Congrats to Ravi Shankar... and Amit Singhal!

What do Ravi and Amit have in common? They were both among those honored yesterday in London at the Asian Awards 2011, a global celebration of Asian achievement. Amit has been with Google since 2000 and has led the transformation of our search engine. Anyone who knows Amit understands his passion for search and empowering users. For his decades of innovations and contributions, Amit was presented with the UBM Award for Outstanding Achievement in Science and Technology.

We’re all honored to be able to work with Amit on a daily basis, and it’s great to see his excellence be recognized by the outside world as well.

Posted by Gabriel Stricker, Director, Global Communications and Public Affairs

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To pitch a perfect game, teach yourself online

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog.

Searches can become stories. Some are inspiring, some change the way we see the world, and some just put a smile on our face. This is a story of how people can use Google to do something extraordinary. If you have a story, share it. - Ed.

My major league pitching career was anything but perfect. The closest I ever came was a seven-inning outing against Milwaukee while playing for the Cincinnati Reds, in which I gave up only four runs and earned the victory. In baseball, you can be successful without coming close to perfect. Just think about batting average: a .400 average is insanely good, but that means you strike out or get out in some other way more than half the time you're at bat. Hall of Fame pitchers give up an average of more than two runs per game. Seldom does a pitcher throw a shutout. A perfect game—in which a pitcher does not allow a single player on base—is incredibly rare.

In the majors, setting your team up to win involves daily physical workouts, hours of practice and in-depth analysis of the opposing teams’ traits and tendencies. The idea that someone without this training and background could instead go online, gather and process the necessary information and use it to throw a perfect game is unfathomable. Yet that’s exactly what happened to Brian Kingrey.

Brian is a high school music teacher from Hammond, La. and not much of a sports fan. As one of his students put it, “I’ve never heard him say the word baseball.” But Brian is a gamer—so naturally, he was intrigued by the $1 million prize he saw in a TV commercial for a new baseball video game called MLB 2K11. He knew nothing about baseball, had never even played the real game in his life, but encouraged by his wife, he went out, bought the game and started playing. A few weeks later, Brian won the $1 million prize for pitching the first perfect game in MLB 2K11. And he learned how to do it entirely online.



“I had to figure out what baseball was, not just what a perfect game was,” Brian said. He found that everything he needed to know was online: he was able to search about batters, batting averages, the different kinds of pitches. He combined the information to figure out that he had the best odds in a match-up between the Phillies -- with star pitcher Roy Halladay on the mound -- and the Houston Astros. He also researched the weak spots of each player—for instance, the toughest batter Halladay would face was going to be Astro’s infielder Bill Hall. After that, Brian was ready to play.

And play he did. On his third try, Brian pitched the perfect game and became a millionaire. “Once I got past Bill Hall, I knew I had it,” he said. “Without online search, I would’ve been in deep trouble. If I had played like it was in my head, I would’ve done it all wrong.” Perhaps if I’d known that search was the answer when I was playing in the major leagues, I might have come a little closer to perfection more often.  

Posted by Jeff Austin, Google Apps channel manager and former Major League Pitcher

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It’s a beautiful day for some baseball...searches, that is

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog

These days, thanks to the movie “Moneyball,” everyone is talking about evaluating baseball through the lens of data and statistics. As the World Series matchup between the Texas Rangers and the St. Louis Cardinals begins, we thought: why not take a look at what the search data says about the players, managers and other aspects of the 2011 baseball postseason?

Let’s start with the teams themselves. The Cardinals are more popular in search than the Rangers. Perhaps that’s because the Redbirds—not your typical underdogs with 10 World Series titles and 18 pennants—were 10 games back from the NL Wild Card in September, and have since overpowered the regular season’s best Phillies, then their division mates the Brewers to win the NLCS last weekend. The Rangers are in the World Series for the second year in a row, still without a title to their name; yet searches were higher in the last months for the team they defeated in the ALCS, the Detroit Tigers, who saw an even steeper increase in search interest than the Cardinals.

The Cards are known first and foremost for their hitting, but Chris Carpenter overtook first baseman Albert Pujols for a period earlier this month after the former pitched a complete game against Philadelphia to advance his team to the NLCS.

Meanwhile, the Cardinals’ breakout star, hometown hero and NLCS MVP David Freese is (as recently as our data goes) an underdog in search—outpaced in the first half of the month not only by Pujols and Carpenter but by other slugging teammates like Lance Berkman and Matt Holliday.

On the AL side, searches for the Rangers’ Nelson Cruz were below those for teammates Adrian Beltre, Ian Kinsler and Josh Hamilton until October 11, when he hit the first-ever postseason walkoff grand slam, took his team to an early lead in the series against Detroit and himself to the lead in searches (for a while) as well as the MVP title.

Matching up the Rangers and Cardinals top players, we find that Albert Pujols is the subject of nearly double as many searches as Josh Hamilton. And as of October 12, Nelson Cruz had double the searches of David Freese—we’re guessing that’s changed a bit since Freese was named MVP on Sunday. We have our eye on the data to see how these player matchups go over the course of the series.

Famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) St. Louis manager Tony LaRussa, who had an entire book written about his shrewd game strategy back in 2005, is more searched for than Texas manager Ron Washington, who’s been at the helm since the 2007 season. But neither is as popular in search as Texas owner and Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan.

As always, there were some twists during this year’s playoffs, starting with the rally squirrel—a big hit in St. Louis. The rally squirrel made two live appearances during the Phillies/Cards series, including one in which he (or she) ran across home plate and distracted Phillies pitcher Roy Oswalt. The Cardinals ended up winning, and the rally squirrel’s likeness has since shown up in the stadium on T-shirts, towels and homemade signs. Perhaps the squirrel had a hand in helping the Cardinals overpower the Brewers and their “beast mode,” too.

While the World Series is on our mind, we’re also starting to plan our Halloween costumes. Luckily, we can recycle from last year: Brian Wilson of the San Francisco Giants—the 2010 MLB champions—is still a hot Halloween costume choice.

Finally, although starting tonight all eyes will be on the Rangers and the Cardinals, neither team appears on the list of most-searched teams in 2011 so far. According to search data, fan favorites this year were the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox, the Philadelphia Phillies, the Chicago Cubs and the Atlanta Braves. The Yankees and Phillies went out in the first round of the playoffs, while the Braves and Sox both failed to claim hold of a wild card spot in waning days of the regular season.

With sunflower seeds in hand, we’ll keep our eyes out over the next few days to see which of these two World Series teams will finally get their chance in the national—and search—spotlight. Having spent summers traveling up to Busch Stadium for games, I know who I’ll be rooting for!

Posted by Kat Eller, Cardinals Fan (pictured on the right)

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Breaking down language barriers with translated English-language results

English speakers take it for granted that they can always find answers online, regardless of their search topic. But what if you speak Hindi, Welsh or Afrikaans? The amount of content available online per speaker for Hindi is just 1% of the vast content out there on the web per English speaker. So if you speak one of the languages with less online content, some of the most relevant results for your search may actually be in English.

To help break down that language barrier between you and the answers you need, starting today you may see relevant results in English in addition to those in your default language. For example, let’s say you speak Hindi and want to find information on mountain climbing -- we want to help you also find the relevant pages in English and for these, you’ll also see a translation into your language.


Language is one of the biggest barriers to making information universally accessible, and we’ve been working to make increasing use of machine translation to improve search across languages. This is especially important for languages with less prevalent local language content available online. You should also get the most relevant information regardless of the language you’re searching in. We use machine translation to translate your search, find the pages that best answer your question and translate the relevant results for you.

You’ll start to see relevant English-language pages when you’re searching in one of 14 languages: Afrikaans, Malay, Swahili, Serbian, Slovak, Macedonian, Slovenian, Norwegian, Hindi, Catalan, Maltese, Icelandic, Welsh and Albanian. If you click on the main result title, you’ll get to the original English-language page, while the translated link underneath will take you to a translated page. We hope this will help you find the information you need, no matter what language it’s in.  

Posted by Jordan Gilliland, Software Engineer - Cross Language Search Team

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Hurricane Irene Through the Eyes of Mobile Search

Anyone who has a smartphone knows what a valuable resource it can be in day-to-day life; getting directions, sending e-mails, video chat, sharing photos and more. You might be excused for forgetting that smartphones can even let you make phone calls!

As these devices become more popular, we’ve seen a meteoric rise in mobile search activity—five-fold worldwide in just the past two years. But what about when day-to-day life is interrupted by natural disaster? Prompted by Hurricane Irene in late August, we decided to look at what was going on with mobile searches as the storm made its way up along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.

For one, we found that a larger-than-expected amount of hurricane queries came from smartphones, in particular, Android devices and iPhones. From August 22 to 28, 9.7 percent of all hurricane-related searches were made from these devices. This speaks not only to the growth in popularity of smartphones, but also to the innate utility of a supercomputer that’s always with you.

We also found that certain searches were particularly likely to come from smartphones, like [power outage]. The chart above shows two spikes in searches for [power outage] that came from smartphones on the East Coast: one on August 23, the day that a large earthquake in Virginia disrupted power in many East Coast cities; and one on August 28, the day after the hurricane made landfall. At its peak of 18.6 percent, this particular search is several times more “smartphone-oriented” than the typical queries we saw those days. Perhaps this was driven by people affected by power outages who did not have desktop computers available to them.

Thankfully, Hurricane Irene wasn’t as damaging as had been predicted, but we’re glad to see that our products on these smartphones are really useful when disaster strikes.

Posted by Jim Prosser, Communications Manager

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Search Stories: Surfing for the Perfect Wave

(Cross-posted on the Google LatLong Blog)

Searches can become stories. Some are inspiring, some change the way we see the world, and some just put a smile on our face. Today we continue our series of posts about people who have used Google to discover or do something extraordinary. Have a story? Share it. - Ed.

I’ve surfed all my life. And every summer I spend a couple weeks with my family on a small island called Hornby just east of Vancouver Island. I always think that area would be paradise if only it had great surf. It turns out it does... And with the help of Google Maps and Search, local pro surfer Sepp Bruhwiler is well on his way to finding that perfect wave that breaks somewhere off Vancouver's west coast.

 

Vancouver Island has a large, beautiful coastline. Before Google, local fishermen would tell Sepp about these enormous waves they found along some remote part of the coast. Sepp would run down to the dock, hop in a boat, and try his luck tracking down those elusive "breaks". It was an imprecise science with mixed results.

Sepp’s quest then led him to pull up the satellite layer in Google Maps, where he scanned the coastline near his hometown of Tofino. What, exactly, was he was searching for? That tell-tale image of a line of curling white swells -- waves.

Just like Google Maps lets you zoom in to explore your city, your street and your house, that same viewing experience extends to Canada's rugged coastlines. As Sepp put it, "we navigated the entire coastline by dragging my finger across my phone." When he found what he was looking for, he zoomed in and put a virtual pin in the location of the waves. Sepp and his surfing pro friends then pulled up the weather conditions and a swell report from nearby buoys on Google Search. And, just like that, it was on!

They found great waves that had possibly never been ridden before. In the words of Sepp’s friend, Pete Devries: "To go to a spot that few people have surfed ever before, that's been breaking for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, keeps you wondering what else is out there and what else we could possibly find."

I’m inspired. Next summer when I head up north, I plan to bring my surfboard, a smartphone, and a really warm wetsuit. I can’t wait to join Sepp in the never ending search for great new waves.

Surf on...  

Posted by Brett Crosby, Surfer & Director of Product Marketing.

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Choosing the result you want just became easier

In addition to some recent changes to the look and feel of search, today we’re making it even easier to see Instant Previews of your search results. Sometimes you’re searching for a page with a specific type of visual - like a seating chart when you want to buy baseball tickets - but can’t tell from the results page which one will have exactly what you’re looking for. Or you’ve already seen a specific page and would recognize it in an instant if you saw it again. You can now quickly glance at a preview of the page without having to click and see if it’s the page you want.

Instant Previews have been around since last year, allowing you to click on the magnifying glass to the right of the result to see a visual overview of a page. Now these previews are no longer even a click away: if you move your mouse over a search result, arrows will appear. Hover over them to see a visual preview of that result.

Posted by Jeromy Henry, User Experience Designer

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