Greater access to voting information

At Google, we pride ourselves on helping people find things on the Internet. And every four years in America, Google Trends shows that people are searching to find voting information, like how to register and where to vote.

It's hard to believe that in 2008, information so important to U.S. citizens and the democratic process isn't well organized on the web. To solve this problem, we've released our US Voter Info site, an effort to simplify and centralize voting locations and registration information.


We developed the site in the hope that it will increase voter participation. We were helped by a number of partners, including many state and local election officials, the League of Women Voters, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and others involved in the Voting Information Project.

Are you registered to vote? What's the best way to obtain an absentee ballot? When people visit the site, answers to these questions appear. And anyone with a website can provide the same information. The US Voter Info gadget places a simple search box that expands to show a full set of voter information when someone enters an address.


We are also offering a simpler way to find out where to vote. By entering a home address, citizens across the country will be able to find their polling place for election day.

To encourage political participation, we've opened up this data to third-party sites and developers through an API developed by Dan Berlin, one of our open-source engineers. We're excited to share this data, and hope that others will find it useful in encouraging citizens to vote.

Organizing information is our mission. We do that every day with web content, and we want to do the same thing with information to inform and empower voters and to help them get to the polls this election season.

Posted by JL Needham, Public Sector Content Partnerships, and Abe Murray, Product Manager

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Saving electricity one data center at a time

Hundreds of millions of users access our services through the web, and this traffic requires lots of computers. We strive to offer great Internet services while taking our energy use very seriously. That's why, nearly a decade ago, we started work to optimize the energy efficiency of our servers and later set out to build the most environmentally sustainable data centers possible. We now believe that Google-designed data centers are the most efficient in the world.

The graph below shows what we've achieved: our data centers use considerably less energy for the servers themselves, and much less energy for cooling, than a typical data center. We achieved this milestone by significantly reducing the amount of energy needed for the data center facility overhead. Specifically, Google-designed data centers use nearly five times less energy than conventional facilities to feed and cool the computers inside. Our engineers worked hard to optimize every element in the data center, from the chip to the cooling tower.

As a result, the energy used per Google search is minimal. In the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than we will use to answer your query. To learn more about our 5-step approach to efficiency, please check out our new website about efficient data centers.

Link - from Official Google Blog

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RabbitMQ Tech Talk at Google London

My day job involves working with Google's strategic mobile partners to solve tricky problems but in the evenings I'm usually to be found at the eXtreme Tuesday Club and similarly geeky gatherings. I'm usually the bloke with the Nikon D50 alternating between talking about new features in Python and taking pictures. Sometimes, like PyCon UK, I get to do both and I end up with photos like this:

That doesn't always happen though. For instance last Thursday I invited some special guests to our London office. Alexis Richardson, Matthias Radestock and Tony Garnock-Jones from LShift/CohesiveFT traveled all the way from their Silicon Roundabout offices to Victoria to give a tech talk about, RabbitMQ, their open source messaging platform. Their talk covered everything from how distributed systems are built in Erlang to their preferred approach to fixing Twitter's scaling problems.

Since the Google Moderator tool had launched the night before I thought we should experiment with using that to supplement the questions from the assembled Googlers. We only got 2 online questions but I think that with the feedback that team is getting here. This could become a really useful tool for technical conferences.

Afterwards I took the guys upstairs to the canteen for lunch with various Google engineers where we got to discuss everything from implementing Protocol Buffers in C# to Jaiku and the future of federated micro-blogging. Lunch wasn't recorded but the Tech Talk was so you'll soon be able to see it for yourself on Youtube. We'll update this blog post when the video is ready.

In the meantime you can read the slides here:

• Part 1 - http://www.rabbitmq.com/resources/google-tech-talk-final/alexis-google-rabbitmq-talk.pdf
• Part 2 - http://www.rabbitmq.com/resources/google-tech-talk-final/google.html

Ade Oshineye,
Technical Solutions Engineer, PSO, Google London

Link:UK Developer Blog: RabbitMQ Tech Talk at Google London

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Vehicle to Grid (V2G) Overview

Current concerns about climate change, energy security and record high oil prices have generated a lot of enthusiasm for plug-in vehicles -- both plug-in hybrids and pure battery electric vehicles. Widespread adoption of plug-in vehicles would result in significant reductions in CO2 emissions from transportation. It would also reduce our dependence on fossil fuels by replacing petroleum-sourced energy with renewable, domestically produced electricity. But the benefits of plug-in vehicles extend beyond just those well known areas. These vehicles are also enablers for new technology that could offer significant benefits to the electric grid and to plug-in vehicle owners. In particular, Vehicle to Grid (V2G) technology - in the form of vehicles capable of full bi-directional power flow (true V2G) and those capable of uni-directional "smart charging" - allows these grid-connected vehicles to provide grid stability and load management services in near real time. This gives the grid operators additional grid stability headroom, allowing even adoption of renewable energy on the grid. Plug-in vehicle owners would benefit from cheaper electricity rates and could even profitably contract with their utilities to have their vehicle provide grid ancillary services such as grid frequency, regulation and spinning reserves.

So how does V2G work "under the hood"? Historically, plug-in vehicles have simply connected to the grid and charged. There was no communication or control between the vehicle and the grid, and power flowed only from the grid to the vehicle. A fully V2G-capable plug-in vehicle is equipped with a communications interface that receives signals from the grid as well as an intelligent charging system/battery management system (BMS) that allows bi-directional power flow both to and from the vehicle. When this vehicle is connected to the grid, control signals are sent from the grid operator to manage the flow of energy between the vehicle and the grid. In the simplest case, the grid might just turn the vehicle charger on and off in response to grid load. The grid could also tell the vehicle to defer charging until off-peak hours, or possibly have the vehicle charge only when the electricity rates are at their lowest. In the most complex scenario, the grid might send a constant flow of messages to the vehicle, changing the charging rate or even reversing the flow of energy to feed back to the grid depending on a variety of factors including the current grid load, the current amount of renewable generation, the state of charge of the vehicle, and real-time energy pricing.

The benefits of V2G extend past grid load management. An NREL study shows that plug-in vehicles acting as a storage resource on the grid would help the penetration of intermittent renewable energy generation resources such as solar and wind. The energy storage offered by the plug-in vehicles would help smooth the peaks and valleys of renewable energy. This is particularly beneficial in the case of wind energy, which in many geographic locations often produces the greatest amount of energy during low-demand hours, such as late in the evening or at night.

Though V2G has many benefits to offer, it is not a near-term solution. Deploying V2G will require significant investment to evolve the existing grid into the Smart Grid of the future - the existing grid simply does not have the infrastructure in place to communicate with vehicles. Additionally, the V2G services depend on a fairly large scale deployment of plug-in vehicles to be of any value to utilities and grid operators. Several promising pilot projects have demonstrated the capabilities of V2G, but no large scale implementations are in the foreseeable future. There is also significant work to do to formalize standards for how the vehicles will connect and communicate with the grid, and the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) has committees working specifically in these areas - J1772 for connections and J2293 for communications. Lastly, there are issues to work through concerning the impact of constant cycling of the vehicle's battery and the effect this will have on battery life.

The good news is that many of the benefits of grid-connected vehicles don't require that they be deployed with full V2G functionality right from the start. An excellent starting point is just manufacturing vehicles with industry-standard connections that can do "smart charging" directed by the grid. A PNNL study shows that even if plug-in vehicles comprised three-quarters of the American passenger car fleet, the existing grid has sufficient power generation capabilities to handle the charging needs of these vehicles if they are charged during off-peak hours -- all without requiring any new power plants. In addition, the ability to control the charge time and energy flow rate of plug-in vehicles represents value to utilities and grid operators for grid ancillary services and for the ability to dispatch load to match up with real-time renewable generation even if the vehicles are not capable of sending power back to the grid. Finally, even if the grid itself is not capable of handling bi-directional power flow from vehicles, full V2G capabilities could be deployed as part of a "smart garage" at a home or a business, sometimes referred to as V2H (vehicle to home). In this scenario, the plug-in vehicles would be treated as a power generation resource along with solar or wind power, and controlled directly by an energy management system which controls the energy load at the home or business.

Though V2G is still in its infancy and many questions remain -- Who should own the batteries in the vehicles? What communications technology should be used? How would we handle the intermittent connectivity & mobility of vehicles? -- it has a great deal of potential and will be an integral part of the next generation power grid fueled significantly by clean, renewable energy resources.
Link:RechargeIT Blog: Vehicle to Grid (V2G) Overview

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AdWords for disaster relief

In recent posts we've called attention to Grants recipients providing relief during times of crisis around the world. Our goal for these posts is to bring awareness to organizations uniquely suited to provide support when disaster strikes and give you a place to find information and ways to help.

We'd also like to offer optimization help to those of you whose organizations are seeing an increase in traffic from disasters. Rather than waiting for one to strike, we thought we'd share some tips with you now so you can prepare for future events:

1. Ready your accounts
   Create a specific campaign for disasters and a specific ad group for the crisis at hand. If your organization provides relief for disasters, create a campaign within your account specifically for disasters. And when you respond to a disaster, create an ad group within your disaster campaign for the current disaster. This kind of organization will make it easier to manage your keywords, ad texts and budgets to best handle the traffic and disseminate information to those in need.
   
   
2. Prioritize your budget
   Allot the majority of your budget to your disaster campaign when disasters occur. When the majority of your traffic is focused on your disaster relief efforts, shift your account budget to focus mainly on that campaign. You can then pause previous disaster ad groups in the campaign and activate the current disaster ad group to support the increased traffic with the most relevant information. If the rest of your account is drawing too much traffic away from your disaster relief campaign, you can also pause these ad groups/campaigns to give your disaster campaign more traffic.
   
   
3. Build a targeted keyword list
   Create a very precise keyword list for your crisis ad group. You'll want a list that's specific to the disaster at hand and to the support you're providing. Use geo-targeting or geographical terms if relevant, such as "Hurricane Gustav shelters in Houston." Avoid general terms such as "hurricane", "tropical storm" and "disaster," as they won't be as effective as more narrowly targeted terms.
   
   
4. Send users right to the source
   If you're asking for donations or volunteers in your ad text, be sure to link your ads directly to the landing pages where these options are given. Put as few clicks as possible between the user and the information they are seeking.
   

While we hope you won't have to use them, these tips may help you prepare for possible crises so that you can spend your time helping those in need. To discuss these strategies further, visit our Help Group, and start a discussion about best practices for managing increases in traffic.
Link:Google Grants Blog: AdWords for disaster relief

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Advanced Website Diagnostics with Google Webmaster Tools

Tuesday, September 30, 2008 at 11:07 AM

Running a website can be complicated—so we've provided Google Webmaster Tools to help webmasters to recognize potential issues before they become real problems. Some of the issues that you can spot there are relatively small (such as having duplicate titles and descriptions), other issues can be bigger (such as your website not being reachable). While Google Webmaster Tools can't tell you exactly what you need to change, it can help you to recognize that there could be a problem that needs to be addressed.

Let's take a look at a few examples that we ran across in the Google Webmaster Help Groups:

Is your server treating Googlebot like a normal visitor?

While Googlebot tries to act like a normal user, some servers may get confused and react in strange ways. For example, although your server may work flawlessly most of the time, some servers running IIS may react with a server error (or some other action that is tied to a server error occurring) when visited by a user with Googlebot's user-agent. In the Webmaster Help Group, we've seen IIS servers return result code 500 (Server error) and result code 404 (File not found) in the "Web crawl" diagnostics section, as well as result code 302 when submitting Sitemap files. If your server is redirecting to an error page, you should make sure that we can crawl the error page and that it returns the proper result code. Once you've done that, we'll be able to show you these errors in Webmaster Tools as well. For more information about this issue and possible resolutions, please see http://todotnet.com/archive/0001/01/01/7472.aspx and http://www.kowitz.net/archive/2006/12/11/asp.net-2.0-mozilla-browser-detection-hole.aspx.

If your website is hosted on a Microsoft IIS server, also keep in mind that URLs are case-sensitive by definition (and that's how we treat them). This includes URLs in the robots.txt file, which is something that you should be careful with if your server is using URLs in a non-case-sensitive way. For example, "disallow: /paris" will block /paris but not /Paris.

Does your website have systematically broken links somewhere?

Modern content management systems (CMS) can make it easy to create issues that affect a large number of pages. Sometimes these issues are straightforward and visible when you view the pages; sometimes they're a bit harder to spot on your own. If an issue like this creates a large number of broken links, they will generally show up in the "Web crawl" diagnostics section in your Webmaster Tools account (provided those broken URLs return a proper 404 result code). In one recent case, a site had a small encoding issue in its RSS feed, resulting in over 60,000 bad URLs being found and listed in their Webmaster Tools account. As you can imagine, we would have preferred to spend time crawling content instead of these 404 errors :).

Is your website redirecting some users elsewhere?

For some websites, it can make sense to concentrate on a group of users in a certain geographic location. One method of doing that can be to redirect users located elsewhere to a different page. However, keep in mind that Googlebot might not be crawling from within your target area, so it might be redirected as well. This could mean that Googlebot will not be able to access your home page. If that happens, it's likely that Webmaster Tools will run into problems when it tries to confirm the verification code on your site, resulting in your site becoming unverified. This is not the only reason for a site becoming unverified, but if you notice this on a regular basis, it would be a good idea to investigate. On this subject, always make sure that Googlebot is treated the same way as other users from that location, otherwise that might be seen as cloaking.

Is your server unreachable when we try to crawl?

It can happen to the best of sites—servers can go down and firewalls can be overly protective. If that happens when Googlebot tries to access your site, we won't be able crawl the website and you might not even know that we tried. Luckily, we keep track of these issues and you can spot "Network unreachable" and "robots.txt unreachable" errors in your Webmaster Tools account when we can't reach your site.

Has your website been hacked?

Hackers sometimes add strange, off-topic hidden content and links to questionable pages. If it's hidden, you might not even notice it right away; but nonetheless, it can be a big problem. While the Message Center may be able to give you a warning about some kinds of hidden text, it's best if you also keep an eye out yourself. Google Webmaster Tools can show you keywords from your pages in the "What Googlebot sees" section, so you can often spot a hack there. If you see totally irrelevant keywords, it would be a good idea to investigate what's going on. You might also try setting up Google Alerts or doing queries such as [site:example.com spammy words], where "spammy words" might be words like porn, viagra, tramadol, sex or other words that your site wouldn't normally show. If you find that your site actually was hacked, I'd recommend going through our blog post about things to do after being hacked.

There are a lot of issues that can be recognized with Webmaster Tools; these are just some of the more common ones that we've seen lately. Because it can be really difficult to recognize some of these problems, it's a great idea to check your Webmaster Tools account to make sure that you catch any issues before they become real problems. If you spot something that you absolutely can't pin down, why not post in the discussion group and ask the experts there for help?

Have you checked your site lately?

Link:Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Advanced Website Diagnostics with Google Webmaster Tools

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Getting out the vote in Ohio

As election day approaches on November 4, Google is working with state and local election officials across the country to make voter information as widely available and as accurate as possible. Today, we announced a big step forward in that effort with the State of Ohio.

Thanks to the leadership of Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, Ohio is the first state to make comprehensive voting information available through our U.S. Voter Info Guide, a searchable database of election information powered by Google Search and Maps.

In addition, when voters in Ohio do a Google search for “where to vote” or “where to register," they will be directed to maps.google.com/vote, where they can enter their addresses and find registration information, absentee and early vote details, and their polling place.

Our guide already includes voting locations for a number of states and the District of Columbia, and we are aiming to have voting information for all 50 states added by mid-October. We hope that this tool will equip voters with the information they need to make it to the polls on election day. Don't forget to vote!

Link:Google Public Policy Blog: Getting out the vote in Ohio

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