Friday 28 June 2019
Responsible AI: Putting our principles into action
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 responsibly. This past year, thousands of Googlers have completed training in machine learning fairness. We’ve also piloted ethics trainings across four offices and organized an AI ethics speaker series hosted on three continents.
Tools and research
Over the last year, we’ve focused on sharing knowledge, building technical tools and product updates, and cultivating a framework for developing responsible and ethical AI that benefits everyone. This includes releasing more than 75 research papers on topics in responsible AI, including machine learning fairness, explainability, and privacy and security, and developed and open sourced 12 new tools. For example:
- The What-If Tool is a new feature that lets users analyze an ML model without writing code. It enables users to visualize biases and the effects of various fairness constraints as well as compare performance across multiple models.
- Google Translate reduces gender bias by providing feminine and masculine translations for some gender-neutral words on the Google Translate website.
- We expanded our work in federated learning, a new approach to machine learning that allows developers to train AI models and make products smarter without your data ever leaving your device. It’s also now open-sourced as TensorFlow Federated.
- Our People + AI Guidebook is a toolkit of methods and decision-making frameworks for how to build human-centered AI products. It launched in May and includes contributions from 40 Google product teams.
We continue to update the Responsible AI Practices quarterly, as we reflect on the latest technical ideas and work at Google.
Review process
Our review process helps us meet our AI Principles. We encourage all Google employees to consider how the AI Principles affect their projects, and we’re evolving our processes to ensure we’re thoughtfully considering and assessing new projects, products, and deals. In each case we consider benefits and assess how we can mitigate risks. Here are two examples:
Cloud AI Hub
With Cloud AI Hub, enterprises and other organizations can share and more readily access a variety of already-trained machine learning models. Much of AI Hub’s content would be published by organizations outside of Google, which would make it difficult for us to evaluate all the content along the AI Principles. As a result, we evaluated the ethical considerations around releasing the AI Hub, such as the potential for harmful dual use, abuse, or presenting misleading information.
In the course of the review, the team developed a two-tiered strategy for handling potentially risky and harmful content:
- Encouraging community members to weigh in on issues like unfair bias. To support the community, Cloud AI provides resources (like the inclusive ML guide) to help users identify trustworthy content.
- Crafting a Terms of Service for Cloud AI Hub, specifically the sections on content and conduct restrictions.
These safeguards made it more likely that the AI Hub’s content ecosystem would be useful and well-maintained and as a result, we went ahead with launching the AI Hub.
Text-to-speech (TTS) research paper
A research group within Google wrote an academic paper that addresses a major challenge in AI research: systems often need to be retrained from scratch, with huge amounts of data, to take on even slightly different tasks. This paper detailed an efficient text-to-speech (TTS) network, which allows a system to be trained once and then adapted to new speakers with much less time and data.
While smarter text-to-speech networks could help individuals with voice disabilities, ALS, or tracheotomies, we recognize the potential for such technologies to be used for harmful applications, like synthesizing an individual’s voice for deceptive purposes.
Ultimately we determined that the technology described in the paper had limited potential for misuse for several reasons, including the quality of data required to make it work. Arbitrary recordings from the internet would not satisfy these requirements. In addition, there are enough differences between samples generated by the network and speakers’ voices for listeners to identify what’s real and what’s not. As a result, we concluded that this paper aligned with our AI Principles, but this exercise reinforced our commitment to identifying and preempting the potential for misuse.
Engaging with external stakeholders
Ongoing dialogue with the broader community is essential to developing socially responsible AI. We’ve engaged with policymakers and the tech community, participated in more than 100 workshops, research conferences and summits, and directly engaged with more than 4,000 stakeholders across the world.
As advances in AI continue, we’ll continue to share our perspectives and engage with academia, industry, and policymakers to promote the responsible development of AI. We support smart regulation tailored to specific sectors and use cases, and earlier this year we published this white paper to help promote pragmatic and forward-looking approaches to AI governance. It outlines five areas where government should work with civil society and AI practitioners to cultivate a framework for AI.
We recognize there’s always more to do and will continue working with leaders, policymakers, academics, and other stakeholders from across industries to tackle these important issues. Having these conversations, doing the proper legwork, and ensuring the inclusion of the widest array of perspectives, is critical to ensuring that AI joins the long list of technologies transforming life for the better.
by via The Keyword
Thursday 27 June 2019
It’s time for a new international tax deal
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 countries around the world where we have offices helping to sell our services.
We’re not alone in paying most of our corporate income tax in our home country. That allocation reflects long-standing rules about how corporate profits should be split among various countries. American companies pay most of their corporate taxes in the United States—just as German, British, French and Japanese firms pay most of their corporate taxes in their home countries.
For over a century, the international community has developed treaties to tax foreign firms in a coordinated way. This framework has always attributed more profits to the countries where products and services are produced, rather than where they are consumed. But it’s time for the system to evolve, ensuring a better distribution of tax income.
The United States, Germany, and other countries have put forward new proposals for modernizing tax rules, with more taxes paid in countries where products and services are consumed. We hope governments can develop a consensus around a new framework for fair taxation, giving companies operating around the world clear rules that promote a sensible business investment.
The need for modernization isn’t limited to the technology sector. Both the OECD and a group of EU experts have concluded that the wider economy is “digitizing,” creating a need for broad-based reform of current rules. Almost all multinational companies use data, computers, and internet connectivity to power their products and services. And many are seeking ways to integrate these technologies, creating “smart” appliances, cars, factories, homes and hospitals.
But even as this multilateral process is advancing, some countries are considering going it alone, imposing new taxes on foreign companies. Without a new, comprehensive and multilateral agreement, countries might simply impose discriminatory unilateral taxes on foreign firms in various sectors. Indeed, we already see such problems in some of the specific proposals that have been put forward.
That kind of race to the bottom would create new barriers to trade, slow cross-border investment, and hamper economic growth. We’re already seeing this in a handful of countries proposing new taxes on all kinds of goods—from software to consumer products—that involve intellectual property. Specialized taxes on a handful of U.S. technology companies would do little more than claim taxes that are currently owed in the U.S., heightening trade tensions. But if governments work together, more taxes can be paid where products and services are consumed, in a coordinated and mutually acceptable way. This give-and-take is needed to ensure a better, more balanced global tax system.
We believe this approach will restore confidence in the international tax system and promote more cross-border trade and investment. We strongly support the OECD’s work to end the current uncertainty and develop new tax principles. We call on governments and companies to work together to accelerate this reform and forge a new, lasting, and global agreement.
by via The Keyword
Wednesday 26 June 2019
3 ways to improve video viewability and grow revenue
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 experiences, placement, and player.
1. Premium experiences, everywhere people are watching
A premium video experience can drive more value for your viewers and make your video ad inventory more appealing to advertisers. By making your videos load quickly, easy to find, and offering captivating content across screens, viewers will keep returning to your platform and your viewability rates can increase.
An impactful update you can make is to improve the speed of your website or app. Start by using tools like PageSpeed Insights or App Speed reports to understand your existing speeds. Then, try implementing solutions like lazy loading for article pages (waiting to load a video until someone scrolls down to it on your website or app), which can decrease latency and increase viewability rates.
2. Placement—making it easy for people to find and watch your video content and ads
The placement of your videos can make a big difference in your viewability. To make it as easy as possible for people to find and watch your video content and ads, place videos in an optimal location. You can run tests to identify where users spend time on your website or app and place the video player in those locations. To do this, try moving your video player to a different location on your website or app, and then measure if viewability rates change in your Google Ad Manager viewability reports.
3. Player—implementing larger video players can maximize viewability
Typically, the larger the video player, the more viewable the ad. By increasing your instream video player size to fill the majority of the screen, you can increase the viewability of your video ads. For example, according to the State of Ad Viewability report published in September 2018, a 2560 x 1440 video player has the highest viewability rate at 95 percent. Evaluate your video ad inventory sizes and move away from smaller video ads that don’t deliver the viewability rates desired by you or your advertising partners.Using Ad Manager to measure your video viewability
If you’re just getting started with video viewability, make sure you have the Google Ad Manager Interactive Media Ads SDK implemented on your websites and apps to enable Google's MRC-accredited viewability solution, Active View. We also recommend using the Open Measurement SDK for mobile apps, which offers publishers a single SDK that can be used by multiple measurement providers to measure in-app viewability.
Google Ad Manager offers a variety of reports to help you understand and optimize your video ad viewability. You can combine different reporting dimensions, such as creative size and custom criteria such as above-the-fold or below-the-fold placements, to understand potential areas for improvement and ways to implement the 3 P’s of viewability.
Following these best practices can have a big impact on improving the viewability of your video ads, and make the video ad experience better for everyone—users, advertisers, and publishers. For step-by-step recommendations on ways to improve the viewability of your video ads and measure your viewability in Google Ad Manager, download our guide on Video Viewability Best Practices for Publishers.
by via The Keyword
Tuesday 25 June 2019
Monday 24 June 2019
Make every story a performance with help from Kristen Bell
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 the Assistant on Google Home, you can create an account for kids under 13 through Family Link, then link their Google Account and voice to Google Home. And remember—Google Home already comes with lots of other Disney games, so you can go on interactive adventures with some of your favorite characters right from your living room.
So, prepare your costumes, work on your character voices and get ready to read. Google Home and Disney will set the stage.
by via The Keyword
Building the Future of the Classroom with Google for Education
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
WithGoogle 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.
Students can also use Tour Creator—which was just recognized as an AASL 2019 Best Website for Teaching & Learning—to create their own virtual reality tours. They can take fellow students or parents on tours of their town or school using the Expeditions App.
Innovating teaching
We’re continuing to grow the Teacher Center, our library of free online trainings for educators. For teachers getting started with our tools for the first time, we’ve added courses for Expeditions and G Suite Editors (Google Docs and Slides ) to complement the existing trainings on Classroom, Forms, and Jamboard.
We’ve also created shorter courses across a variety of topics, like helping teachers support English language learners, how to use Chromebook accessibility features, or how to get started with our CS First and Applied Digital Skills curriculums.
And for educators who want to get the most out of Google technology, local experts are there to help. Check out our network of trainers, innovators, reference schools and local PD partners on our newly re-designed EDU Directory.
Coaching in the classroom
For educators to benefit from investments in technology, they need to know how to integrate it into their classrooms. The Dynamic Learning Project trains teachers on how to effectively use classroom technology, and we have a new training curriculum for administrators, teaching them how to support instructional coaches in their schools.
We’re also helping school administrators quantify their organization’s Google for Education implementation across products (G Suite and Chromebooks) and programs (Certification and Transformation) with the launch of the EDU Transformation Report.
Additionally, we’ve expanded our resources to help school and district leaders think about centering equity in their school’s transformation. So we created a new Educational Equity page with resources and case studies to help school leaders understand how equity can be a central characteristic in all seven pillars of the Transformation Framework.
Digital Responsibility
Applied Digital Skillshas seven new lessons focused on digital wellbeing. Teachers can use these free, project-based lessons to teach students to build healthy digital habits, avoid online scams, understand their digital footprint, and more.
Life Skills and Workforce Preparation
Applied Digital Skills also has new lessons that prepare middle and high school students to use G Suite fluently in college, the workforce and beyond. To prove their mastery, students can take the professional G Suite certification and add it to resumes and applications. Other new lessons focus on introducing students to machine learning, making art with Google Sheets, calculating probability, and exploring women’s history.
Computational Thinking
CS First, our coding curriculum for students in elementary and middle school, has a new professional development session for teachers to integrate coding activities into English Language Arts, math and science classes.
Acquired by Google last year, Workbench is a content library for educators to discover, create, remix, and share lessons and resources. At ISTE we’re announcing a new integration with the Workbench Blockly programming canvas and Google Sheets. This enables people to build Blockly programs to control multiple bluetooth devices (robots, drones, sensors, microcontrollers) and send that data to or retrieve data from Google Sheets.
We’re honored to be a part of a global community of educators and parents who help their students develop problem-solving skills, safely navigate the digital world, and prepare for future careers. As classrooms continue to evolve, our products to help educators and students evolve as well.
by via The Keyword
Helping kids learn to evaluate what they see online
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 that media literacy is essential to safety and citizenship in the digital age, but agree that it’s a topic that can be tough to cover.
Fortunately, the new media literacy lessons developed for Be Internet Awesome make it easy and fun for kids to learn key skills for evaluating what they see online. These lessons complement the program’s digital safety and citizenship topics, which help kids explore the online world in a safe, confident manner.
Be Internet Awesome is like an instruction manual for making smart decisions online. Kids today need a guide to the internet and media just as they need instruction on other topics. We need help teaching them about credible sources, the power of words and images and more importantly, how to be smart and savvy when seeing different media while browsing the web.
All of these resources are not only available for classrooms, but also free and easily accessible for families as well. They’re in both English and in Spanish, along with eight other languages, and if you’d like to get some hands-on training as well, Google is partnering with the YMCA and National PTA across multiple cities to host online safety workshops.
I encourage parents to take advantage of these resources and the new activities on media literacy. Let’s not only teach kids, but also inspire, educate and empower families to make tech work better for them as well.
by via The Keyword
Friday 21 June 2019
Thursday 20 June 2019
How we fight fake business profiles on Google Maps
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 secure leads and then sell them. Even though fake business profiles are a small percentage of the overall business profiles on Google, local business scammers have been a thorn in the internet’s side for over a decade. They even existed back when business listings were printed, bound and delivered to your doorstep. We take these issues very seriously and have been using a wide array of techniques and approaches to limit abuse on our platforms.
These scammers use a wide range of deceptive techniques to try to game our system—as we shut them down, they change their techniques, and the cycle continues. Although it’s important that we make it easy for legitimate businesses to get their business profiles on Google, we’ve also implemented strict policies and created tools that enable people to flag these issues so we can take action. It’s a constant balancing act and we’re continually working on new and better ways to fight these scams using a variety of ever-evolving manual and automated systems. But we can’t share too many details about these efforts without running the risk of actually helping scammers find new ways to beat our systems—which defeats the purpose of all the work we do.
We understand the concerns of those people and businesses impacted by local business scammers and back in 2017 we announced the progress we’d made. There was still work to be done then and there’s still work to be done now. We have an entire team dedicated to addressing these issues and taking constant action to remove profiles that violate our policies. Here’s more information about the progress we made against this type of abuse last year:
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We took down more than 3 million fake business profiles––and more than 90 percent of those business profiles were removed before a user could even see the profile.
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Our internal systems were responsible for more than 85 percent of these removals.
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More than 250,000 of the fake business profiles we removed were reported to us by users.
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We disabled more than 150,000 user accounts that were found to be abusive – a 50 percent increase from 2017.
This year, we’ve already introduced a new way to report suspicious business profiles and have started to apply refined techniques to business categories where we’re seeing an increase in fraud attempts. To help foster a healthy ecosystem, we’re also donating settlement funds from litigation against bad actors to organizations that educate businesses and consumers about fraud. As we continue to fight against fraud, we’re making sure people people can flag issues when they see them. Here’s how:
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People can learn more about our policies for businesses representing themselves on Google and user contributed content to determine whether or not to report businesses or content for review.
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People can flag individual business profiles for removal. We use such reports to investigate content and take it down if it’s found to be in violation of our policies. We also investigate the associated accounts if they’re suspected of broader abuse.
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People can report multiple business profiles at once via the business redressal form to kick off the review process.
Every month Maps is used by more than a billion people around the world, and every day we and our users work as a community to improve the map for each other. We know that a small minority will continue trying to scam others, so there will always be work to do and we’re committed to keep doing better.
by via The Keyword
Wednesday 19 June 2019
Oversight frameworks for content-sharing platforms
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 anin-depth review of how we combat disinformation, and YouTube continues to regularly update its Community Guidelines Enforcement Report.
Tackling this problem is a shared responsibility. Many laws, covering everything from consumer protection to defamation to privacy, already govern online content. Safe harbors and Good Samaritan laws for online platforms support the free flow of information, innovation, and economic growth, while giving platforms the legal certainty they need to combat problematic content. Over the internet’s history, many countries have not only established criteria to qualify for safe harbors, but also developed codes of practice (like the European Union’s Code of Conduct On Countering Illegal Hate Speech and Code of Practice on Disinformation). And companies have worked together, as with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a coalition sharing information on curbing online terrorism. Approaches continue to evolve—for instance, earlier this month we joined other companies and countries in signing the Christchurch Call to Action To Eliminate Terrorist and Violent Extremist Content Online.
We’ve previously shared our experiences in order to promote smart regulation in areas like privacy, artificial intelligence, and government surveillance, and I recently wrote about specific legal frameworks for combating illegal content online. In that spirit, we are offering some ideas for approaching oversight of content-sharing platforms:
Clarity - Content-sharing platforms are working to develop and enforce responsible content policies that establish baseline expectations for users and articulate a clear basis for removal of content as well as for suspension or closure of accounts. But it’s also important for governments to draw clear lines between legal and illegal speech, based on evidence of harm and consistent with norms of democratic accountability and international human rights. Without clear definitions, there is a risk of arbitrary or opaque enforcement that limits access to legitimate information.
Suitability - It’s important for oversight frameworks to recognize the different purposes and functions of different services. Rules that make sense for social networks, video-sharing platforms, and other services primarily designed to help people share content with a broad audience may not be appropriate for search engines, enterprise services, file storage, communication tools, or other online services, where users have fundamentally different expectations and applications. Different types of content may likewise call for different approaches.
Transparency - Meaningful transparency promotes accountability. We launched our first Transparency Report more than eight years ago, and we continue to extend our transparency efforts over time. Done thoughtfully, transparency can promote best practices, facilitate research, and encourage innovation, without enabling abuse of processes.
Flexibility - We and other tech companies have pushed the boundaries of computer science in identifying and removing problematic content at scale. These technical advances require flexible legal frameworks, not static or one-size-fits-all mandates. Likewise, legal approaches should recognize the varying needs and capabilities of startups and smaller companies.
Overall quality - The scope and complexity of modern platforms requires a data-driven approach that focuses on overall results rather than anecdotes. While we will never eliminate all problematic content, we should recognize progress in making that content less prominent. Reviews under the European Union’s codes on hate speech and disinformation offer a useful example of assessing overall progress against a complex set of goals.
Cooperation - International coordination should strive to align on broad principles and practices. While there is broad international consensus on issues like child sexual abuse imagery, in other areas individual countries will make their own choices about the limits of permissible speech, and one country should not be able to impose its content restrictions on another.
The recent Christchurch Call is a powerful reminder of what we can do when a range of stakeholders work together to address the challenges of online content. The internet has expanded access to information, bringing incredible benefits to people around the world. And as with any new information technology, societies and cultures are developing new social norms, institutions, and laws to address new challenges and opportunities. We look forward to contributing to that extraordinarily important project.
by via The Keyword
How Oscar Mike helps keep injured veterans on the move
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 started the Oscar Mike Foundation to provide funding for wounded, ill or injured veterans to participate in adaptive sports. The foundation is named for a term we used in the military, “Oscar Mike," which means to get “on the move.” To raise money and minimize overhead costs for the foundation, we also started Oscar Mike Apparel, an American-made lifestyle brand that offers T-shirts and activewear through our online store.
Most of our apparel sales happen through our website. With the help of Google Ads and free resources from Grow with Google—like a livestreamed workshop on connecting with customers online—I’ve been able to share our mission with more people around the world. Since 2011, 400 veterans from all around the country have participated in our programs, and we’ve offered more than 1,000 sporting scholarships.
Today, together with Grow with Google and the Google Veterans Network—an internal community of military veterans, service members, civilian allies and family members—we’ll meet with transitioning service members and veterans for a career workshop in New York. There, we’ll offer resume and job search support as they figure out their next moves in civilian life. So many veterans struggle to determine their next steps after leaving the military, and at Oscar Mike, we want to help wounded, ill or injured veterans set new goals and find purpose again.
To learn more about free tools and resources that can help veterans find their next move, visit Grow with Google.
by via The Keyword
Tuesday 18 June 2019
A circular Google in a sustainable world
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 every minute, landfills are overflowing, and our climate crisis is fueled by energy used to sustain this take-make-waste model.
The ‘circular economy’ concept challenges this disconnect between consumption and consequences. In a circular economy abundance become possible, livelihoods raised and progress fueled, all by keeping stuff, circular.
Our vision is simple: we want a circular Google within a sustainable world.
The challenges to making this vision a reality are as daunting as it is exciting. It demands that we redefine how systems work—from what we value and the choices we make, to the assumptions and industrial processes that have been standard practice across our economy for decades. Our new circular Google strategy is part of our wider effort to build sustainability into everything we do.
As we built out this strategy, an intriguing insight emerged. An element of reaching a fully circular economy requires identifying, tracking and managing the overwhelming and globe-spanning swirl of materials. Thankfully, technological developments in the 21st century suggest a way to do so: to view all this stuff as information.
Considering the circular economy as an information challenge is inspiring for us at Google. It suggests that we can leverage our scale, resources and technological expertise to help the world meet resource needs.
It’s been estimated that transitioning to a circular economy could generate $4.5 trillion in new economic output by 2030. That fact illustrates the potential to achieve abundance and make progress, while also significantly improving human and environmental systems.
So we are excited to announce a new goal: Maximize the reuse of finite resources across our operations, products and supply chains and enable others to do the same.But we can’t do it alone. A truly systemic shift to a circular economy goes way beyond Google. We’ll need to create new, and even unlikely, partnerships across industries. The scale of the change required to reach circularity will touch every part of society and span the entire global economy.
If you are a Google team member, partner, supplier or one of the billions of people who use Google every day, we hope you will come on this exciting journey with us.
by via The Keyword
How we help you find lyrics in Google Search
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 in information boxes on Search come directly from lyrics content providers, and they are updated automatically as we receive new lyrics and corrections on a regular basis.
News reports this week suggested that one of our lyrics content providers is in a dispute with a lyrics site about where their written lyrics come from. We’ve asked our lyrics partner to investigate the issue to ensure that they’re following industry best practices in their approach. We always strive to uphold high standards of conduct for ourselves and from the partners we work with.
To help make it clearer where the lyrics come from, we’ll soon include attribution to the third party providing the digital lyrics text. We will continue to take an approach that respects and compensates rights-holders, and ensures that music publishers and songwriters are paid for their work.
by via The Keyword
$1 billion for 20,000 Bay Area homes
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 currently zoned for office or commercial space, as residential housing. This will enable us to support the development of at least 15,000 new homes at all income levels in the Bay Area, including housing options for middle and low-income families. (By way of comparison, 3,000 total homes were built in the South Bay in 2018). We hope this plays a role in addressing the chronic shortage of affordable housing options for long-time middle and low income residents.
Second, we’ll establish a $250 million investment fund so that we can provide incentives to enable developers to build at least 5,000 affordable housing units across the market.
In addition to the increased supply of affordable housing these investments will help create, we will give $50 million in grants through Google.org to nonprofits focused on the issues of homelessness and displacement. This builds on the $18 million in grants we’ve given to help address homelessness over the last five years, including $3 million we gave to the newly openedSF Navigation Center and $1.5 million toaffordable housing for low income veterans and households in Mountain View.
In the coming months, we’ll continue to work with local municipalities to support plans that allow residential developers to build quickly and economically. Our goal is to get housing construction started immediately, and for homes to be available in the next few years. In Mountain View, we’ve already worked with the city to change zoning in the North Bayshore area to free up land for housing, and we’re currently in productive conversations with Sunnyvale and San Jose.
Of course, affordable and quality housing is only one way we’re investing in Bay Area communities. We’re also fundingcommunity spaces that provide free access to co-working areas for nonprofits, improving transit options forthe community and our employees (taking 9,000 cars off the road per day), and supporting programs forcareer development,education andlocal businesses.
Across all of this, our goal is to help communities succeed over the long term, and make sure that everyone has access to opportunity, whether or not they work in tech. Solving a big issue like the housing shortage will take collaboration across business, government and community organizations, and we look forward to working alongside others to make the Bay Area a place where everyone who lives here can thrive.
by via The Keyword
Monday 17 June 2019
Friday 14 June 2019
Thursday 13 June 2019
Cloud Covered: What was new with Google Cloud in May
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 Gmail confidential mode last month, so you’ll soon be able to send messages with built-in information rights management controls. This means you can create expiration dates and revoke sent messages, plus these messages can’t be forwarded, copied, printed or downloaded.
Learn lots more about these and other topics in the brand-new G Suite Learning Center.
Supercomputers for machine learning arrived.
Machine learning (ML) can help with tasks ranging from image recognition to disease research and medical diagnoses. Machine learning requires data scientists to build a model and train it with examples so that the computer can eventually learn a pattern. This requires a lot of computing power. Super powerful and expensive data centers full of servers were not enough to handle the growth of AI workloads and computational horsepower, so we created TPUs, our own hardware chips, just for the purpose of speeding up machine learning. Now, those TPUs are publicly available in pods, which are essentially stacks of these TPUs linked together to form an AI supercomputer. Data scientists and researchers can use them to do machine learning tasks much faster, in minutes or hours compared to days or weeks previously. Make sure to take a look at the photos in the post—when it comes to massive modern supercomputers, a picture is worth a thousand words.
What cloud developers are learning about
Behind many of the apps and websites you use everyday are these things called APIs (short for application programming interface), which essentially allow these apps and sites to talk to each other. Think of a website that has a Google map embedded, for example—there’s an API in use there. API design is a hot topic among developers, since they have to make sure that different applications can all talk to each other to make a website or app run more smoothly for users. One popular post last month was about a newer way to design APIs that is simpler and requires less documentation for developers and software.
That’s a wrap for May. Stay tuned to the Google Cloud blog for more.
by via The Keyword
With 4-H, helping more students learn computer science
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 know he was coding at first—it just felt like solving a puzzle on the computer. As he began to do more coding, he quickly saw the parallels between the skills you need to be a mechanic and the computer science he was learning at 4-H. He says, “You see something wrong, then fix it—and end up with something amazing.” Decklan is still enthusiastic about becoming a diesel mechanic, but he’s now also exploring other opportunities like becoming a biomedical engineer or even going into the Navy.
I know the impact of these types of programs because I grew up going to my local 4-H chapter in Oklahoma. I loved learning about animal care, teamwork, and practical farm skills—a hallmark of 4-H. Like Decklan, those skills inspired me to learn how to fix things—I went to the Oklahoma State University and went on to work for Google here in Pryor. And I still fix things: the servers in our data centers that power our internet products for people across the country.
Decklan and I are representative of the many students across the United States who lack access to computer science learning opportunities. It’s estimated that computer science-related jobs are created at nearly four times the rate of other jobs, but students in small towns are less likely to have access to classes and clubs at school compared to suburban students, and their parents are less likely to know about CS opportunities outside of school.
Together with 4-H, we believe in the potential of technology–and youth—to change and improve our lives, industries and communities. Today’s Google.org grant will provide 4-H educators with the resources they need to ensure that students can access the skills they’ll need—both technical and non-technical—to create the technology that may improve our future.
by via The Keyword
Investing in Oklahoma and across the U.S.
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 privilege to meet the people who are making Pryor a great place to live and work.
At Google, we are technology optimists. Not because we believe in technology, but because we believe in people.
The people of Mayes County shared our sense of optimism from the very start. That optimism is why, when Google proposed building a data center here in 2007, you welcomed us with open arms. And that optimism is what’s made it possible for Google to continue our expansion in Pryor in the years since—not once, not twice...but three times. Today’s announcement will make it four.
Pryor is already home to one of Google’s largest data centers in the country. I am pleased to announce that we will be investing another $600 million to expand the data center here and create an additional 100 jobs for the Pryor community. This brings the total investment in Oklahoma to over $3 billion, and total jobs created to more than 500.
It’s part of our $13 billion investment in expanding our data centers across the U.S. This week we also announced new investments in Michigan, and we’re breaking ground on a new data center in Texas.
This national expansion comes at a significant moment for Google. For 21 years we’ve pursued a timeless mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. In that time, we’ve evolved from a company that helps people find answers to a company that helps people throughout their day.
Pryor is a part of our effort to build a more helpful Google for everyone. We’ve spent more than two decades scaling our technical infrastructure to match the growth of information. And we are continuously working to make it more efficient and more reliable.
This site is an important part of our global network of data centers. This network is what powers your searches, your email, all of the photos you store and treasure, and the maps that help you find the fastest way home. And that network includes 13 locations around the world, with new data centers underway in eight additional locations.
It's a privilege to serve billions of people every day. With that privilege comes a big responsibility to ensure that information truly serves everyone. Every day, millions of Americans go online to find answers, learn new skills, and grow their businesses. Two years ago, Google announced Grow with Google, a new effort to expand economic opportunity to all Americans. A big way we do this is through digital skills training. Our partnership with Goodwill is already helping thousands of Oklahomans learn new skills and find jobs.
We’re also excited to help young people learn computer science to prepare them for the jobs of tomorrow. Since 2017, we’ve been working with the National 4-H Council to create a computer science curriculum.
Today we are pleased to be able to build on this work with a $6 million grant to support computer science education in 4-H chapters across the country. This is our largest ever computer science education grant from Google.org. It will help ensure that young people in Oklahoma and 25 other states have access to the curriculum, training, and devices to learn and grow their coding skills. I look forward to joining students to do some coding later today!
Thank you to everyone who has a hand in keeping our data center running smoothly. We’re proud to call Oklahoma home, and look forward to Pryor being a vital part of the engine that powers the internet for years to come.
by via The Keyword
Wednesday 12 June 2019
Changing how Google Drive and Google Photos work together
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 called “Upload from Drive,” which lets you manually choose photos and videos from Drive, including “Shared with Me” items, to import into Photos. Once copied, these items are not connected between the two products. Since photos and videos will no longer sync across both products, items copied in Original Quality will count towards your storage quota in both Drive and Photos.
Backup and Sync for Windows and Mac will continue to work
You’ll still be able to use Backup and Sync on Windows or macOS to upload to both services in High Quality or Original Quality. As before, items uploaded in High Quality won’t count against your account storage quota, and items uploaded using Backup and Sync in Original Quality to both services will count only once towards your quota.
Your existing photos and videos will stay in Google Drive and Google Photos
Any photos or videos from Drive in Photos that you have uploaded prior to this change will remain in Photos. If you have a “Google Photos” folder in Drive, it will remain in Drive, but will no longer update automatically.
Our goal with these changes is to simplify some features that caused confusion for our users, based on feedback and our own research. We’ll continue to look for more ways to help support Drive and Photos users going forward.
If you want to take a closer look at these new changes, please check out our guide.
by via The Keyword
Tuesday 11 June 2019
Monday 10 June 2019
Growing into a mom and CEO
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 Campus for Moms, a program operated by the Google for Startups Campus in Korea. The program provided training and mentorship to help you start your business, but they also gave us support, like childcare services, so that parents can fully dive into their work, while having their child nearby. It was just what I was looking for. The Campus for Moms program taught me different things every week—from customer outreach and marketing, to product development and investment. Little by little, I received the training and feedback to help my little business idea flourish.
The part of the program I remember most vividly is going out onto the streets of Seoul and interviewing potential customers as part of the market research training module. Talking with strangers on the street about my potential business was no easy task. But the feedback from these everyday people, and the survey data I collected during the program, provided invaluable insights. And perhaps more importantly, by explaining my business to others, I eventually developed the courage needed to actually make my idea a reality.
Today, I’m the CEO of a flourishing business. Growing Mom has more than 40,000 social media followers, and we employ regular data management and analysis to constantly improve (a bit more sophisticated than my woman-on-the-street interviews!). We work with trusted psychology and education professionals to provide parents with information in a creative and approachable way. In the future, I want to provide more services and offline experiences that further build community and provide support for parents.
I’m sharing my story for other new mothers who might have an idea, but feel like they don’t have what it takes to grow it into reality, especially while raising their own children. It was Campus for Moms, and the community that shared the experience with me, that gave me the courage to take that leap, and the skills I needed to grow into the mother and the CEO I am today.
by via The Keyword
Friday 7 June 2019
Thursday 6 June 2019
Supporting underrepresented founders with Backstage Accelerator
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 partnering to help scale their new Backstage Accelerator, a three-month program for diverse founders in Detroit, Los Angeles, London and Philadelphia. In addition to initial investments, Backstage Accelerator helps startups reach their next critical milestone, with a team of experienced investors, experts and mentors. And now, they’ll get support from Google, too. Over the next year, each startup will be connected with Google advisors and product experts, onsite workshops in Google spaces, and access to the Google network of resources and support.
Backstage Accelerator is a natural addition to the 50+ organizations in the growing Google for Startups partner network. This year, we're supporting organizations like Founder Gym, Veteran Capital, and SheStarts to help level the playing field for underrepresented founders, connecting them to the resources and network they need to grow. Together, we can close the funding gap and open doors for founders of all backgrounds.
We’re proud to work alongside Backstage Accelerator to change the face of startup success. But don't just take our word for it. Join us in celebrating the incredible companies being built by Backstage Accelerator founders, featured this month on the Google for Startups Twitter, Instagram and Facebook channels.
by via The Keyword
Wednesday 5 June 2019
Tuesday 4 June 2019
What the future of the classroom looks like
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.S., according to our report, 76 percent of teachers and administrators say technology is important in engaging parents with their child’s school performance. Meanwhile, a majority of teachers in Spain (58 percent) report that more fluid communication with parents and students is a major benefit of using technology.
Student-led learning has developed momentum as well. Around the world, educators and guardians seek to give students more agency over their education, from what they learn to how their classroom operates. In America, 65 percent of educators say student-led learning is extremely valuable in developing 21st-century skills. And in Spain, students are pushed to be creative and think independently rather than stick to strict discipline.
And with 92 percent of future jobs globally requiring digital skills, there’s a focus on helping students develop skills for careers that don’t yet exist. Last year, Sweden declared coding a core subject to be taught from the first year of primary school. And there is an appetite for these skills among students, too, with 85 percent of Brazilians from 16-23 indicating that they want to work in the technology sector.
We know that education isn’t black and white, so we’re looking beyond the research, too. Throughout the month, we’ll be hosting digital conference sessions to explore the topics live. And it’s important to consider multiple perspectives, so we’ve partnered with subject matter experts and educators around the world to understand their views on these topics. Together, we hope to shed some light on an ever-changing classroom—and learn something new along the way, too.
by via The Keyword
Stonewall Forever: Honoring LGBTQ+ history through a living monument
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 2016, President Obama designated Christopher Park, the small triangle of green that sits in front of the Stonewall Inn, as the first national monument dedicated to telling the story of this community’s struggle. The Stonewall National Monument serves as a reminder of the continuing fight for civil and human rights.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Stonewall. To recognize this pivotal moment in history, the LGBT Community Center of New York City (The Center) spearheaded the creation of Stonewall Forever, an interactive “living monument” to 50 years of Pride. Google provided support in the form of a $1.5 million grant from Google.org, and volunteers from Google Creative Lab helped bring the experience to life.
Stonewall Forever connects diverse voices from the Stonewall era to the millions of voices in today’s LGBTQ community. The monument is made up of countless colorful pieces that contain digitized historical artifacts, oral histories capturing the early days of the movement, interviews with new voices of LGBTQ equality, and photos and messages added by people around the world.
Anyone can visit Stonewall Forever on the web, and through an augmented reality app that allows you to experience the Stonewall National Monument in New York’s Christopher Park. Explore the past, present and future of Pride and then add your own piece to the ever-growing monument. You can dive deeper by watching a short documentary, directed by Ro Haber, featuring an inclusive array of activists, from across generations, each giving their own interpretation of the Stonewall legacy.
Beyond our support of Stonewall Forever, we’re launching Pride Forever, a campaign honoring the past, present, and future of the LGBTQ+ community. This theme is rooted in sharing the past 50 years of global LGBTQ+ history with our users. Today’s interactive Google Doodle celebrates 50 years of Pride by taking us through its evolution over the decades, with animated illustrations by Doodler Nate Swinehart.
Google Arts & Culture is also preserving even more archives and stories from LGBTQ history, in partnership with The Center,GLBT Historical Society of San Francisco, the National Park Service’s Stonewall Monument, and Cyark. The collection includes never-before-seen photos and videos, 3D models of the Stonewall monuments, and a virtual walking tour of LGBTQ sites in the Village.
Here are a few other ways we’re helping people celebrate Pride.
- Like past years, we’ll identify major Pride parade routes on Google Maps.
- Later this month, check out Google Play for apps, movies, books, and audiobooks to help the LGBTQ+ community share stories and also learn more about the history of LGBTQ+ rights.
- And through Google My Business, business owners can mark their businesses as “LGBTQ-friendly” and as a “Transgender Safe Space” on their Google listing to let customers know they’re always welcome. As of today, more than 190,000 businesses have enabled these attributes on their business listing.
Today, Stonewall lives on in images, histories and monuments—old and new. It also lives on in the LGBTQ community and its supporters. The past paves the way for the future, and Stonewall Forever reminds us that alone we’re strong, but together we’re unstoppable. Pride is forever.
by via The Keyword