Cutting back on your long list of passwords

Does anyone actually like passwords? Most people can't stand them because they end up having to keep track of a long (and often memorized) list of usernames and passwords to sign into the websites they visit. Website owners hate them because it's hard to get people to create a new account on their website, and almost half of those account registrations are never completed. Thanks to the utilization of new technology, we're now seeing large-scale success in eliminating the need for passwords while increasing the successful registration rate at websites to over 90%. The most visible examples come from Plaxo, Facebook, Yahoo! and Google using a technique the industry calls hybrid onboarding. In the past, if you're a Gmail user who got an invitation to use Plaxo or Facebook, you were asked to perform the traditional process of creating a new account with yet another password, and then you might also have been asked to provide the password of your email account so Plaxo or Facebook could look up the list of your friends. With hybrid onboarding, if you click on such an invitation in your Gmail, you'll see a page like one of these:


Clicking the large button on the Plaxo page takes you to a page at Google like this:


If you give consent to share a few pieces of information, you are sent back to Plaxo with all key registration steps finished.

The registration process used to involve more than 10 steps, including requiring you to find one of those "email validation" messages in your inbox. If you've followed the steps above, you can now sign into Plaxo more easily — by simply clicking a button.

While Plaxo showed the first successful results of this technique in early 2009, other companies like Facebook are starting to use the same model and to recognize its business value potential. At the same time, the hybrid onboarding model improves authentication security because websites like Plaxo that use this technique never see a password from you at all. Since you don't have to enter your password on additional sites, your password remains closer to you and is less likely to be misused. We'd like to applaud Plaxo and Facebook's work in designing the user experience needed for this technique as well as pushing us to create the optimizations needed to carry out their design. Today we're happy to announce that all of these login flow designs are now available to any website operator. All of these hybrid onboarding techniques are based on industry standards that both Google and Yahoo! support, and that other email providers are beginning to support as well. For more technical details, check out our Google Code Blog post.

Hybrid onboarding is also being used by Enterprise Software-as-a-Service vendors — such as ZoHo — that want to eliminate the need for employees at their customers' businesses to create another password. More details are available on our Enterprise Blog. In addition, after a thorough evaluation of the security and privacy of these technologies, the same techniques are being piloted by President Obama's open identity initiative to enable citizens to sign in more easily to government-operated websites.

There is still a long way to go before you'll be able to trim down your long list of website passwords, but this progress demonstrates the potential for even the largest websites to adopt to adopt the hybrid onboarding model. We hope many other websites will follow.

Posted by Eric Sachs, Product Manager, Google Security

Investing in innovation at Google

Eric said during our third quarter earnings call that "innovation is the technological pre-condition for growth." He was talking about the kind of innovation that's only possible when you can attract and retain the world's finest minds. Some come to Google through acquisition, like the people who created Google Earth (formerly Keyhole), or the folks at Android Inc. — but most innovation coming out of Google is homegrown.

A good example is Google Chrome, which in only a year, has more than 30 million active users. Larry and Sergey recently gave the Chrome team a Founders Award, a multimillion-dollar stock bonus shared by the Googlers who worked across functions and regions to create and launch that product. As its name suggests, this award is presented by our founders to celebrate the kind of large-scale, game-changing achievements that Google stands for. The Chrome team joined a long list of teams — including Gmail, AdSense for Content, Google Maps and parts of our sales and marketing units — who have won this award (and could win again!).

We want to continue to create products that rethink industry standards, challenge the status quo and make people's lives easier — and we know that there are great minds out there with the same goal. Recently, we announced that we're starting to ramp up hiring for positions across the company, continuing our investment in the future as we imagine it. That future is shaped by small teams of creative people who want to make a difference. We're on the hunt for these kind of people — let us know if you think you're one of them.

Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, Engineering & Research

Next steps in cyber security awareness

(Cross-posted from the Public Policy blog)

Last week I joined several industry experts to speak at a cyber security panel on Capitol Hill organized by Congresswoman Yvette Clarke and sponsored by the Committee on Homeland Security. The conversation focused on things everyday Internet users can do to help protect their computers and stay safe online. Given that we just wrapped up our observation of National Cyber Security Awareness Month, I thought I'd share some of the key recommendations from the panel:

What are the most important things we all need to do to protect our computers and mobile devices?
You should have the same expectations when using the Internet as you would when exploring a city: you don't give your credit card to the person selling watches on the street just because you recognize the brand, you don't let your kids wander around by themselves and you don't give personal information unless you know who's getting it. If an offer is "urgent" or seems too good to be true, take a step back and research the offer. Add a password to your mobile phone, and browse cautiously on open WiFi networks as you would when using a computer.

What are the most common misconceptions about cyber security?
Many dangerous websites are not designed to be dangerous. In fact, most of the sites that serve malware (malicious software) are innocent sites that have been compromised in one way or another. Your computer isn't necessarily safe just because you're avoiding sites that contain adult content or pirated software. Use reputable anti-virus and anti-spyware programs, and keep your computer operating system and applications updated with the latest software versions.

How do I know if my computer or network has been compromised?
First, disconnect it from the Internet. Take note of any slowness, and if you're not sure how to proceed, get someone with technical expertise to check your network logs for high traffic appearing during times when you're not using the computer. When in doubt, contact a computer support expert.

As President Obama recently stated, cyber security is a shared responsibility. At Google, we recognize how important awareness and education are because many online security threats can only be avoided if we work together.

We spent the month of October exploring cyber security and talking about how to use Google products in a more secure manner. If you haven't seen them already, take a look at the posts we've released over the last month:

• Kick-off and YouTube Cyber Security Awareness Channel
• Choosing smart passwords
• How the website malware review process works
• Blogging security tips
• New malware snippets feature for webmasters
• Protecting users and ads from malware
• Best practices for verifying and cleaning up a malware-infected site
• Gmail account security tips
• Online commerce security
• Updating your web browser
• Taking charge of document sharing with Google Docs
• Web browser security and Google Chrome security messages

Be sure to share the tips you find most helpful with others, and remember to stay safe online.

Posted by Eric Davis, Head of Anti-Malvertising

Google Search by voice travels the world, finds Nokia, learns Chinese

(Cross-posted from the Google Mobile Blog)

Google Search by voice has grown up quickly. Some might say that search by voice has matured from a toddler to a tween. It's certainly been traveling across the English-speaking world and getting better at understanding a range of accents, from the US, U.K., India and Australia. Today it's taking another big step — we're happy to announce that Google search by voice is available for Nokia S60 phones, and now understands Mandarin Chinese.

Nokia S60 phones are popular around the world. If you have an Nseries or Eseries phone such as the N95 or E71, you're using S60. Many of these phones have 12-digit keypads — good for making calls, but not so easy when you need to type a few words. Many of you have asked if we could build our search by voice feature for these phones, and we've been working on this feature for a while.

The new version of Google Mobile App places a shortcut to Google search on your Nokia phone's home screen, allowing you to search using your voice or by typing. You can search for anything — from "movie times", to "fish 'n chips", to "masala dosa." It doesn't matter if you're in London or Bangalore: we'll use your location to give you nearby results. And Google Mobile App shows search results in the application, so you don't have to wait for a web browser to launch to get an answer.

We always use Google products ourselves before we share them with users. We like to think of this process as "eating our own dogfood" and you can see a video of some early testing here.



Up until now voice search has only been available in English, but the new version of Google Mobile App for Nokia S60 devices works for Mandarin speakers, too. We're really proud of the work we've done with Mandarin speech recognition, both because it's the most spoken language in the world, and because of the engineering challenge. To get Mandarin speech recognition to work, we had to learn a lot about this fascinating language — the differences between traditional and simplified Chinese, its tonal characteristics, automatic segmentation of text into words, pinyin representations of Chinese characters, sandhi rules, the different accents and languages in China, unicode representations of Chinese character sets...the list goes on and on.

Mandarin speakers can now search by voice for complex queries like 清华大学附近的水煮鱼 (which translates to "water-boiled fish near Tsinghua University"). Although this only works on the Nokia S60 at the moment, we're working on adding support for Mandarin speech recognition to our products on other mobile platforms, such as Android and iPhone. And bear in mind that this is a first version of our system in Mandarin, and it might not be as polished as our English version. For example, if you have a strong southern Chinese accent, it might not work as well as for people with a Beijing accent. However, our system will improve over time, so please give it a try!


Google Mobile App in Mandarin Chinese

Note that the application is for version 3 of Nokia S60 — more recent phones running version 5 (touch screen) are not yet supported.

To download the new version of Google Mobile App on your Nokia S60 phone, visit m.google.com from your phone's browser.

Posted by Elke Michlmayr, Software Engineer

This week in search 10/30/09

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label "This week in search" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

The week leading up to Halloween has brought a flood of new treats for you.

Music Search
On Wednesday, we rolled out our new music search feature, fully integrated into Google's web search. Now, when you search for a band, singer, song name, or album title, Google will recognize it and return a special music result on the top of the page. These new special music results do exactly what you want - they let you listen to the full song. To provide this feature, we have partnered with Lala and MySpace (formerly iLike) to bring you full-song streaming. That's not all, however. The real "wow" in this new music feature is that you can type in phrases of lyrics, we recognize the song - and bring you the song for full play. You can listen, verify it's the one you were looking for, and then continue on to buy the song on iMeem, iLike, Lala, Pandora, or Rhapsody.

Example searches (singers): Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Jay-Z, Jack Johnson, Michael Jackson
Example searches (band): Coldplay, TV on the Radio, The Killers, MGMT, The Rolling Stones

Example searches (song): Sample in a Jar, Waiting for the World to Change, When Doves Cry, All I Want for Christmas is You, Walking on Sunshine
Example searches (album): Dark Side of the Moon, Achtung Baby, Aqualung, Evil Urges
Example searches (lyrics): gonna be a good night tonight, can feel the hand of fate, lucky we're in love in every way, take away this ball and chain

Social Search
On Monday, we introduced Social Search on Google Labs and Google Experimental. Social Search finds relevant content that your social circle has published and returns that content with your web search results. What defines your social circle? To use Social Search, you need to be logged in to your Google Account and opted in to the Social Search experiment. We then analyze your Gmail contacts (if you have a Gmail account) and the connections on your social networks (if you have a Google Profile and have listed public social networks like Twitter and FriendFeed). What kind of results do we find? Our Social Search results include blogs, photo albums, web pages, and reviews. This way, you not only seeing the most relevant content on the web globally, but you also see the content most relevant and personal to you.

To try Google Social Search, go to Google Experimental and click the "Join the experiment" button pertaining to social search. Then try searching on Google for something your friends may have written about. Example searches like 'restaurant' or 'vacation' tend to occur in people's personal writings. Social Search results always occur at the bottom of the page, so scroll to the end of the page to see these results. You can also trigger Social Search results explicitly by opening the Search Options panel and clicking on 'Social'. This will cause all of your results to be from your social circle.

Similar Images on Image Search
In addition to our new features on core web search this week, we introduced a new and revolutionary way to refine image searches to our main image search functionality this week. The feature is called "Similar Images". We've had it for a while as a separate site, but it has proved so useful and interesting that we decided to make it part of our core image search. The idea here is to find an image that you like and then click the "Find similar images" link below it. This may seem simple, but think about all the complicated things you can express. For example, if I wanted a picture of a single turtle swimming, and I wanted the turtle to be headed to the left rather than the right, it would be almost impossible to express as a keyword search. Now with "Similar Images" features, I can simply do an image search for turtles, then find an image that meets my requirements, like the seventh image on that results page, and by clicking the "Find similar images" underneath it, I get a page composed of solo turtles actively swimming.

Example search: jack-o-lanterns, then click on "Find similar images" under the fifth image to get jack-o-lanterns lit from within in night-time settings
Example search: birthday hat, then click on "Find similar images" under the second image to get multi-colored birthday hats
Example search: peacock, then select "Find similar images" on the third image to get white peacocks with their feathers displayed

Personalized Search on Mobile
This week we also introduced personalized search for the mobile phone. Personalized search has been available on our website for some time. Now, when you are logged in on your phone, you get the same personalized search results on your mobile phone as well.

Google Suggest now global
Internationally, we also rolled out Google Suggest on our search results pages. Now, the helpful suggestions that you see when you begin typing on our homepage and results page are available on 156 country domains and in 52 more languages.

And to wish you a Happy Halloween, trick-or-treat us by visiting the homepage (www.google.com) today and clicking on the Google logo.

Hope you enjoyed this week's features. Stay tuned for what's next!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience