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Every day, we see how AI can help people from around the world and make a positive difference in our lives—from helping radiologists detect lung cancer , to increasing literacy rates in rural India, to conserving endangered species . These examples are just scratching the surface—AI could also save lives through natural disaster mitigation with our flood forecasting initiative and research on predicting earthquake aftershocks .  As AI expands our reach into the once-unimaginable, it also sparks conversation around topics like fairness and privacy. This is an important conversation and one that requires the engagement of societies globally. A year ago, we announced Google’s AI Principles that help guide the ethical development and use of AI in our research and products. Today we’re sharing updates on our work. Internal education We’ve educated and empowered our employees to understand the important issues of AI and think critically about how to put AI into practice responsib...

Finance ministers from the world’s largest economies recently came together and agreed on the need for the most significant reforms to the global tax system in a century. That’s great news. We support the movement toward a new comprehensive, international framework for how multinational companies are taxed. Corporate income tax is an important way companies contribute to the countries and communities where they do business, and we would like to see a tax environment that people find reasonable and appropriate. While some have raised concerns about where Google pays taxes, Google’s overall global tax rate has been over 23 percent for the past 10 years, in line with the 23.7 percent average statutory rate across the member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Most of these taxes are due in the United States, where our business originated, and where most of our products and services are developed. The rest we paid in the roughly fifty countr...

Video content has reached new heights and more screens than ever before, making video ads one of the most engaging and effective ad formats today. But as people gain more control to watch video content anytime and anywhere, there are still a number of design and technical factors that can get in the way of people actually seeing those video ads. For video ads to work, people have to be able to see them—that’s where viewability comes in. Higher viewability can lead to better viewing experiences for users, better results for advertisers, and increased demand, fill rates, and revenue for publishers. In fact, increasing the viewability of video ads from 50 percent to 90 percent can result in more than an 80 percent revenue uplift for publishers (averaged across desktop and mobile sites) according to internal data. To help publishers capture these opportunities and improve the viewability of their instream video ads on websites and apps, we’ve identified the 3 P’s of viewability—premium...

Kristen Bell knows how to tell a story. She's taking a break from Disney’s “Frozen” to help you make every story a performance, with Google Home Mini as her co-star. If you need help with your own storytelling, you can get a Google Home Mini and three Little Golden Books—”The Lion King,” “Aladdin,” and “Frozen”—for $49 at Walmart.  To read along with Google Home Mini, grab one of these Little Golden Books and say, “Hey Google, let’s read along with Disney.” As you read aloud, your Google Home will play sound effects and music to bring more magic to the story. It recognizes where you are in the book, so if you skip ahead or read your favorite part a few times, it can keep up with you and play the right sound effects. We know that interruptions are inevitable, so if you pause for any reason, background music will play until you’re ready to begin again.  As the kids get older, they may want to do story time on their own. For parents who want to give their kids access to th...

Editor’s Note: This week, we’re joining thousands of educators and students at ISTE in Philadelphia. Visit us at booth 2200, where you can demo the latest Chromebook devices and classroom technology from Google and our partners.  Follow along on Twitter and Facebook for the latest news and updates. In order to build technology helps students learn, we try to imagine where the future of education is going. The recent Future of the Classroom Global Report identifies emerging trends in education, backed by research. Here’s how our products and initiatives line up with each of those trends:  Emerging technologies With Google Expeditions , students can go on virtual field trips—and there are 1,000 tours to pick from, including Carmen Sandiego tours published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt . Through the rest of the rest of the year, we’re rolling out an improved Expeditions experience across many Chrome OS devices. Check here to see if your device is compatible. Student...

Editor’s Note: This week we're launching six new media literacy activities for Be Internet Awesome , designed to help kids analyze and evaluate media as they navigate the internet. The new activities were developed in collaboration with experts Anne Collier, executive director of The Net Safety Collaborative, and Faith Rogow, PhD, co-author of The Teacher’s Guide to Media Literacy and a co-founder of the National Association for Media Literacy Education. As a reading specialist and former high school English teacher, I’ve witnessed technology enhance our lives in and out of the classroom. But that comes with lots of challenges, like learning to communicate responsibly, being kind online and deciphering what is real and what is fake. We need the right tools and resources to help kids make the most of technology, and while good digital safety and citizenship resources exist for families, more can be done for media literacy. I’ve worked alongside dozens of educators who believe tha...

Google Maps helps people explore, navigate and get things done—and increasingly people are using Google Maps to find local businesses. Over the years, we’ve added more than 200 million places to Google Maps and every month we connect people to businesses more than nine billion times, including more than one billion phone calls and three billion requests for directions.  To help people find the places and businesses they're looking for—both big and small— Local Guides , business owners and people using Maps every day can contribute to business information. We get millions of contributions each day (like new business profiles, reviews, star ratings, and more) and the vast majority of these contributions are helpful and accurate. But occasionally, business scammers take advantage of local listings to make a profit. They do things like charge business owners for services that are actually free, defraud customers by posing as real businesses, and impersonate real businesses to secu...

A range of governments, tech platforms, and civil society are focused on how best to deal with illegal and problematic online content. There’s broad agreement on letting people create, communicate, and find information online, while preventing people from misusing content-sharing platforms like social networks and video-sharing sites. We’ve been working on this challenge for years, using both computer science tools and human reviewers to identify and stop a range of online abuse , from “get rich quick” schemes to disinformation to child sexual abuse material . We respond promptly to valid notices of specific illegal content, and we prohibit other types of content on various different services. A mix of people and technology helps us identify inappropriate content and enforce our policies, and we continue to improve our practices . Earlier this year we issued an in-depth review of how we combat disinformation, and YouTube continues to regularly update its Community Guidelines En...

I served in the United States Marine Corps for three years. I was deployed in 2001, just after the September 11th attacks, and again in 2003 during the invasion of Iraq. After my final deployment, I returned to Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton. But just a few nights after arriving back in the states, I was involved in a car accident that left me paralyzed from the neck down. The six years following the accident were some of the toughest I’ve ever experienced, and I wasn’t sure what the future might hold for me. I felt like everything had been taken from me, and it was hard not to focus on all the things I could no longer do. But everything changed when I discovered the world of adaptive sports, which let me experience the camaraderie of the military again and the adrenaline rush of competitive sports. This discovery was a major turning point in my life, and I knew I needed to share these experiences with other veterans like me. But these events are expensive. So my friends and I st...

A circular Google and how we plan to get there People love stuff. During the 20th Century, the use of raw materials rose globally at twice the rate as the population. All of this consumption puts a strain on resources. In fact, just last year, humanity’s consumption of resources--such as metals, timber and even land--required 1.7 planet Earths to sustain.So, is all this demand for ‘stuff’ inherently unsustainable, or is the problem with how we take, make and waste it? The sheer scale of our resource economy is almost unimaginable: Billions of tons of materials, from plastic straws and  blocks of concrete to bales of wheat and sheets of metal, all of these things are constantly being taken, made, moved around, built with, used up, and disposed of, all across the world. For too long, the damaging environmental consequences of these linear systems remained relatively invisible. Today, however, the impact cannot be ignored. One garbage truck of plastic is dumped into our oceans ev...

When you’re searching for a song’s lyrics, often you’ll see an information box in Search that shows the lyrics on the page. This feature has been under scrutiny this week, so we wanted to explain how it works and where the lyrics come from. How lyrics appear in Search Lyrics can appear in information boxes and on Knowledge Panels in Search when you’re looking for songs or lyrics. While we do this to help you find that information quickly, we also ensure that the songwriters are paid for their creative work. To do that, we pay music publishers for the right to display lyrics, since they manage the rights to these lyrics on behalf of the songwriters. Where the lyrics text comes from Here’s something you might not know: music publishers often don’t have digital copies of the lyrics text. In these cases, we—like music streaming services and other companies—license the lyrics text from third parties. We do not crawl or scrape websites to source these lyrics. The lyrics that you see ...

As we work to build a more helpful Google, we know our responsibility to help starts at home. For us, that means being a good neighbor in the place where it all began over 20 years ago: the San Francisco Bay Area. Today, Google is one of the Bay Area’s largest employers. Across the region, one issue stands out as particularly urgent and complex: housing. The lack of new supply, combined with the rising cost of living, has resulted in a severe shortage of affordable housing options for long-time middle and low income residents. As Google grows throughout the Bay Area—whether it’s in our home town of Mountain View, in San Francisco, or in our future developments in San Jose and Sunnyvale—we’ve invested in developing housing that meets the needs of these communities. But there’s more to do. Today we’re announcing an additional $1 billion investment in housing across the Bay Area. First, over the next 10 years, we’ll repurpose at least $750 million of Google’s land, most of which is c...

As May flowers bloomed, we watched our garden of blog posts grow. New features in Android phones and Gmail cropped up, and we’ve got some updates for cloud developers. Plus, check out photos and details about our new machine learning supercomputers. Here’s what was new. Android phones help add security. Android phones (versions 7.0+, Nougat) now come with a built-in security key . This is the FIDO type of security key, an industry standard that can be used for two-factor authentication—an extra verification step on top of a password that makes your sign-ins resistant to phishing scams. Calendar now comes in dark mode. When you’re looking at your Google Calendar, or at Keep, our task management tool, you can now see it in dark mode . This is nice in low light, for those of you checking the next day’s schedule in the dark, since it reduces screen brightness. Whether it’s enabled by default will depend on your version of Android and your settings. Plus, we announced the launch of Gmai...

As our CEO Sundar Pichai announced today in my home state of Oklahoma, we’re making our largest ever computer science education grant from Google.org to support 4-H , the largest youth development organization in the country. This $6 million grant—made as part of Grow with Google's efforts to ensure that everyone has access to future opportunities—will help provide more than 1 million youth across the country with computer science skills, plus computer science training for their educators. 4-H is a second home for students like Decklan Thomas, a high schooler from Bruceton Mills, West Virginia (population 86). Following three generations in the trucking industry, Decklan was certain that he was on a path to becoming a diesel mechanic. The field was appealing not only because of family tradition, but also because it allowed him to do something he liked: identifying problems and fixing them. One day, he learned about computer science through his local 4-H chapter. He didn’t even...

Editor’s Note: This week we’re making some big moves around the $13 billion U.S. investment we announced in February. On Monday, our CFO Ruth Porat was in Michigan to announce an additional investment in our offices in Ann Arbor and Detroit. And tomorrow, we’re breaking ground on a new data center in Midlothian, TX, and expanding our office in Austin. Today, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was in Oklahoma to announce a $600 million investment to expand our data center in Mayes County, as well as our biggest computer science education grant in Google.org’s history. Read his edited remarks below. I enjoy visiting the places our data centers call home. I especially love to see the local touches. In the case of Pryor, it’s the mechanical bull in the lobby, which I’m told is a lot of fun. It requires good positioning, strong balance, and sometimes digging in your heels. So, not much different from my day job. But the real reason I look forward to these visits is the community. It’s a privi...

Many of you store your photos and videos on both Google Drive and Google Photos, which keeps them safe and easy to access. We’ve heard feedback that the connection between these services is confusing, so next month, we’re making some changes to simplify the experience across Drive and Photos. Changes to automatic sync between Google Drive and Google Photos Starting in July, new photos and videos from Drive won’t automatically show in Photos. Similarly, new photos and videos in Photos will not be added to the Photos folder in Drive. Photos and videos you delete in Drive will not be removed from Photos. Similarly, items you delete in Photos will not be removed from Drive. This change is designed to help prevent accidental deletion of items across products.   New “Upload from Drive” feature in Google Photos We’ve heard that many of you would like more granular control when copying photos and videos from Drive into Photos. So we’re bringing a new feature to photos.google.com cal...

Editor’s Note: Lee Da-rang is a graduate of the Campus for Moms program at Campus in Seoul , a hub run by Google for Startups where entrepreneurs can discover a supportive community, work on their big idea, and gain access to resources like mentorship and technical training. Recently, the author and six other Campus for Moms graduates published a book about their experience. I’ll be honest, I was a bit overwhelmed as a new mom. I found it hard to reconcile my former work as a counselor with this new role as a mom, which I felt ill-prepared for. I blogged about my experience and found a community online, which became the inspiration for my business. My idea was to create an online community for parents that offers training and solutions to guide them through the many choices, challenges, and joys of parenthood. But growing an idea into a successful online business is not easy, especially with my hands full as a busy mom. I had no idea where to start. One day, I happened upon Camp...

As a first-time Black founder from South Carolina, Harold Hughes isn’t your stereotypical startup CEO.  Despite his infectious enthusiasm and extensive sales experience, more than 140 investors passed on Bandwagon , his analytics company for sports venues, teams and fans. But after three years of no’s, Harold finally received a resounding yes with funding from Backstage Capital at the 2016 Google for Startups Black Founders Immersion Program. Not fitting in was exactly why Harold was the perfect fit for Backstage Capital’s team of “venture catalysts.” “I found out later that Backstage saw more than 2,000 companies, and we were one of the startups they bet on,” remembers Harold. “I've always appreciated their team for believing in us early on and helping us find additional investors, minimize our costs, and amplify our message.” Backstage Capital shares our belief that great ideas can come from anywhere, and we want to help them support more founders like Harold. So we’re partn...

In 2019, kids around the world are getting a much different education than their parents did. In addition to traditional subjects like reading and math, today’s children are learning digital skills—and taking more control over their educational experiences. In recent years, new approaches and new tools have led to shifts in the classroom that are more significant than any other period in recent history. Google for Education partnered with a global team of researchers to understand these changes, examining hundreds of research studies and interviewing fourteen global education leaders. Today, we’re rolling out the Future of the Classroom Global Report , which examines research-based trends in classroom education. We’re highlighting eight key trends, exploring what’s driving these shifts and locating where they’re happening. Educators and guardians play pivotal roles in student success, and forging successful relationships between these groups is more top of mind than ever. In the U....

Many people have shaped my life—my parents who brought me into the world; Miss Moran, my fifth grade teacher, who pushed me to be a better student; my late mentor Bill McCarthy who helped guide my career early in my professional life. But perhaps the most meaningful people in my life are my husband, whom I have been with for nearly 30 years, and my son, who gives me more joy (and a fair amount of frustration) than I could have ever imagined. For them, I owe thanks in large part to a valiant handful of New Yorkers whom I've never me. Their act of defiance ultimately enabled me to live, love and be who I am. It was early in the morning on Saturday, June 28, 1969, when the police raided the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, one of the few places at the time where LGBTQ people could gather openly. New Yorkers fought back. This altercation, known as the Stonewall Riots, led to angry protests that lasted for days and sparked the modern fight for LGBTQ rights around the world. In 2...