If you walk down the halls of our New York office, you might learn something about the history of technology. This month, our walls showcase the contributions of Black inventors in science, technology, engineering and mathematics in celebration of Black History Month.

Black History Month, which is every February in the U.S., provides us with an opportunity to recognize the history and diversity of the communities where we operate. Yesterday, our midwestern Googlers listened to the music of Michigan’s only Black and Latino Orchestra and next week, Dr. Clarence Jones will be speaking to our Bay-area Googlers about writing Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. This is just a small sampling of the dozens of celebrations Googlers are hosting all month long.


Black History Month also gives us a chance to celebrate the diversity of our Googlers and highlight some ways we work with underrepresented groups. One of my favorite examples is the story of the Black Googlers Network (BGN). In June 2006, a group of Googlers looking to connect and foster community among Black colleagues got together to create an internal networking group. The Black Googlers Network started as a mailing list, but quickly grew into much more. Passionate about growing the next generation of Black leaders in the technology industry, BGN partnered with our university programs team to strengthen our relationships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). As a result, we’ve not only increased our recruiting presence at these schools, but are now also partnering with HBCU faculty to develop STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) curriculum, encouraging more students to pursue degrees in these areas and prepare them for careers in technology.

Members of our BGN are also shaping the way we do business. In May of 2009, two recent grads in our Ann Arbor office saw an opportunity, and what started as an idea bounced around between two twenty-somethings turned into an official Google program. The idea was to help minority-owned small businesses grow their online presence and, just a few months later, the idea became a reality when Accelerate with Google officially launched. The program has since grown into a team of several dozen Googlers, all working to get small, minority-owned businesses online and helping those business owners connect with one another.

Our passionate Googlers, like those behind BGN and Accelerate, allow us to better connect with the Black community and help to create an inclusive and diverse workplace. As we throw dozens of celebrations around the country in our Atlanta, Chicago, Ann Arbor, New York, Los Angeles and Mountain View offices to mark Black History Month, we invite you to join us by following our Google for Students and Life at Google pages on Google+, where we’ll be hosting photos, recaps and hangouts throughout the month.

Posted by Yolanda Mangolini, Director of Global Diversity Talent & Inclusion

President Barack Obama declared Friday he's found a solution that will protect religious liberty but also ensure that women have access to free birth control. (Feb. 10)

Former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky spoke to reporters following a hearing on pretrial issues, including whether Sandusky should be confined inside of his home. He faces 52 criminal counts of alleged sexual misconduct involving boys. (Feb. 10)

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum took on President Obama and his policies toward health care and contraception Friday at a conference for conservative political activists. (Feb. 10)

Syrian state television says 28 people were killed in two explosions that targeted security compounds in the northern city of Aleppo. (Feb. 10)

Stunning new time-lapse images of the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, have been released by NASA. (Feb. 10)

An Islamic extremist who admitted killing two U.S. airmen bound for Afghanistan at Frankfurt airport last year was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison on Friday. Arid Uka's face is blurred in line with German law. (Feb. 10)

Computers store every piece of text using a “character encoding,” which gives a number to each character. For example, the byte 61 stands for ‘a’ and 62 stands for ‘b’ in the ASCII encoding, which was launched in 1963. Before the web, computer systems were siloed, and there were hundreds of different encodings. Depending on the encoding, C1 could mean any of ¡, Ё, Ą, Ħ, ‘, ”, or parts of thousands of characters, from æ to 品. If you brought a file from one computer to another, it could come out as gobbledygook.

Unicode was invented to solve that problem: to encode all human languages, from Chinese (中文) to Russian (русский) to Arabic (العربية), and even emoji symbols like or
; it encodes nearly 75,000 Chinese ideographs alone. In the ASCII encoding, there wasn’t even enough room for all the English punctuation (like curly quotes), while Unicode has room for over a million characters. Unicode was first published in 1991, coincidentally the year the World Wide Web debuted—little did anyone realize at the time they would be so important for each other. Today, people can easily share documents on the web, no matter what their language.

Every January, we look at the percentage of the webpages in our index that are in different encodings. Here’s what our data looks like with the latest figures*:

*Your mileage may vary: these figures may vary somewhat from what other search engines find. The graph lumps together encodings by script. We detect the encoding for each webpage; the ASCII pages just contain ASCII characters, for example. Thanks again to Erik van der Poel for collecting the data.
As you can see, Unicode has experienced an 800 percent increase in “market share” since 2006. Note that we separate out ASCII (~16 percent) since it is a subset of most other encodings. When you include ASCII, nearly 80 percent of web documents are in Unicode (UTF-8). The more documents that are in Unicode, the less likely you will see mangled characters (what Japanese call mojibake) when you’re surfing the web.

We’ve long used Unicode as the internal format for all the text Google searches and process: any other encoding is first converted to Unicode. Version 6.1 just released with over 110,000 characters; soon we’ll be updating to that version and to Unicode’s locale data from CLDR 21 (both via ICU). The continued rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the processing for the many languages that we cover. Without it, our unified index it would be nearly impossible—it’d be a bit like not being able to convert between the hundreds of currencies in the world; commerce would be, well, difficult. Thanks to Unicode, Google is able to help people find information in almost any language.

Posted by Mark Davis, International Software Architect

Will devices be the next victim in the net neutrality debate?

Remember that whole network neutrality fight in the U.S. from 2009 and 2010? Well back then the issue was over applications hogging precious bandwidth, and ISPs hoping to charge the likes of Google, Netflix and others for the increasing traffic running across wireline and wireless pipes. Korea Telecom in South Korea has taken an interesting twist on the idea, and decided to block Samsung’s Smart TVs from accessing the Internet, according to this article from the Maeil Business Newspaper, a large S. Korean daily. That’s right, net neutrality isn’t just for applications anymore.

According to the story, KT cut off Samsung’s Smart TVs Friday morning after a dispute over how much data those TVs consume. From the story:

The dispute has been festering for a while as KT insists smart TVs share the costs of quality maintenance of the internet as they tend to hog the networks, while TV makers argue they have no obligation to do so.

The argument is familiar. Remember this quote from Ed Whitacre when he was the CEO of AT&T?

“How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?”

Or what about this quote from John Petter, managing director of BT Retail’s consumer business?

“We can’t give the content providers a completely free ride and continue to give customers the [service] they want at the price they expect.”

But this angle of attacking a device seems new and troublesome. It’s unclear if this is a problem in Korea because Samsung is based there and KT feels like it might have less success going after a content provider like Netflix or Google. However, if other ISPs follow suit, would Roku, Boxee or even Smart TV makers such as LG or Vizio be next in line for some form of blocking?

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The Millrose Games is regarded as the most historic indoor track & field event in the world, and is now coming to YouTube for the first time.

This event serves as a homecoming for the country’s top men’s and women’s athletes aiming for Olympic Gold in London as they sprint to the finish line on the "world’s fastest indoor track." You can watch the Millrose Games livestream in HD on YouTube starting at 1pm PT Saturday, February, 11, 2012. The premiere showcase begins at 3:45pm PT and runs through the famed Wanamaker Mile around 7pm PT.



Highlights of the event include Olympic gold medalist LaShawn Merritt in pursuit of the first sub-minute 500m dash. Also, three of the women slated to run in the 400-meter dash have won Gold at the Olympic Games, so you can watch Sanya Richards-Ross, Natasha Hastings and Mary Wineberg go head to head.

Get your stopwatches ready as the 2012 Millrose Games are expecting to see top talent challenge long-standing records. You can get even more into track and field on YouTube Sports.

Julie Kikla, YouTube Sports, recently watched “Worlds fastest man meets his match.”

Video conferencing has quickly evolved into a technology that's everywhere, from Facebook feeds to corporate boardrooms. Its value as a communications tool is profound. But so too is its vulnerability to hackers. (Feb. 10)

Madonna's stalker escapes; TV producer in court for murder; Pawscars awards announced. (Feb. 10)

Recently discharged U.S. Marine Jason Braddock says after years in Afghanistan the biggest challenge many veterans face is trying to figure out how to market the skills they used on the battlefield to civilian employers. (Feb. 9)

Here's the latest news for Friday, Feb. 10th: Powell investigators say disturbing images on computer; Sandusky prosecutors don't want local jurors; Marines say no punishment over Nazi-like flag; Weather suspends oil removal from grounded cruise ship.

Rough weather has forced crews in Italy to stop pumping oil from the grounded Costa Concordia cruise ship. (Feb. 10)

When Roku said it would start shipping its media streaming boxes to the U.K. for the first time last month, there was a significant omission from the lineup of services it was offering — the BBC’s iPlayer.

The iPlayer is the dominant force in Britain’s streaming TV landscape, available everywhere from the PC to cable to mobile, and responsible for nearly two billion viewings in 2011 alone.

No surprise, then, that today Roku is announcing that it’s launching an iPlayer channel for its British customers, allowing them to access the service’s library of popular television programs through their devices.

The moves adds a real backbone to the service — which already boasts a lineup including UFC, Fox News, and Netflix, which launched last month in the U.K and Ireland.

“This is among the first of many significant content partnerships for Roku in Europe and we look forward to making additional announcements in the coming weeks,” said the company’s European boss, Clive Hudson.

Rumors continue to circulate that will soon add Netflix competitor Lovefilm, but the deal with the BBC makes a big difference for anyone purchasing a Roku box, which are priced locally at £49.99 and £99.99 ($79 and $158).

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Sarah Jessica Parker, Heidi Klum and Cindy Crawford were among many stars who turned out to support amfAR's AIDS charity gala in New York. (Feb. 10)

Dozens of people were arrested in Denver's largest-ever drug bust. The suspects face state and federal charges stemming from five separate investigations. (Feb. 10)

The Marine Corps has determined that a sniper team will not be punished for posing for a picture with a flag resembling the flag of the World War Two-era Nazi S.S. The Corps said the picture was an unacceptable but naive mistake. (Feb. 10)

Nine months ago a hotel maid accused Dominique Strauss Kahn of sexual assault. The case was dropped but now NYC hotel owners and the union that represents maids wants all housekeepers to carry a security 'panic button.' (Feb. 10)