Test your creativity with our search caption challenge

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

Our main goal at Google Search is to bring you the most relevant and useful results as quickly as possible. But, we are aware that often that is only part of your task or journey. Sometimes, you need more than simple results. You might want to learn, to discover, to be entertained or get insights.

Insights can happen when you least expect them. To improve their chances, it's good to try other things, or do things differently once in awhile. As a lifelong fan and connoisseur of New Yorker style cartoons, I always believed in the power of humor not just to entertain but to enlighten. I have tried to connect humor to everything I do (although, I have to admit, not always successfully). The best cartoonists possess great insights, which they illustrate in a clever package that we can consume in seconds and yet remember for years.

With all of this in mind, today we’re connecting Google search and cartoons through a search caption challenge. Cartoon caption contests have a long history dating back at least to the 1930s, as can be seen in this example I found from Ballyhoo magazine. For our modern version, we worked with artists like Matthew Diffee, Emily Flake, Christoph Niemann, Danny Shanahan and Jim Woodring, who created cartoons that place characters in unusual, interesting and funny situations—all with a common twist. In each cartoon, one of the characters is doing a Google search. We've left it to you to imagine what they'd be searching for at that moment, and left the caption blank for you to fill in with your answer.

To participate, go to Inside Search and submit your idea. Your caption will appear on the site, and you can share it with friends via a unique link. You can also vote on your favorite submissions and the most popular will rise to the top.

We hope this game helps you think in a way you wouldn't otherwise, and maybe get some insights. Or just have fun.

Posted by Udi Manber, VP of Engineering and Cartoons

Santa Search it!

Sometimes music makes learning easier. With this in mind, a few of us Googlers decided to make a search tip rap music video to help you, and Saint Nick, navigate the holidays.

Hopefully, these tricks will help make your holiday season easier. And if you found our video as helpful as Santa did, feel free to share it with a loved one. Remember, re-gifting is okay when sharing search tips.

Happy Holidays!

Posted by Matt Kane, Content and User Education Specialist

Exploring art from the Met -- wherever you find it

Have you ever wanted to learn more about a piece of art than what’s on the placard next to it, or find out more about an artist’s life and how a piece fits into it? What about outside the museum -- the artwork on your favorite book’s cover, or a poster you really like at a bus stop?

We’ve teamed with the Metropolitan Museum of Art to bring their art collection to life in Google Goggles. We want art patrons to be able to bridge the physical art world with the online world in new, easy-to-use ways. So now no matter where you spot an image of art from the Met’s collection, you can simply snap a picture of it with Goggles and get detailed information about its history, the bibliography of its creator, or even the story of the collection -- including info from the recently launched mobile-optimized version of the Met’s website.

Google Goggles’ image recognition abilities work both inside the Met where wireless is available (it’s expanding rapidly) and outside as well. That means that anywhere you can take a picture and connect to the web, whether you’re looking at artwork in books, magazines, or on billboards, you can identify and begin interacting with the art. If you really enjoy a piece of art, Goggles will let you share your find with a friend or help you buy a copy for your home. And if you just want to remember a piece to enjoy later, you can use Goggles Search History to pick and choose pieces to revisit -- in effect, creating your own virtual art collection.

The Met has provided us over 76,000 artwork images to index. Thousands of these aren’t on display at the moment -- so you can actually learn about works you won’t find in the galleries. With over 340,000 works of art from the Met accessible online, there’s plenty more to come. Learn more about how to use Google Goggles, and have fun exploring!

Posted by Matt Bridges, Technical Lead, Google Goggles

Rich Snippet Instructional Videos

(cross-posted to the Webmaster Central Blog)

When users come to Google, they have a pretty good idea of what they’re looking for, but they need help deciding which result might have the information that best suits their needs. So, the challenge for Google is to make it very clear to our users what content exists on a page in both a useful and concise manner. That’s one reason we have rich snippets.

Essentially, rich snippets provide you with the ability to help Google highlight aspects of your page. Whether your site contains information about products, recipes, events or apps, a few simple additions to your markup can result in more engagement with your content -- and potentially more traffic to your site.

To help you get started or fine tune your rich snippets, we’ve put together a series of tutorial videos for webmasters of all experience levels. These videos provide guidance as you mark up your site so that Google is better able to understand your content. We can use that content to power the rich snippets we display for your pages. Check out the videos below to get started: 

For more information on how to use rich snippets markup for your site, visit our Help Center. 

Posted by Alejandro Goyen, Product Manager

Supporting users by answering a different kind of query

Imagine Bob Dylan asking to hear the thoughts of every audience member at Woodstock ‘69 and you’ll get a glimpse of what we’re inviting when we say, “Give us feedback.” With hundreds of millions of users, Google Search may have more customers than any other product on the planet. And, like any customers, these hundreds of millions of people need support. Perhaps not surprisingly, in 2011 we had nearly 9 million visits to our Search Help Forum. With an ever-changing product and a diverse user base, keeping our ears attuned to what people are saying is a very interesting challenge, and one we’ve taken seriously.

Of course, there’s more to providing support than just listening. It involves in-person and online interaction, targeted education and online help resources, and continuous product refinements based on feedback. Supporting our users means engaging with them and taking action. To do this we combine two of Google’s biggest strengths: building for scalability and continuous product refinement.

Providing scalable support
When it comes to providing support for search, working at scale is our bread and butter. We reach nearly 320,000 users per day through our Help Center, which is available in over 40 languages. It’s full of articles and videos to explain search features and answer users’ most frequently asked questions. We also continually refine old content and publish new content so that when you click on “Search help”, the information you read is up-to-date. Since Google Help Centers, as a unit, rank 12th on the list of most visited Google properties, quality and relevance is of the utmost importance. We also try to surface help content in our products as well. For example, you’ll often find “Learn more” links on the results page when we launch a new feature or show you an alert message. We also recently linked to an educational video about SafeSearch from the Google Images homepage so that users can easily learn how to strictly filter their search results.

There’s also a wealth of knowledge in our user base that, when shared, can be a very powerful resource. In our Help Forum, our search-savvy superusers called “Top Contributors” share tips and best practices with the community every day. We also have over 30 Google product managers, engineers, and community managers who pop in to help answer questions, monitor launch feedback, and look for issues and feature requests. Just this year, Googlers have posted over 3,500 times and Top Contributors over 9,000 times. In partnership with our Search Education Evangelism team, we also venture into the classroom in order to teach students, librarians, and teachers how to get the most out of Google Search. By equipping educators with best practices for searching, we can scalably reach the next generation of Internet users.

We work at scale because, frankly, we have to. Even if every Google employee worked full-time answering user questions, we still couldn’t talk with even a small percentage of our users or website owners. Since hundreds of millions of people use Google, and there are more than 200 million websites online, the only way for us to support our user base is through scalable solutions like videos, blogs, documentation, forums, and other means.

Translating feedback into action
You have many options for sharing feedback with us. Some reports come through our various contact forms in the Help Center and others via the forum or the Give us feedback link on the bottom of the results page. You can also turn to social media to seek help on a particular feature. Regardless of how you share feedback, we try to stay abreast of the issues you face. When we do find a bug, we work to fix it as soon as possible. Does that mean that we page engineers at 3:00am to immediately fix bugs? Sometimes, yes! More often, though, we collaborate with our users and our product managers and engineers by gathering information on issues. Often, an engineer or product manager will respond to a user directly in our forum in order to better understand the situation or to announce that the bug has been fixed.

To help keep our team accountable for addressing user feedback, we create a quarterly list of our top user issues and work to address them with folks from all levels in the company. The search team is not afraid of tackling tough problems, but it can take some time to come to agreement on an approach and implement it. This doesn’t mean that we fix every problem, as many of you know. We recognize that there is a lot of room for improvement whether in our rankings, our UI, or by fixing minor bugs. The good news is that we’re quickly aware when there are serious issues and we keep working hard to address them.

While every change we make is to a some extent motivated by user feedback and testing, here are a few examples of changes that were largely inspired by the feedback we've seen in our help forums and across the web:

• Verbatim search tool: For all of you who told us that you wanted remove synonyms, spelling refinements, and personalization from your results, we added this new tool to the left panel of the results page.
• Google Security Center: In response to many of you reporting erroneous redirects when clicking on a result, we launched an entirely new security center including educational content about malware.
• Results per page preference: As a result of your feedback following the launch of Google Instant, we greyed out the results per page preference when you have Instant enabled.
• Ability to hide sites: Because you requested to permanently exclude certain results from your results pages, we made it possible for you to block a particular site from appearing.

Support isn’t just about issue resolution or education. It’s about relationships and showing the human side of the knowledge engine that our users have come to love. We want you to tell us how we can improve your personal Google experience because, ultimately, we want to delight you. It’s important to know that by sharing your thoughts, you’re not just exercising free speech, you’re helping to shape the future of search.

Posted by Kelly Fee, Community Manager

Clicks and impressions for authors

(Cross-posted on the Webmaster Central Blog)

With the latest improvements to the way authorship annotations look in search and the addition of authorship to Google News, authors have been really excited about getting more visibility, and users benefit from seeing the name, photo, and way to connect with the person who created the content.

Authors have also been giving us a lot of feedback on what else they'd like to see, so today we're introducing “Author Stats” in Webmaster Tools that shows you how often your content is showing up on the Google search results page. If you associate your content with your Google Profile either via e-mail verification or a simple link, you can visit Webmaster Tools to see how many impressions and clicks your content got on the Google search results page. Check out what Matt Cutts would see for his content:

To see your information, go to google.com/webmasters and login with the same username you use for your Google+ Profile. On the left hand panel, you can see “Author Stats” under the “Labs” section. This is an experimental feature so we’re continuing to iterate and improve, but we wanted to get early feedback from you. You can e-mail us at authorship-pilot@google.com if you run into any issues or have feedback.

If you’re a content creator interested in learning more about authorship, check out our Help Center.

Posted by Javier Tordable, Software Engineer

Searching for fresh, artisanal ingredients

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 the latest in a series of posts about people who have used Google to discover or do something extraordinary. Have a story? Share it.

For a chef, a great dish starts with a solid foundation of fresh and unique ingredients. As part of Google’s Food Team, we’re tasked with serving about 50,000 healthy, creative and flavorful meals every day at nearly 100 cafes around the world. Our team thrives on the challenge of creating innovative new dishes, expanding our knowledge of what ingredients go well together, and satisfying our curiosity of where ingredients come from and the difference it makes in the quality of our food. We try to find ingredients that are as local, seasonal and organic as possible because when it’s fresh, it just tastes better.

Brett Ottolenghi, supplier of specialty ingredients to elite chefs in Las Vegas, has a similar philosophy. He is passionate about food, and he prides himself on finding the highest quality ingredients and being knowledgeable about what he supplies. I’m always thrilled to hear about people who share our passion for fresh ingredients, who’d go the extra mile to make sure what they get is the real thing.

One of Brett’s most recent discoveries was a wasabi farm in Japan. Realizing that the majority of wasabi in the United States is just horseradish that has been dyed green, Brett wanted to learn more about the real stuff. He searched on Google to find out more about fresh wasabi, and with the help of Translate, was able to read a site in Japanese about a local wasabi farm. He then contacted the family in Shizuoka, Japan who has been producing wasabi for 11 generations. During his trip to the wasabi farm in Japan, Brett learned the background of the condiment and how it’s fed oxygen and minerals from man-made waterfalls and got a taste of fresh wasabi -- and was able to bring it back to his chefs.



“It’s not as harsh as horseradish. It’s much sweeter,” said Brett. “That’s the reason it’s so important to travel and visit the producers because you can learn about the details in what they’re doing that makes their product so much better.”

With this knowledge, not only is Brett is able to provide his chefs with a unique ingredient, he provides a new experience with wasabi. “I don’t think my chefs would expect their supplier to know that much. Yuma’s family, their story adds to the flavor, it adds to the experience. You get into food because you’re passionate about it. As much as you learn, there’s still more to know.”

Posted by Scott Giambastiani, Executive Chef