Google Europe Blog

The UK’s public data tsunami gathers speed

Thursday, June 17, 2010

When the British Government said at the beginning of May that they would be releasing a ‘tsunami of public data’ you had to wonder whether reality would match up to the rhetoric. Oh ye of little faith... A fortnight ago, the Government released hundreds of new datasets - including a full list of Government expenditure - and this week, Transport for London announced that they too would be releasing lots of their transport data for free to the public.

The policy itself is not new. It was kicked off in the UK back in 2009 by Sir Tim Berners Lee and has resulted in the establishment of the data.gov site as the primary place for public data to be accessed. But the new Government has sent some strong signals from the top that it is an even greater priority for them to get government departments and agencies to shift from being information hoarders to information sharers.

This new mood makes it a really exciting time for the data geeks amongst us in the UK. It’s clear that the new British Government is getting as excited about data as the developer community itself, and that it is determined to be a European - and perhaps even global - leader in transparency. Countries around the world are waking up to the huge potential for re-use of data financed by the taxpayer. There are good social and democratic arguments behind this policy - but it also makes economic sense. If Governments want to stimulate the national growth of their local Internet economy, making data public for developers to reuse is a great way to build skills and position the country for data based business models of the future.

But, as we all know, the usability of the data is just as important as the data itself. To the ordinary citizen, a gargantuan list of numbers means nothing. Data only becomes useful when it is rendered accessible to the citizen: the task traditionally of statisticians and, increasingly, creative web developers who ‘mash’ different data sets, drop them into data crunching tools and turn them into citizen friendly applications. From Tube schedules to postcode databases, information works best when it can be overlaid with other datasets and correlations can be made, as services such as those created by the Government’s new Transparency Advisor, Tom Steinberg.

Some departments and agencies have been better than others at releasing data in truly useful ways. A machine readable format rather than in a PDF is preferable - so that developers spend as little time as possible manually reformatting and more time innovating. And there should be as few ‘strings’ attached as possible so developers can easily reuse it, mash it up, and create new tools and services. These details matter - and the next step for the UK officials behind the public data agenda is to ensure that all data released has consistently high standards of usability.

We hope this is the start of something big and that, rather than a one-off tidal wave, this becomes an ever flowing river of information that is released.

Posted by Sarah Hunter, UK Policy Manager.

Unlocking our shared cultural heritage: Google partners with the Austrian National Library

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Gregor Mendel, the nineteenth century Austro-Hungarian scientist, is an ancestor of modern genetic studies. His paper, Experiments on Plant Hybrids, helped early twentieth century scientists make new discoveries about genetics and hybridity. Several of Mendel’s works now reside in the original in the Austrian National Library, alongside other important works of European and human culture, science and history. Among the other treasures contained in the library are Martin Luther’s first complete translation of the Christian bible, and several of the works of the Renaissance-era doctor and philosopher, Paracelsus.

Today we’re announcing an agreement with the Austrian National Library to digitize works from the library, bringing its rare and unique collection to a global audience through Google Books. The library was founded in the fourteenth century, and it was intended to become the universal human library, containing books in German, Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, among other languages. It contains the first ever printed book in Slovene, the oldest known prints in Bulgarian and an extensive collection of Czech and Hungarian works.

Through this agreement, the library will select up to 400,000 public domain books from its collections. Google will then digitize these works, making them available to anyone in the world with access to the web. This is a great step in our aim to help make the world’s books accessible to anyone with a connection to the Internet. We’re not alone in this aim. Around Europe and the rest of the world, an increasing number of organizations are running ambitious and promising book digitization projects, including the European Union’s own Europeana. We're very supportive of these efforts, because we want to see these books have the broadest reach possible. The books we scan are available for inclusion in Europeana and in other digital libraries.

Through a proliferation of projects such as these, and through more partnerships between private and public bodies, important works like those owned by the Austrian National Library can have tremendous reach. Earlier this year we announced a partnership with the Italian Ministry of Culture to digitize books. Today’s announcement is the next step towards the goal of preserving and disseminating Europe’s cultural heritage.

The Austrian National Library is our tenth library partner in Europe, and we look forward to working with more libraries and other partners. By working with these important institutions, we can help to unlock and democratize access to the world's cultural heritage.

Posted by Annabella Weisl, Strategic Partner Manager, Google Books

Brussels debates Open Internet on 10 June

Friday, June 4, 2010

Brussels will debate the European Union’s new digital agenda when the Open Forum Europe (OFE) holds its annual summit next Thursday, 10 June, in Brussels. After a keynote speech from Commissioner Neelie Kroes, Google’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond will speak. He will outline his take on the next wave of innovations on the Internet - and what policies are required to ensure the Internet creates the maximum social and economic benefits.

OFE, supported by a number of tech companies including Google, advocates an open, competitive European IT market. The summit’s packed agenda promises interesting debates on a range of subjects such as new innovation models, e-government and digital citizenship. If you have yet to sign up for the summit, do so asap at info@openforumeurope.org.

OFE was launched in 2002 to promote open source software. Like many Internet companies, Google benefits from open source - we use tens of millions of lines of open source code to run our products. We also give back: we are the largest open source contributor in the world, contributing over 800 projects that total over 20 million lines of code to open source.

The day before its summit, the OFE will return to its roots and host a Round Table on “Open Source Innovation in Business Models: Company and Community Integration.” Google open source guru Chris DiBona, who is responsible for our open source programmes will talk about the open source model, joined by George Greve, past President of Free Software Foundation Europe and now CEO at Kolab Systems. Maha Shaikh, senior researcher at the London School of Economics, will moderate.

The Round Table will take place on Wednesday 9 June between 8:00-10:00 AM at our Brussels premises at Chaussée d'Etterbeek 180, 1040 Brussels. Yes, that’s early, so we’ll provide a light breakfast. Some seats remain so if interested in attending, please sign up here.

Posted by Sebastian Müller, European Policy Manager

Google@Thought: The Alhambra, symmetries and the beauty of mathematics

Monday, May 31, 2010

As everyone involved in lobbying will know, public policy discussions can often be very technical, quickly getting down to nuts and bolts. In this environment, one of the biggest challenges lobbyists face is to make sure that the ideals and activities of the companies we represent are also fully reflected in the conversations we have.

At Google Brussels, we have developed a complementary approach: our Google@Thought seminar series. In these talks, we do not focus on upcoming legislation or the debates of the day, but instead go back to Google’s roots as a company that finds inspiration in the exploration of ideas and concepts.

Our first Google@Thought speaker was Professor Marcus du Sautoy, who told the story of how he discovered the language of symmetry at the age of twelve and fell in love with mathematics as a result. Today, Marcus is the University of Oxford’s Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science.

“Symmetry is present everywhere in nature,” Marcus explains. “It is used by all organisms, from viruses upwards. Take bees: they have very bad vision and can’t see colours. But they excel at detecting the symmetry of a flower. Symmetry means sustenance to them. For flowers, it means reproductive success. Symmetry is the tool that bonds bees and flowers, the language they use to communicate.”

Marcus illustrates his exploration of the language of symmetry with reference to Japanese aesthetics, Bach’s Goldberg variations and to the beauty and perfection of the Moorish decorations at the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. Today, we know that the Alhambra’s designs represent all seventeen mathematically possible kinds of symmetry that can be drawn on a plane - an incredible achievement given the Alhambra was completed in 1391!

You can watch the highlights of Professor Du Sautoy’s Google@Thought seminar on YouTube.

Posted by Simon Hampton, Director of European Public Policy, and a former mathematician ;-)

WiFi data collection: An update

Friday, May 14, 2010

Update June 9, 2010:

When we announced three weeks ago that we had mistakenly included code in our software that collected samples of payload data from WiFi networks, we said we would ask a third party to review the software at issue, how it worked, and what data it gathered. That report, by the security consulting firm Stroz Friedberg, is now complete and was sent to the interested data protection authorities today. In short, it confirms that Google did indeed collect and store payload data from unencrypted WiFi networks, but not from networks that were encrypted. You can read the report here. We are continuing to work with the relevant authorities to respond to their questions and concerns.

Update May 17, 2010:

On Friday May 14 the Irish Data Protection Authority asked us to delete the payload data we collected in error in Ireland. We can confirm that all data identified as being from Ireland was deleted over the weekend in the presence of an independent third party. We are reaching out to Data Protection Authorities in the other relevant countries about how to dispose of the remaining data as quickly as possible.

You can read the letter from the independent third party, confirming deletion, here.
Nine days ago the data protection authority (DPA) in Hamburg, Germany asked to audit the WiFi data that our Street View cars collect for use in location-based products like Google Maps for mobile, which enables people to find local restaurants or get directions. His request prompted us to re-examine everything we have been collecting, and during our review we discovered that a statement made in a blog post on April 27 was incorrect.

In that blog post, and in a technical note sent to data protection authorities the same day, we said that while Google did collect publicly broadcast SSID information (the WiFi network name) and MAC addresses (the unique number given to a device like a WiFi router) using Street View cars, we did not collect payload data (information sent over the network). But it’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products.

However, we will typically have collected only fragments of payload data because: our cars are on the move; someone would need to be using the network as a car passed by; and our in-car WiFi equipment automatically changes channels roughly five times a second. In addition, we did not collect information traveling over secure, password-protected WiFi networks.

So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.

As soon as we became aware of this problem, we grounded our Street View cars and segregated the data on our network, which we then disconnected to make it inaccessible. We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and are currently reaching out to regulators in the relevant countries about how to quickly dispose of it.

Maintaining people’s trust is crucial to everything we do, and in this case we fell short. So we will be:

Asking a third party to review the software at issue, how it worked and what data it gathered, as well as to confirm that we deleted the data appropriately; and
Internally reviewing our procedures to ensure that our controls are sufficiently robust to address these kinds of problems in the future.

In addition, given the concerns raised, we have decided that it’s best to stop our Street View cars collecting WiFi network data entirely.

This incident highlights just how publicly accessible open, non-password-protected WiFi networks are today. Earlier this year, we encrypted Gmail for all our users, and next week we will start offering an encrypted version of Google Search. For other services users can check that pages are encrypted by looking to see whether the URL begins with “https”, rather than just “http”; browsers will generally show a lock icon when the connection is secure. For more information about how to password-protect your network, read this.

The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust—and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here. We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake.

Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior VP, Engineering & Research

Cross posted from the Official Google Blog

A Polish Internet Revolution

Monday, May 10, 2010

Poland is one of the few countries that is emerging from Europe’s financial crisis relatively unscathed. While many European Union members struggle to raise funds, Poland’s zloty remains stable and interest rates low.

During my recent visit, my former Dow Jones colleague, now Bloomberg bureau chief Dennis McQuaid, told me how the government just had sold off a large state-owned insurance company – and the offering was seven times oversubscribed, making it the country’s biggest ever IPO. Poland’s economy has kept growing and the streets of Warsaw bustle with well-dressed shoppers and the clatter of construction.

Personally, this success is gratifying. As a journalist, I covered Poland during the 1980s when it laboured under communism. Stores were empty then. But the Polish spirit amazed me – how a courageous people could undertake a successful non-violent, spiritually-based, worker- and intellectual-led revolution. In 1989, I watched some Solidarity supporters set up the country’s first free newspaper in a day care centre. It was called Gazeta Wyborcza.

Today, Gazeta Wyborcza is Poland’s top paper, part of the giant Agora group. It operates out of an airy, sparkling, shiny steel headquarters building. Grzegorz Piechota, the paper’s special projects editor, presented an upbeat outlook for the future. While Gazeta hasn’t escaped the pain of the transition online, it has embraced the web, starting dozens of sites targeted to different audiences, from teenage girls to senior citizens. “We know we have no choice except to move online,” Piechota said.

For Google, Poland represents a successful laboratory for bringing business online. Nimble, small, family owned companies dominate the economy. Yet most have little or no online presence. While four in every five consumers are searching for information online about products and services, a Google-sponsored study last year showed that fewer than half of small Polish businesses have any online presence.

In order to get Poland online, we launched an Internet Revolution campaign at the end of last year, supported by the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The program offers advice on how Polish companies could get online using both Google and non-Google tools, including a free package to help them establish a web domain, create a website and launch their first domestic or international online advertising campaign.

The success of this initiative has exceeded our expectations. Last week, we announced at a press conference that over 10,000 small entrepreneurs had signed up. The Polish economy may ‘only’ rank 21st globally, but it’s clear that the country has a healthy appetite for making the internet an integral part of doing business and driving growth for the future.

Posted by Bill Echikson, Head of Communications, South, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa

TechTalk: Search Quality

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Google’s Search Quality team is responsible for the ranking of Google search results.Their job is clear: A few hundreds of millions of times a day people will ask Google questions, and within a fraction of a second Google needs to decide which among the billions of pages on the web to show them -- and in what order.

There’s a lot of work that goes into building a ranking system like ours - by some estimates, more than one thousand years of programming work have gone directly into the development of our algorithms. The pace of development and innovation is not slowing down either: because the web changes all the time, so our signals and our algorithms are constantly changing and improving too.

On Friday 28th of May, Matt Cutts, one of Google’s most distinguished engineers, will be giving a TechTalk for webmasters on what you can do to optimise your website and also increase the likelihood that web users looking for your particular product or service can find you in search engines.

As usual, the TechTalk will take place over lunchtime (there will be food available of course!), at the Google Brussels office.

We hope you can make it along. If you’d like to attend, please register here.

When: Friday, May 28, 12:15 - 13:45 hours CET (sandwich lunch provided).
Where: Google Brussels - Chaussée D'Etterbeek 180 - Steenweg op Etterbeek 180, 2nd floor, 1040 Brussels

Matt Cutts is a principal software engineer and joined Google in 2000. Within the Search Quality group he heads up the Web Spam team. He knows the ins and outs of Google Search and how to optimize your website for your users. Get a flavour of what Matt has to say on YouTube, or check out our site for webmasters, google.com/webmasters.

Posted by Alain Van Gaever, Policy Manager, Google

Europe Blog

The UK’s public data tsunami gathers speed

Unlocking our shared cultural heritage: Google partners with the Austrian National Library

Brussels debates Open Internet on 10 June

Google@Thought: The Alhambra, symmetries and the beauty of mathematics

WiFi data collection: An update

A Polish Internet Revolution

TechTalk: Search Quality

Labels

Archive

Feed

Company-wide

Products

Developers