Google and Guggenheim Museum Launch Design It: Shelter Competition Inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright

Announcement
June 8, 2009

Today, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Google are kicking-off the Design It: Shelter Competition, a global competition that will challenge users to design a simple shelter in 3D with Google SketchUp, give it a geographic location using Google Earth, and share it by uploading to the Google 3D Warehouse. The summer-long competition, which begins on Frank Lloyd Wright’s birthday and will conclude on the Guggenheim Museum’s 50th anniversary, is inspired by the work of architecture students at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architectureand a recent exhibition of that work at the Guggenheim called ‘Learning by Doing’. A signature project in the school’s curriculum for over seventy years, students are tasked with choosing a location near one of the school’s Taliesin campuses in Arizona and Wisconsin and designing a small, 100 square foot shelter. Students are encouraged to consider human needs for safety and comfort, and more broadly, to recognize the connections between a structure and its geographic location. The Design It: Shelter Competition offers a twist on this assignment, empowering anyone – not just students – to use Google tools to think about design and ultimately share their ideas with the world.

After choosing a location in Google Earth, competition participants use SketchUp to design their shelters in 3D and upload them to the Google 3D Warehouse. They submit an official entry on the Guggenheim website and, within a couple of days, will be able to see their work, as well as other participants’ submissions, with the Google Earth Plug-in on the Guggenheim Museum’s website.

Competition judging will occur according to the following schedule:

• June 8
  Contest begins
• Aug 23
  Model submission deadline
• Aug 23 – Sept 7
  Current Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture students will select 10 finalists
• Sept 7 – Oct 10
  Public vote to select winner of the “People’s Prize”
• Oct 10 – Oct 21
  Panel of architecture and design experts will select “Juried Prize” winner. Panel includes
  • Martin Cox, Principal, Bade Stageberg Cox
  • Neil M. Denari, Principal, Neil M. Denari Architects
  • Cathleen McGuigan, Architecture Critic, Newsweek
  • Victor Sidy, Dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture
  • Lisa Strausfeld, Partner, Pentagram
  • Aidan Chopra, Google SketchUp Product Evangelist
  • David van der Leer, Assistant Curator, Architecture and Design, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

On October 21, 2009, the 50th anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum, winners will be announced and prizes will be awarded. Both winners will receive airfare and two nights’ accommodation for two in New York City, behind-the-scenes tours of both the Guggenheim Museum and the Google Office in NYC, complimentary admission to selected NYC museums, and a Google SketchUp Pro 7license.

For more information, visit www.guggenheim.org/shelter and read our blog posts on the SketchUp, Lat Long, and Official Google Blogs

To reach representatives from the Guggenheim Museum, please contact:

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Lauren Van Natten, Senior Publicist
212 423-3840 or pressoffice@guggenheim.org

Nora Semel, External Affairs Manager
212 423 3881
Foundation@guggenheim.org

Read more »

Google Launches New, Data-Rich Dashboard in Local Business Center

Announcement
June 2, 2009

New feature will provide businesses with new visibility into the ways their local listings are found on Google, enabling them to make smarter decisions about attracting customers

Today Google is launching a new dashboard feature in the Google Local Business Center (LBC) that will provide business owners with a powerful level of information about how Google users are interacting with their local listings. The Local Business Center (www.google.com/lbc) is a free tool that enables business owners to control the content of their listings in Google Search and Google Maps. With the addition of the new dashboard, the LBC will now draw upon local search data to help owners optimize their local listings and their other efforts to attract more customers.

It’s estimated that 82% of consumers use search to find local businesses*, and the LBC dashboard will initially provide business owners with the following data on that activity in Google Search and Google Maps:

• Impressions: The number of times the business listing appeared as a search result on Google.com search or Google Maps search in a given period.
• Actions: How many times users interacted with the listing; for example, the number of times users clicked through to the business’ website or requested driving directions to the business.
• Top search queries:Which queries led users to the business listing; for example, whether more customers are finding the listing for a cafe by searching for “tea” or “coffee”.
• Zip codes where driving directions come from: Lists and maps of the zip codes users are coming from when they request directions to a listing.

With the LBC dashboard, business owners will be able to identify trends, such as days of the week when interest in their business spikes, or seasonality in the types of searches that lead potential customers to their listings. Owners will also be able to better determine how changes to their listings – such as adding a video or refining their category – influence the traffic to that listing.

The LBC dashboard also allows business owners to better measure the impact of changes to associated web content or adjustments to marketing campaigns – such as a new post to the company blog, or a new advertising campaign – by measuring impressions, actions, location, and more before and after the changes.

So, for example, a restaurant could host an event and then watch to see if queries for its business name increase in the following days. Or it could measure the results of an advertising campaign targeted at a nearby town by watching to see if more people are searching for directions to the restaurant from that zip code after the ad runs. It could also experiment with the information in its LBC listing to uncover which configurations produce more hits in Google search for certain keywords. With this data, owners will be able to make informed decisions about the most effective ways to promote their businesses and attract new customers.

The LBC dashboard will be pre-populated at launch with Google data from the past 30 days, and it will then be updated daily. All data available in the LBC dashboard will be anonymized and aggregated, so no individual Google user data will be shared.

The dashboard is accessible to any business owner who has claimed his or her listing in the Local Business Center. Business owners who do not yet have an LBC account can quickly create theirs for free by visiting www.google.com/lbc. The Local Business Center is currently available to business owners in 36 countries, but the dashboard feature will initially be available only for US listings.

For more information about the Local Business Center and the new dashboard, head to the Google Lat Long Blog for a tour. For information on how business owners can help Google users find and connect with their businesses, check out this list of tips.

*According to a 2009 WebVisible/Nielsen Study.

Read more »

Six Degrees of Google Search Appliance: now searching billions of documents

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (June 02, 2009) – Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced a new edition of the Google Search Appliance™, GSA 6.0, with architecture that indexes all of even the largest organization’s content: limitless linking of appliances to create unparalleled enterprise search power.

The GSA 6.0 allows businesses to:

• Scale to billions of docs simply – The new GSA can search not just thousands or millions, but billions of documents. With our dynamic scalability feature, you can easily connect multiple GSAs, whether in one location or many, while providing employees an an easy-to-navigate set of results that also unifies information across departments and data stores.

• Customize across the board – GSA 6.0 comes with options to customize administrative, security and relevancy features. Ranking Framework, Node Biasing and Collection Biasing allow you to fine-tune search results to your needs. The new Administrative API provides more control for automation of common tasks, and GSA 6.0 now supports both early and late binding, so search results can be screened according to company security policies.

• Achieve higher quality search results – Along with improved precision in the core algorithms, GSA 6.0 includes social search features, such as Query Suggestions and User-added Results, that aggregate knowledge across the organization for more precise search results . Additionally, cross-language enterprise search also enables enterprise users across the globe to translate their search results in real-time – into whichever language they choose.

• Deploy the most powerful search architecture – With this release, we are providing new customers with more powerful architecture, regardless of their document count, upgrading the entry-level appliance to the powerful GB 7007 architecture. Today we’re also launching a brand new model for customers with the highest document counts, the GB-9009, with built-in redundancy and enhanced performance, and built on the PowerEdge R710 platform from Dell and powered by Xeon 5500 Series processors from Intel.

"With the GSA 6.0, it’s easy for companies to give all employees the powerful Google search experience inside their business – even if they are searching among billions of documents in dispersed intranets, data stores, languages or geographies," said Dave Girouard, President of Google Enterprise. "With the improved architecture and software for the search appliance, global businesses can provide secure search across the largest enterprise content repositories – with one GSA system that can scale to billions of documents without limits."

The GSA handles enterprise search for the smallest and now very largest organizations – like NASA.

"The Google Search Appliance deployment is ramping up across the NASA systems" said David Valliere, Program Manager, eTouch, search integrator for NASA. "The Google Search Appliance 6.0’s new dynamic scalability feature is instrumental to helping search internally, and the customization options mean that search results match employee security authorization levels. NASA has multiple centers and complex intranets, the Google Search Appliance 6.0 can search each autonomously, while still giving unified results that are easy for employees to navigate quickly and help them be more productive – critical when there are rockets to launch and space missions to plan."

The GSA 6.0 launched at a Google event in Washington DC. Check out what’s new and see the architecture actually needed to search a billion documents at www.google.com/gsa.

For more information, please visit www.google.com/gsa

Media Contact:

Aviva Gilbert
Google Inc.
415-736-1060
press@google.com

###

Google, Google Search Appliance are the trademarks of Google Inc.

Read more »

Google to Present at the Credit Suisse Global Media and Communications Convergence Conference

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (June 2, 2009) – Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) announced today that Patrick Pichette, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, will participate in a question-and-answer session at the Credit Suisse Global Media and Communications Convergence Conference in Dana Point, California. The session is scheduled for 12:45 p.m. Eastern Time / 9:45 a.m. Pacific Time on Tuesday, June 9, 2009.

To access the live audio webcast of the session, please visit investor.google.com/webcast.html.

About Google Inc.

Google’s innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google’s targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.google.com.

Contacts:

Maria Shim
Investor Relations
650.253.7663
marias@google.com

###

Google is a registered trademark of Google Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

Read more »