News Brief: February Updates from the Google News Initiative

February brought flowers and chocolate, but we had heart eyes for new journalist tools and events across the globe. Read on for more updates from the last month.  

Supporting the future of news in Europe

190+ participants attended the first GNI EMEA summit, where we announced the expansion of the GNI Subscriptions Lab to Europe, as well as additional training commitments and funding for the Reuters Institute Digital News Report.

Debunk.eu uses AI to help identify disinformation and reduce its harmful impact on society.

In partnership with journalists and fact checkers, the Google News Initiative supported company, Debunk.eu uses AI to help identify disinformation and reduce its harmful impact on society.

During the GNI EMEA Summit, Debunk.eu showed us how they brought journalists, fact-checkers and AI specialists together to curb the spread of disinformation. Partners and Digital News Innovation Fund recipients shared insights about the latest products and innovations in news, the role of machine learning in publishing and new ways to grow reader revenue.

GNI Lab programs help publishers grow their business

The GNI Labs are cohort-based programs that group individual publishers together to tackle a shared challenge. For instance, the GNI Subscriptions Lab is designed to help participants to grow their digital business. Since starting the program, The Buffalo News was able to grow their digital subscribers by 49 percent.

Participants in the GNI Data Lab worked together to understand how data can drive business growth. Six local media companies used data to understand their audience, increase sales, and improve their systems and tools, releasing a full report of their learnings. 

The GNI Ads Lab works with local publishers to identify opportunities for revenue growth. Through the Lab, the Long Beach Post increased their website traffic for breaking news stories, leading to significant advertising revenue growth.

After learning from other Labs, the first GNI Startup Lab is launching in Brazil for entrepreneurs committed to the development of news products that offer quality journalism. The Lab will support early-stage news startups through funding and a 13-week immersion program at the Google for Startups Campus in São Paolo.


Using insights to grow audience engagement

The GNI Audience Lab works with digital publishers to tackle audience growth. The Lab recently created newsletter assessments to help the first cohort of publishers influence loyalty among their readers.  

We recently partnered with Adswerve, a leading Google Marketing Platform and Cloud partner, to create new playbooks on using data to grow audience engagement. While the guides are primarily geared toward publishers and media members, they're applicable to any business that wants to discover new ways to engage with prospects and customers. 

Tackling the spread of misinformation with regional workshops and new tools

Over 500 French citizens and journalists attended full-day workshops at Google Digital Garage spaces in Rennes, Montpellier, Nancy, and Saint-Etienne ahead of the March 15th municipal elections. The content focused on preventing misinformation, including fact-checking workshops and media literacy trainings.


SourceGIF.gif

We worked with Storyful, a beneficiary of the GNI Cloud Program, to build the Source app, which helps detect manipulated images and counter misinformation. Powered by Google’s machine learning technology, the app enables journalists to discover the origins and trustworthiness of photos and memes.

That’s a wrap for February. Check back next month, and keep up with the Google News Initiative through our newsletter and social.

News Brief: February Updates from the Google News Initiative

February brought flowers and chocolate, but we had heart eyes for new journalist tools and events across the globe. Read on for more updates from the last month.  

Supporting the future of news in Europe

190+ participants attended the first GNI EMEA summit, where we announced the expansion of the GNI Subscriptions Lab to Europe, as well as additional training commitments and funding for the Reuters Institute Digital News Report.

Debunk.eu uses AI to help identify disinformation and reduce its harmful impact on society.

In partnership with journalists and fact checkers, the Google News Initiative supported company, Debunk.eu uses AI to help identify disinformation and reduce its harmful impact on society.

During the GNI EMEA Summit, Debunk.eu showed us how they brought journalists, fact-checkers and AI specialists together to curb the spread of disinformation. Partners and Digital News Innovation Fund recipients shared insights about the latest products and innovations in news, the role of machine learning in publishing and new ways to grow reader revenue.

GNI Lab programs help publishers grow their business

The GNI Labs are cohort-based programs that group individual publishers together to tackle a shared challenge. For instance, the GNI Subscriptions Lab is designed to help participants to grow their digital business. Since starting the program, The Buffalo News was able to grow their digital subscribers by 49 percent.

Participants in the GNI Data Lab worked together to understand how data can drive business growth. Six local media companies used data to understand their audience, increase sales, and improve their systems and tools, releasing a full report of their learnings. 

The GNI Ads Lab works with local publishers to identify opportunities for revenue growth. Through the Lab, the Long Beach Post increased their website traffic for breaking news stories, leading to significant advertising revenue growth.

After learning from other Labs, the first GNI Startup Lab is launching in Brazil for entrepreneurs committed to the development of news products that offer quality journalism. The Lab will support early-stage news startups through funding and a 13-week immersion program at the Google for Startups Campus in São Paolo.


Using insights to grow audience engagement

The GNI Audience Lab works with digital publishers to tackle audience growth. The Lab recently created newsletter assessments to help the first cohort of publishers influence loyalty among their readers.  

We recently partnered with Adswerve, a leading Google Marketing Platform and Cloud partner, to create new playbooks on using data to grow audience engagement. While the guides are primarily geared toward publishers and media members, they're applicable to any business that wants to discover new ways to engage with prospects and customers. 

Tackling the spread of misinformation with regional workshops and new tools

Over 500 French citizens and journalists attended full-day workshops at Google Digital Garage spaces in Rennes, Montpellier, Nancy, and Saint-Etienne ahead of the March 15th municipal elections. The content focused on preventing misinformation, including fact-checking workshops and media literacy trainings.


SourceGIF.gif

We worked with Storyful, a beneficiary of the GNI Cloud Program, to build the Source app, which helps detect manipulated images and counter misinformation. Powered by Google’s machine learning technology, the app enables journalists to discover the origins and trustworthiness of photos and memes.

That’s a wrap for February. Check back next month, and keep up with the Google News Initiative through our newsletter and social.

Announcing mobile first indexing for the whole web

It's been a few years now that Google started working on mobile-first indexing - Google's crawling of the web using a smartphone Googlebot. From our analysis, most sites shown in search results are good to go for mobile-first indexing, and 70% of those shown in our search results have already shifted over. To simplify, we'll be switching to mobile-first indexing for all websites starting September 2020. In the meantime, we'll continue moving sites to mobile-first indexing when our systems recognize that they're ready.

When we switch a domain to mobile-first indexing, it will see an increase in Googlebot's crawling, while we update our index to your site's mobile version. Depending on the domain, this change can take some time. Afterwards, we'll still occasionally crawl with the traditional desktop Googlebot, but most crawling for Search will be done with our mobile smartphone user-agent. The exact user-agent name used will match the Chromium version used for rendering.  

In Search Console, there are multiple ways to check for mobile-first indexing. The status is shown on the settings page, as well as in the URL Inspection Tool, when checking a specific URL with regards to its most recent crawling.

Our guidance on making all websites work well for mobile-first indexing continues to be relevant, for new and existing sites. In particular, we recommend making sure that the content shown is the same (including text, images, videos, links), and that meta data (titles and descriptions, robots meta tags) and all structured data is the same. It's good to double-check these when a website is launched or significantly redesigned. In the URL Testing Tools you can easily check both desktop and mobile versions directly. If you use other tools to analyze your website, such as crawlers or monitoring tools, use a mobile user-agent if you want to match what Google Search sees. 

While we continue to support various ways of making mobile websites, we recommend responsive web design for new websites. We suggest not using separate mobile URLs (often called "m-dot") because of issues and confusion we've seen over the years, both from search engines and users. 

Mobile-first indexing has come a long way. It's great to see how the web has evolved from desktop to mobile, and how webmasters have helped to allow crawling & indexing to match how users interact with the web! We appreciate all your work over the years, which has helped to make this transition fairly smooth. We’ll continue to monitor and evaluate these changes carefully. If you have any questions, please drop by our Webmaster forums or our public events.


Posted by John Mueller, Developer Advocate, Google Zurich

Easier access to web pages: Let the Assistant read it aloud



Think about how much you read on your phone every day: catching up on the news, scanning a new blog, finally reading the article that everyone is talking about. This may require reading a lot of text, which can be a barrier for people with visual or reading difficulties, or who simply need a little help reading meatier articles.


With the Google Assistant, your browser can now read web articles out loud. Whenever a web article is displayed on your browser in your Android phone, you can say, “Hey Google, read it” or “Hey Google, read this page” it will immediately read aloud the content of the web page. To help you follow along, your browser will automatically scroll the page and highlight words as they’re read aloud. You can also alter the reading speed and choose from multiple voices. Speaking of which, the web pages are read aloud in expressive and natural voices, aiming to use the same intonation and rhythm that you'd use if you were reading it aloud yourself.



If the original content isn’t in your native language, the Assistant can trigger your browser to read aloud in 42 languages (which includes Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu.) You can use the translation menu to select the desired language, and all pages will be automatically translated and read out in that language.




Websites don't need to do anything special to enable this functionality. Webmasters that prefer not to use this feature can  use the nopagereadaloud tag. If you’re a developer, you can add the ability for Google Assistant to read aloud content in your mobile app using Actions on Google.


With this new experience, we hope to remove language barriers and help a wide variety of people access information from the web more easily. 

Posted by Yossi Matias, VP, Engineering

Earn more from your ads

In today's environment, managing a digital ads business is complex. You have different types of content, deals, auction rules, even technology solutions. To extract the most value from your sites and apps, you need to be able to take all of these things into account at the same time. So when a user clicks on an article, presses play on a video, or opens your app, they’ll be served the ad that generates top dollar for you, while receiving a first-rate user experience. 

With Google Ad Manager, partners can manage and optimize their direct deals and auctions across all of their inventory, including inventory sold with third-party advertising technologies, from one powerful platform. Our yield management solutions are designed to help publishers streamline their processes, so managing a variety of demand sources is not just simpler, but additive.

Let’s take a look at some of our direct, indirect, and yield management features that can help you make the most revenue from your inventory.


Perfecting the direct deal

Direct deals are an important aspect of nearly every publisher's ad business, so Ad Manager allows partners to strike them in a variety of ways. While we’ve long had the capability to help publishers facilitate traditional reservations, we are seeing strong adoption of our Programmatic Direct deal types, particularly Programmatic Guaranteed.

Programmatic Guaranteed

In 2019, 85 of Ad Manager’s top 100 global publishers transacted Programmatic Guaranteed deals. And according to internal Google data from 2018 through 2019, the number of Programmatic Guaranteed deal orders placed increased by over 65 percent. 

The Programmatic Guaranteed deal type simplifies the reservations workflow by combining the precision and control of direct deals with an automated media buying process, helping secure inventory for advertisers and revenue for publishers. The deal workflow also helps eliminate cumbersome and manual processes, such as exchanging tags, troubleshooting discrepancies, overseeing billing and reconciliation, as well as delivers performance benefits for advertisers.

According to a recent Google sponsored white paper from Harvard Business Review, top publishers embracing automated reservations like Programmatic Guaranteed have freed their direct sales teams to develop more strategic client relationships with their advertisers while offering a wider variety of deal types across their entire portfolio. 


A better environment for indirect demand 

After fulfilling your most premium campaigns through reservations, Ad Manager can help you earn more with solutions to manage all your programmatic demand sources. When it comes to ad auctions, a lot of things need to happen in a short amount of time. Subtle differences in how you connect your demand sources, configure your auctions, and deliver ads across your sites, apps, or channels can have a meaningful impact on how much revenue you’ll earn. Below are a few solutions that we’ve developed to ensure that you make optimal revenue, while also delivering first-class experiences for your users. 

Open Bidding (formerly known as Exchange Bidding)

Open Bidding allows you to invite multiple third-party exchanges and ad networks to compete for your ad inventory in a unified, real-time first price auction. This solution reduces operational complexity and minimizes latency helping you achieve a higher yield on your ad inventory without sacrificing your user experience. 

Open Bidding works across all your inventory, including web and app, display and video. It also provides customized tools, unified reporting, simplified billing, and complete auction transparency.

App Mediation

App Mediation, also referred to as mediation, increases mobile app revenue by calling a series of third-party ad networks in order of highest expected yield, based on static prices set by partners, or pulled from third-party ad networks periodically, to fill an ad request. It maximizes yield and fill rates by passing the request along in sequence. So if one ad network doesn’t fill the request, the next ad network in the sequence gains an opportunity.

For mobile app, we’ve designed mediation and Open Bidding to work well together. Ad Manager first selects the highest paying bid from Authorized Buyers and Open Bidding buyers and inserts the winning price in order into the mediation chain. This way app partners get a unified mediation chain, that’s optimized for yield and inclusive of real-time bids.  

Smarter Ad Breaks for video and advanced TV

We’ve brought our extensive experience with video to bear to develop the Smarter Ad Breaks feature suite for video and advanced TV partners. The suite helps maximize the value of commercial breaks by combining the control of linear TV selling with the addressability of digital advertising. You can customize each individual ad slot to build a personalized commercial break, known as an Optimized Pod. You set the pod length and Ad Manager will look across open auction, sponsorships, direct deals, and Programmatic Guaranteed deals to slot in ads yielding the highest possible revenue. 

Using the Smarter Ad Breaks feature suite provides higher monetization through enhanced yield management, time savings through seamless workflow efficiencies, greater user experience through lower ad load latency, and brand safety protections like unified competitive exclusions. 


Bring it all together, with comprehensive yield management

The most difficult task when trying to make the most from your inventory is knowing the best buyer to sell your inventory to. That’s why harmonizing your direct and indirect demand in a single, powerful auction is important. Ad Manager offers a suite of yield management solutions designed to help you find the best model for monetizing inventory across all of your advertising partners.

We start by maximizing your yield with a single, unified first price auction that reconciles all of your guaranteed campaigns and non-guaranteed advertising sources—including real-time bidding partners (such as Authorized Buyers and Open Bidding partners) and non-guaranteed line items (including those used in header bidding implementations). This all happens in a transparent and fair marketplace to help you manage your inventory as efficiently and effectively as possible. 

In addition to increasing yield through competition, we’ve also developed automated and machine learning features like Dynamic Allocation, First Look, Optimized Competition, and Target CPM to help you make the most revenue possible without having to do anything. In fact, in 2018 we made nearly 50 optimizations aimed at improving publisher revenue, that generated 15% more revenue on mobile web and 9% more revenue in total for publishers using Google Ad Manager.

To learn more about how Ad Manager can help you manage your digital advertising business, read the complete blog series here or visit our new feature brief archive in the resources section of our website. And stay tuned for our next post on, Safeguard your advertising business.

Growing our investment in India with a new cloud region coming to Delhi

At Google Cloud, our mission is to accelerate every organisation’s ability to transform through data-powered innovation with leading infrastructure, platform, industry solutions and expertise designed to meet our customers where they are on their journey to the cloud. 


Our cloud regions bring Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services to global organizations in industries like media and entertainment, retail and manufacturing, helping them drive growth, differentiation, and innovation for their business. As our customers in India grow and diversify, we continue to advance and invest in our cloud infrastructure to help regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services, as well as public sector organisations across India achieve their goals. 


Introducing our next cloud region in India


Today, we are thrilled to share our plans to open a Delhi cloud region. This will be our second cloud region in India since we launched our Mumbai region in 2017, and will expand our existing network of eight regions in Asia Pacific and 22 regions globally today.


GCP regions are the cornerstone of our cloud infrastructure, and they enable customers such as L&T Finance, Manipal Hospital Group, Reliance Mutual Fund, Royal Enfield, TechMahindra, Truecaller, and many more to deliver high performing, secure, low latency, cloud-based services to their users, no matter where they are around the world. 




Projected to launch in 2021, our Delhi cloud region will have three zones to protect against service disruptions. The region will also include  a portfolio of key GCP products, offer lower latency to nearby users, and, when combined with the existing region in Mumbai, enables geographically separate in-country disaster recovery for our customers’ mission critical applications. 


For customers in Delhi and beyond—and businesses and organisations yet to try our services—the new region presents an opportunity to take advantage of our big data and infrastructure services onshore while staying compliant with India’s data laws and regulations.  

Here’s what some of our customers have to say about the value of our expanding GCP infrastructure brings to their business:

“Cloud is the technology that enables us to achieve scale and reach. Today there are countless data points available about rural consumers which enable us to personalize our products to serve them better. With access to faster compute power, we can also on-board consumers more efficiently. Our rural businesses have clocked a disbursement CAGR of 60% over the past three years." 
-- Sunil Prabhune, Chief Executive-Rural Finance, and Group Head-Digital, IT and Analytics, L&T Financial Services
“We knew we made the right choice when we selected Dialogflow Enterprise Edition as our strategic, long-term platform to run intelligent chatbots across our inhouse processes and functions. A Delhi cloud region shows we are working with a cloud provider that shares our commitment to high quality in-market and multinational services.” -- Mukesh Rathi, CIO & Chief Digital Officer, Dr. Reddy's Laboratories
“Buyers and suppliers can already access our marketplace much faster than previously with Google Cloud, and this has a positive impact on customer engagement, time spent and the entire user journey. We are extremely excited about the potential of a second GCP region in India to help us provide an even better experience to the businesses that use IndiaMART.” -- Amarinder S Dhaliwal, Chief Product Officer, IndiaMART
“Google Cloud is transforming the cloud market similar to what NoBroker is doing by providing C2C platform for real estate needs without any brokerages. A second Google Cloud region in India will give us access to secure infrastructure closure to customers as we recently launched NoBroker services in NCR region. It will also help us retain customer data within India - meeting our compliance requirements.” -- Akhil Gupta, Co Founder and Chief Technology Officer, NoBroker

2020 is already shaping up to be a great year for Google Cloud in India, and we look forward to helping businesses and governments solve their most complex challenges and create value for years to come. 

Posted by Rick Harshman, Managing Director, Google Cloud Asia Pacific

Chrome Beta for Android Update

Hi everyone! We've just released Chrome Beta 81 (81.0.4044.42) for Android: it's now available on Google Play.

You can see a partial list of the changes in the Git log. For details on new features, check out the Chromium blog, and for details on web platform updates, check here.

If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug.

Ben Mason
Google Chrome

Investing in the Aussie cloud with the launch of a new cloud region in Melbourne

At Google Cloud, we’re committed to building the most secure, high performance and intelligent public cloud for regulated industries, businesses and government agencies across Australia.

Since opening our first cloud region in Sydney in July 2017, we’ve continued to invest in secure and sustainable infrastructure to support our growing customers.

From new regions across the globe to cables under the sea, we’re dedicated to building infrastructure that helps our customers connect with more people than ever before.

Regions are the cornerstone of our cloud infrastructure, enabling customers such as Australia Post, Macquarie Bank, Optus and Woolworths to deliver high performing, low latency cloud-based services to their users, no matter where they are around the world.

Today, we take another step forward by announcing that a new Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region is coming to Melbourne. Projected to come online in 2021, the Melbourne region will have three zones to protect against service disruptions, and will launch with our portfolio of key products.


The opening of the new Melbourne region strengthens our long-standing investment in Australia. Our services are designed for millions of users and the new region will bring lower latency to businesses and offer the infrastructure to support disaster recovery and regulatory needs. Our infrastructure is certified for a growing number of compliance standards and controls and has undergone several independent third party audits to test for data safety, privacy and security.

A great example of this is the work we’re doing with financial services institutions in Australia to advance their multi-cloud strategy:

“We aim to shape a world where people and communities thrive and Google Cloud is key to the transformation that enables us to achieve this purpose. Google Cloud’s Melbourne region presents opportunities to further enhance a cloud-based technology environment that incorporates integrated governance controls and service management, as well as consistent security controls,” said Gerard Florian, Group Executive, Technology, ANZ Bank.

“At NAB, we’re in the midst of a company-wide digital transformation to simplify our business and improve the experience customers have with us. Technology is both an enabler and foundation in our transformation and our multi-cloud approach, incorporating Google Cloud services, is a key differentiator for us. Having a GCP region in Melbourne will certainly help our availability, durability and resilience requirements,” said Steve Day, Executive General Manager Infrastructure, Cloud & Workplace at National Australia Bank.

In addition to security, latency and openness, we believe that sustainability is important. At Google, we match 100% of the energy consumed by our global operations with renewable energy and maintain a commitment to carbon neutrality. That includes our data centres and cloud regions. When customers choose Google Cloud to run their compute, store their data and develop their applications, their digital footprint is offset with clean energy, making the services they run in our Cloud net carbon neutral.

Catering to the cloud demand 
The demand for cloud services across Australia continues to grow. Recent research from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) commissioned by Google Cloud revealed that locally the public cloud is gaining significant momentum.

Cloud adoption in Australia is expected to contribute a sizable US$108 billion of GDP and create as many as 26,000 jobs over the next five years. However, these benefits can only be realised with the investment of supporting infrastructure.

Our Google cloud regions in Australia will play an instrumental role in facilitating this growth, and will empower businesses and governments to securely and sustainability digitally transform and create value for years to come.

Posted by Rick Harshman, Managing Director, Google Cloud Asia Pacific Mark Innes, Vice President, Google Cloud in ANZ and APAC Industry Verticals

Google Cloud announces new Toronto region to support growing customer base in Canada

For more than a decade, we’ve been investing in Canada to become a go-to cloud partner for organizations across the country, from Vancouver to my hometown of St. John’s and every city in between. Whether they’re in financial services, media and entertainment, retail, or another industry, a rapidly growing number of Canada-based organizations are choosing Google Cloud to help them build applications better and faster, store data, and ultimately deliver awesome experiences to their own users.


To support our expanding customer base in Canada, we’re excited to announce a new Google Cloud Platform region coming to Toronto. We’re working constantly to bring you new cloud products and capabilities in Canada, and our goal is to allow you to access those services quickly and easily — wherever you might be in the country. That’s why we decided to build this new region in Toronto, complementing our existing one in Montréal, which marked Google Cloud’s official arrival in Canada when we opened it in 2018.


Like Montréal, the new region will have three zones, allowing organizations of all sizes and industries to distribute apps and storage to protect against service disruptions. It will also launch with our core portfolio of Google Cloud Platform products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Bigtable, Spanner, and BigQuery.


And the benefits don’t stop there. The Toronto region will provide distributed, secure infrastructure to help you meet disaster recovery and compliance requirements—something our customers have been asking for, especially financial institutions, public sector organizations, e-commerce providers, and other businesses operating in highly regulated industries.


While we’re thrilled about this news, don’t take it from us. We asked some of our customers with Canadian roots for their take on the upcoming cloud region. Here’s what they had to say:



  • David Furlong, SVP Artificial Intelligence, Venture Capital and Blockchain, at Banque Nationale: “Paired with their existing Montréal region, Google Cloud’s Toronto region will benefit the Canadian financial industry, enabling highly regulated organizations to perform disaster recovery while meeting data residency requirements.”
  • Ken Pickering, CTO at Hopper, the popular travel booking app: “Having already collaborated closely with the Google Cloud team in Montréal, where we’re headquartered, we look forward to their Toronto expansion. Google Cloud services are allowing us to bring a lower-latency travel planning and booking service to our customers. The second Canada region will allow us to extend that experience to more people around the world.”
  • Andrew McCormack, CIO at Payments Canada, a national payment clearing and settlement system that uses Google Cloud solutions like Apigee to digitize and manage its hybrid cloud environment: “System performance and security are critical for us an organization that clears and settles hundreds of billions of dollars every day. Google’s new Toronto cloud region will help us continue to modernize our infrastructure, strengthen our resilience, and create a digital platform for innovation.”

Today, Google Cloud customers around the world are currently served by 22 cloud regions and 67 zones. When we complete it in 2021, Toronto—along with three additional cloud regions we announced today on the other side of the world, Delhi, Doha, and Melbourne — will be part of our worldwide network of secure and reliable infrastructure.


For the latest and greatest updates on service availability, visit Google Cloud locations. Just getting started with Google Cloud? You can contact our sales team or find a local partner.


Posted by Jim Lambe, Managing Director, Google Cloud Canada