Users love simple and familiar designs – Why websites need to make a great first impression

Posted by Javier Bargas-Avila, Senior User Experience Researcher at YouTube UX Research I’m sure you’ve experienced this at some point: You click on a link to a website, and after a quick glance you already know you’re not interested, so you click ‘back’ and head elsewhere. How did you make that snap judgment? Did you really read and process enough information to know that this website wasn’t what you were looking for? Or was it something more immediate?...

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Google at UAI 2012

Posted by Kevin Murphy, Research ScientistThe conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) is one of the premier venues for research related to probabilistic models and reasoning under uncertainty. This year's conference (the 28th) set several new records: the largest number of submissions (304 papers, last year 285), the largest number of participants (216, last year 191), the largest number of tutorials (4, last year 3), and the largest number of workshops (4, last year 1). We interpret this as a sign that the conference is growing,...

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Better table search through Machine Learning and Knowledge

Posted By Johnny Chen, Product Manager, Google ResearchThe Web offers a trove of structured data in the form of tables. Organizing this collection of information and helping users find the most useful tables is a key mission of Table Search from Google Research. While we are still a long way away from the perfect table search, we made a few steps forward recently by revamping how we determine which tables are "good" (one that contains meaningful...

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Machine Learning Book for Students and Researchers

Posted by Afshin Rostamizadeh, Google ResearchOur machine learning book, The Foundations of Machine Learning, is now published! The book, with authors from both Google Research and academia, covers a large variety of fundamental machine learning topics in depth, including the theoretical basis of many learning algorithms and key aspects of their applications. The material presented takes its origin in a machine learning graduate course, "Foundations...

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Faculty Summit 2012: Online Education Panel

Posted by Peter Norvig, Director of ResearchOn July 26th, Google's 2012 Faculty Summit hosted computer science professors from around the world for a chance to talk and hear about some of the work done by Google and by our faculty partners. One of the sessions was a panel on Online Education. Daphne Koller's presentation on "Education at Scale" describes how a talk about YouTube at the 2009 Google Faculty Summit was an early inspiration for her, as she was formulating her approach that led to the founding of Coursera. Koller started with the...

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Improving Google Patents with European Patent Office patents and the Prior Art Finder

Posted by Jon Orwant, Engineering ManagerCross-posted with the US Public Policy Blog, the European Public Policy Blog, and Inside Search BlogAt Google, we're constantly trying to make important collections of information more useful to the world. Since 2006, we’ve let people discover, search, and read United States patents online. Starting this week, you can do the same for the millions of ideas that have been submitted to the European Patent...

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Teaching the World to Search

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University RelationsFor two weeks in July, we ran Power Searching with Google, a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) similar to those pioneered by Stanford and MIT. We blended this format with our social and communication tools to create a community learning experience around search. The course covered tips and tricks for Google Search, like using the search box as a calculator, or color filtering to find images. The course had interactive activities to practice new skills and reinforce learning,...

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Speech Recognition and Deep Learning

Posted by Vincent Vanhoucke, Research Scientist, Speech TeamThe New York Times recently published an article about Google’s large scale deep learning project, which learns to discover patterns in large datasets, including... cats on YouTube! What’s the point of building a gigantic cat detector you might ask? When you combine large amounts of data, large-scale distributed computing and powerful machine learning algorithms, you can apply the technology...

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Reflections on Digital Interactions: Thoughts from the 2012 NA Faculty Summit

Posted by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special InitiativesLast week, we held our eighth annual North America Computer Science Faculty Summit at our headquarters in Mountain View. Over 100 leading faculty joined us from 65 universities located in North America, Asia Pacific and Latin America to attend the two-day Summit, which focused on new interactions in our increasingly digital world. In my introductory remarks, I shared some themes that are shaping our research agenda. The first relates to the amazing scale of systems we...

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