Author Archives: bechikson

Seeking advice on the Right to be Forgotten

Earlier this summer we announced the formation of an Advisory Council on the Right to be Forgotten. As the Council begins its work, it is seeking comment from experts on the issues raised by the CJEU ruling. Experts will be considered for selection to present to the Council in-person during public consultations held this fall, in the following cities:
  • September 9 in Madrid, Spain
  • September 10 in Rome, Italy
  • September 25 in Paris, France
  • September 30 in Warsaw, Poland
  • October 14 in Berlin, Germany
  • October 16 in London, UK
  • November 4 in Brussels, Belgium
The Council welcomes position papers, research, and surveys in addition to other comments. We accept submissions in any official EU language. Though the Council will review comments on a rolling basis throughout the fall, it may not be possible to invite authors who submit after August 11 to present evidence at the public consultations.

Stay tuned for details on the Council’s activity.

Posted by Betsy Masiello, Google Secretariat to the Council

Launching new features for bicyclists

While the Tour de France may just have completed its final lap around the Champs Elysees, our Maps team continues to pedal ahead at top speed. Want to avoid that brutal Mountain Stage while you’re cycling to work? The latest version of Google Maps for Android update puts elevations in bike directions, so you can arrive with leg muscles intact.

We first added biking directions three years ago to our maps for a number of countries in Europe, from Austria to the United Kingdom. It proved to be a popular feature among cycling amateurs and enthusiasts and we’ve expanded the product to cover almost the entire continent. Enthusiastic users have added hundreds of kilometers of biking paths through Google Mapmaker.

We’re also innovating before you hop onto the bicycle. Do you sometimes get a sudden urge for a pizza or a banana split? The improved GoogleMaps for desktop lets you click and drag to measure your next road trip, bike ride or run—even if you’re taking a few sharp turns.

Oh, and what about the Tour de France? With the race over, you might want to relive its high moments, visiting the routes the riders took up the same mountains with StreetView, starting in Saint-Étienne and climbing into the Alps to finish at Chamrousse. And if you want to say au revoir to Le Tour de France, look below, or click on an EarthView on the Champs Élysées.


Posted by Gareth Evans, Communications Manager, London

Celebrating Czech culture online

Václav Havel was a playwright, essayist, poet, philosopher - and also a politician, first a leading anti-communist dissident and then president of Czechoslovakia. A new exhibit on this remarkable man just has been launched on our Cultural Institute. It shows the interior of his quirky, personalised office, full of brightly colored furniture and modern art, and recounts the trajectory of his remarkable life.
Vaclav Havel's quirky office
The new Havel exhibit is only one of a slew of new exhibitions celebrating Czech culture. Until now, the Culture Institute featured only two Czech galleries, the Kampa Museum and the National Gallery. Nine new Czech museums and organizations from all around the country have joined, bringing together up to 500 art works. Two new high definition gigapixel pictures are featured, including Jiri Sopko’s spectacular Dance. In addition to Havel, the life of the first Czechoslovak President Tomas Garrigue Masaryk is featured.
Tomas Garrigue Masaryk
Enjoy the exhibitions from the other Czech partner museums:


Along with the new Czech museum exhibits, we also launched new Street View imagery, including interiors of museums. Our launch event took place in the Decorative Arts Museum’s library.
The entrance to the Decorative Arts Museum Library
Launching the new exhibits
The venue will be closed soon due to reconstruction of its historical building - but it will remain visible and visitable online.

Posted by Martina Ondrusova, Communications Manager, Prague

Showcasing tolerance From Berlin to Budapest

At a time when racism is on the rise in Europe, reportedly reaching its worst level since the 1980s, it is more more important than ever to stand up against scapegoating of migrants and minorities. Two initiatives highlight our commitment to tolerance.

In Germany, we kicked off a new edition this month of the YouTube 361 Grad Respekt combating social exclusion and (cyber-)bullying. This YouTube youth competition runs five video camps across the country, helping students script and shoot videos. You can also participate from home using a webcam or make a video with your smartphone or tablet. Tell us all what makes you strong, talk about your experiences, give others courage, and inspire and motivate them to submit their own statement about showing more respect. Share the video and upload here.


Submissions from the five video camps will be presented one by one on www.youtube.de/361grad until September. Keep checking the channel. After only two days live, the site had received more than 500,000 views!

In Hungary, we’re well into our second year of an exciting program called WeAreOpen. It’s rallying cry is: "Being open is not only the right thing to do, but it's also worth it." To date, more than 750 companies, communities and organisations, big and small, have signed up in support. This year’s version launched in March with a social media campaign to counter hate speech. Musicians, actors, celebrities, and Internet users (including students, doctors and teachers) shared their own experiences, taking a stand against prejudice, showing support for Roma, lesbians, gays, Jews and handicapped. Their videos have received more than 200,000 views on YouTube.

At July’s Budapest Pride march, WeAreOpen supplied an army of colorful balloons and invited everyone to join. The march was live streamed the on YouTube and more than 20,000 watched it live.

This year's WeAreOpen 2014 features research from the Gemius consulting firm about diversity and tolerance at the workplace. It found that more than half of Hungarian employees have already encountered negative discrimination.

The virus of hatred, unfortunately, will not vanish. 361 Grad Respekt, WeAreOpen and many more initiatives promoting tolerance are urgently needed.

Posted by Richard Schuster and Mounira Latrache, Communications managers

Germany’s World Cup victory comes alive through search

On Sunday, Germany won their fourth world championship, and, over the course of the last month, the world watched them do it—in Brazil, in bars and living rooms around the world, on their phones and laptops and tablets. This World Cup was the most digital, most connected, and most searched global event we've seen to date. There were more than 2.1 billion tournament-related searches on Google, many of which we shared on our trends hub.

Looking at the trends from each match, you’ll see some topics that you’d expect to catch the world’s attention, such as top players and highly-anticipated matches. But who would have guessed that there were 10x more searches in the U.S. for the World Cup than for the NBA Playoffs? Or that Clint Dempsey, American soccer star who also has a rap single, had 2x more search interest than Jay-Z? Or that after Ángel di María's divine goal against Switzerland, he netted 4x more global searches than his fellow countryman, Pope Francis?


Mexico’s Guillermo Ochoa was the most searched goalie in the tournament, but Tim Howard’s heroics could hardly be forgotten. German goalkeeper Manuel Neuer not only snagged third place in search, but took home the 2014 Golden Glove award and a World Cup championship to boot.



The Germany vs. Brazil semifinal was the most searched match throughout the tournament, leaving many people around the world asking, “What is the biggest win in World Cup history?” Meanwhile, some countries were ready to move on to the next opportunity: after the third place game, Brazilians searched more for “World Cup 2018” than for the final game between Argentina and Germany.



No World Cup would be complete without a few surprises—and the creative people of the web were ready to weigh in. Uruguay's Luis Suarez was the most searched player meme, and at the time of the Uruguay-Italy game, there were 20x more searches globally for “Suarez Bite” than for snake, spider, tick, fly, dog and mosquito bites combined.

And if a search Dream Team was created, you’d see these 11 players strutting their stuff on the field. While German star Mario Götze didn’t make this list, he was a favorite on search. Even before his goal won it all in the final, he attracted 4x more search attention than Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen, who presented Germany with the championship trophy.

Beyond the impressive stats on the field, we’ve got some numbers of our own to share:

Our team watched 107+ hours of football (we didn’t even need a water break!) and spent 250+ hours bringing you regular insights from our first ever World Cup trends hub. We hope you enjoyed the excitement of the tournament as much as we did, and for more trends, visit google.com/worldcup or check out our Google+ album.

Posted by Roya Soleimani, Communications Manager, who searched for [iran vs. argentina], [brazil’s 12th player], and of course [world cup schedule] throughout the tournament<

Enjoy the best of Slovakia with the Google Cultural Institute

Slovakia enjoys a rich, vibrant culture, full of beautiful music, famous painters, and both natural and manmade wonders. Last week at the beautiful Cafe Berlinka at the Slovak National Gallery, the Google Cultural Institute welcomed its first ever partners from the Central European nation. Eight museums and galleries from across the country have made available their content so that it can be explored in more detail by people around the world.



The exhibitions features works by famous Slovak painters; Ladislav Mednyánszky, Ľudovít Fulla, Martin Benka and sculptors such as Štefan Siváň and Jozef Jankovič. A super high resolution image of Mednyánszky's "Bank of a river in bloom" contraststhe botanical details on the river bank in bloom with the hazy river. Zoom into the barely there image of grazing cattle in the distance. We also have published Indoor Street View imagery of the Chateau Strážky and Bratislava City Gallery.

Another exhibition features the jewels of Slovakia's Natural History Museum including an ancient Egyptian mummy, a skull of Homo sapiens from the late Upper Palaeolithic and a Palaeontological collection with traces of dinosaurs.

Posted by Martina Ondrusova, Communications Manager, Prague

Searching for World Cup trends

The World Cup continues to inspire feverish discussion around the globe. Here are some highlights from our search results from the second week of action.

Dutchman Robin Van Persie's flying header won honors for the best goal.



Brazilian striker Neymar won for the most searched hairdo.



Englishman Howard Webb lost out for the most searched referee to a Japanese rival.



Find out more about World Cup by tuning into this special trends edition.

Posted by William Echikson, Google Europe Blog editor

Commemorating World War I

A century ago, a Serb nationalist assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, sparking World War I. Today, we are launching a new channel dedicated to commemorate the war’s centenary. It brings together World War I content, paintings, photographs, letters, documents, soldiers’ poems and more, from a range of Museum partners, ranging from the German Federal Archives to the Belgian Mundaneum to the Imperial War Museum.



A search for Franz Ferdinand brings up photos relating to the Archeduke’s assassination. They show the Franz and his wife Sophie arriving in Sarajevo. Outfitted in regal dress, treated with the pomp and circumstance of royalty, they stroll through the streets. A final image shows police arresting Serb assassin Gavrilo Princip.

Other exhibits explore the art around the conflict and personal impact of the conflict. Belgium’s Mundaneum has collected postcards sent from POW camps. The Imperial War Museum’s features Christopher Nevinson's bleak landscapes. The British authorities censored some of the paintings for being too “negative.” At the same time, the museum also features John Nash’s patriotic paintings.

The German side of the war is well represented, with more than 200 new items in 13 new exhibits. Items include photographs, newspapers, letters, army documents, ration cards, and unusual items like the anti war poem written by a German soldier which lead to his detention. Exhibits range from German policy around the Sarajevo assassination to the rise of German airships to problems of nutrition due to the conflict.

The exhibits are designed for for a wide audience and full of exciting details for specialists. More content will be added over the coming months and years as commemorations around the Great War continue.

Posted by James Davis, Google Culture Institute, Paris

Helping Europe’s youth find work

All across Europe, far too many young people struggle to find a job and starting their careers. That is why we are joining a coalition of businesses and governments called the Alliance for Youth, which will support European youth to gain new skills and work experience.

At an event today in Lisbon attended by European Commission President Jose-Manuel Barroso and Portuguese Prime Minister Passos Coelho, we committed to a range of initiatives to increase access to digital skills training and education in science, technology, engineering and maths. We're also extending our support for entrepreneurs in Europe.



At Google, we’ve taken on nearly 3500 new employees in Europe over the last three years - net growth of 60% since 2011. Of those 3500, nearly 650 are newly-minted graduates of European universities. They work in a wide range of technical and non-technical roles based in our offices across Europe. More jobs are available. We still have entry level positions open in engineering, advertising support, and product management.

Another priority is helping university students develop professional skills via internships. This summer alone, we’ll play host to more than 600 technical and non-technical interns in Europe. We have strong partnerships with universities and organizations.

Across Europe, we are working with partners to help meet some of the specific challenges facing young people. In Spain, where youth unemployment has reached an alarming 57%, we launched Activate, a platform to train the young generation in digital skills. Through a suite of offline and massive open online courses (MOOCs) on digital marketing, data analytics, cloud computing, e-commerce, we hope to reach more than 100,000 Europeans by early next year.

Our RISE (Roots in Science & Engineering) and CS4HS (Computer Science for High School) programs target younger high students. These programs nurture coding skills, use robotics to teach engineering and maths and help teachers with STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) education tools. Through our partnerships with education organizations, we’ll reach 500,000 students and teachers in 20 European countries, up from 100,000 in 2013.

Finally, Google continues to supports entrepreneurship in Europe. We plan to reach thousands of entrepreneurs through Google for Entrepreneurs, including Startup Weekend, Startup Grind or publicly available online learning resources tailored to early-stage entrepreneurs. We also support a growing number of startup hubs and co-working spaces: in London (Campus London), Berlin (The Factory) and Paris (Numa), and a recently announced Campus in Warsaw.

We're delighted to contribute to the new Alliance for Youth. All of us need to support young Europeans to develop the skills and experience allowing them to find meaningful careers in the 21st century economy.

Posted by Matt Brittan, President, Business and Operations, Northern and Central Europe

After a week in Brazil, here are the hot trends on the field

The 2014 FIFA World Cup™ is heating up, and it’s capturing the imagination of Europeans. Google Trends gives your real-time guide to the players, teams and moments that football lovers are interested in. Here’s a flavour of what Europeans have been searching for during the first week of action in Brazil.

During a match without national anthems due to a technical glitch, France searches for anthem La Marseillaise increased more than 3x
In a game that went all Germany’s way, Müller’s hat-trick scored 3x more local searches than Pepe’s head-butt.
We can show you what questions fans are most asking Google about the tournament, and we can give you a flavour of the national sentiment before or after a match, by analysing posts on Google+. Compare how Costa Rica and Italy are feeling before today’s game:


At google.com/worldcup you can explore these moments throughout the tournament, whether it’s insight on how a country is feeling ahead of a big match, or where fans stand on a controversial match-winning refereeing decision.

Posted by Gareth Evans, Communications, London