The race that stops a nation starts online search trends

If the number of Google searches a horse gets is an indicator of our favourite for the Melbourne Cup, then “Americain” is racing ahead.

In yesterday’s search analysis of Melbourne Cup horses, Americain took the lead in the rankings, but a number of other thoroughbreds were galloping closely behind including, “Jukebox Jury” and “Dunaden”.

As we know, race-day fashion can draw almost as much attention as the race itself. Online searches for fascinators have increased consistently with online searches for the Cup. There have been more searches for the fashionable headwear throughout September and October than any other time of the year, but surprisingly, hats top the number of searches for headwear, including a dramatic rise in the search for men’s top hats.

In Google Image searches, Melbourne Cup fashion was in the lead until the final horses were confirmed. Over the weekend and today Australians have been searching for images of the horses they will put their money on.

As for who’s searching for the Cup online? Interestingly, the ACT beats out Victoria in terms of regional interest in the Melbourne Cup, followed closely by Western Australia.

A number of celebrity guests have been rumoured and confirmed for cup day. In order of the most searched this month here are some of the expected famous faces:

1. Kim Kardashian
2. Leonardo Dicaprio
3. Dita Von Teese
4. Sarah Jessica Parker
5. Cadel Evans

Happy Melbourne Cup day from Google Australia!

Posted by Kate Mason, Google Communications, Australia and New Zealand.

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Is Halloween your “Selloween”? How to prepare for your key business periods

‘Tis the season to be… scary! Halloween has come and gone again — the peak season not just for marauding ghouls and goblins but also for Australia’s costume and party suppliers. Here at Google we see a spike every year around this time in searches about Halloween topics. And we also see businesses like Dean Salakas at ThePartyPeople smartly timing their AdWords campaigns to capitalize on the public’s perennial interest in all things spooky.

ThePartyPeople is one of Australia’s most successful party supply stores, offering a large range of costumes, balloons and themed party accessories. About six weeks ago Dean started “flexing up” for the season by switching on his Halloween AdWords campaign and staffing up for increased customer enquiries. If you take a look at Insights for Search – our free tool to find out what search terms trend on Google at any given time – you can see what searches for Halloween have been hot this year. Unsurprisingly, most people have been looking online for costumes and costume ideas, followed by food, party games and decorations.

The graph shows the growing interest of Aussies in Halloween. By matching his Google AdWords campaign to this trend, Dean got so many orders he actually had to ease up on his campaign in order to fill all the orders. Right through Halloween eve, Dean and his team were still busy trying to keep up with all the enquiries and sales requests that came in over the last few weeks.

If you wonder how you can replicate Dean’s success, here are some tips to help you achieve similar results:

• Make sure you’re online — no matter the device. If you don’t yet have a website, you can sign up for a free one at http://www.gettingbusinessonline.com.au/. You can add your business listing to Google Places on Google Maps. And don’t forget all those customers with smartphones and tablets; with Google sites for mobile landing pages, you can set up a simple site that’s optimized for smaller screens.
• Find and understand your peak seasons. Look up your products or services on Google Insights for Search to determine their demand over the year, and then tweak your keywords to correspond with trending topics. Riding a natural wave is a lot easier than trying to generate your own initial momentum.
• Connect with the hot topics. Can you easily link your product or service to a popular search topic? For example, if you own a costume business that sells items modeled after the latest superhero movie, you might want to advertise against search queries connected to the movie or superhero.

Of course, you know your business better than anyone. But these tools give you a little extra data to help you make decisions.

And a final Halloween tip? Even though Hollywood keeps pumping out vampire romances, Dean told us that Aussies have been much more into zombie costumes this year. And yep — we are seeing that exact same trend in Insights for Search.

Posted by Ross Mcdonald, Head of Retail, Google Australia

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Google+ is now available with Google Apps

This is a cross-post from our Official Google Enterprise Blog

Google Apps fans, today we’re ready to add you to our circles. Google+ makes sharing on the web more like sharing in the real world, and now Google+ is available to people who use Google Apps at university, at work or at home.

Starting now you can manually turn on Google+ for your organisation. Once Google+ is turned on, your users will just need to sign up at google.com/+ to get started. For customers who use Google Apps for Business or the free version of Google Apps and who have chosen to automatically enable new services, Google+ will automatically become available to all of your users over the next several days.*

Google Apps users will have access to the same set of features that are available to every Google+ user, and more. In addition to sharing publicly or with your circles, you’ll also have the option to share with everyone in your organisation, even if you haven’t added all of those people to a circle.


Google+ at home, at work and at university
You use Google Apps in lots of different ways, and we expect the same for Google+. Apps users from artists to doctors to parents to students to teachers have told us that they are ready to join the 40 million people already sharing on Google+.

Circles is a great way to share relevant content with the right people. With Circles, your photography crew doesn’t have to get an update about your morning workout, your triathlon team doesn’t have to see all your thoughts on the latest camera gear, and your project teams can be kept separate from all of this.


Hangouts with extras, which combines multi-person video chat with screen sharing and collaboration in Google Docs, lets you work together on projects even when your team can't be in the same room. Whether you’re out of town, working on a project with a distributed group, or just don’t feel like walking to the next building for your meeting, Hangouts with extras can give your team the productivity boost it needs.


Google+ coming to a campus near you
Many students and teachers have sent us their ideas about how they can use Google+ to teach, learn, work, and play. These are a few Google Apps for Education universities from around the world that are bringing Google+ to their campuses today:

Abilene Christian University

American University in Cairo (Egypt)

Arizona State University

AT Still University

Boise State University

Central Piedmont Community College

Dublin City University (Ireland)

ESSEC Business School (France)

Leeds Metropolitan University (United Kingdom)

Loughborough University (United Kingdom)

Saint Louis University

Strathmore University (Kenya)

Universidad Panamericana (Mexico)

University of Ferrara (Italy)

University of Maryland Baltimore County

University of Minnesota

University of Notre Dame

University of Pavia (Italy)

University of Portsmouth (United Kingdom)

University of Washington

Vanderbilt University

Wake Forest University

Just the beginning
For those of you who’ve already started using Google+ with a personal Google Account and would prefer to use your Google Apps account, we’re building a migration tool to help you move over. With this tool, you won’t have to rebuild your circles, and people who’ve already added you to their circles will automatically be connected to your new profile. We expect this migration option to be ready in a few weeks, so if you’d like, you can go ahead and get started with your Apps account today and merge your connections once the tool is available.

It took more technical work than we expected to bring Google+ to Google Apps, and we thank you for your patience. This integration is just the beginning. We’ll continue to add features and improve the way that Google+ works with Google Apps, and we encourage you to share your ideas.

Note: * Google+ requires Picasa Web Albums for photo sharing and Google Talk for chat, so if these services are not enabled then Google+ will not automatically become available, even if your domain has chosen to automatically enable new services. The option to automatically enable new services is controlled in the Domain settings tab of the administrator control panel. More information about using Google+ with Google Apps is available in the Help Center.

Posted by Ronald Ho, Product Manager

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From the desert to the sea: Google Voice Search experiments

As an engineer I like to solve problems and I like to test stuff, the bigger the better. A couple of months ago I was intrigued by a challenge: Australians have the second highest smartphone penetration in the world (second only to Singapore) but we have one of the lowest usage rates of Google Voice Search. This had some of us scratching our heads, because Google Voice Search understands our Australian accents.

So we thought it would be fun to show Australians how well Google Voice Search works by conducting a series of experiments in remote Australian locations. I went to the middle of the South Australian desert with James, a fellow engineer. We found some of the hottest, reddest earth in the country to test a long distance voice search - 50 metres away from the phone! Here’s our adventure:



Meanwhile, our fellow Google engineers Noel and Alice went up north to the beautiful Great Barrier Reef, to test Google Voice Search underwater.



Now that you’ve seen what Google Voice Search can do, we hope these experiments will inspire you to try it yourself in a more everyday setting, and with your broadest Aussie accent!

You can use Google Voice Search on Android phones by pressing the microphone button on the homescreen or downloading the app. You can also download the app for the iPhone here.

Posted by Mike Lawther, Software Engineer.

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Sydney Google+ photowalk

It all began with a quick post I threw up on Google+ a month ago: “Is anyone interested in doing a photo walk here in Australia?”

Since joining Google+ I’ve discovered so many great photographers, with many of them right here in Australia. So I chatted with +Gretchen Chapelle and +Michael Sutton about the the idea of hosting a photowalk, a day where budding photographers who have met online can get together, take photos, help each other with tips/tricks and - most importantly - get to know each other. Lucky for us, a Googler saw my post and offered to support our idea, helping out with customised Google+ t-shirts, camera straps, stickers and even a BBQ to end the day.

We were hoping maybe 10 to 20 people would enjoy a day out, take some photos and pick each others’ brains about our photography obsession. Instead, over 150 people turned up. The light was beautiful and there was lots to inspire us from architecture, to the Occupy Sydney demonstration, gardens, and Art & About installations.

Thanks to everyone who came along and stayed tuned for details about the next one. You can check out the photos for yourself via this search link in Google+.

Posted by +Giuseppe Basile (Aussie Google+ Photographer)

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Dynamic Views: Update #2

Hi Bloggers!

Thanks again for all the terrific feedback on Dynamic Views. Over half a million blogs have selected Dynamic Views as their default template since they were introduced less than a month ago, which is solid evidence that you’re as excited about this new technology as we are!

As I mentioned in my last update, we’ve been working hard to respond to your feedback and quickly introduce enhancements. The ability to customize Dynamic Views has been a top request, so I’m pleased to announce that as of today, this is now possible.

Using the Template Designer, you can now modify your background, fonts, or colors, and add a custom header image like we did on Blogger Buzz (just make sure it’s 65 pixels high). If you don’t fancy yourself a web designer, simply choose from one of the “suggested themes” that we provide.

To begin personalizing your blog, log in to the Blogger dashboard, select “Template”, choose from one of the seven Dynamic Views, and then click “Customize” to access the Template Designer.

Finally, if you’re waiting for gadget support in Dynamic Views, stay tuned...

Happy blogging!

Posted by: Bruce Polderman, Product Manager

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Use your Google+ profile with your Blogger blogs

In fewer than 4 months since its launch, more than 40 million people have joined Google+, making it a living, breathing space for social connections and sharing to thrive.

Today we’re excited to announce the first way you will be able to leverage Google+ -- by making it possible to replace your Blogger profile with your Google+ profile.

In addition to giving your readers a more robust and familiar sense of who you are, your social connections will see your posts in their Google search results with an annotation that you've shared the post.

Plus, bloggers who switch will automatically get access to the Google+ integrations we’ll be rolling out in the future.

If you blog under a pseudonym and you don’t want to connect your common name with your blog, this integration may not work for you. That’s why we’ve made it completely optional to switch.

This option is available for all users today in our testing ground, Blogger in Draft, and will be accessible from www.blogger.com in the coming weeks.

If you have a Google+ account and would like to replace your Blogger profile with your Google+ profile, log in to draft.blogger.com and click “Get started” on the promotion message, pictured below, or click here to get started right away.

If you don’t have a Google+ account, you can create one here first, and then head back to draft.blogger.com and look for the promotion message.

To learn more, check out our FAQs or visit our Help Forum. Happy blogging!

Posted by Vardhman Jain, Software Engineer

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Update: Blogger’s new look

Back in August, we announced a completely new, streamlined blogging experience that makes it easier for you to find what you need and focus on writing great blog posts.

Since then, millions of you have opted to try it out, and we’ve received tens of thousands of feedback submissions. Based on that feedback we’ve fixed a number of bugs, including design updates, Safari compatibility for the iPad, and tweaks to scheduling posts.

In about two weeks from today, all Blogger accounts that haven’t yet made the switch will be upgraded to the new user interface. You will be able to opt-out at any time by clicking the “Switch back” link; however, all accounts will eventually be permanently upgraded.

To help you get a better sense of what’s changed and how to navigate the new interface, check out the short video below.

If you’d like to switch to the new look at any time, you can easily do so by clicking the “Try the updated Blogger interface” link at the top of your dashboard.

We hope you enjoy the updates we continue to make to Blogger and welcome your thoughts about the new look. If you have suggestions or feedback, click the gear icon in the top right of the navigation bar and select “Send Feedback.”

Posted by Chang Kim, Product Manager

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Vote for your Doodle 4 Google

Eliza Dyde-Nairn, St. Augustine's Primary School, Queensland

Voting has begun to pick your favourite Google Doodle. Last week our judges narrowed the thousands of entries to a shortlist of 32. Now is your turn to choose the four national age groups winners.

Voting closes October 24th.

Posted by Leticia Lentini, Events Marketing Manager, Google Australia

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Google Analytics support in Blogger

Having a solid understanding of the traffic and visitor engagement statistics of your blog is one of the best ways to help it grow, and that’s why today we’re excited to announce that you can now easily connect your Google Analytics account with your blog.

Adding Google Analytics to your blog will give you more insight into where your visitors are coming from and help you determine which content they engage with the most. It's an easy to use, powerful, free product that is used internationally by businesses large & small.

If you already have a Google Analytics account, simply navigate to your blog’s Settings > Other tab and enter your blog's Google Analytics Web Property ID. Blogger will then insert Google Analytics code into your blog automatically, regardless of which template you're using, including mobile.

For more details and troubleshooting tips, check out this post on the Blogger Developers Network blog.

A few notes:

• Google Analytics is supported on blogs using Dynamic Views, Layouts templates, and mobile templates, but not Classic templates.
• Because of the technical differences in how Blogger’s stats and Google Analytics collect data, you are likely to see some minor discrepancies between the two.

Posted by Muthu Kannan, Software Engineer

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Judging Doodle 4 Google

Earlier this year we announced the popular Doodle 4 Google competition for 2011 which gives Australian students the chance to have their version of the Google logo on our homepage and win prizes for their school.

We asked the ‘doodles’ to represent this year’s theme ‘My Future Australia’. More than four thousand schools across the country grabbed their pencils and paints to take part.

There was excitement in the Google HQ this morning as our judges Anne Geddes, Del Kathryn Barton, Jack Manning Bancroft and Joanna Gilmour pored over the entries to choose our 32 state and territory winners.

Stayed tuned to see who they've chosen when we'll open voting for your favourite doodle to narrow it down to the top four.

L-R: Jack Manning Bancroft, Anne Geddes, Joanna Gilmour and Del Kathryn Barton

This year our volunteers who sorted through all the doodles were also given a chance to pick their favourite. This special packing room mention goes to Shayla Dinh from Beechboro Primary School in Western Australia, who wrote:

“"My brother Justin has helped me think about this, so I have picked for my Doodle for Google, to help my disabled brother, Justin, he has Down syndrome. I want to cure all types of disabled people, with my own medicine (Shayla's smartability)."

Voting will begin on October 17th so make sure to get voting for your favourite doodle to appear on the Google Australia homepage.

To vote, visit http://www.google.com.au/doodle4google.

Posted by Leticia Lentini, Events Marketing Manager, Google Australia

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Lightbox update

When we enabled a brand new photo viewing experience, called Lightbox, by default a few weeks ago, we heard from a number of Bloggers who preferred to use their own, previously installed Lightbox solution, or who simply wanted to continue blogging without the new feature.

Thanks to your feedback, we turned Lightbox off temporarily, and we’re re-launching it today with the option to disable it, along with a handful of fixes to bugs that you reported.

To learn more about Lightbox and how it works, check out the original blog post.

If you’d like to disable Lightbox on your blog, log in to Blogger and select “No” next to Lightbox in the Settings | Posts and Comments section (new interface) or the Settings | Formatting section (old interface).

Thanks again for your detailed suggestions, and please continue to share your feedback in our help forum.

Posted by Marcos Almeida, Software Engineer

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What's killing Australian innovation?

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas held at the spectacular Sydney Opera House. My co-panelists were Martin Rogers, biomed entrepreneur and founder of Prima Biomed, and Prof Alec Cameron, Dean of the Australian School of Business. Our topic: “What's killing Australian innovation?”

My view is that the future of innovation in Australia is neither as dark as that topic suggests, nor is it all sunny. A recent Federal Government report concludes that we’re very good at incremental innovation, which essentially means adapting overseas innovations. Yet despite being blessed with ample talent and capital, plus a reasonably strong education system, Australia produces relatively few global innovations. Arguably, countries with much smaller populations, such as Finland, Switzerland, Israel, and Taiwan, have performed much better. 

So what’s holding us back then? 

From my experience, what may be holding us back from achieving our innovation potential is our attitude towards failure. It might sound counter-intuitive, but big innovation and failure are intimately intertwined. All innovations are essentially experiments which carry the prospect of failure. Innovators in the US, and particularly Silicon Valley, where I lived for 16 years, understand this only too well.

Sadly, Steve Jobs, one of the greatest innovators of our time, passed away yesterday. I watched his 2005 Stanford University commencement speech (well worth the time) in which he describes how “failure” has shaped his life for the better. In particular, his getting fired from Apple, the company he founded, liberated him to think afresh, and start, not one, but two new companies, Next and Pixar.

Australians love success, but we hate failure. As a result, we can be very harsh on entrepreneurs who try and fail. Yet if you look into the history of many innovators, just like Steve Jobs, you will find many examples of failure being a way point on the road to success.

It’s high time we started to embrace failure as much as we embrace success.

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Dynamic Views: Update #1

Hi Bloggers!

Last week, we launched Dynamic Views in an effort to make it easier for readers to enjoy and discover your posts. You responded. As of today, hundreds of thousands of blogs have changed their blog template to Dynamic Views. The clear favorite appears to be Magazine, with Classic running a close second.

I would like to thank everyone who has taken the time to provide their feedback, and let you know that in the last week we’ve made the following improvements:

• Added more emphasis to search results with Magazine & Timeslide
• Improved the preservation of image position within the full post
• Enabled JavaScript support within posts
• Fixed the issue that sometimes resulted in continuously spinning gears after clicking a link
• Turned on support for Archive pages

The other big pieces of feedback we’ve heard have been around gadget support and customization. The good news is...both are on the way! Since Dynamic Views uses HTML5, Javascript and CSS3, our existing library of gadgets is being rewritten to function in this new environment. We’ll be introducing the first set of gadgets very soon, so stay tuned!

With respect to customization, we realize that many bloggers have invested lots of time and effort to personalize their blog with custom background, fonts, etc. We plan to enable similar customization of Dynamic View templates via the Template Designer in the very near future.

Our plan is to continue to introduce updates and improvements as quickly as we can. Thanks again for your feedback, and we’re happy to hear that you’re enjoying Dynamic Views!

Happy blogging.

Bruce Polderman, Product Manager

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Google Earth downloaded more than one billion times

This is a cross-post from the Google LatLong blog.

How large is one billion? One billion hours ago modern humans were living in the Stone Age. One billion minutes ago, the Roman Empire was flourishing. If you traveled from Earth to the Moon three times, your journey would measure one billion meters.

Today, we’ve reached our own one billion mark: Google Earth has been downloaded more than one billion times since it was first introduced in 2005. That’s more than one billion downloads of the Google Earth desktop client, mobile apps and the Google Earth plug-in—all enabling you to to explore the world in seconds, from Earth to Mars to the ocean floor.

We’re proud of our one billion milestone, but we’re even more amazed at the way people have used Google Earth to explore the world. When we founded Keyhole, Inc. back in 2001 (the company was acquired by Google in 2004), we never imagined our geospatial technology would be used by people in so many unexpected ways. At www.OneWorldManyStories.com, we’ve collected stories from people all over the world who use Google Earth to follow their dreams, discover new and distant places, or make the world a better place.



Visit www.OneWorldManyStories.com to learn about people like Professor David Kennedy of the University of Western Australia, who’s used Google Earth to scan thousands of square kilometers in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Professor Kennedy has discovered ancient tombs and geoglyphs dating back at least 2,000 years, all without leaving his desk in Perth. Architect Barnaby Gunning, after the April 6, 2009 earthquake near L’Aquila Italy, encouraged his fellow citizens to start rebuilding the city virtually in 3D. Their online urban planning will aid city planners and architects. Retired English teacher Jerome Burg created Google Lit Trips, which uses Google Earth to match places in famous books to their geographical locations, encouraging students to create connections between the stories they read in school and the world they live in.

We hope you enjoy the site, and that it illustrates how some of those one billion downloads of Google Earth have been making a difference. You can explore these stories right in your browser with the Google Earth plug-in or download the KML files to view in Google Earth.

If you have a Google Earth story you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you. If you don’t have Google Earth, download it now and be part of the next billion stories. While it’s inspiring to see how Google Earth has touched the lives of so many, we know the best is yet to come.

Posted by Brian McClendon, VP of Engineering, Google Earth and Maps

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