Unlock the Truth with Peter Dinklage in Sci-Fi Mystery REMEMORY on Google Play

rememory1.jpg

Does the mind forget things for a reason?

Peter Dinklage takes a break from playing the Game of Thrones  in the sci-fi mystery film REMEMORY— available for free today exclusively on Google Play, before heading into select theatres on September 8.

When a scientist is found dead shortly after unveiling his newest invention—a device that  extracts, records and plays a person’s memories—Sam Bloom (Peter Dinklage) steals the machine to solve the mystery, beginning an investigation of memories that lead him to unexpected and dangerous places.

Directed by Mark Palansky, the film also stars Julia Ormond, Martin Donovan, Henry Ian Cusick, Evelyne Brochu and the late Anton Yelchin.

Head to Google Play to see what he finds.

Dev Channel Update for Chrome OS

The Dev channel has been updated to  62.0.3193.0 (Platform version: 9869.0.0) for most Chrome OS devices. This build contains a number of bug fixes, security updates and feature enhancements.

If you find new issues, please let us know by visiting our forum or filing a bug. Interested in switching channels? Find out how. You can submit feedback using ‘Report an issue...’ in the Chrome menu (3 vertical dots in the upper right corner of the browser). 


Bernie Thompson
Google Chrome

Introducing Our New International Webmaster Blogs!

Join us in welcoming the latest additions to the Webmasters community:

नमस्ते Webmasters in Hindi!

Добро Пожаловать Webmasters in Russian!

Hoşgeldiniz Webmasters in Turkish!

สวัสดีค่ะ Webmasters in Thai!

xin chào Webmasters in Vietnamese!

We will be sharing webmaster-related updates in our current and new blogs to make sure you have a place to follow the latest launches, updates and changes in Search in your languages! We will share links to relevant Help resources, educational content and events as they become available.

Just a reminder, here are some of the resources that we have available in multiple languages:

  • Google.com/webmasters - documentation, support channels, tools (including a link to Search Console) and learning materials.
  • Help Center - tips and tutorials on using Search Console, answers to frequently asked questions and step-by-step guides.
  • Help forum - ask your questions and get advice from the Webmaster community
  • YouTube Channel - recordings of Hangouts on Air in different languages are on our
  • G+ community - another place we announce and share our Hangouts On Air

Testing tools:

Some other valuable resources (English-only):

If you have webmaster-specific questions, check our event calendar for the next hangout session or live event! Alternatively, you can post your questions to one of the local help forum, where our talented Product Experts from the TC program will try to answer your questions. Our Experts are product enthusiasts who have earned the distinction of "Top Contributor," or "Rising Star," by sharing their knowledge on the Google Help Forums.

If you have suggestions, please let us know in the comments below. We look forward to working with you in your language!

Beta Channel Update for Desktop

The beta channel has been updated to 61.0.3163.59 for Windows, Mac, and Linux.


A partial list of changes is available in the log. Interested in switching release channels? Find out how. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug. The community help forum is also a great place to reach out for help or learn about common issues.


Krishna Govind
Google Chrome

Learning more about clinical depression with the PHQ-9 questionnaire

Editor’s note:

Now when you search for "clinical depression" on Google on mobile, you'll see a Knowledge Panel that will give you the option to tap “check if you’re clinically depressed”, which will bring you to PHQ-9, a clinically validated screening questionnaire to test what your likely level of depression may be. To ensure that the information shared in the PHQ-9 questionnaire is accurate and useful, we have partnered with the National Alliance on Mental Illness on this announcement. Please see a guest post from them below.

Clinical depression is a very common condition—in fact, approximately one in five Americans experience an episode in their lifetime. However, despite its prevalence, only about 50 percent of people who suffer from depression actually receive treatment. To help raise awareness of this condition, we’ve teamed up with Google to help provide more direct access to tools and information to people who may be suffering.

You may have noticed that in Google search results, when you search for depression or clinical depression in the U.S., you see a Knowledge Panel for the condition which provides general information about it, the symptoms, and possible treatment options. Today PHQ-9, a clinically validated screening questionnaire which can help identify levels of depressive symptoms is also available directly from the search result. By tapping “Check if you’re clinically depressed,” you can take this private self-assessment to help determine your level of depression and the need for an in-person evaluation. The results of the PHQ-9 can help you have a more informed conversation with your doctor.

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Mental health professionals often refer to major depressive disorder as clinically significant depression or clinical depression. Clinical depression is a treatable condition which can impact many aspects of  a person's life. The PHQ-9 can be the first step to getting a proper diagnosis.

Statistics show that those who have symptoms of depression experience an average of a 6-8 year delay in getting treatment after the onset of symptoms. We believe that awareness of depression can help empower and educate you, enabling quicker access to treatment. And while this tool can help, it’s important to note that PHQ-9 is not meant to act as a singular tool for diagnosis.

We hope that by making this information available on Google, more people will become aware of depression and seek treatment to recover and improve their quality of life.

For more information about depression, you can explore our website.

Universal App Campaigns: Steer Performance with Goals

We recently announced that we'll be moving all AdWords app install campaigns to Universal App Campaigns (UAC) later this year.

With UAC, you can reach the right people across all of Google’s largest properties like Google Search, Google Play, YouTube and the Google Display Network — all from one campaign. You also get access to ad placements exclusive to UAC, like the home and app listing pages in the Google Play Store. These placements connect you to users in “discovery mode” as they browse for their next favorite app.

UAC ad in the Google Play store
UAC uses Google’s machine learning technology to analyze hundreds of millions of signal combinations in real time to optimize your bids and ads to find the best app users for your business goals.

In this post, we’ll share some best practices on how to get the best performance from Universal App Campaigns — whether you’re looking for install volume, in-app actions or both.


Pick the right goal for your campaign


You’ll need to pick an objective for your Universal App campaign. Tell your campaign what kind of users you’d like. This means 1) identifying what you’d like your app users to do, and 2) defining the value of that action.
Example: Say you’re a mobile game developer who’s about to launch a new app. You want as many users to install your app as possible for a target cost-per-install (CPI). Say you expect 1 out of 10 people who install your game to buy a $20 upgrade in the first 30 days. You can afford to pay up to $2 per install (or $20 ÷ 10 installs). Pick the campaign objective “Install volume” and set your target cost-per-install (CPI) to $2. 



Reach different types of users with different campaigns


If you have multiple goals, you can set up a separate campaign for each one. Each campaign will optimize your bids and ads for a specific type of user you’re trying to reach.
Example: After launching your game, you decide you’d like more users who are likely going to buy something, like a $20 upgrade you offer.  
This doesn’t mean that you’d like to stop finding other types of users. You may still want to find people who will install and engage, but not necessarily pay. You create a separate campaign alongside your first one. You set this second campaign’s objective to be “In-app actions.” You calculate your target cost-per-action (CPA) of to be $20, equal to the value of the upgrade.  
Setting campaign bidding objectives
Then, you decrease the target CPI and lower the budget for the first campaign focused on “Install volume.” This signals to AdWords that you’re more interested in users who are likely to complete an in-app action.


Use budgets to find the right mix of users


You can also change the mix of new users for your app as your business needs change.
Continuing the example: Say it’s been a couple of months and you’ve added a social feature and new levels to your game. You want to get this update to as many new users as you can.You adjust the target CPI and budget UP for the campaign that’s focused on “Install Volume.” At the same time, you adjust the budget DOWN for the campaign that’s focused on “In-app actions.” You’re signaling to AdWords yet another change in direction.
After setting new target bids and budgets, periodically measure results waiting for at least 100 conversions before making changes as needed. The campaign needs roughly 100 conversions to recognize and apply patterns confidently to find the users you’re looking for.

Marketers are already seeing positive results from their Universal App campaigns:

“Zynga now operates 100% of AdWords spend through UAC, however we did not get here overnight as it was a long process of testing and learning to understand how to make UAC work for us at scale. We are now able to scale up games profitably and increase operational efficiencies across all aspects of our user acquisition efforts by leveraging UAC machine learning.” - Tyson Nguyen, Senior Manager User Acquisition


“Performance is at the core of our business and Universal App Campaigns out-performed manual campaign management, allowing us to achieve efficiency at scale.” - Jonna Onselius, Mobile Marketing Manager



“As the largest online bus booking platform in the world, increasing bus booking transactions is crucial for our business to stay competitive. UAC helped us achieve this by maximizing transactions at a minimal cost and adapting faster to changing market dynamics when compared to standard app install campaigns.”- Rajiv Kondal, Director, Performance Marketing




“Using relevant ad placements in the Google Play Store, Universal App Campaigns have accelerated our new user growth and expansion into new markets.”- Richard Fenning, Digital Marketing Specialist

Tune in next week when we’ll talk about another way you can steer performance for UAC: creative assets.

Meanwhile, you can read our best practices guide to learn more about how to get the most from your Universal App Campaigns.

Posted by Sissie Hsiao, Director of Product Management, Mobile Advertising

Source: Inside AdWords


Start on Android and succeed on Google Play

Posted by Karolis Balciunas, VC & Startups Business Development, Google Play

Early Access was launched at Google I/O 2016 as a destination on Google Play for beta app and game titles still in development, and to attract early adopters willing to test those titles. The results speak for themselves. The program has helped over 350 developers launch their titles and generated over 40M beta installs for their apps and games during just the short window before their public availability on the Play Store. More importantly, the average rating for titles that have been through Early Access is 4.3☆ once in production, putting them in a strong position to be favored in search and discovery on Google Play.

Early Access also generates positive awareness for new titles. Alumni like Simple Habit and Digit were chosen as finalists in the "Standout Startup" category at the Google Play Awards this year. Omnidrone's game Titan Brawl became the first game to reach 1M testers. Hear more about their experience in the video below.

Early Access and our work with the venture capital community has taught us a lot about successful startups. We know you seek rapid iteration towards product-market fit and are thirsty for the same kind of powerful testing, analytics, and user feedback that Google's own product teams depend on to launch successful products. When we know about your startup's plans well in advance of your launch date, we can impact your trajectory by supporting you through this understood process of iterative improvement.

Start on Android

Earlier this year we launched Start on Android to identify the highest potential Android startups earlier in their lifecycle and provide tools, perks, and guidance for those who qualify. We've developed five components that have proven to be most impactful:

  1. Early Access participation enabling developers to recruit beta testers and respond to their feedback before it impacts an app's rating on the Play Store.
  2. Pre-launch user interface and user experience reviews from the Play editorial team to help optimize onboarding experiences, material design implementation, business model execution, and user engagement.
  3. Access to Google perks like the Google Cloud Platform's Spark Package which includes $20K in Google Cloud and Firebase credits, free 12 months of G Suite for up to 10 employees, and other financial incentives.
  4. Opportunities to participate in Google Play and other Google teams' programs and special events including Google Cloud Platform, Google for Entrepreneurs, and Launchpad.
  5. Guidance in the form of videos and content on startup best practices available to all at StartonAndroid.com.

We are just getting started

We've already seen a lot of developer interest and received hundreds of public applications and referrals from venture capitalists and other startup influencers. Below are a few accepted startups:

  • Socratic - A Spark Capital backed company that allows students to solve math problems by snapping a photo with their camera and using computer vision to return relevant answers and related concepts and video.
  • Astro - A Redpoint portfolio company that layers AI on top of your email to help intelligently manage your inbox.
  • Snaky Snake -
  • Peanut - A Tinder-like app for connecting moms, funded by NEA and Felix Capital.
  • Gyroscope - A startup working on an "operating system for the human body".
  • Empower - An exciting new money management app backed by Sequoia Capital, coming soon to Android.

We are incredibly proud of every developer we work with and grateful to our friends within VC firms and the wider community who bring exciting new startups to our attention.

Get in touch with us

If you would like to be part of Start on Android, complete the form at StartonAndroid.com. We're looking for developers who are planning to launch on Android soon, or have done so in the past 6 months.

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Google at KDD’17: Graph Mining and Beyond

Posted by Bryan Perozzi, Research Scientist, NYC Algorithms and Optimization Team

The 23rd ACM conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD’17), a main venue for academic and industry research in data science, information retrieval, data mining and machine learning, was held last week in Halifax, Canada. Google has historically been an active participant in KDD, and this year was no exception, with Googlers’ contributing numerous papers and participating in workshops.

In addition to our overall participation, we are happy to congratulate fellow Googler Bryan Perozzi for receiving the SIGKDD 2017 Doctoral Dissertation Award, which serves to recognize excellent research by doctoral candidates in the field of data mining and knowledge discovery. This award was given in recognition of his thesis on the topic of machine learning on graphs performed at Stony Brook University, under the advisorship of Steven Skiena. Part of his thesis was developed during his internships at Google. The thesis dealt with using a restricted set of local graph primitives (such as ego-networks and truncated random walks) to effectively exploit the information around each vertex for classification, clustering, and anomaly detection. Most notably, the work introduced the random-walk paradigm for graph embedding with neural networks in DeepWalk.

DeepWalk: Online Learning of Social Representations, originally presented at KDD'14, outlines a method for using a series of local information obtained from truncated random walks to learn latent representations of nodes in a graph (e.g. users in a social network). The core idea was to treat each segment of a random walk as a sentence “in the language of the graph.” These segments could then be used as input for neural network models to learn representations of the graph’s nodes, using sequence modeling methods like word2vec (which had just been developed at the time). This research continues at Google, most recently with Learning Edge Representations via Low-Rank Asymmetric Projections.

The full list of Google contributions at KDD’17 is listed below (Googlers highlighted in blue).

Organizing Committee
Panel Chair: Andrew Tomkins
Research Track Program Chair: Ravi Kumar
Applied Data Science Track Program Chair: Roberto J. Bayardo
Research Track Program Committee: Sergei Vassilvitskii, Alex Beutel, Abhimanyu Das, Nan Du, Alessandro Epasto, Alex Fabrikant, Silvio Lattanzi, Kristen Lefevre, Bryan Perozzi, Karthik Raman, Steffen Rendle, Xiao Yu
Applied Data Science Program Track Committee: Edith Cohen, Ariel Fuxman, D. Sculley, Isabelle Stanton, Martin Zinkevich, Amr Ahmed, Azin Ashkan, Michael Bendersky, James Cook, Nan Du, Balaji Gopalan, Samuel Huston, Konstantinos Kollias, James Kunz, Liang Tang, Morteza Zadimoghaddam

Awards
Doctoral Dissertation Award: Bryan Perozzi, for Local Modeling of Attributed Graphs: Algorithms and Applications.

Doctoral Dissertation Runner-up Award: Alex Beutel, for User Behavior Modeling with Large-Scale Graph Analysis.

Papers
Ego-Splitting Framework: from Non-Overlapping to Overlapping Clusters
Alessandro Epasto, Silvio Lattanzi, Renato Paes Leme

HyperLogLog Hyperextended: Sketches for Concave Sublinear Frequency Statistics
Edith Cohen

Google Vizier: A Service for Black-Box Optimization
Daniel Golovin, Benjamin Solnik, Subhodeep Moitra, Greg Kochanski, John Karro, D. Sculley

Quick Access: Building a Smart Experience for Google Drive
Sandeep Tata, Alexandrin Popescul, Marc Najork, Mike Colagrosso, Julian Gibbons, Alan Green, Alexandre Mah, Michael Smith, Divanshu Garg, Cayden Meyer, Reuben KanPapers

TFX: A TensorFlow­ Based Production ­Scale Machine Learning Platform
Denis Baylor, Eric Breck, Heng-Tze Cheng, Noah Fiedel, Chuan Yu Foo, Zakaria Haque, Salem Haykal, Mustafa Ispir, Vihan Jain, Levent Koc, Chiu Yuen Koo, Lukasz Lew, Clemens Mewald, Akshay Modi, Neoklis Polyzotis, Sukriti Ramesh, Sudip Roy, Steven Whang, Martin Wicke,  Jarek Wilkiewicz, Xin Zhang, Martin Zinkevich

Construction of Directed 2K Graphs
Balint Tillman, Athina Markopoulou, Carter T. Butts, Minas Gjoka

A Practical Algorithm for Solving the Incoherence Problem of Topic Models In Industrial Applications
Amr Ahmed, James Long, Dan Silva, Yuan Wang

Train and Distribute: Managing Simplicity vs. Flexibility in High-­Level Machine Learning Frameworks
Heng-Tze Cheng, Lichan Hong, Mustafa Ispir, Clemens Mewald, Zakaria Haque, Illia Polosukhin, Georgios Roumpos, D Sculley, Jamie Smith, David Soergel, Yuan Tang, Philip Tucker, Martin Wicke, Cassandra Xia, Jianwei Xie

Learning to Count Mosquitoes for the Sterile Insect Technique
Yaniv Ovadia, Yoni Halpern, Dilip Krishnan, Josh Livni, Daniel Newburger, Ryan Poplin, Tiantian Zha, D. Sculley

Workshops
13th International Workshop on Mining and Learning with Graphs
Keynote Speaker: Vahab Mirrokni - Distributed Graph Mining: Theory and Practice
Contributed talks include:
HARP: Hierarchical Representation Learning for Networks
Haochen Chen, Bryan Perozzi, Yifan Hu and Steven Skiena

Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning
Contributed talks include:
Fair Clustering Through Fairlets
Flavio Chierichetti, Ravi Kumar, Silvio Lattanzi, Sergei Vassilvitskii
Data Decisions and Theoretical Implications when Adversarially Learning Fair Representations
Alex Beutel, Jilin Chen, Zhe Zhao, Ed H. Chi

Tutorial
TensorFlow
Rajat Monga, Martin Wicke, Daniel ‘Wolff’ Dobson, Joshua Gordon

Introducing Network Service Tiers: Your cloud network, your way

By Prajakta Joshi, Product Manager, Cloud Networking

We're excited to announce Network Service Tiers Alpha. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) now offers a tiered cloud network. We let you optimize for performance by choosing Premium Tier, which uses Google’s global network with unparalleled quality of service, or optimize for cost, using the new Standard Tier, an attractively-priced network with performance comparable to that of other leading public clouds.

"Over the last 18 years, we built the world’s largest network, which by some accounts delivers 25-30% of all internet traffic” said Urs Hölzle, SVP Technical Infrastructure, Google. “You enjoy the same infrastructure with Premium Tier. But for some use cases, you may prefer a cheaper, lower-performance alternative. With Network Service Tiers, you can choose the network that’s right for you, for each application.”

Power of Premium Tier 

If you use Google Cloud today, then you already use the powerful Premium Tier.

Premium Tier delivers traffic over Google’s well-provisioned, low latency, highly reliable global network. This network consists of an extensive global private fiber network with over 100 points of presence (POPs) across the globe. By this measure, Google’s network is the largest of any public cloud provider.

In Premium Tier, inbound traffic from your end user to your application in Google Cloud enters Google’s private, high performance network at the POP closest to your end user, and GCP delivers this traffic to your application over its private network.
Outbound and Inbound traffic delivery
Similarly, GCP delivers outbound traffic from your application to end users on Google’s network and exits at the POP closest to them, wherever the end users are across the globe. Thus, most of this traffic reaches its destination with a single hop to the end user’s ISP, so it enjoys minimum congestion and maximum performance.

We architected the Google network to be highly redundant, to ensure high availability for your applications. There are at least three independent paths (N+2 redundancy) between any two locations on the Google network, helping ensure that traffic continues to flow between these two locations even in the event of a disruption. As a result, with Premium Tier, your traffic is unaffected by a single fiber cut. In many situations, traffic can flow to and from your application without interruption even with two simultaneous fiber cuts.

GCP customers use Global Load Balancing, another Premium Tier feature, extensively. You not only get the management simplicity of a single anycast IPv4 or IPv6 Virtual IP (VIP), but can also expand seamlessly across regions, and overflow or fail over to other regions.
With Premium Tier, you use the same network that delivers Google’s Search, Gmail, YouTube, and other services as well as the services of customers such as The Home Depot, Spotify and Evernote.
"75% of homedepot.com is now served out of Google Cloud. From the get-go, we wanted to run across multiple regions for high availability. Google's global network is one of the strongest features for choosing Google Cloud."   
— Ravi Yeddula, Senior Director Platform Architecture & Application Development, The Home Depot.


Introducing Standard Tier 


Our new Standard Tier delivers network quality comparable to that of other major public clouds, at a lower price than our Premium Tier.

Why is Standard Tier less expensive? Because we deliver your outbound traffic from GCP to the internet over transit (ISP) networks instead of Google’s network.

Outbound and Inbound traffic delivery
Similarly, we deliver your inbound traffic, from end user to GCP, on Google’s network only within the region where your GCP destination resides. If your user traffic originates from a different region, their traffic will first travel over transit (ISP) network(s) until it reaches the region of the GCP destination.

Standard Tier provides lower network performance and availability compared to Premium Tier. Since we deliver your outbound and inbound traffic on Google’s network only on the short hop between GCP and the POP closest to it, the performance, availability and redundancy characteristics of Standard Tier depend on the transit provider(s) carrying your traffic. Your traffic may experience congestion or outages more frequently relative to Premium Tier, but at a level comparable to other major public clouds.

We also provide only regional network services in Standard Tier, such as the new regional Cloud Load Balancing service. In this tier, your Load Balancing Virtual IP (VIP) is regional, similar to other public cloud offerings, and adds management complexity compared to Premium Tier Global Load Balancing, if you require multi-region deployment.

Compare performance of tiers 

We commissioned Cedexis, an internet performance monitoring and optimization tools company, to take preliminary performance measurements for both Network Service Tiers. As expected, Premium Tier delivers higher throughput and lower latency than Standard Tier. You can view the live dashboards at www.cedexis.com/google-reports/ under the "Network Tiers" section. Cedexis also details their testing methodology on their website.

Cedexis graph below shows throughput for Premium and Standard Tier for HTTP Load Balancing traffic at 50th percentile. Standard (blue line) throughput is 3,223 kbps while Premium (green line) is 5,401 kbps, making Premium throughput ~1.7x times that of Standard. See Cedexis graph below:


In general, Premium Tier displays considerably higher throughput, at every percentile, than Standard Tier.

Compare pricing for tiers 


We're introducing new pricing for Premium and Standard Tiers. You can review detailed pricing for both tiers here. This pricing will take effect when Network Service Tiers become Generally Available (GA). While in alpha and beta, existing internet egress pricing applies.

With the new Network Tiers pricing (effective at GA), outbound traffic (GCP to internet) is priced 24-33% lower in Standard Tier than in Premium Tier for North America and Europe. Standard Tier is less expensive than internet egress options offered by other major public cloud providers (based on typical published prices for July, 2017). Inbound traffic remains free for both Premium and Standard Tiers. We'll also change our current destination-based pricing for Premium Tier to be based on both source and destination of traffic since the cost of network traffic varies with the distance your traffic travels over Google’s network. In contrast, Standard Tier traffic will be source-based since it does not travel much over Google’s network.

Choose the right tier 


Here’s a decision tree to help you choose the tier that best fits your requirements.


Configure the tier for your application(s) 


One size does not fit all, and your applications in Google Cloud often have differing availability, performance, footprint and cost requirements. Configure the tier at the resource-level (per Instance, Instance template, Load balancer) if you want granular control or at the overarching project-level if you want to use the same tier across all resources.

Try Network Service Tiers today 

“Cloud customers want choices in service levels and cost. Matching the right service to the right business requirements provides the alignment needed by customers. Google is the first public cloud provider to recognize that in the alpha release of Network Service Tiers. Premium Tier caters to those who need assured quality, and Standard Tier to those who need lower costs or have limited need for global networking.”  
— Dan Conde, Analyst at ESG

Learn more by visiting Network Service Tiers website, and give Network Service Tiers a spin by signing up for alpha. We look forward to your feedback!

Google’s Contacts app (v2.1) now available for more Android devices

Google’s Contacts app is now available for any device running Android 5.0 (Lollipop) or higher, including Samsung, LG, Motorola, and others.

Android users in your organization can now download version 2.1 of the Contacts app from the Play Store. This version features:

  • A simple way to move contacts from a device’s storage into a Google Account, so the contacts are safely backed up and available on all devices.
  • Clear separation between work and personal contacts.
  • Suggestions for adding new contacts, cleaning up duplicates, and more.
For more information on using the Contacts app on Android devices, check out this Help Center article.

Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace:
Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Sync all contact data to your mobile device


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