Sparking new ideas in news with global Innovation Challenges

The news industry has a serious challenge ahead: building a successful, sustainable business model for high quality journalism in the digital age. Looking at ways to help this industry-wide transition to digital, last year we launched the Google News Initiative, along with a $300 million commitment to help journalism thrive.

Google has also supported 662 European news organizationswith funds to support innovative ideas in the last three years. Those projects addressed some of the industry’s most pressing issues—everything from new business models to new methods of fact-checking. Building on this experience, we’re announcing a new program: the GNI Innovation Challenges.

$30 million, two years, five regions of the world

To kickstart innovation globally, we will allocate $30 million over the next two years to launch up to five regional editions of the Challenges program, covering the North America, Middle East and Africa, Europe, Latin America, and Asia Pacific regions. Publishers in different parts of the world have told us about issues specific to their regions, and suggested the need for diverse approaches. This is why each Challenge will be designed around a theme that meets their local requirements.

The Innovation Challenges will be open to organizations of every size that look to produce original journalism. These projects should aim to enlighten citizens with trustworthy content and focus on encouraging a more sustainable news ecosystem. The full details about eligibility, as well as the theme, will be published on our website when each regional challenge opens up its application process. For the recently concluded Innovation Challenge in Asia Pacific, the key focus was on reader revenue.

As you’d expect from such a diverse region, we saw a lot of excitement for the Challenge, resulting in 215 applications from 18 countries covering a broad range of news organizations. The applications went through a rigorous assessment process, which concluded with a jury panel made up of a mix of Google executives and external experts from the Asia-Pacific news industry.

In the end, 23 projects from 14 countries were selected for funding, including CommonWealth Magazine, a Taiwanese news magazine, which will be working on an improved paywall to increase subscriptions. Other projects include an experiment by Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper, to allow readers to give a “tip” to valuable stories to encourage engagement by potential subscribers, and The Record, Nepal’s first membership-supported news site. You can read full details of the winners on our website.

Next, we will be opening applications for projects that help support local news in Europe and North America. We will soon announce the main topic for the Challenges in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

Sharing what we’ve learned from the Challenges

We believe this regional approach will allow us to be responsive to individual regions’ needs. And in that spirit, we plan to adapt the program as we learn from the various GNI Challenges globally and hope they will play a meaningful role in working towards a globally sustainable and regionally relevant news environment.

To find out more and apply, check our website for more details.

How to discover & suggest Google-selected canonical URLs for your pages

Sometimes a web page can be reached by using more than one URL. In such cases, Google tries to determine the best URL to display in search and to use in other ways. We call this the “canonical URL.” There are ways site owners can help us better determine what should be the canonical URLs for their content.

If you suspect we’ve not selected the best canonical URL for your content, you can check by entering your page’s address into the URL Inspection tool within Search Console. It will show you the Google-selected canonical. If you believe there’s a better canonical that should be used, follow the steps on our duplicate URLs help page on how to suggest a preferred choice for consideration.

Please be aware that if you search using the site: or inurl: commands, you will be shown the domain you specified in those, even if these aren’t the Google-selected canonical. This happens because we’re fulfilling the exact request entered. Behind-the-scenes, we still use the Google-selected canonical, including for when people see pages without using the site: or inurl: commands.

We’ve also changed URL Inspection tool so that it will display any Google-selected canonical for a URL, not just those for properties you manage in Search Console. With this change, we’re also retiring the info: command. This was an alternative way of discovering canonicals. It was relatively underused, and URL Inspection tool provides a more comprehensive solution to help publishers with URLs.


Here are the winners of the GNI Innovation Challenge in Asia Pacific

Last November, we launched the Google News Initiative (GNI) Asia Pacific Innovation Challenge, aimed at strengthening our support of digital innovation and new business models in news organizations across the APAC region. Through our work and partnership with publishers, it’s clear that reader revenue is key to their financial stability. We want to support innovators in this space—those who are pioneering approaches that involve everything from granting digital currency to subscription-based membership models.


Within two months of opening up the Innovation Challenge, we received 215 applications from 18 countries. We heard from news startups in Indonesia, web publishers in Mongolia and Nepal, and video and audio broadcasters in Australia. After a rigorous review, a round of interviews and a thorough jury selection process, we ended up providing support to 23 projects in 14 countries—amounting to a total of $3.2 million.


Creative approaches to reader revenue


When we called for applications, we listed four criteria: impact, feasibility, innovation and inspiration. The winners demonstrated a combination of each. Several themes emerged from the applications we reviewed, including:

  • Building or renovating membership models:For startups, this may just mean building a membership model. For established players, this can include creating group subscriptions, more responsive platforms and better targeted newsletters. Crikey, an independent news organization based in Australia, has over 90 percent of its total revenue coming from individual subscribers. With the GNI funding, they plan to build a new subscription offering that can be tailored to organizations, businesses and groups of all sizes.

  • Leveraging machine learning and AI to surface more engaging content:A handful of organizations used trends emerging from big data to surface relevant and engaging content to potential subscribers. CommonWealth Magazine, a Taiwanese news organization, built a paywall in 2017 and enjoyed early success. It will now make this model more dynamic, leveraging AI and machine learning to develop personalized content—including a customized newsletter—to increase and improve reader engagement.

  • Gamification to create community-wide sharing:A final category learnt how to gamify the process of sharing or commenting on content. News organizations are experimenting with rewarding especially engaged readers with badges or tokens that can be used to pay for access to events. Asahi Shimbun, a national news publisher in Japan, believes that readers will be experimenting with gamification via tips. Tips are a common way of expressing their gratitude or affection, so why not extend this to the world of journalism? They will be issuing points to subscribers in order for them to “tip” stories and helping expand the market to non-subscribers so that they can do the same.

There were 20 others that received GNI support, all equally impressive in their own right. Check them out here: 

GNI APAC Innovation Challenge

Finally, to every organization who applied, thank you for your time and effort. There will be a second round of the APAC GNI Innovation Challenge later this year, and we encourage you all to re-apply. Watch out for details on our website.

Down under, over and all around: Sydney in 3D on Google Earth

Google Earth is one of the world's most comprehensive 3D maps available. In addition to global satellite and terrain coverage, over the past several years we've been adding highly detailed 3D imagery of entire cities and towns, from the iconic architecture of cities like New York and Paris to views of landmarks like the Grand Canyon. And now, we’re sharing 3D imagery of central Sydney, Australia!

But 3D imagery of Sydney isn’t the only thing that’s new today. We've made many incremental improvements to our modeling process that, overall, help us achieve an even more precise 3D landscape. (You can check out this video to learn more about the process.) For a while now, parts of Sydney—sites like Sydney Harbour Bridge and Bondi Beach—have already been available in 3D. Expect to see this quality across all of our new Earth imagery.

Central Sydney sits beneath busy airspace, so it’s taken a while to make 3D models of the area. We’ve finally collected enough imagery to build a more complete picture of this iconic city. Explore landmarks like the Sydney Opera House and popular tourist spots Darling Harbour and The Rocks. You can even plan your next visit to Sydney with our guided tour, Explore Sydney.

You can see all the places where we have 3D imagery available in Google Earth.

Source: Google LatLong


Take a look inside our YouTube House

It’s morning here at the YouTube House in New York City, and we’re getting ready for a packed day inside our first-ever experiential house.

It’s a pop-up, and since we know most of you are tuning in from far away, we wanted to give you a behind-the-scenes tour of our temporary digs. In the video below, you’ll see how YouTube isn’t just a place for watching random videos, but a community where people congregate for music, fitness, food, culture, and so much more.

See if you can spot some guest appearances from The Fitness Marshall and Laura in the Kitchen, too!



— The YouTube Team

Source: YouTube Blog


Get a taste of Spanish culinary history on Google Arts & Culture

The last time you enjoyed a flavorful spoonful of gazpacho, you probably didn't stop to think about how the Spanish dish became a popular staple on restaurant menus worldwide. Made of sun-ripened tomatoes, vinegar and garlic, the dish was once only enjoyed by the poorest communities in Andalucia. Yet by the 18th century, gazpacho’s undeniable deliciousness brought it from modest farm tables all the way into the most opulent dining rooms—including the Royal Palace of Madrid’s Gala Dining Hall.

A dish tastes better when you know its history. In that spirit, Google Arts & Culture has worked with the Royal Academy of Gastronomy in Spain to present “Spain: an Open Kitchen.” It’s the most comprehensive online exhibition on Spanish cuisine to date and the first time Google Arts & Culture has focused on a standalone retrospect about a country’s culinary culture.

In the Spain: an Open Kitchen exhibit, you can discover the stories behind Spanish cuisine.

Enjoy scrumptious stories from all over Spain and meet the people who shaped the cultural legacy that has turned the country into a global culinary superpower: there’s chef Ferran Adrià who turned beach bar elBulli on the Costa Brava into the most famous restaurant in the world. Or learn the story of gastronomic pioneer Clara María González de Amezúa, who has left her mark with the creation of Alambique—a cooking school that has played a key role in the evolution of cooking in Spain.

"Spain: an Open Kitchen" features more than 60 exhibitions and editorial features, the voices of more than 60 food experts and over 2,000 images, sketches, videos—some which, like Ferran Adrià’s creative notebooks, have been made public for the very first time. We carved up these exciting ingredients into three major chapters: “The Faces” (the people behind Spain's remarkable food culture); “the Flavors” (the traditional tastes and dishes of the region like Iberico ham and tapas); and "the Fusion" (decoding what happens when food meets art, architecture and culture).

Hungry for more? "Spain: an Open Kitchen" offers a feast of content for your enjoyment. Take a seat next to Ferran Adria as he goes through a one hour menu tastingor takes on a creative challenge with YouTube  creators, enjoy a 360 tour inside the cellars of Portia winery designed by architect Norman Foster, or discover expert insights into what the future of gastronomy may hold.

Download the Google Arts & Culture Android or iOS app, join the conversation on #SpainOpenKitchen and explore Spain’s Open Kitchen as you learn more about the history behind your favorite Spanish dish.

Training a network of fact-checkers in India

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This week marks the one-year anniversary of the Google News Initiative. Read more about what has happened in India since then from Surabhi Malik, Program Director of the Google News Initiative Training Network and an important figure in India's fight against fake news.
Surabhi Malik at a GNI training session
Two-and-a-half years ago, I  joined the Google News Lab as a fellow to strengthen its mission of collaborating with journalists and entrepreneurs to drive innovation in news. Of the many areas I worked with the industry on, including data-backed  journalism and visual storytelling, I kept hearing one request: help was needed with online verification and fact-checking.
Online misinformation was a new challenge for everyone in India - including the news media. Some journalists described it as the biggest issue facing the industry. Many who I met during my workshops were keen to know how they could pitch in to tackle this growing menace and help their readers sift facts from the sea of misinformation around. And as the first and probably the only verification trainer in the country back then, I was equally determined to do all I could to help.


The verification curriculum offered by the Google News Lab could help them navigate this maze. Built in consultation with experts at the First Draft, it provided them the best practices of online verification adopted by fact-checkers worldwide.


Verification quickly became one of the most sought after trainings offered by the News Lab. In the 20 months that followed, I travelled over 133,000 miles, across 25 cities, and conducted over 150 workshops for almost 6500 journalists and journalism students. It was a rare opportunity for journalists to learn new skills on the job, and the classes were oversubscribed.


To reach as many journalists as possible and offer in-depth and hands-on training, we announced the launch of the Google News Initiative India Training Network in June 2018,  and invited interested journalists to sign up. The program was launched in partnership with Internews, DataLeads, BoomLive, AltNews, First Draft and Storyful. After my fellowship ended, I went on to lead this network as its Program Director working for Internews.


The call for sign-ups received an overwhelming response. Journalists from newsrooms across the country - including senior editors from publications in different languages - applied and sat through the four-day bootcamps, where fact-checkers from India like BoomLive and AltNews and trainers from First Draft and Storyful provided hands-on training.

Seven bootcamps and several weeks later, we had a team of fact-checkers better equipped to combat online misinformation and also motivated to help colleagues around them do the same.


In the six months after the launch of the network, these ‘truth warriors’ went on to pass on the skills they had learnt, to over 5,000 journalists and journalism students. Some of them also launched fact-checking initiatives and regular columns in their newsrooms. Thanks to their commitment, readers now have ways to sift through and recognize authentic information.

The journalist in me feels immense gratification to know that through each of those who joined us in this fight against misinformation, I continue striving to ensure that millions of readers get uninhibited access to nothing but the truth.


There is no underestimating the scale and complexity that online misinformation poses for India and other countries.  Empowering fact checking networks is but one part of a solution that requires actions from many players, but it is a step in the right direction.

Posted by Surabhi Malik, who works with Internews as the Program Director for Google News Initiative India Training Network. Prior to this, she was the Google News Lab Teaching Fellow for India for two  years. She has also been a digital journalist for over a decade handling key editorial responsibilities in different newsrooms in India

Stable Channel Update for Chrome OS


The Stable channel has been updated to 73.0.3683.88 (Platform version: 11647.104.0/1/2/3) 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.

New Features

  • Better Chrome OS out-of-memory management
  • Report additional telemetry data for Chrome OS devices
  • Alerts regarding upcoming removal of remaining Chrome Supervised Users
  • Video Player: switch to native media controls
  • Demo Mode: Switch language setting 
  • Audio Focus on CrOS
  • Developers can share files/folders with Linux apps.
  • Improved native Drive integration with added support for the Drive->Computers root in Files app
  • Demo Mode: Offline enrollment and setup functionality
  • For managed devices, the remotely configured 20 printer maximum cap will be raised to allow for several thousand native printers for each organizational unit in the Google Admin console. If you’re interested in testing the new feature, please join our trusted tester program.

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).

Cindy Bayless
Google Chrome

Chrome for Android Update

Hi, everyone! We've just released Chrome 73 (73.0.3683.90) for Android: it'll become available on Google Play over the next few weeks.

This release includes stability and performance improvements. You can see a full list of the changes in the Git log. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug.

Ben Mason
Google Chrome

Announcing v2.1 of the Content API for Shopping

Today we're announcing the release of v2.1 of the Content API for Shopping. This version has been available as an experimental version since late last year and is now ready for production use by all Content API users.

Highlights
You can find a complete list of changes in the release notes and accompanying migration guide, but here are some highlights:
  • A more consistent product validation experience. Product insert requests no longer report non-fatal warnings or errors. This allows you to insert products and make subsequent updates to resolve issues via feed rules in the Merchant Center UI, just as you would with feeds maintained outside the API.
  • A better experience for managing Shopping Actions. Multiple improvements have been made to the Orders API based on feedback from beta users.
  • More features are on the way! Today's release contains many improvements, but more are on the way, including new ways to supply local inventory data and features to support supplemental feeds.
  • Continued v2 support. While we strongly encourage you to migrate to v2.1, support for v2 will continue at least through the first quarter of 2020. Subscribe to this blog to ensure you receive important updates on Content API releases and deprecations.
Updated client libraries
Updated client libraries with support for v2.1 are now available in multiple languages.

Learn more
Check out the v2.1 API reference documentation to explore the new version of the API, and read through the list of behavior changes and deprecations in the migration guide to help plan your upgrade to v2.1.

If you have any questions or need help with migration, please head over to our support forum.