Tag Archives: Events

ZuriHac 2018: Haskell hackathon in Rapperswil

Google Open Source recently co-sponsored a three-day hackathon for Haskell, an open source functional programming language. Ivan Krišto from Google’s Zürich office talks more about the event below.

Over the weekend of June 9th, Rapperswil, Switzerland became a home for 300 Haskellers. Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil hosted the seventh annual ZuriHac, the biggest Haskell Hackathon in Europe. ZuriHac is a free, international coding festival with the goal to expand our community and to build and improve Haskell libraries, tools and infrastructure.

Participants could choose to hack all day long, attend the Haskell beginners course led by Julie Moronuki, join the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) DevOps track organized by GHC contributors with the goal to bring in new contributors, listen to the Haskell flavoured talks, or socialize and swim in the lake. The event was colocated with C++ standardization committee meetings which offered a unique opportunity for sharing ideas between the two communities.

Here is a short summary of featured talks at ZuriHac.
The event concluded with a presentation of the results of the three day hackathon: project presentations.

Video by Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil.

Once again, we broke the attendance record! We’re already preparing for ZuriHac 2019 and hope to keep up this amazing growth. See you next year!

By Ivan Krišto, Software Engineer

Googlers on the road: CLS and OSCON 2018

Next week a veritable who’s who of free and open source software luminaries, maintainers and developers will gather to celebrate the 20th annual OSCON and the 20th anniversary of the Open Source Definition. Naturally, the Google Open Source and Google Cloud teams will be there too!

Program chairs at OSCON 2017, left to right:
Rachel Roumeliotis, Kelsey Hightower, Scott Hanselman.
Photo used with permission from O'Reilly Media.
This year OSCON returns to Portland, Oregon and runs from July 16-19. As usual, it is preceded by the free-to-attend Community Leadership Summit on July 14-15.

If you’re curious about our outreach programs, our approach to open source, or any of the open source projects we’ve released, please find us! We’re eager to chat. You’ll find us and many other Googlers throughout the week on stage, in the expo hall, and at several special events that we’re running, including:
Here’s a rundown of the sessions we’re hosting this year:

Sunday, July 15th (Community Leadership Summit)

11:45am   Asking for time and/or money by Cat Allman

Monday, July 16th (Tutorials)

9:00am    Getting started with TensorFlow by Josh Gordon
1:30pm    Introduction to natural language processing with Python by Barbara Fusinska

Tuesday, July 17th (Tutorials)

9:00am    Istio Day opening remarks by Kelsey Hightower
9:00am    TensorFlow Day opening remarks by Edd Wilder-James
9:05am    Sailing to 1.0: Istio community update by April Nassi
9:05am    The state of TensorFlow by Sandeep Gupta
9:30am    Introduction to fairness in machine learning by Hallie Benjamin
9:55am    Farm to table: A TensorFlow story by Gunhan Gulsoy
11:00am  Hassle-free, scalable machine learning with Kubeflow by Barbara Fusinska
11:05am  Istio: Zero-trust communication security for production services by Samrat Ray, Tao Li, and Mak Ahmad
12:00pm  Project Magenta: Machine learning for music and art by Sherol Chen
1:35pm    Istio à la carte by Daniel Ciruli

Wednesday, July 18th (Sessions)

9:00am    Wednesday opening welcome by Kelsey Hightower
11:50am  Machine learning for continuous integration by Joseph Gregorio
1:45pm    Live-coding a beautiful, performant mobile app from scratch by Emily Fortuna and Matt Sullivan
2:35pm    Powering TensorFlow with big data using Apache Beam, Flink, and Spark by Holden Karau
5:25pm    Teaching the Next Generation to FLOSS by Josh Simmons

Thursday, July 19th (Sessions)

9:00am    Thursday opening welcome by Kelsey Hightower
9:40am    20 years later, open source is as important as ever by Sarah Novotny
11:50am  Google’s approach to distributed systems observability by Jaana B. Dogan
2:35pm    gRPC versus REST: Let the battle begin with Alex Borysov
5:05pm    Shenzhen Go: A visual Go environment for everybody, even professionals by Josh Deprez

We look forward to seeing you and the rest of the community there!

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source

How we fought webspam – Webspam Report 2017





We always want to make sure that when you use Google Search to find information, you get the highest quality results. But, we are aware of many bad actors who are trying to manipulate search ranking and profit from it, which is at odds with our core mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Over the years, we've devoted a huge effort toward combating abuse and spam on Search. Here's a look at how we fought abuse in 2017.


We call these various types of abuse that violate the webmaster guidelines “spam.” Our evaluation indicated that for many years, less than 1 percent of search results users visited are spammy. In the last couple of years, we’ve managed to further reduce this by half.



Google webspam trends and how we fought webspam in 2017



As we continued to improve, spammers also evolved. One of the trends in 2017 was an increase in website hacking—both for spamming search ranking and for spreading malware. Hacked websites are serious threats to users because hackers can take complete control of a site, deface homepages, erase relevant content, or insert malware and harmful code. They may also record keystrokes, stealing login credentials for online banking or financial transactions. In 2017 we focused on reducing this threat, and were able to detect and remove from search results more than 80 percent of these sites. But hacking is not just a spam problem for search users—it affects the owners of websites as well. To help website owners keep their websites safe, we created a hands-on resource to help webmasters strengthen their websites’ security and revamped our help resources to help webmasters recover from a hacked website. The guides are available in 19 languages.

We’re also recognizing the importance of robust content management systems (CMSs). A large percentage of websites are run on one of several popular CMSs, and subsequently spammers exploited them by finding ways to abuse their provisions for user-generated content, such as posting spam content in comment sections or forums. We’re working closely with many of the providers of popular content management systems like WordPress and Joomla to help them also fight spammers that abuse their forums, comment sections and websites.


Another abuse vector is the manipulation of links, which is one of the foundation ranking signals for Search. In 2017 we doubled down our effort in removing unnatural links via ranking improvements and scalable manual actions. We have observed a year-over-year reduction of spam links by almost half.


Working with users and webmasters for a better web



We’re here to listen: Our automated systems are constantly working to detect and block spam. Still, we always welcome hearing from you when something seems … phishy. Last year, we were able to take action on nearly 90,000 user reports of search spam.


Reporting spam, malware and other issues you find helps us protect the site owner and other searchers from this abuse. You can file a spam report, a phishing report or a malware report. We very much appreciate these reports—a big THANK YOU to all of you who submitted them.


We also actively work with webmasters to maintain the health of the web ecosystem. Last year, we sent 45 million messages to registered website owners via Search Console letting them know about issues we identified with their websites. More than 6 million of these messages are related to manual actions, providing transparency to webmasters so they understand why their sites got manual actions and how to resolve the issue.

Last year, we released a beta version of a new Search Console to a limited number of users and afterwards, to all users of Search Console. We listened to what matters most to the users, and started with popular functionalities such as Search performance, Index Coverage and others. These can help webmasters optimize their websites' Google Search presence more easily.

Through enhanced Safe Browsing protections, we continue to protect more users from bad actors online. In the last year, we have made significant improvements to our safe browsing protection, such as broadening our protection of macOS devices, enabling predictive phishing protection in Chrome, cracked down on mobile unwanted software, and launched significant improvements to our ability to protect users from deceptive Chrome extension installation.


We have a multitude of channels to engage directly with webmasters. We have dedicated team members who meet with webmasters regularly both online and in-person. We conducted more than 250 online office hours, online events and offline events around the world in more than 60 cities to audiences totaling over 220,000 website owners, webmasters and digital marketers. In addition, our official support forum has answered a high volume of questions in many languages. Last year, the forum had 63,000 threads generating over 280,000 contributing posts by 100+ Top Contributors globally. For more details, see this post. Apart from the forums, blogs and the SEO starter guide, the Google Webmaster YouTube channel is another channel to find more tips and insights. We launched a new SEO snippets video series to help with short and to-the-point answers to specific questions. Be sure to subscribe to the channel!


Despite all these improvements, we know we’re not yet done. We’re relentless in our pursue of an abuse-free user experience, and will keep improving our collaboration with the ecosystem to make it happen.



Posted by Cody Kwok, Principal Engineer

How we fought webspam – Webspam Report 2017





We always want to make sure that when you use Google Search to find information, you get the highest quality results. But, we are aware of many bad actors who are trying to manipulate search ranking and profit from it, which is at odds with our core mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Over the years, we've devoted a huge effort toward combating abuse and spam on Search. Here's a look at how we fought abuse in 2017.


We call these various types of abuse that violate the webmaster guidelines “spam.” Our evaluation indicated that for many years, less than 1 percent of search results users visited are spammy. In the last couple of years, we’ve managed to further reduce this by half.



Google webspam trends and how we fought webspam in 2017



As we continued to improve, spammers also evolved. One of the trends in 2017 was an increase in website hacking—both for spamming search ranking and for spreading malware. Hacked websites are serious threats to users because hackers can take complete control of a site, deface homepages, erase relevant content, or insert malware and harmful code. They may also record keystrokes, stealing login credentials for online banking or financial transactions. In 2017 we focused on reducing this threat, and were able to detect and remove from search results more than 80 percent of these sites. But hacking is not just a spam problem for search users—it affects the owners of websites as well. To help website owners keep their websites safe, we created a hands-on resource to help webmasters strengthen their websites’ security and revamped our help resources to help webmasters recover from a hacked website. The guides are available in 19 languages.

We’re also recognizing the importance of robust content management systems (CMSs). A large percentage of websites are run on one of several popular CMSs, and subsequently spammers exploited them by finding ways to abuse their provisions for user-generated content, such as posting spam content in comment sections or forums. We’re working closely with many of the providers of popular content management systems like WordPress and Joomla to help them also fight spammers that abuse their forums, comment sections and websites.


Another abuse vector is the manipulation of links, which is one of the foundation ranking signals for Search. In 2017 we doubled down our effort in removing unnatural links via ranking improvements and scalable manual actions. We have observed a year-over-year reduction of spam links by almost half.


Working with users and webmasters for a better web



We’re here to listen: Our automated systems are constantly working to detect and block spam. Still, we always welcome hearing from you when something seems … phishy. Last year, we were able to take action on nearly 90,000 user reports of search spam.


Reporting spam, malware and other issues you find helps us protect the site owner and other searchers from this abuse. You can file a spam report, a phishing report or a malware report. We very much appreciate these reports—a big THANK YOU to all of you who submitted them.


We also actively work with webmasters to maintain the health of the web ecosystem. Last year, we sent 45 million messages to registered website owners via Search Console letting them know about issues we identified with their websites. More than 6 million of these messages are related to manual actions, providing transparency to webmasters so they understand why their sites got manual actions and how to resolve the issue.

Last year, we released a beta version of a new Search Console to a limited number of users and afterwards, to all users of Search Console. We listened to what matters most to the users, and started with popular functionalities such as Search performance, Index Coverage and others. These can help webmasters optimize their websites' Google Search presence more easily.

Through enhanced Safe Browsing protections, we continue to protect more users from bad actors online. In the last year, we have made significant improvements to our safe browsing protection, such as broadening our protection of macOS devices, enabling predictive phishing protection in Chrome, cracked down on mobile unwanted software, and launched significant improvements to our ability to protect users from deceptive Chrome extension installation.


We have a multitude of channels to engage directly with webmasters. We have dedicated team members who meet with webmasters regularly both online and in-person. We conducted more than 250 online office hours, online events and offline events around the world in more than 60 cities to audiences totaling over 220,000 website owners, webmasters and digital marketers. In addition, our official support forum has answered a high volume of questions in many languages. Last year, the forum had 63,000 threads generating over 280,000 contributing posts by 100+ Top Contributors globally. For more details, see this post. Apart from the forums, blogs and the SEO starter guide, the Google Webmaster YouTube channel is another channel to find more tips and insights. We launched a new SEO snippets video series to help with short and to-the-point answers to specific questions. Be sure to subscribe to the channel!


Despite all these improvements, we know we’re not yet done. We’re relentless in our pursue of an abuse-free user experience, and will keep improving our collaboration with the ecosystem to make it happen.



Posted by Cody Kwok, Principal Engineer

Six essential security sessions at Google Cloud Next 18

By Robert Sadowski, Trust and Security Marketing, Google Cloud

We aim to be the most secure cloud, but what does that mean? If you’re coming to Google Cloud Next '18 next month in San Francisco, now is your chance to identify and understand the technologies and best practices that set Google Cloud Platform (GCP) apart from other cloud providers. There are dozens of breakout sessions dedicated to security, but if time is short, here are six sessions that will give you a solid understanding of foundational GCP security practices and offerings, as well as insight into the cutting-edge security research and development being done by our team.

1. How Google Protects Your Data at Rest and in Transit

First things, first. Come learn how Google protects your data within Google infrastructure, when it’s stored on disk as well as when it moves across our network, for use by various services. Google Cloud Security and Privacy Product Managers Maya Kaczorowski and Il-Sung Lee will also cover additional protections you can put in place such as Customer-Managed Encryption Keys, IPsec tunnels, and Istio. More details are available here.

2. How Google's Security Infrastructure Design Enabled Rapid, Seamless Response to “Spectre” and “Meltdown”

Not content to sit back and wait, Google has a huge team of security researchers that actively push the limits of our systems. This year, researchers found two significant vulnerabilities in modern compute architectures: Spectre and Meltdown. This session will detail those vulnerabilities, and more to the point, how we remediated them transparently, without customer downtime. Learn more here.

3. BeyondCorp Beyond Google

New Google employees always marvel at how they can access Google resources from anywhere, without a VPN. That’s made possible by our BeyondCorp model, and core BeyondCorp technologies such as global scale security proxies, phishing-resistant 2nd factor authentication, and laptop security enforcement are increasingly available to Google Cloud customers. In this session, French resource management provider VEOLIA describes how it built out a BeyondCorp model on Google Cloud to reach 169,000 employees across five continents. Register for the session here.

4. Trust Through (Access) Transparency

'When do you access my data, and how will I know?' is a question that troubles every cloud customer who cares about their data—and one that few cloud providers have an answer for. This talk reviews Google's robust data protection infrastructure, and introduces Google's new Access Transparency product, which gives customers near-real-time oversight over data accesses by Google's administrators. The talk also guides customers through how to audit accesses and mitigate against this risk, together with examples from our customers of where this has successfully been done. Register for the session here.

5. Google Cloud: Data Protection and Regulatory Compliance

Security in the cloud is much more than encryption and firewalls. If you’re subject to regulations, you often need to demonstrate data protection and compliance with a variety of regulatory standards. In this session, we cover recent trends in the data protection space, such as GDPR, and share tools you can leverage to help address your compliance needs. You'll learn how you can partner with Google to enhance data security and meet global regulatory obligations. You can find a full session description here.

6. Shield Your Cloud with Verifiable Advanced Platform Security

Last but not least, you’ll definitely want to attend this session by Googlers Andrew Honig and
Nelly Porter, as they discuss issues facing VM security in the cloud, and an interesting new approach to mitigate against local code gaining escalation privileges. After attending this session, you’ll understand how we prevent workloads running on Google Cloud Platform from being penetrated by boot malware or firmware rootkits. Register for the session here.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Security runs through everything we do at Google Cloud. In addition to these six sessions, there are 31 other breakout sessions dedicated to security, not to mention keynotes and supersessions, hands-on labs, meetups and bootcamps. Don’t delay, register for Next today.

Google Search at I/O 2018

With the eleventh annual Google I/O wrapped up, it’s a great time to reflect on some of the highlights.

What we did at I/O


The event was a wonderful way to meet many great people from various communities across the globe, exchange ideas, and gather feedback. Besides many great web sessions, codelabs, and office hours we shared a few things with the community in two sessions specific to Search:




The sessions included the launch of JavaScript error reporting in the Mobile Friendly Test tool, dynamic rendering (we will discuss this in more detail in a future post), and an explanation of how CMS can use the Indexing and Search Console APIs to provide users with insights. For example, Wix lets their users submit their homepage to the index and see it in Search results instantly, and Squarespace created a Google Search keywords report to help webmasters understand what prospective users search for.

During the event, we also presented the new Search Console in the Sandbox area for people to try and were happy to get a lot of positive feedback, from people being excited about the AMP Status report to others exploring how to improve their content for Search.

Hands-on codelabs, case studies and more


We presented the Structured Data Codelab that walks you through adding and testing structured data. We were really happy to see that it ended up being one of the top 20 codelabs by completions at I/O. If you want to learn more about the benefits of using Structured Data, check out our case studies.



During the in-person office hours we saw a lot of interest around HTTPS, mobile-first indexing, AMP, and many other topics. The in-person Office Hours were a wonderful addition to our monthly Webmaster Office Hours hangout. The questions and comments will help us adjust our documentation and tools by making them clearer and easier to use for everyone.

Highlights and key takeaways


We also repeated a few key points that web developers should have an eye on when building websites, such as:


  • Indexing and rendering don’t happen at the same time. We may defer the rendering to a later point in time.
  • Make sure the content you want in Search has metadata, correct HTTP statuses, and the intended canonical tag.
  • Hash-based routing (URLs with "#") should be deprecated in favour of the JavaScript History API in Single Page Apps.
  • Links should have an href attribute pointing to a URL, so Googlebot can follow the links properly.

Make sure to watch this talk for more on indexing, dynamic rendering and troubleshooting your site. If you wanna learn more about things to do as a CMS developer or theme author or Structured Data, watch this talk.

We were excited to meet some of you at I/O as well as the global I/O extended events and share the latest developments in Search. To stay in touch, join the Webmaster Forum or follow us on Twitter, Google+, and YouTube.

 Posted by Martin Splitt, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Our goal: helping webmasters and content creators

Great websites are the result of the hard work of website owners who make their content and services accessible to the world. Even though it’s simpler now to run a website than it was years ago, it can still feel like a complex undertaking. This is why we invest a lot of time and effort in improving Google Search so that website owners can spend more time focusing on building the most useful content for their users, while we take care of helping users find that content. 

Most website owners find they don’t have to worry much about what Google is doing—they post their content, and then Googlebot discovers, crawls, indexes and understands that content, to point users to relevant pages on those sites. However, sometimes the technical details still matter, and sometimes a great deal.

For those times when site owners would like a bit of help from someone at Google, or an explanation for why something works a particular way, or why things appear in a particular way, or how to fix what looks like a technical glitch, we have a global team dedicated to making sure there are many places for a website owner to get help from Google and knowledgeable members of the community.

The first place to start for help is Google Webmasters, a place where all of our support resources (many of which are available in 40 languages) are within easy reach:

Our second path to getting help is through our Google Webmaster Central Help Forums. We have forums in 16 languages—in English, Spanish, Hindi, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, German, Russian, Turkish, Polish, Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese and Korean. The forums are staffed with dedicated Googlers who are there to make sure your questions get answered. Aside from the Googlers who monitor the forums, there is an amazing group of Product Experts who generously offer their time to help other members of the community—many times providing greater detail and analysis for a particular website’s content than we could. The forums allow for both a public discussion and, if the case requires it, for private follow-up replies in the forum.

A third path for support to website owners is our series of Online Webmaster Office Hours — in English, German, Japanese, Turkish, Hindi and French. Anyone who joins these is welcome to ask us questions about website appearance in Google Search, which we will answer to the best of our abilities. All of our team members think that one of the best parts of speaking at conferences and events is the opportunity to answer questions from the audience,  and the online office hours format creates that opportunity for many more people who might not be able to travel to a specialized event. You can always check out the Google Webmaster calendar for upcoming webmaster officer hours and live events.

While how a website behaves on the web is openly visible to all who can see it, we know that some website owners prefer not to make it known their website has a problem in a public forum. There’s no shame in asking for support, but if you have an issue for your website that seems sensitive—for which you don’t think you can share all the details publicly—you can call out that you would prefer to share necessary details only with someone experienced and who is willing to help, using the forum’s “Private Reply” feature.

Are there other things you think we should be doing that would help your website get the most out of search? Please let us know -- in our forums, our office hours, or via Twitter @googlewmc.

Posted by Juan Felipe Rincón from Google’s Webmaster Outreach & Support team

Google I/O 2018 – What sessions should SEOs and Webmasters watch live ?

Google I/O 2018 is starting today in California, to an international audience of 7,000+ developers. It will run until Thursday night. It is our annual developers festival, where product announcements are made, new APIs and frameworks are introduced, and Product Managers present the latest from Google.

However, you don't have to physically attend the event to take advantage of this once-a-year opportunity: many conferences and talks are live streamed on YouTube for anyone to watch. You will find the full-event schedule here.

Dozens upon dozens of talks will take place over the next 3 days. We have hand picked the talks that we think will be the most interesting for webmasters and SEO professionals. Each link shared will bring you to pages with more details about each talk, and you will find out how to tune in to the live stream. All times are California time (PCT). We might add other sessions to this list.


Tuesday, May 8th

3pm - Web Security post Spectre/Meltdown, with Emily Schechter and Chris Palmer - more info.
5pm - Dru Knox and Stephan Somogyi talk about building a seamless web with Chrome - more info.


Wednesday, May 9th

9.30am - Ewa Gasperowicz and Addy Osmani talk about Web Performance and increasing control over the loading experience - more info.
10.30am - Alberto Medina and Thierry Muller will explain how to make a WordPress site progressive - more info.
11.30am - Rob Dodson and Dominic Mazzoni will cover "What's new in web accessibility" - more info.
3.30pm - Michael Bleigh will introduce how to leverage AMP in Firebase for a blazing fast website - more info.
4.30pm - Rick Viscomi and Vinamrata Singal will introduce the latest with Lighthouse and Chrome UX Report for Web Performance - more info.


Thursday, May 10th

8.30am - John Mueller and Tom Greenaway will talk about building Search-friendly JavaScript websites - more info.
9.30am - Build e-commerce sites for the modern web with AMP, PWA, and more, with Adam Greenberg and Rowan Merewood - more info.
12.30pm - Session on "Building a successful web presence with Google Search" by John Mueller and Mariya Moeva - more info.



This list is only a sample of the content at this year's Google I/O, and there might be many more that are interesting to you! To find out about those other talks, check out the full list of web sessions, but also the sessions about Design, the Cloud sessions, the machine learning sessions, and more… 

We hope you can make the time to watch the talks online, and participate in the excitement of I/O ! The videos will also be available on Youtube after the event, in case you can't tune in live.


Posted by Vincent Courson, Search Outreach Specialist, and the Google Webmasters team

Googlers on the road: FOSSASIA Summit 2018

In a week’s time, free and open source enthusiasts of all kinds will gather in Singapore for FOSSASIA Summit 2018. Established in 2009, the annual event attracts more than 3,000 attendees, running from March 22nd to 25th this year.

FOSSASIA logo licensed LGPL-2.1.
FOSSASIA Summit is organized by FOSSASIA, a nonprofit organization that focuses on Asia and brings people together around open technology both in-person and online. The organization is also home to many open source projects and is a regular participant in the Google Open Source team’s student programs, Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in.

Our team is excited to be among those attending and speaking at the conference this year, and we’re proud that Google Cloud is a sponsor. If you’re around, please come say hello. The highlight of our travel is meeting the students and mentors who have participated in our programs!

Here are the Googlers who will be giving presentations:

Thursday, March 22nd

2:00pm Real-world Machine Learning with TensorFlow and Cloud ML by Kaz Sato

Friday, March 23rd

9:30am BigQuery codelab by Jan Peuker
10:30am  Working with Cloud DataPrep by KC Ayyagari
1:00pm Extract, analyze & translate Text from Images with Cloud ML APIs by Sara Robinson
2:00pm    Bitcoin in BigQuery: blockchain analytics on public data by Allen Day
2:40pm What can we learn from 1.1 billion GitHub events and 42 TB of code? by Felipe Hoffa2:40pm Engaging IoT solutions with Machine Learning by Markku Lepisto
2:45pm CloudML Engine: Qwik Start by Kaz Sato
3:20pm Systems as choreographed behavior with Kubernetes by Jan Peuker
4:00pm The Assistant by Manikantan Krishnamurthy

Saturday, March 24th

10:30am Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in by Stephanie Taylor
10:30am Zero to ML on Google Cloud Platform by Sara Robinson
11:00am  Building a Sustainable Open Tech Community through Coding Programs, Contests and Hackathons panel including Stephanie Taylor
11:05am Codifying Security and Modern Secrets Management by Seth Vargo
1:00pm    Open Source Education panel including Cat Allman
5:00pm Everything as Code by Seth Vargo

We look forward to seeing you there!

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source