Engineering

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Running Hood to Coast

When I woke up at 4:00 AM in a dark field, after just a half hour of sleep, I wondered if I was crazy. When I put on my headlamp and running shoes for a six-mile run?my second of three runs that day?I knew that I was crazy. But I was happy about it because I knew that my teammates were just as crazy. I was running Hood to Coast with the Google relay team. That's a 197-mile Oregon race that starts at Mount Hood, travels through Portland, and finishes on the beach in the town of Seaside. More than 1000 teams participate in the race, with 12 runners on each team running three legs each. The 12 runners on our team were all Googlers from different parts of the company: AdSense, AdWords, Google.org, Engineering, Search and Analytics, Search Quality, and more. We had runners from a number of offices: Cambridge, Chicago, Mountain View, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle . Many of us had run Hood to Coast before and even won similar races for Google; some of us were rookies to all-night relay races. What brought us all together was a love of running and a desire to get Team Google to the finish line as fast as possible ? even if that meant that we wouldn't get much sleep. We started last Friday night with fresh legs, fresh clothes, and lots of enthusiasm. Over the next 197 miles we wore out our legs, made our running clothes and vans smell terrible, and generated even more enthusiasm by coming together as a team and cheering each other on. We had a lot to cheer about, because everyone contributed great performances and because we ran faster than we expected. We finished in 19 hours and 45 minutes, which meant that we averaged 10 miles per hour for the race. That was good enough to finish in 9th place overall and in 3rd place in the corporate division?behind a couple of running shoe companies that you might have heard about. We were more than happy with the result. As we gathered on the beach near the finish line, we enjoyed the sun, the sense of accomplishment, and the camaraderie of our teammates. I smiled and thought back to when I woke up at 4:00 AM in that dark field. Considering all that we had accomplished, maybe I wasn't so crazy after all. Here's a picture of the Team Google runners and drivers, enjoying the beach at the finish. Posted by Chris Holstrom, Technical Writer

Bosch strategy boutique fails greenwash test

Saving the planet, one space shuttle launch at a time The marketing robots at the UK tentacle of remorseless Teutonic engineering firm Bosch haven't quite mastered the art of eco-friendly promotion guff.?

Amazon will sell OLPC laptops

Starting in November, Amazon will sell the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop, a marvel of engineering and pedagogy, on a "give one, get one" basis: every XO you buy will also pay for one to be given to a kid in the developing world: This year, OLPC teamed up with a Web retailer instead of running the program itself, said Matt Keller, director of Europe, Middle East and Africa at OLPC. Amazon.com will start selling XO laptops under the Give One, Get One program in late November. Sales will likely extend through the end of December. Amazon to sell OLPC XO laptops in November...

Train disruption causing concern

An MP expressed concern over disruption to train services during engineering work.

Search quality, continued

A few weeks back Udi Manber introduced the search quality group, and the previous posts in this series talked about the ranking of documents. While the ranking of web documents forms the core of what makes search at Google work so well, your search experience consists of much more than that. In this post, I'll describe the principles that guide our development of the overall search experience and how they are applied to the key aspects of search. I will also describe how we make sure we are on the right track through rigorous experimentation. And the next post in this series will describe some of the experiments currently underway. Let me introduce myself. I'm Ben Gomes, and I've been working on search at Google since 1999, mostly on search quality. I've had the good fortune to contribute to most aspects of the search engine, from crawling the web to ranking. More recently, I've been responsible for the engineering of the interface for search and search features. A common reaction from friends when I say that I now work on Google's search user interface is "What do you do? It never changes." Then they look at me suspiciously and tell me not to mess with a good thing. Google is fine just the way it is -- a plain, fast, simple web page. That's great, but how hard can that be?" To help answer that question, let me start with our main goal in web search: to get you to the web pages you want as quickly as possible. Search is not an end in itself; it is merely a conduit. This goal may seem obvious, but it makes a search engine radically different from most other sites on the web, which measure their success by how long their users stay. We measure our web search success partly by how quickly you leave (happily, we hope!). There are several principles we use in getting you to the information you need as quickly as possible: A small page. A small page is quick to download and generally faster for your browser to display. This results in a minimalist design aesthetic; extra fanciness in the interface slows down the page without giving you much benefit. Complex algorithms with a simple presentation. Many search features require a great deal of algorithmic complexity and a vast amount of data analysis to make them work well. The trick is to hide all that complexity behind a clean, intuitive user interface. Spelling correction, snippets, sitelinks and query refinements are examples of features that require sophisticated algorithms and are constantly improving. From the user's point of view search, almost invisibly, just works better. Features that work everywhere. Features must be designed such that the algorithms and presentation can be adapted to work in all languages and countries. Consider the problem of spell correction in Chinese, where user queries are often not broken up into words or Hebrew/Arabic, where text is written right to left (interestingly, this is believed to be an example of first-mover disadvantage -- when chiseling on stone, it is easier to hold the hammer in your right hand!). Data driven decisions - experiment, experiment, experiment. We try to verify that we've done the right thing by running experiments. Designs that may seem promising may end up testing poorly.There are inherent tensions here. For instance, showing you more text (or images) for every result may enable you to better pick out the best result. But a result page that has too much information takes longer to download and longer to visually process. So every piece of information that we add to the result page has to be carefully considered to ensure that the benefit to the user outweighs the cost of dealing with that additional information. This is true of every part of the search experience, from typing in a query, to scanning results, to further exploration.The start of your search is typing in a query. A common cause of frustration is if you don't know the correct spelling of a word! Spell correction -- which seems like a simple and obvious feature -- hides many technical challenges. No common English dictionaries would ever include the correct spelling of Britney Spears, for instance (who, probably completely unbeknownst to her, has become the poster child example for this feature). We do a huge amount of analysis of the billions of pages on the web and our query logs to determine what are "real words" on the web, and what are likely to be misspellings. The system that gives you the spell correction has to, in a fraction of a second, consider a huge number of possible words you might have meant (vastly greater than any dictionary ever manually constructed) and determine if there is a more likely query you meant to type. When we are confident that you actually meant to type something else, we take a rare liberty with our search results: we try to distract you from looking at the top result on the page. The spelling correction is in your line of sight and colored a bright must-see red. Furthermore, we now make sure that nothing else on the page is red, unless it is as important to you as spelling! (so far, nothing is). The algorithms involved in spell correction are constantly getting better. They now work in a large number of languages and are even better at detecting when you have made a spelling mistake. Getting the spelling of your query right is so important that we are considering showing you the results of the spell-corrected query in the middle of the page (just in case you missed our bright red text at the top and bottom!). Having formulated your query correctly, the next task is to pick a page from the result list. For each result, we present the title and url, and a brief two line snippet. Pages that don't have a proper title are often ignored by users. One of the bigger recent changes has been to extract titles for pages that don't specify an HTML title -- yet a title on the page is clearly right there, staring at you. To "see" that title that the author of the page intended, we analyze the HTML of the page to determine the title that the author probably meant. This makes it far more likely that you will not ignore a page for want of a good title. Below the title comes the snippet, and a key early innovation was in what Google showed for the snippet. At the time, search engines showed you the first two lines of the web page; Google, instead, showed you parts of the page where your actual search keywords showed up (information retrieval experts call this "keywords-in-context"). Showing keywords-in-context is visually simple and virtually indistinguishable from the simpler style of snippets, but vastly more useful in helping you decide which page to visit. This simplicity belies underlying complexity: when we create a snippet we have to go through the actual text from each result to find the most relevant part (which contain your keywords) rather than just giving you the first few lines. We have been making improvements to our snippets over time with algorithms for determining the relevance of portions of the page. The changes range from the subtle -- we highlight synonyms of your query terms in the results -- to more obvious. Here's an example screenshot where the user searched for "arod" and you can see that Alex and Rodriguez are bolded in the search result snippet, based on our analysis that you might plausibly be referring to him:As a more obvious example, we now extract and show you the byline date from pages that have one. These byline dates are expressed in a myriad formats which we extract and present uniformly, so that you can scan them easily:For one of the most common types of user needs, navigational queries -- where you type in the name of a web site you know -- we have introduced shortcuts (we refer to them as sitelinks). These sitelinks allow you to get to the key parts of the site and illustrate many of the same principles alluded to above; they are a simple addition to the top search result that adds a small amount of extra text to the page.For instance, the home page of Hewlett-Packard has almost 60 links, in a two-level menu system. Our algorithms, using a combination of different signals, pick the top ones among these that we think you are most likely to want to visit.What if you did not find what you were looking for among the top results? In that case, you probably need to try another query. We help you in this process by providing a set of query refinements at the bottom of the results page -- even if they don't give you the query that you need, they provide hints for different (likely more successful) directions in which you could refine your query. By placing the query refinements at the bottom of the page, the refinements don't distract users, but are there to help if the rest of the search results didn't serve a user's information need.I've described several key aspects of the search experience, including where we have made many changes over time -- some subtle, some more obvious. In making these changes to the search experience, how do we know we've succeeded, that we've not messed it up? We constantly evaluate our changes by sharing them with you! We launch proposed changes to a tiny fraction of our users and evaluate whether it seems to be helping or hurting their search experience. There are many metrics we use to determine if we've succeeded or failed. The process of measuring these improvements is a science in itself, with many potential pitfalls. Our experimental methodology allows us to explore a range of possibilities and launch the ones that work the best. For every feature that we launch, we have frequently run a large number of experiments that did not see the light of day.So let me answer the question I started with: We're actually constantly changing Google's result page and have been doing so for a long time. And no, we won't mess with a good thing. You won't let us.In the next post in this series, I'll talk about some of the experiments we are running, and what we hope to learn from them.Posted by Ben Gomes, Distinguished Engineer

Reinventing the wheel

About a month ago, we found out that our team, along with all of Offline Ads, would be moving from our comfortable 4th floor cubicles in New York City all the way up to the comparatively uninhabited 6th floor. It was definitely a change of pace from the Manhattan-esque bustle of our old space to a quieter, more Brooklyn-esque feel. So the question arose: what happens when you drop an entire floor's worth of Googlers into a new office? The answer: a cubicle decorating contest to end all cubicle decorating contests.It wasn't initially clear what sort of decoration would be fitting for our team (Print Ads Engineering). While the rest of the floor had been caught up in the decorating fervor, it seemed our team was completely lacking enthusiasm. We watched morosely as everyone else paraded their grass hula skirts and mariachi music in our faces. But what could we do? We were more into building things, designing robust programs, and, well, being engineers. We couldn't see how anything in the way of decorating would represent the personality of our team, short of building a giant LED display flashing, "Print Ads Eng."So we set out on the task to figure out what we could feasibly build. We do happen to have have a large supply of Legos here at Google NY, so that came to mind first. But alas, co-founder Larry Page was already legendary for building a working printer out of Legos. We definitely couldn't top that. An erector set, perhaps? Too much hardware. Finally we settled on K'Nex. So we went online and found the biggest K'Nex set we could: a 6' tall Ferris Wheel of Doom.With the contest deadline looming, we purchased the set and started building. Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into. We got to the table with over 8500 parts, roughly 40 lbs. of plastic, and only 4 of us. Perhaps we had bitten off a little more than we could chew.We resolved to have it done by the following Monday, but the fact is we were all busy with actual work. So we came in on the weekend and dragged along a few "contractors" (read: personal friends) whose manual labor was rewarded in snacks. Still, even with all of the extra help, it was a daunting task. The instruction book wasn't always the most helpful, with only pictures of what we had to build and how many. (The box wasn't kidding when it said, "for ages 16 and up.")The first few pages had pictures with only "x2" or "x3" next to them, but things started getting intense as we got towards the end, seeing "x48," "x96," and even, "x192." Since we are engineers, and aim to maximize efficiency, we formed assembly lines to expedite the repetitive tasks. It was quite a sight. (We also discovered the detriments of assembly lines and repetitive motion injuries, but that's another story altogether.)By Monday, it was done. Well, all except for one thing: no Google logo. So we built one. We may have had to stray a little from the specifications to fit it in, but all in a good day's work for a few engineers. Upon completion, we put it on display for everyone to see. (In fact, sitting atop two tables, roughly 5 feet above ground, it's pretty hard to miss.) We certainly won't have to worry about anyone questioning our team's enthusiasm anytime soon. L to R: Ben, Hunter, Tristan, Autumn. Posted by Tristan Naumann, Ben Cole, Autumn Petros-Good, & Hunter Freyer, Print Ads Interns

Two Wheels, Zero Emissions and Loads of Fun

Ask Neil Saiki why he designed an all-electric motocross motorcycle and he'll tell you EVs are the future, dirt riders must be more environmentally responsible and the sport faces a shaky future because dirt bikes are so loud they'll make your ears ring. That's all true, but push him a little and he'll confess the truth. "I love to ride. That's the real reason I did it," he told us with a laugh. "I wanted to make a product that's crazy fast and fun to ride." The Zero X from Zero Motorcycles is an EV you can actually buy right now for $7,450, and it's a real motorcycle. It weighs a bantamweight 140 pounds with the lithium-ion battery, and with a 23-horsepower motor it'll hit 57 mph and leave a fat streak of rubber on the pavement getting there. Saiki says the street version coming next year will be even quicker.Saiki started developing the Zero X five years ago after participating in a NASA round table analyzing transportation technology. He became convinced electric drivetrains are the best way forward and motorcycles the logical place to develop them. They're smaller and less complex than cars, and the regulatory hurdles to getting them on the road aren't as high. Off-road bikes lend themselves to electric power because they're typically ridden short distances, so range isn't that big an issue. Electric motors also provide gobs or torque, a big plus in motocross riding. The Zero X produces power instantaneously, and it'll catch you off guard because the bike is all but silent. Snap the throttle too hard and you'll lift the front wheel. "The throttle is like a light switch," Saiki says. "It's on or it's off." A low-speed mode limits the bike to about 30 mph and is good for tooling around. Switch to high-speed mode and you get unfettered acceleration to about 57 mph. The Zero X will hit 30 mph in under two seconds and 57 in about twice that. Juice comes from a proprietary li-ion battery that weighs 40 pounds and provides about two hours of riding time. It recharges in about two hours using any household socket, and you can get a spare for $2,950. The Zero X has hydraulic disc brakes and fully adjustable suspension with about 8 inches of travel. It looks a bit like a big mountain bike, which isn't a coincidence. Saiki, who holds a degree in aerospace engineering, has designed bicycles for Santa Cruz, Haro and Mountain Cycles. He worked through seven prototypes and designed most of the 300 or so components himself. The bikes are built in a factory near Santa Cruz, and Saiki hopes to turn out 300 a month by next summer. He's sold 127 since April (Google's Larry Page bought three) and has a waiting list of 77 people, including two guys who signed up after seeing the bike outside our office. Saiki says about 75 percent of buyers are seasoned motocross riders, which speaks to the bike's dirt cred. Saiki had motocross hall-of-famer Jeff Emig flog a prototype at a track in Las Vegas last year, and Emig says it's the real deal. "I'm expecting the production version to have a huge impact on the motor sports industry," he says. We probably won't see James Stewart or Ryan Villopoto racing them anytime soon (although Saiki says the AMA is interested in racing e-bikes) but the guys at Dirt Rider (.pdf) called an early prototype of the Zero X "the inevitable sound of the future of off-road motorcycle riding." As for Zero Motorcycle's future, it includes a street version good for 70 mph and a range of 60 miles. Look for it in January with a sticker price of $9,000. Photos by Emily Lang / wired.com Photo by Zero Motorcycles.

Can engineering the earth save it from catastrophe?

Fears that the world is not doing enough to cut carbon dioxide emissions are forcing scientists to "think the unthinkable" by taking seriously the idea that humans may have to alter the global climate artificially with mega-engineering projects.

James Lovelock: Medicine for a feverish planet: kill or cure?

Planetary scale engineering might be able to combat global warming, but, as with nineteenth century medicine, the best option may simply be kind words and letting Nature take its course, says James Lovelock

Extreme action urged on warming

Environment, science & technology: Royal Society papers suggest ways to combat global temperature rise through geo-engineering