Everything announced at the Google for Games Developer Summit

Every year, GDC is a moment to celebrate our successes and learn from one another. Although we won’t be gathering in person this year, we’re bringing you the latest updates at our Google for Games Developer Summit, where developers can watch the announcements and virtually attend sessions for free  at g.co/gamedevsummit.

We also realize this may have been a big sacrifice for your teams. For some, GDC is a major opportunity for annual business development and marketing strategies. That’s why we’ve partnered with WINGS andthe GDC Relief Fund to support teams in continuing to do what they do best: build world-class games.

Now more than ever, games are helping players around the globe feel more connected. To ensure you have access to the tools you need to deliver the best possible game experiences, our teams have been building solutions to help you tackle your biggest challenges and set you up for long-term success. You can check out the highlights below:

Build games and reach a wider audience with Android and Google Play

We’re making it easier for you to build and optimize games on Android. Learn about new tools to help your development process, provide greater insights into your game’s performance, and access a wider player base. Once you’re ready to publish, review our updated guidance to ensure your game is high-quality and leverages various features and services for a successful go-to-market with Google Play.

Grow your business with Google Ads and AdMob

The best game developers think about their players first—both when creating experiences people love and building sustainable businesses. Google Ads and AdMob are introducing new ways to analyze and utilize player insights to help you grow your games and earn the revenue you need to improve them over time.

Simply scale your global game with Google Cloud Game Servers 

Hosting and scaling a global game can be challenging and requires that you either build costly solutions, or turn to pre-packaged ones that limit choice and control. To offer you more choices and time to dedicate to core elements of producing games, the Google Cloud team is introducing a simplified, convenient way for managing game server clusters.

Build and publish the next generation of games with Stadia

New game platforms present new challenges and opportunities for game creators and Google is here to help. For developers of all sizes looking to bring their games to Stadia, the team is unveiling Stadia Makers, a new program to support the independent development community.

We’re excited to see this community continue to delight players around the world, and we look forward to building what’s next, together. From all of us, thank you for keeping this community thriving.

Source: Android


Everything announced at the Google for Games Developer Summit

Every year, GDC is a moment to celebrate our successes and learn from one another. Although we won’t be gathering in person this year, we’re bringing you the latest updates at our Google for Games Developer Summit, where developers can watch the announcements and virtually attend sessions for free  at g.co/gamedevsummit.

We also realize this may have been a big sacrifice for your teams. For some, GDC is a major opportunity for annual business development and marketing strategies. That’s why we’ve partnered with WINGS andthe GDC Relief Fund to support teams in continuing to do what they do best: build world-class games.

Now more than ever, games are helping players around the globe feel more connected. To ensure you have access to the tools you need to deliver the best possible game experiences, our teams have been building solutions to help you tackle your biggest challenges and set you up for long-term success. You can check out the highlights below:

Build games and reach a wider audience with Android and Google Play

We’re making it easier for you to build and optimize games on Android. Learn about new tools to help your development process, provide greater insights into your game’s performance, and access a wider player base. Once you’re ready to publish, review our updated guidance to ensure your game is high-quality and leverages various features and services for a successful go-to-market with Google Play.

Grow your business with Google Ads and AdMob

The best game developers think about their players first—both when creating experiences people love and building sustainable businesses. Google Ads and AdMob are introducing new ways to analyze and utilize player insights to help you grow your games and earn the revenue you need to improve them over time.

Simply scale your global game with Google Cloud Game Servers 

Hosting and scaling a global game can be challenging and requires that you either build costly solutions, or turn to pre-packaged ones that limit choice and control. To offer you more choices and time to dedicate to core elements of producing games, the Google Cloud team is introducing a simplified, convenient way for managing game server clusters.

Build and publish the next generation of games with Stadia

New game platforms present new challenges and opportunities for game creators and Google is here to help. For developers of all sizes looking to bring their games to Stadia, the team is unveiling Stadia Makers, a new program to support the independent development community.

We’re excited to see this community continue to delight players around the world, and we look forward to building what’s next, together. From all of us, thank you for keeping this community thriving.

Source: Android


Announcing Season of Docs 2020

Google Open Source is delighted to announce Season of Docs 2020!

Season of Docs brings technical writers and open source projects together for a few months to work on open source documentation. 2019 was the first year of Season of Docs, bringing together open source organizations and technical writers to create 44 successful documentation projects!

Docs are key to open source success

Survey after survey show the importance of good documentation in how developers choose and use open source:
  • 72% of surveyed developers say “Established policies and documentation” is a key decision factor when choosing open source
  • 93% of surveyed developers say “Incomplete or outdated documentation is a pervasive problem” in open source
  • “Lack of documentation” was the top reason developers gave for deciding against using an open source project
Open source communities know this, and still struggle to produce good documentation. Why? Because creating documentation is hard. But...

There are people who know how to do docs well. Technical writers know how to structure a documentation site so that people can find and understand the content. They know how to write docs that fit the needs of their audience. Technical writers can also help optimize a community’s processes for open source contribution and onboarding new contributors.

Season of Docs brings open source projects and technical writers together with the shared goal of creating great documentation. The writers bring their expertise to the projects, and the project mentors help the technical writers learn more about open source and new technologies. Communities gain new docs contributors and technical writers gain valuable open source skills.

Together the technical writers and mentors build a new doc set, improve the structure of the existing docs, develop a much-needed tutorial, or improve contribution processes and guides. See more ideas for technical writing projects.

By working together in Season of Docs we raise awareness of open source, docs, and technical writing.

How does it work?

April 13 – May 4Open source organizations apply to take part in Season of Docs
May 11Google publishes the list of accepted mentoring organizations, along with their ideas for documentation projects
May 11 – July 9Technical writers choose the project they’d like to work on and submit their proposals to Season of Docs
August 10Google announces the accepted technical writer projects
August 11 – September 11Community bonding: Technical writers get to know mentors and the open source community, and refine their projects in collaboration with their mentors
September 11 – December 6Technical writers work with open source mentors on the accepted projects, and submit their work at the end of the period
January 7, 2021Google publishes the list of successfully-completed projects.
See the timeline for details, including the provision for projects that run longer than three months.

Join us

Explore the Season of Docs website at g.co/seasonofdocs to learn more about participating in the program. Use our logo and other promotional resources to spread the word. Check out the timeline and FAQ, and get ready to apply!

By Erin McKean, Google Open Source

Grow your games business with a player-first approach

As an avid gamer, every year I look forward to spending time with developers at GDC to celebrate together and learn from their successes. We are all disappointed that this year's conference was postponed, but we applaud the organizers for taking steps to protect our global community. 

Although we won’t be gathering in person this year, the Google team is hosting the Google for Games Developer Summit, a free, digital-only experience where developers can watch the announcements and session content that was planned for GDC. We still wanted to share these updates with you because we think these new products will help developers succeed and are a direct response to feedback from our developer community. 

As we study emerging gaming trends one of the most consistent things we've noticed over the years is that those who build a strong games business always put players first. That means deeply understanding players at every stage of their app journey. Today, we’re announcing new solutions that help you launch a game people love, improve it based on player insights, and earn more during the time that someone is engaged with your game. 

Launch a game players love with scaled user testing

Appealing to players at launch is essential to the success of your game. Based on recent Google internal data, more than half of installs come within the first 8 weeks of an app’s release. To make the most of this influx of users, leading developers like Big Fish Games test their apps in beta before releasing them publicly.  That’s why last year we introduced open testing in the Google Play Console to help you get early feedback from real users before your full release. 

To get even more testers into your app, you’ll soon be able to promote Android games with open testing in Google Ads as well. By running open testing ads in App campaigns, you can drive early users to your app to test things like app stability, user retention, monetization, and effectiveness of ad creatives—then use the learning to improve your results when you launch. 

In one example, Chinese developer NetEase used open testing ads to reach more beta users that helped them optimize in-app purchase behavior based on open testing data.  For their new game, Dawn of Isles, Netease was able to double in-app purchases which ultimately led to higher lifetime value (LTV) at launch.

E02526911 Google Ads PAM Mobile Phone Mock GIF Feb20-GDC_v03.gif

Improve your game by learning from your players

Many developers use Google Analytics to understand how people are playing their game. Now, we’re taking it a step further by introducing a gaming-specific Analytics experience to help you get relevant insights even faster. Starting today, App + Web properties in Google Analytics will proactively surface gaming-specific user funnel metrics like acquisition, retention, engagement, and monetization in one place.


Engagement_report_w_laptop@2x.png

With games reporting, you can see how players move through the lifecycle. Then, you can use that insight to improve the game experience and drive more revenue using both ads and IAPs. For example, you could group the players that have dropped off after one week in your game and share that audience to Google Ads to re-engage them with a tailored message and offer. There’s no extra work to set up games reporting in your Google Analytics App + Web property. Learn more to get started.  


In addition to Google Analytics games reporting, coming soon are a few other new ways for you to use Google tools to unlock more valuable insights about your players. 

  • Updated Google Ads asset report: Understand how your App campaign creatives are resonating with new users and optimize campaign performance more easily. 

  • AdMob cohort report: Understand the LTV of your players across their user journey.

  • AdMob mobile app:Quickly access ads monetization reports on the go via a new mobile app.

Earn more from your game

In addition to using player insights, another way to earn more from your game is with AdMob mediation. Leading developers like GameHouse, Playdots, and StickyHands, who use AdMob mediation have seen revenue increases of up to 30%—and now they can earn even more. 

We’re introducing a new tool called Mediation A/B testing, so you can test and refine your ads monetization setups directly in your AdMob account. For example, you’ll soon be able to run a test to see how much more you could earn by using Open Bidding compared to waterfall mediation. 

mediation ab testing.jpg

Disclaimer: revenue results may vary. 

Using Google’s internal A/B testing engine, mediation A/B testing will split your traffic to run on your control group and the variant at the same time. This approach provides unbiased results that can help you maximize the value of every ad you show to players. 

To learn more about how these solutions will help you build a strong games business, tune into our broadcast keynote of the Google for Games Developer Summit on Monday March 23 9AM PT. Get all the details on the digital event at g.co/gamedevsummit. 

Source: Google Ads


Google for Games Developer Summit March 2020

Posted by Greg Hartrell, Head of Product Management, Games on Android & Google Play

"Developer Summit Google for Games " with game illustration.

While we're sorry we didn't get to see you all in person at GDC, we hope you are all staying healthy and safe. As many of us look to press on with work as much as possible, we’d like to share with you what our teams have been working on at the digital Google for Games Developer Summit. We couldn’t be happier with the continued growth of the vibrant Android gaming ecosystem. In fact, Android remains the world's most popular mobile platform with more than 2.5 billion monthly active devices and great news for game developers, we’re seeing more than 1.4 trillion minutes played per month in your games on Google Play. It’s important to us that our platforms are highly useful to every kind of game developer, so our payment system helps games monetize in more than 65 countries. Moreover, we offer our users more than 275 local forms of payment, including more than 180 carrier billing options, with gift cards sold in over 900 thousand unique retail locations worldwide.

Across Android and Google Play, our mission is to deliver the best platform to build, discover, and experience games. Specifically, we’re working on ways to help you increase the reach of your games and manage the fragmentation of the Android ecosystem. We’re also focused on helping you access a wider player base, once you’ve made a great game and are ready to get it out there. Last year, we shared that we’re investing heavily in our games efforts to address your challenges in these areas, and now we are excited to share several new tools and services built specifically with game developers in mind.

Catch up on everything shared at g.co/gamedevsummit.

New Android tools for mobile game development

A major area of investment for us has been making it easier for developers to build and optimize games for Android. Here’s a round-up of several new tools we’re releasing:

  • Android Studio Profilers: We’ve overhauled our Android Studio System Trace profiler to allow you to inspect and visualize in fine detail how your code is being executed. We also added native memory profiling capabilities so you can see how your game is allocating memory and find memory leaks. Download Android Studio 4.1 Canary and watch the session.
  • Android Game Development Extension for Visual Studio: We’re introducing a new tool to make it easy to add Android support for your cross-platform games. This integrates easily with existing Visual Studio-based workflows so now you can conveniently generate APKs, deploy to Android devices or an emulator, and debug your Android game from within Visual Studio. Apply for the developer preview and watch the session.
  • Android GPU Inspector: Our new Android GPU Inspector enables you to look deeply into an Android GPU and see detailed information about your game’s render stages and GPU counters. Now graphics engineers are empowered with information and insights to optimize their game for better frame rates and more battery life. Apply for the developer preview and watch the session.
  • Game Package Registry for Unity by Google: Our new package registry consolidates various Google APIs, starting with Google Play Billing, Android App Bundles, Play Asset Delivery, Play Instant, and Firebase for Games, all in one place. Learn more and watch the session.
  • Crytek announces Android support: CRYENGINE is known as a high performance game engine for PCs and game consoles and will be adding a full Android pipeline to their engine this summer. Learn more.

New ways to reach more devices & users

We’ve been working to help developers scale their reach to a growing player-base across the Android ecosystem. Today, we’re introducing a few new tools to help your development process and provide greater insights into your game’s performance.

  • Google Play Asset Delivery: Introducing a new set of delivery features for games services, building on our App Bundle infrastructure to give you free, dynamic delivery of the right game assets to the right devices at the right time. All of this allows players to get into your game faster while assets are being downloaded, while you cut the costs of hosting and delivering d game resources. Learn more and watch the session.
  • Android vitals native crash symbolication: Now you can debug your native crashes more easily with support for native symbols in Play Console. Simply upload your native debug symbols to get the benefits in Android Vitals. Apply for the open beta and watch the session.
  • Android vitals performance insights with Android Performance Tuner: We’re making it possible to optimize your frame rate and fidelity across many devices at scale with new performance insights in Android vitals. For those in our developer preview, you can unlock this by integrating the new Android Performance Tuner into your game: a new library in the Android Game SDK. Apply for the developer preview and watch the session.
  • Play Billing Library 2 for Unity developers: Game developers using Unity can now access all of Play Billing Library 2's features, such as allowing users to pay with cash and surfacing IAPs outside of the game. This is the best way for Unity developers to prepare for Play’s Billing Library version requirements in 2021. Learn more.

New ways to reach more devices and win go-to-market

The Google Play store is shifting to be more gameplay centric by showing more visuals that demonstrate gameplay and a new system of tags to help users learn more about specific game traits and aid in exploration. Learn how you can ensure your game is of high-quality and leverage various features and new services to help you succeed in your go-to-market activities.

  • Emphasis on quality: We continue to emphasize high quality gaming experiences across Google Play, to encourage immersive gameplay with strong technical performance and being free of crashes. Learn more.
  • Pre-registration: Hundreds-of-millions of players use pre-registration campaigns on Google Play each year, making it an effective way to expand the reach on launch. We’ll soon be rolling out day 1 auto-installation for all pre-registration games, to help you build early consumer awareness and capture pre-launch demand.
  • Play Pass: Late last year we launched Play Pass in the US market as a subscription service providing users with access to hundreds of great apps and games on Google Play, completely free of ads and in-app purchases. Learn more and express interest.

Thanks for your support in continuing to build incredible games. Make sure to try some of the new tools and services we just released and catch the full playlist of mobile developer sessions. If you’re interested in sharing feedback to help shape the development of cutting edge features, apply to join our developer preview programs from Android and Google Play. You can also learn about all of the offerings we have to help game developers building on Android at d.android.com/games.

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Grow your games business with a player-first approach

As an avid gamer, every year I look forward to spending time with developers at GDC to celebrate together and learn from their successes. We are all disappointed that this year's conference was postponed, but we applaud the organizers for taking steps to protect our global community. 

Although we won’t be gathering in person this year, the Google team is hosting the Google for Games Developer Summit, a free, digital-only experience where developers can watch the announcements and session content that was planned for GDC. We still wanted to share these updates with you because we think these new products will help developers succeed and are a direct response to feedback from our developer community. 

As we study emerging gaming trends one of the most consistent things we've noticed over the years is that those who build a strong games business always put players first. That means deeply understanding players at every stage of their app journey. Today, we’re announcing new solutions that help you launch a game people love, improve it based on player insights, and earn more during the time that someone is engaged with your game. 

Launch a game players love with scaled user testing

Appealing to players at launch is essential to the success of your game. Based on recent Google internal data, more than half of installs come within the first 8 weeks of an app’s release. To make the most of this influx of users, leading developers like Big Fish Games test their apps in beta before releasing them publicly.  That’s why last year we introduced open testing in the Google Play Console to help you get early feedback from real users before your full release. 

To get even more testers into your app, you’ll soon be able to promote Android games with open testing in Google Ads as well. By running open testing ads in App campaigns, you can drive early users to your app to test things like app stability, user retention, monetization, and effectiveness of ad creatives—then use the learning to improve your results when you launch. 

In one example, Chinese developer NetEase used open testing ads to reach more beta users that helped them optimize in-app purchase behavior based on open testing data.  For their new game, Dawn of Isles, Netease was able to double in-app purchases which ultimately led to higher lifetime value (LTV) at launch.

E02526911 Google Ads PAM Mobile Phone Mock GIF Feb20-GDC_v03.gif

Improve your game by learning from your players

Many developers use Google Analytics to understand how people are playing their game. Now, we’re taking it a step further by introducing a gaming-specific Analytics experience to help you get relevant insights even faster. Starting today, App + Web properties in Google Analytics will proactively surface gaming-specific user funnel metrics like acquisition, retention, engagement, and monetization in one place.


Engagement_report_w_laptop@2x.png

With games reporting, you can see how players move through the lifecycle. Then, you can use that insight to improve the game experience and drive more revenue using both ads and IAPs. For example, you could group the players that have dropped off after one week in your game and share that audience to Google Ads to re-engage them with a tailored message and offer. There’s no extra work to set up games reporting in your Google Analytics App + Web property. Learn more to get started.  


In addition to Google Analytics games reporting, coming soon are a few other new ways for you to use Google tools to unlock more valuable insights about your players. 

  • Updated Google Ads asset report: Understand how your App campaign creatives are resonating with new users and optimize campaign performance more easily. 

  • AdMob cohort report: Understand the LTV of your players across their user journey.

  • AdMob mobile app:Quickly access ads monetization reports on the go via a new mobile app.

Earn more from your game

In addition to using player insights, another way to earn more from your game is with AdMob mediation. Leading developers like GameHouse, Playdots, and StickyHands, who use AdMob mediation have seen revenue increases of up to 30%—and now they can earn even more. 

We’re introducing a new tool called Mediation A/B testing, so you can test and refine your ads monetization setups directly in your AdMob account. For example, you’ll soon be able to run a test to see how much more you could earn by using Open Bidding compared to waterfall mediation. 

mediation ab testing.jpg

Disclaimer: revenue results may vary. 

Using Google’s internal A/B testing engine, mediation A/B testing will split your traffic to run on your control group and the variant at the same time. This approach provides unbiased results that can help you maximize the value of every ad you show to players. 

To learn more about how these solutions will help you build a strong games business, tune into our broadcast keynote of the Google for Games Developer Summit on Monday March 23 9AM PT. Get all the details on the digital event at g.co/gamedevsummit. 

Women at Google: Meet Nicola Yap


For Women's History Month, we're profiling some of the powerful, dynamic and creative Canadian women at Google.




How would you describe your job at a dinner party to people who don't work in tech?
I like to call myself an information untangler, but my official title is Technical Writer! Technical writers create documentation to clearly explain complex or technical information. A few examples of this are hardware manuals, instructions for medical equipment, or help for online banking software. At Google, I write documentation for software developers and other IT professionals who use Google Cloud software.


Was there something specific that pushed you toward your career in tech?
At an early age, my dad introduced me to computers, and it instantly fueled a passion for exploring and problem solving. When I started taking tech writing courses, I quickly realized it was a good fit for me. Instead of doing a summer internship in translation, my professor suggested that I try one in tech writing. While it was a new territory, I ended up loving it. It was so positive that I ended up staying part-time with the company as an intern for two more semesters, while I finished my degree and the rest of the technical writing program. My real-world experience cemented my decision to stay in tech writing.


What is the most challenging part of your job?
The projects I work on span multiple product teams, and support both internal and external users which means there are a lot of stakeholders. To ensure customers are successful with our products, I collaborate across these teams so that we can work together to resolve inconsistencies, ambiguity, and differences in view.


What is your favourite part of the job?
I love technology, and I love to teach. Technical writing has combined my two loves, and challenges me every day to simplify technology and complex systems to make them easy to understand, and fun to use.

What is your secret power that makes you successful?
My desire to constantly seek more. I'm always looking for ways to make new connections between people and ideas so that we can build great things together.


What advice would you give to women pursuing a career in technology?
Consider everything you can bring to the table and not just the specific subjects you learned in school.

I remember being frustrated with a programming class in high school and being disheartened because it didn't match the joy I felt exploring my computer at home. So I never considered software as a career path. Then in university, I stumbled across technical writing when I saw that it was a requirement for my translation degree. Discovering the tech writing program was a turning point for me, and helped me realize that there are so many different ways to contribute to technology that you may not have considered. Asking questions and exploring can lead to a career path you may not have known exists!


What inspires you in your career?
I am truly inspired by the amazing people I get to work with every day. And I'm excited about the many opportunities we have to help reach and mentor the next generation considering careers in tech.


Is there someone that inspires you?
Two things come to mind when you ask this question. The first is my cousin. Simply put, she’s one of those people that is always positive and open to new experiences. She goes outside of her comfort zone, tries new things, and is open to learning. I love to think of her as someone who never lost the curiosity we all have as a child and that’s an amazing quality. Her openness and way of thinking inspires me.

The second thing is an experience. In 2012, I had some personal things going on, I was in a role that I was frustrated with and I really needed inspiration. At the same time, my husband had friends that were looking at starting a PyCon conference in Canada. I joined the board for the inaugural conference. At a time when I really needed to be inspired and needed an outlet, the enthusiasm and dedication of the PyCon Canada organizers got me excited again. It gave me strength and I was enthusiastic about building something to support the developer community in Canada.


Tell us about a project that you're proud of!
I’m passionate about helping people to work productively and be at their best. When you join Google and go through orientation, many of the roles offer role-specific training. However, technical writers didn’t have this personalized experience. Each team did their own writer onboarding, which created an inconsistent experience and longer ramp up times for some writers. I saw an opportunity in my first few months to make a change. I gathered some like-minded colleagues and we developed training that we now deliver to incoming writers.

Connecting people with COVID-19 information and resources

Since the beginning of the year, search interest in COVID-19 has continued to climb around the world. Right now the disease is the largest topic people are looking for globally, surpassing even some of the most common and consistent queries we see in Search.

Search Interest COVID

As this public health crisis has evolved into a pandemic, information needs are continuing to change, differing from region to region. When COVID-19 was declared a public health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO) in late January, we launched an SOS Alert with resources and safety information from the WHO, along with the latest news. The alert has launched in 25 languages across dozens of countries, and people in more than 50 countries can access localized public health guidance from health authorities. 

Expanding our COVID-19 Search experience
Now, as we continue to see people’s information needs expanding, we’re introducing a more comprehensive experience for COVID-19 in Search, providing easy access to authoritative information from health authorities alongside new data and visualizations. This new format organizes the search results page to help people easily navigate information and resources, and it will also make it possible to add more information over time as it becomes available.

Search COVID GIF

In addition to links to helpful resources from national and local health authorities, people will also find a carousel of Twitter accounts from local civic organizations and health authorities to help connect them with the latest local guidance as it’s shared. We’ve also introduced a feature to surface some of the most common questions about the pandemic, with relevant snippets sourced from the WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

To help people track the latest information about the spread of the disease, we’re adding modules with statistics and a map showing COVID-19 prevalence in countries around the world. This new COVID-19 experience on Search will roll out in the coming days in English in the U.S., and we plan to add more information and expand to other languages and countries soon.

A website dedicated to help and resources
In addition to launching new features on Google Search that provide easy access to more authoritative information, we’ve worked with relevant agencies and authorities to roll out a website—available at google.com/covid19—focused on education, prevention and local resources. People can find state-based information, safety and prevention tips, search trends related to COVID-19, and further resources for individuals, educators and businesses. Launching today in the U.S., the site will be available in more languages and countries in the coming days and we’ll update the website as more resources become available. Along with our other products and initiatives, we hope these resources will help people find answers to the questions they’re asking and get the help they need.

Guidance around local health services
We’re also looking for more ways we can help people follow authoritative public health guidance and locate appropriate health services through our products. Right now in the U.S., people seeking out urgent care, hospitals and other medical services in Search or Maps will see an alert reminding them of the CDC’s recommendation that symptomatic individuals call ahead in order to avoid overwhelming health systems and increasing the risk of exposure.

Urgent Care COVID

As coronavirus becomes a challenge in more communities and as authorities around the world develop new guidance and tools to address the pandemic, we’ll continue to find more opportunities to connect people with key information to keep themselves, their families, and their communities safe.

Source: Google LatLong


Connecting people with COVID-19 information and resources

Since the beginning of the year, search interest in COVID-19 has continued to climb around the world. Right now the disease is the largest topic people are looking for globally, surpassing even some of the most common and consistent queries we see in Search.

COVID trends

As this public health crisis has evolved into a pandemic, information needs are continuing to change, differing from region to region. When COVID-19 was declared a public health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO) in late January, we launched an SOS Alert with resources and safety information from the WHO, along with the latest news. The alert has launched in 25 languages across dozens of countries, and people in more than 50 countries can access localized public health guidance from health authorities. 

Expanding our COVID-19 Search experience
Now, as we continue to see people’s information needs expanding, we’re introducing a more comprehensive experience for COVID-19 in Search, providing easy access to authoritative information from health authorities alongside new data and visualizations. This new format organizes the search results page to help people easily navigate information and resources, and it will also make it possible to add more information over time as it becomes available.

Search COVID GIF

In addition to links to helpful resources from national and local health authorities, people will also find a carousel of Twitter accounts from local civic organizations and health authorities to help connect them with the latest local guidance as it’s shared. We’ve also introduced a feature to surface some of the most common questions about the pandemic, with relevant snippets sourced from the WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

To help people track the latest information about the spread of the disease, we’re adding modules with statistics and a map showing COVID-19 prevalence in countries around the world. This new COVID-19 experience on Search will roll out in the coming days in English in the U.S., and we plan to add more information and expand to other languages and countries soon.

A website dedicated to help and resources
In addition to launching new features on Google Search that provide easy access to more authoritative information, we’ve worked with relevant agencies and authorities to roll out a website—available at google.com/covid19—focused on education, prevention and local resources. People can find state-based information, safety and prevention tips, search trends related to COVID-19, and further resources for individuals, educators and businesses. Launching today in the U.S., the site will be available in more languages and countries in the coming days and we’ll update the website as more resources become available. Along with our other products and initiatives, we hope these resources will help people find answers to the questions they’re asking and get the help they need.

Guidance around local health services
We’re also looking for more ways we can help people follow authoritative public health guidance and locate appropriate health services through our products. Right now in the U.S., people seeking out urgent care, hospitals and other medical services in Search or Maps will see an alert reminding them of the CDC’s recommendation that symptomatic individuals call ahead in order to avoid overwhelming health systems and increasing the risk of exposure.

Urgent Care COVID

As coronavirus becomes a challenge in more communities and as authorities around the world develop new guidance and tools to address the pandemic, we’ll continue to find more opportunities to connect people with key information to keep themselves, their families, and their communities safe.

Stable Channel Update for Chrome OS

The Stable channel is being updated to 80.0.3987.158 (Platform version: 12739.105.0) for most Chrome OS devices. This build contains a number of bug fixes and security updates. Systems will be receiving updates over the next several days.

If you find new issues, please let us know by vising 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).

Daniel Gagnon
Google Chrome OS