This is the latest in our series of YouTube highlights. Every couple of weeks, we bring you regular updates on new product features, interesting programs to watch and tips you can use to grow your audience on YouTube. Just look for the label “YouTube Highlights” and subscribe to the series. – Ed.

Since our last update, we’ve connected you with the U.S. President via an exclusive YouTube interview, brought the Sundance Film Festival to your virtual door and launched a new homepage that’s personalized to your interests.

YouTube World View kicks off
For the second year in a row, President Obama sat down with YouTube for his first interview after the State of the Union speech. The President took the opportunity to respond to the protests in Egypt, address concerns on jobs, debt and health care, and to answer a series of more personal questions that you submitted in video and text via YouTube.

This interview marks the beginning of the YouTube World View program, a series of interviews that will let you ask important questions of public leaders and big thinkers from around the world.



U.S. Speaker of the House John Boehner will be doing a YouTube Interview soon, so stay tuned for more news on how to participate.

“Life in a Day” premiered at Sundance
We premiered the world’s largest user-generated documentary “Life in a Day” last week at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. After months of hard work, Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald and a team of editors created a 90-minute documentary film based on thousands of videos uploaded from around the world on a single day—July 24, 2010. The film will be distributed in the U.S. on the one-year anniversary of that date and available on YouTube at the same time. Between now and then, “Life in a Day” will play at film festivals worldwide and international distribution deals will be put in place in other regions.

YouTube and the Sundance Film Institute also teamed up to bring you a collection of past and present short films in the YouTube Screening Room.

The Onion’s A.V. Club “Inventory” lists comes to YouTube
The Onion’s sister publication the A.V. Club debuted a new video series on YouTube called “Inventory,” based on the popular lists that catalog the unconventional—everything from the “19 artists who dramatically reinvented themselves after their early work” to “25 songs about outdated (and soon-to-be outdated) technology.”

YouTube partner Josh Sundquist is January’s “On the Rise” star
Our congratulations to Josh Sundquist, who edged past Luke Conard in the final hours to win this month’s edition of On the Rise, a program in which you decide who gets featured on the YouTube homepage based on a shortlist of channels that have experienced fast growth in the last month.

The “Bobee?” Track this and other trends
Each weekday, YouTube Trends takes a look at the most interesting videos and cultural phenomena on YouTube as they develop. We comb through YouTube's search data to investigate top spiking search terms and the videos they lead to. For example, we've recently come across a new dance craze popping up in Taiwan called "Bobee.” Find out what other interesting trends we’ve uncovered.



New YouTube homepage for everyone
With the new YouTube homepage, rolled out to everyone this month, our goal was to put more of an emphasis on "videos for you.” So we removed or moved some elements of the page to make room for videos that matter more to you—your subscriptions, friends’ sharing and recommendations. We hope you enjoy more videos as a result and are always open to hearing your suggestions for improvement.

Five questions for Jack Conte and Natalie Dawn, Pomplamoose
What you hear is what you get with Pomplamoose, a YouTube musical partner that’s garnered millions of video views on YouTube. Every sound you hear in their music videos is produced by an instrument you see played in their music videos—a refreshingly old-fashioned idea they call the “videosong.” Pomplamoose’s approach to original music has opened up opportunities for them in other arenas like TV (see their Hyundai commercials). Learn how they got their start.



We’ll update you again in a few weeks. In the meantime, you can get frequent updates from the team on the YouTube Blog.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Marketing Manager, The YouTube Team

(Cross-posted on the Public Policy Blog)

In the same way your phone is associated with a unique number, your computer is assigned a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address when you connect to the Internet. The current protocol, IPv4, allows for approximately 4 billion unique addresses—and that number is about to run out.

This morning the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced (PDF) that it has distributed the last batch of its remaining IPv4 addresses to the world’s five Regional Internet Registries, the organizations that manage IP addresses in different regions. These Registries will begin assigning the final IPv4 addresses within their regions until they run out completely, which could come as soon as early 2012.

As the last blocks of IPv4 addresses are assigned, adoption of a new protocol—IPv6—is essential to the continued growth of the open Internet. IPv6 will expand Internet address space to 128 bits, making room for approximately 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses (enough to last us for the foreseeable future).

Google, along with others, has been working for years to implement the larger IPv6 format. We’re also participating in the planned World IPv6 Day, scheduled for June 8, 2011. On this day, all of the participating organizations will enable access to as many services as possible via IPv6.

Today’s ICANN announcement marks a major milestone in the history of the Internet. IPv6, the next chapter, is now under way.

Update 2/4/2011: Corrected the number of addresses possible with IPv6. -Ed.

Posted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist

When you think about football, computer scientists probably aren’t the first thing to jump into your head. But with the big game this weekend, that’s exactly how to describe some of the fans who will be rooting along for both the Packers and Steelers. With Google engineering offices in both Pittsburgh, Pa. and Madison, Wis., Googlers in both areas will be glued to our TVs on Sunday along with the rest of the country.

As everyone begins to gear up for their own parties this weekend, we thought it would be fun to see what (American) football fans are searching for on the web.

Across the U.S., Google users have shown that football is the most popular sport, in terms of queries, year after year—ahead of baseball, soccer, basketball and hockey. Surprisingly, two states that don't have NFL teams search for [nfl] the most—Delaware and South Dakota.


You might be surprised at the lengths to which we go in terms of being fans. Take for example, the Packers. Fans in Wisconsin are currently taking a higher interest in our quarterback Aaron Rodgers than pop superstar Lady Gaga.


Pittsburgh residents also have gone Steeler-crazy, with queries for the Steelers running higher than queries for President Obama for most of the season.

Each team is also known for its fan gear: Cheeseheads for Packers nuts and Terrible Towels for Steelers supporters. As of the last week, [terrible towels] are being searched for more than [cheeseheads]. Perhaps the rise in searches for Terrible Towels can be attributed to their dual use: for cheering during the game or, in the event of a Steelers loss, to dry those terrible tears.

As we poked around the search trends, we wondered—could search query volume be the new “Sports Illustrated” jinx? Might Google’s search query volume leader foreshadow the loser of the big game? In examining the data, we’ve found that over the past two seasons, that has indeed been the case. Last year, the losing quarterback, Peyton Manning of the Indianapolis Colts, led the New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees in query volume heading into the game. Brees and the Saints won. Same situation the year before: heading into the big game on February 1, 2009, Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kurt Warner held a significant lead in query volume over Steeler quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. Big Ben and the Pittsburgh Steelers came out on top.

That trend doesn’t bode well for Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers. The Packers quarterback has maintained an edge in query volume over Steeler quarterback Ben Roethlisberger and is still in the lead as we head into Sunday. Could that mean the Ben Roethlisberger, Troy Polamalu and the rest of the Pittsburgh Steelers will host the Lombardi trophy over their heads Sunday night? Our Cheesehead-wearing Wisconsin engineers are certainly hoping that the data doesn’t hold up!


But it isn’t just about the players and game on the field. Food, the halftime show and the commercials are just as big a part of the celebration. If the minutes in between the game action are your favorite part, YouTube hosts their annual Ad Blitz, a contest where people review and rate the Super Bowl commercials as they air. This year, you can even vote on your mobile phone as you’re watching the game. The winner will receive YouTube homepage glory on February 19, after all the votes are tallied.

Some game watchers pay particularly close attention to the TV during the halftime show. If history is any indication, this year’s act, the Black Eyed Peas, can expect a surge of search queries the day of the game. Past performers [the who], [tom petty], [bruce springsteen] and the [rolling stones] have all had peak interest level during the year they performed at halftime.


For others—especially if your team’s not competing—the best part is always the spread. Searches for food and recipes surge, beginning two weeks ahead of the game, as families start to plan their party. This year, searches for [super bowl recipes] outpace those for [super bowl food] and [super bowl snacks]. Dips of all types are hot this year, with slight differences across the country: searches for [guacamole] are on average 12% more popular in Wisconsin than in Pennsylvania, while searches for [baba ganoush] are 5% more popular in Pennsylvania than in Wisconsin.

If we had our way, it would be all [bratwurst] and [fish boils] in Wisconsin and [pierogies] and [primanti brothers] in Pittsburgh. But with fans all over the country planning their menus, it seems that the big winner in the snack world appears to be chicken. Each year, searches for [chicken wings] hit their peak the week of the game.

So whether you’re a passionate Cheesehead, a proud waver of Terrible Towels or you just enjoy the spectacle, there’s something for you to enjoy around the big game: sports, drama, commercials, music, performance and food! This weekend, Googlers in our Pittsburgh and Wisconsin offices will, with millions more across the world, be on the edge of their couches watching the game and cheering along for their team. Either way, we know that only one Google office will hold bragging rights for the next year!

Googlers in Pittsburgh

Googlers in Madison

Posted by Jim Laudon, Site Director of Google’s Madison office and Andrew Moore, Site Director of Google’s Pittsburgh office

(Cross-posted on LatLong Blog and Hotpot Blog)

Back in November, we introduced Hotpot, a new local recommendation engine powered by you and your friends. Using Hotpot is simple: you rate places on google.com/hotpot—restaurants, hotels, cafes—and add friends on Hotpot whose opinions you trust. Then the next time you perform a search, Google will serve up personalized results, listing places based on your tastes, as well as recommendations from your friends.

We’ve watched Hotpot grow and change over the last couple months, and today Hotpot is really going places: to a Google search box near you and around the world.

You can now enjoy Hotpot recommendations in your regular search results on Google.com. So say you’re looking for a restaurant in Barcelona. Go to Google and search [restaurant barcelona]. If a friend has rated a particular restaurant, you might see their rating and what they had to say about it—as well as their name and photo—directly beneath that restaurant’s listing. To see all recommendations by your friends, click “Places” on the lefthand side of the page, and choose “Friends only.” Remember, you’ll need to be logged in to your Google account in order to see recommendations.

Seeing place recommendations based on your tastes and those of your friends across more Google searches will make results more relevant to you and maybe lead you to discover a new gem. If you don’t have Hotpot friends yet, you can invite them to share all the places they love with you by using the “Friends” tab on google.com/hotpot.

But Hotpot will only be half the fun if you can’t share it with all your international friends. So starting today, we’re making Hotpot available in 38 new languages—including Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, Polish, Russian and Spanish—allowing people to share their favorite places in their native language.

Start rating and sharing recommendations with Hotpot everywhere, anytime: at google.com/hotpot, on Google Maps, using Google Maps for Android with an easy widget, and on our new iPhone app.

Happy rating!

Posted by Lior Ron, Product Manager

By now, you may have read Danny Sullivan’s recent post: “Google: Bing is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results” and heard Microsoft’s response, “We do not copy Google's results.” However you define copying, the bottom line is, these Bing results came directly from Google.

I’d like to give you some background and details of our experiments that lead us to understand just how Bing is using Google web search results.

It all started with tarsorrhaphy. Really. As it happens, tarsorrhaphy is a rare surgical procedure on eyelids. And in the summer of 2010, we were looking at the search results for an unusual misspelled query [torsorophy]. Google returned the correct spelling—tarsorrhaphy—along with results for the corrected query. At that time, Bing had no results for the misspelling. Later in the summer, Bing started returning our first result to their users without offering the spell correction (see screenshots below). This was very strange. How could they return our first result to their users without the correct spelling? Had they known the correct spelling, they could have returned several more relevant results for the corrected query.

This example opened our eyes, and over the next few months we noticed that URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency for all kinds of queries: popular queries, rare or unusual queries and misspelled queries. Even search results that we would consider mistakes of our algorithms started showing up on Bing.

We couldn’t shake the feeling that something was going on, and our suspicions became much stronger in late October 2010 when we noticed a significant increase in how often Google’s top search result appeared at the top of Bing’s ranking for a variety of queries. This statistical pattern was too striking to ignore. To test our hypothesis, we needed an experiment to determine whether Microsoft was really using Google’s search results in Bing’s ranking.

We created about 100 “synthetic queries”—queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag]. As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google’s top result a unique (real) webpage which had nothing to do with the query. Below is an example:


To be clear, the synthetic query had no relationship with the inserted result we chose—the query didn’t appear on the webpage, and there were no links to the webpage with that query phrase. In other words, there was absolutely no reason for any search engine to return that webpage for that synthetic query. You can think of the synthetic queries with inserted results as the search engine equivalent of marked bills in a bank.

We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.

We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted. We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing. Below is an example: a search for [hiybbprqag] on Bing returned a page about seating at a theater in Los Angeles. As far as we know, the only connection between the query and result is Google’s result page (shown above).


We saw this happen for multiple queries. For the query [delhipublicschool40 chdjob] we inserted a search result for a credit union:

The same credit union soon showed up on Bing for that query:


For the query [juegosdeben1ogrande] we inserted a page of hip hop bling jewelry:


And the same hip hop bling page showed up in Bing:


As we see it, this experiment confirms our suspicion that Bing is using some combination of:

• Internet Explorer 8, which can send data to Microsoft via its Suggested Sites feature
• the Bing Toolbar, which can send data via Microsoft’s Customer Experience Improvement Program

or possibly some other means to send data to Bing on what people search for on Google and the Google search results they click. Those results from Google are then more likely to show up on Bing. Put another way, some Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results—a cheap imitation.

At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We’ve invested thousands of person-years into developing our search algorithms because we want our users to get the right answer every time they search, and that’s not easy. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there—algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant search results, we encourage you to come directly to Google. And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we'd like for this practice to stop.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

(Cross-posted on the Mobile Blog and LatLong Blog)

We first introduced Google Latitude to help you stay in touch with your friends and family by making it easy to share where you are. For the 10 million people actively using Latitude each month, this “where” has been a location on a map. Starting today in Google Maps 5.1 for Android, you can also connect that location to a real place by checking in there using Latitude.

Connecting your location with places
You can still use Latitude to automatically update and share your location, but check-ins let you add context to the location—like captions to a photo. For example, I live in San Francisco but often travel around the world. Until today, sharing my location let friends and family know if I was across the globe or in their neighborhood. Now, check-ins let them see the cool restaurant I’m trying in Taipei or join me for a latte at the cafe nearby.

See where your friends are on a map and where they’re checking in.

Not your typical check-ins
Because you can use Latitude to automatically detect your location, we’ve added a few twists to checking in to make it really easy:

• Notifications: Turn on check-in notifications in Latitude’s settings and get a notification to check in at a nearby place once you arrive. Never forget to check in again.
• Automatic check-ins: Choose to automatically check in at specific places you designate, and you’ll be checked in when you’re there. You can talk to friends or finish your bagel without fumbling with your phone.
• Check out: Once you leave, Latitude knows to automatically check you out of places so friends aren’t left guessing if you’re still there.

Explore your world one check-in at a time
Latitude is built right into Google Maps for Android so check-ins work across Latitude and Maps seamlessly. For example, check in at that new hamburger joint, and you’ll see its Place page with reviews to help you order. When friends check in at a place, you can go straight from their Latitude profile to its Place page to learn about it, fire up Google Maps Navigation (Beta) for turn-by-turn directions to them, and more.

You can also check in at a favorite place to earn special status there; you’ll see if you’ve become a “Regular,” a “VIP” or a “Guru” on its Place page. Keep checking in to hold onto your status or reach the next level.

Latitude check-ins are built right into Google Maps and Place pages.

Of course, we thought carefully about how to make checking in to places quick and easy while giving you control over your privacy. Just like when sharing your location with Latitude, checking in is 100% opt-in, and you can choose to share any check-in with your friends on Latitude, publicly on the web and your Google profile, or just yourself. Learn more about checking in and managing your check-ins with Latitude in the Help Center. Coming later this week, you’ll also be able to see your complete history of check-ins using the optional History tab at google.com/latitude from your computer.

Choose options for individual check-ins or turn on and off notifications in the Latitude settings.

Start checking in by downloading the latest Google Maps from Android Market (on Android 1.6+; tap here if you're on your phone) and then joining Latitude from the main menu. You can check in everywhere Maps and Latitude are already available. If you’re using the new Latitude app for iPhone, you’ll see your friends’ check-ins, and we’ll update the app soon so you can check in too.

Just the beginning...
Checking in from Latitude is just one step in helping you connect the places you go with the people you care about. We believe in letting you use or share your location however you like, and we’re working on making location and check-ins useful in more places—across Google and the web.

Posted by Joe LaPenna, Software Engineer, Google Latitude Team

One of the things I love about working at Google is that you can come up with an idea one day and the next day start getting to work to make it a reality. That's what happened with the Art Project—a new tool we're announcing today which puts more than 1,000 works of art at your fingertips, in extraordinary detail.

It started when a small group of us who were passionate about art got together to think about how we might use our technology to help museums make their art more accessible—not just to regular museum-goers or those fortunate to have great galleries on their doorsteps, but to a whole new set of people who might otherwise never get to see the real thing up close.

We're also lucky here to have access to technology like Picasa and App Engine and to have colleagues who love a challenge—like building brand-new technology to enable Street View to go indoors! Thanks to this, and our unique collaboration with museums around the world, we were able to turn our 20% project into something you can try out for yourself today at www.googleartproject.com.

You’ll find a selection of super high-resolution images of famous works of art as well as more than a thousand other images, by more than 400 artists—all in one place. And with Street View technology, you can take a virtual tour inside 17 of the world’s most acclaimed art museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York, The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Tate Britain & The National Gallery in London, Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Officer and Laughing Girl, Johannes Vermeer (The Frick Collection, New York - U.S.)

Here are a few things you can do:

• Dive into brushstroke-level detail: On top of the 1,000+ other images, each of the 17 museums selected one artwork to be photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution or “gigapixel” photo-capturing technology. Each of these images contains around 7 billion pixels—that's that’s around 1,000 times more detailed than your average digital camera—and a specially-built “microscope view” uses Picasa to deliver these images at amazingly high resolution. You can zoom in to see Van Gogh’s famous brushwork or watch how previously hard to-see elements of an artwork suddenly become clear—such as the tiny Latin couplet which appears in Hans Holbein the Younger’s “The Merchant Georg Gisze.”

The bedroom, Vincent van Gogh (Van Gogh Museum)

• Explore inside the museums: the Street View team designed a brand-new vehicle called the “trolley” to take 360-degree images of the interior of selected galleries. These were then stitched together and mapped to their location, enabling smooth navigation of more than 385 rooms within the museums. We also created a new clickable annotation feature, so you can jump from being inside a museum one moment to viewing a particular artwork the next. Once inside an image, an info panel lets you read more about an artwork, find more works by that artist and watch related YouTube videos. Gallery interiors can also be explored directly from within Street View in Google Maps.

Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy—with a view on Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”

• Create your own collection: With the “Create an Artwork Collection” feature, you can save specific views of any of the artworks and build your own personalized collection. Comments can be added to each painting and the whole collection can then be shared with friends, family or on the web using the integrated goo.gl URL shortener.

We’re incredibly excited about this project—it’s our first step toward making great art more accessible, and we hope to add more museums and works of art in time. So whether you’re a student, an aspiring artist or a casual museum-goer, we hope the Google Art Project gives you a fun and unusual way to interact with art—and hopefully inspires you to visit the real thing.

Posted by Amit Sood, Head of Google Art Project