5 years of Gmail

It was five years ago yesterday that Gmail launched by giving out a gig. Back then, a typical webmail account could only store about five megabytes of mail. It's hard to remember what those days were like, considering that today, you can send a single 20 megabyte attachment, four times the size of an entire webmail account from 2004. A gigabyte of online storage may have been what got a lot of people to give Gmail a try, but changes to the email experience — like search, labels, conversation view, and strong spam protection — seem to be what kept people around.

The engineers who created Gmail were frustrated with the existing email solutions, and wanted to build a better tool for people who got a lot of mail, which meant rethinking everything from the ground up. They built an architecture that was a combination of HTML and JavaScript (this later became known as AJAX), which offered a smoother, faster interface. And they designed Gmail with the most demanding users in mind — Googlers who got hundreds of messages each day and power users with broadband connections, back when 56k modems were still the norm.

The last 5 years have brought about a lot of change, and Gmail is now more than just mail. We added chat, and then video chat. We've invested in under-the-hood changes that allow for the rapid development that's been happening lately in Gmail Labs — 43 experimental features in 43 weeks including tasks, offline, undo send, and even some silly stuff. What started as internal email for Google employees is now used by more than a million companies and tens of millions of people in 52 languages. And one gigabyte doesn't feel like very much space anymore.

Today's email problems are different than the problems people had five years ago, and Gmail's most demanding users continue to push it to its limits. We're getting more mail and communicating in more ways than ever before. Web browsers are getting faster and offering functionality that people could only dream of in 2004. We expect the changes over the next five years to be even more radical than those of the past five. We're already getting excited about some new stuff we're testing internally, and we'll keep you updated on our progress on the Gmail Blog.

Posted by Todd Jackson, Gmail Product Manager

ARIA for Google Calendar, Finance and News: In praise of timely information access

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful.

In our continued efforts to make Google applications more accessible, we have launched ARIA support for several Google applications over the last few months. W3C ARIA is a set of HTML DOM properties that enables adaptive technologies like screenreaders to work better with dynamic web applications. As with previous ARIA-enabled Google solutions, screenreader users can now switch on ARIA support in the following applications by activating an invisible Enable Screenreader Support link. Alternatively, simply browse to the links in this blog with a supporting screenreader and Firefox 3.0 to experience the interface enhancements. If you do not have a screenreader installed, but are curious to experience what eyes-free interaction with these applications feels like, we recommend the freely downloadable Firefox enhancement Fire Vox by Charles Chen.

1. Google Calendar: The ARIA-enhanced Google Calendar enables speech-enabled access to the day view in Google Calendar. You can use the keyboard to move through events, move through the days of the week, as well as to cycle through your various calendars. As you work with the calendar, the application raises appropriate DOM events through W3C ARIA to invoke the relevant spoken feedback through the screenreader.
2. Google Finance: The Finance page can be viewed as a set of logical panes, with related content appearing as items in each pane. The ARIA-enhanced version of Google Finance enables you to switch panes, and navigate the current pane with the arrow keys. Navigation produces spoken feedback through the screenreader. In addition, Google Finance provides several power user tools, including a stock screener, all of which are speech-enabled through ARIA. These power user tools provide interesting examples for Web developers experimenting with ARIA. (ARIA support for Finance was developed by intern Svetoslav Ganov as his starter project.)
3. Google News: Finally, we have added ARIA support to enable rapid eyes-free access to Google News. These enhancements follow the same pattern as seen earlier for Google Finance, and the ability to navigate between the different views provided by Google News, (e.g., World News vs Sports enables rapid access to the large volume of news that is accessible via the Google News interface).

As with all of our ARIA-enhanced services, you can obtain additional help by pressing the ? key to hear the available list of shortcuts. If you're interested in discussing these enhancements, visit the Google Group for accessibility.

Posted by T. V. Raman, Research Scientist, and Charles L. Chen, Software Engineer

CADIE awakens

We do lots of research here at Google, and we release lots of products. And we always hope that the research we do and the products that result will change the world.

CADIE, we're fairly certain, is one of those that will. We won't pretend to know the future of the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity, but we're eager to learn what we can, and to watch and study while CADIE learns what she can. So you can expect to see her influence crop up in a number of Google products in the months to come. That will happen slowly and carefully, though, and we ask for your patience as we work through a few initial bugs. It seems CADIE has a mind of her own...

Posted by Michael Krantz, Team CADIE

Local flavor for Google Suggest

Since the launch of Google Suggest last August, you may already be used to the magic feeling of getting real-time suggestions just after typing a few keystrokes — that is, if you're searching on Google.com. But what if you're doing a search on Google in the U.K., India, Ireland or Australia?

Today we're happy to announce the international launch of Google Suggest. We've localized our suggestions to account for various cultural and local factors to offer suggestions that look familiar to our users. For example, English users in different countries will get suggestions that feel natural:

• If you type [liver] in the U.K., you're probably a Liverpool fan (but in the U.S. you'll get more suggestions about liver diseases):

• In Australia, typing [kan] will offer suggestions about Australia's most famous animal:

• In India, where the mobile phone market is exploding, it's no wonder that typing [no] leads to:

• In Ireland, there are [pubs] everywhere:

• While in the Maldives, typing [ato] leads to:

Google Suggest now covers 155 domains in 51 languages. Special thanks go to the Suggest team in Israel for their hard work in making this a reality.

So go ahead and start using Google Suggest wherever you are, and enjoy the special flavor of local suggestions.

Posted by David Kadouch, Product Manager

Analytics in Latin America

If you run an e-commerce site or use AdWords to direct traffic to your business' webpage, chances are you're interested in knowing what visitors to your site are clicking on, what content interests these potential customers and what avenues brought them there. The more you know about how people engage with your site, the better you are able to design successful advertising campaigns to help grow your business.

In Latin America, online advertising is growing as more and more small businesses initiate an online presence and publicize their efforts through search and display advertising. But less than 5% of web properties throughout Latin America rely on analysis tools to improve their website's performance. Last week, our offices throughout the region hosted several Analytics-themed events to give agencies and other clients a better look at several Google measurement tools that provide people with the means to analyze their site's flow of data, interest and readership in order to build a better advertising campaign.

In Mexico City, advertisers got together to learn about Insights for Search, Ad Planner, YouTube Insights, Analytics, Sitemaps and Website Optimizer, as well as DoubleClick tools. Presentations were designed to give companies an in-depth look at the Google tools that can be helpful for planning their marketing budgets during an economic downturn. Being able to measure data on what content interests people and where consumers are searching for information can help advertisers be more selective about how they invest ad budget. Since the great majority of consumers go online for information before making a purchase, the goal of the seminar was to familiarize advertisers with tools that can increase the reach of their campaigns, while giving them a better idea of what works and what people are searching for.

Meanwhile, our Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik visited São Paulo and Buenos Aires to speak to clients about web analytics and how to make the most of online marketing through analyzing metrics (check out his recent post on bounce rate for related information). Avinash made web analytics fun and accessible with colloquial comparisons (referring sites as 'BFFs'), and demonstrated how to optimize a website's performance with changes in color and layout, among other things. He was accompanied by Google's Latin America managing director Alexandre Hohagen, Brazil's country manager Alex Dias, and Argentina's country manager Adriana Noreña at a succession of events revolving around web metrics and website optimization.



The response and interest from customers and agencies to all of these events was indicative of the huge need for metrics and the ability to track ROI for their marketing investments, especially during these difficult times. For more information on Google Analytics tools, check out the Google Analytics Blog, the Website Optimizer Blog and the Conversion Room blog.

Posted by Alfonso Luna, Marketing Director, Latin America