. You acquire data through partners. You do a bunch of engineering on that data to get it into the right format and conflate it with other sources of data, and then you do a bunch of operations, which is what this tool is about, to hand massage the data. And out the other end pops something that is higher quality than the sum of its parts.”

Describing Ground Truth to be an elaborate internal Map Maker of sorts, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the story is just how much human input goes into making the Google Maps experience accurate. In the story, Madrigal noted the Ground Truth Geo team aims to address most of the fixable problems reported by users (thousands daily) within minutes: Read more

Google Now interface rolls out to Google searches performed on mobile devices

Jake Smith

In its push to have the Google Now interface in what looks to be across all platforms, Google has incorporated it in Google Search results on mobile devices. When searching for a forecast, stock quote, flight time, math equation, sports score, and more on your smartphone, the information will now be conveniently displayed in Google’s new Now UI. The information is not any different, as Google has been doing this for a while, but it definitely looks much better and easier to manage.

It looks very similar to the interface of Google Now that is available on Jelly Bean. Google also incorporated the look in its upcoming Google Search app update on iOS. The new interface will roll out to all users in the coming days and on desktops soon. [Google]

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Google adds 34-button scientific calculator to search results

Jordan Kahn

You may already be aware that Google search provides a calculator that offers answers to queries, such as 2+2 directly, from the main search results page. As pointed out by a reader, Google recently updated the calculator search functionality, and it now provides a full HTML5 scientific calculator for these types of search queries. The features work with voice—except for on mobile devices, as they do not have access to the full scientific calculator presented on desktops.

Earlier this month, Google started to roll out a similar widget on its search page for unit conversions, like inches to centimeters. Now, unit conversion queries are presented with the live unit conversion tool (pictured below) that allows you to switch between units of measurements for temperature, length, mass, speed, digital storage, and much more.

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Google updates Transparency Report with government requests for blog post removals and user data

Jordan Kahn

As noted in a recent post on the Official Google Blog, Google recently made changes to the Transparency Report that launched a couple of years ago to report data on “government requests.” The interactive reports, which are available here, already included user data requests from courts and government agencies, real-time and historical traffic from various Google services worldwide, and removal requests from both governments and copyright owners. Google is adding data related to government requests today for user information and the removal of blogs posts and videos made from July 2011 to December 2011:

Today we’re releasing data showing government requests to remove blog posts or videos or hand over user information made from July to December 2011… Unfortunately, what we’ve seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no different. When we started releasing this data in 2010, we also added annotations with some of the more interesting stories behind the numbers. We noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it’s not… For the six months of data we’re releasing today, we complied with an average of 65% of court orders, as opposed to 47% of more informal requests.

An example of some of the requests is outlined by Google’s Senior Policy Analyst Dorothy Chou:
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Google now warns Chinese users certain queries may interrupt connection

Jordan Kahn

In a blog post on the official Google Search blog, Google’s Senior Vice President, Knowledge Alan Eustace today provided some insight into ongoing issues Google Search users in mainland China have been experiencing. As highlighted in the video above, we can see Google observes specific search queries appear to be providing error messages and interrupting the connection. Specifically, users in mainland China over the past couple years have reported frequently experiencing “This webpage is not available” or “The connection was reset” error messages for specific search queries and browsers.

After looking into the issue, Google confirmed the problem doesn’t appear to be originating on its end and has decided to implement notifications to warn users of problem search terms:
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