International tourists find the Polish seaside through Google AdWords

(Cross-posted on the Google Small Business Blog)

Sebastian Hejnowski’s parents built the Villa Zdroj Bed and Breakfast in 2002 to share Poland’s beauty with weary travelers. Located in Miedzyzdroje, a city on the coast of Polish island Wolin, Villa Zdroj is one of the island’s first modern bed and breakfasts.

Sebastian’s parents handle reservations, property development and sometimes breakfast. Sebastian runs the advertising efforts for his parents’ Villa, including Google AdWords. “When we first started our AdWords campaigns, we focused on Poland but we soon realized that there was increasing interest from our neighboring countries,” says Sebastian. When he noticed an upward trend in drop-in visitors from other countries, he decided to launch campaigns across Poland’s borders as well.

Villa Zdroj - courtesy of Marcin Matecki Photography

According to Sebastian, the variety of outdoor activities combined with the relatively inexpensive cost of Polish tourism make Wolin a vacation paradise for Germans and Scandinavians. “Germans and Scandinavians were coming to Miedzyzdroje, but mostly staying in expensive five-star hotels,” says Sebastian. “B&B’s were never an option since they didn’t know where to find them.” So Sebastian made Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden his first international targets. The strategy proved correct: “We were one of the first Polish B&B’s to create a website in English. When we targeted an AdWords campaign to these people, they started calling and booking reservations.”

As time went on, Sebastian noticed that Poland had become more and more accessible to Europeans due to an increase in flights to the area. To capitalize on this trend, Sebastian expanded his AdWords campaigns even beyond bordering countries. “With time we extended the campaign to the Great Britain and the Netherlands.” says Sebastian. “Europeans tend to explore new places and travel extensively.”

Sebastian with his family - courtesy of Marcin Matecki Photography

Today, foreigners account for more than half of Villa Zdroj’s guests. And Sebastian estimates that up to 60% of those international guests book Villa Zdroj because they found his AdWords ads.

Thanks to his effective targeting, Sebastian now sells out all of the villa’s rooms during peak summer travel season. He adjusts his ad campaigns to reflect availability: “In summer, we track vacancies and adjust our campaigns accordingly. We pause the campaigns if we’re booked a few weeks out.”

In 2012, Poland will host the Euro Cup and Sebastian’s dad is already getting ready for an influx of visitors. “My father is considering buying a big projector so everyone can watch the games together in the communal room,” says Sebastian. “We’re already excited to share the Polish seaside with more out of town visitors!”

Learn more about Villa Zdroj Bed and Breakfast and Sebastian’s success with online advertising in this short video (it's in Polish, but you can view captions).

Posted by Piotr Zalewski, Communications Associate, Poland

European Court of Justice rules in Google’s favour

Google aims to provide as much information as possible to users so that they can make informed decisions. For this reason, we have been awaiting a series of decisions by the European Court of Justice that explore the extent to which trade mark rights can be used to restrict information available to users. The first of those decisions was delivered today.

The question before the court was whether advertisers should be allowed to choose keywords freely when reaching out to users on the Internet. In other words, if advertisers are allowed to show advertisements when another company's brand name is entered as a search query.

Trade marks are part of our daily life and culture, helping us to identify the products and services that we may be looking for. They are key for companies to market and advertise their products and services. But trade mark rights are not absolute.

We believe that user interest is best served by maximizing the choice of keywords, ensuring relevant and informative advertising for a wide variety of different contexts. For instance, if a user is searching for information about a particular car, he or she will want more than just that car’s website. They might be looking for different dealers that sell that car, second hand cars, reviews about the car or looking for information about other cars in the same category.

And, contrary to what some are intimating, this case is not about us arguing for a right to advertise counterfeit goods. We have strict policies that forbid the advertising of counterfeit goods; it's a bad user experience. We work collaboratively with brand owners to better identify and deal with counterfeiters.

Some companies want to limit choice for users by extending trade mark law to encompass the use of keywords in online advertising. Ultimately they want to be able to exercise greater control over the infomation available to users by preventing other companies from advertising when a user enters their trade mark as a search query. In other words, controlling and restricting the amount of information that users may see in response to their searches.

Today, the Court confirmed that Google has not infringed trade mark law by allowing advertisers to bid for keywords corresponding to their competitors’ trade marks. It also confirmed that European law that protects internet hosting services applies to Google’s AdWords advertising system. This is important because it is a fundamental principle behind the free flow of information over the internet.

Our guiding principle has always been that advertising should benefit users, and our aim is to ensure that ads are relevant and useful. We will study the decision as we move forward in order to make sure that we continue to deliver advertising that is perceived as both valuable and relevant by our users.

Posted by Dr. Harjinder S. Obhi, Senior Litigation Counsel, EMEA

A digital renaissance: partnering with the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage

The Renaissance, Europe's period of cultural, political and scientific rebirth, began in Florence around 600 years ago. At Google we're interested in a (small “r”) renaissance of a different kind — a digital one. Since the launch of Google Books, we’ve been working with libraries and publishers around the globe to bring more of the world's books to more readers around the globe. Any school child should be able to access the works of Petrarch, Dante or Vico (or, if they're so inclined, Machiavelli). In the case of these more famous authors, this is already largely possible, but what about the work of Guglielmo il Giuggiola or Coluccio Salutati? We want all of the great literature and writings of Italy to be accessible to the general public.

Today we’re announcing an agreement with the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage that will push this vision forward. Working with the National Libraries of Florence and Rome, we’ll digitize up to a million out-of-copyright works. The libraries will select the works to be digitized from their collections, which include a wealth of rare historical books, including scientific works, literature from the period of the founding of Italy and the works of Italy's most famous poets and writers. It marks the first time we’ve ever joined forces with Italian libraries, and the first time we've worked with a ministry of culture.

Around Europe and the rest of the world, we are effectively witnessing a digital renaissance, with an increasing number of organizations running ambitious and promising book digitization projects. We're not the only ones who have seen the need to bring the world's books into digital form. Digitization of books is a tremendous undertaking, requiring the joint effort of a great number of public and private stakeholders. For this reason, we’re supportive of many other efforts at digitization, such as the European Commission's Europeana. We want to see these books have the broadest reach possible — the books we scan are available for inclusion in Europeana, of which the Florence Library is a contributing member, and other digital libraries. The more of the world's historical, cultural treasures we can bring online, the more we can unlock our shared heritage.

We believe today’s announcement is an important step, and we look forward to working with more libraries and other partners. We envision a future in which people will be able to search and access the world's books anywhere, anytime. After all, Antonio Beccadelli and Anastasius Germonius — like Shakespeare and Cervantes — are part of our human cultural history.

Posted by Gino Mattiuzzo, Strategic Partner Development Manager, Italy

A meeting of the minds: Google's 2010 EMEA Faculty Summit

As the world's premier athletes assembled in Vancouver for the Winter Games, Googlers in the equally snowy Zurich, Switzerland were preparing for a prestigious event of a different sort. On February 8, 100 top academics from 62 leading universities throughout EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) descended upon our Zurich engineering headquarters for our third annual Faculty Summit — three days of in-depth technical presentations, discussions and networking sessions, all targeted at strengthening partnerships with EMEA's foremost computer science thinkers. Like their athletic counterparts in Vancouver, Faculty Summit attendees face big challenges. EMEA is a huge and very diverse region where companies and universities alike have huge mountains to climb. By sharing information about our projects, plans and initiatives, we hope to foster mutually beneficial relationships with our academic colleagues and their universities — working together to solve the big problems and drive technology forward.


We designed the Summit to allow maximum potential for debate, networking and reflection. Attendees participated in day-long "stream" discussions on themes ranging from privacy and security — with the participation of leading researchers such as Ross Anderson (University of Cambridge) — to natural language technologies, featuring NLP expert Fred Jelinek (Johns Hopkins University). Academics selected from a range of opt-in "teach the teacher"-style workshops on Google tech (including mobile platforms, MapReduce and web technologies). Additional events included a Google Wave demo geared towards educational use and special sessions for guests from Africa and the Middle East, showcasing Google's ongoing work in these regions. This year, we added extra time for 1-1 break-out sessions, in which academics and Google engineers met, chatted and developed ideas in an intimate, face-to-face setting.

The Summit also gave us a chance to see long-term relationships maturing and generating concrete outcomes inside and outside academic settings. Notable guests included keynote speaker Professor Andy Hopper, Head of the Cambridge Computer Lab, whose research initiative Computing for the Future of the Planet (CFTFP) received a Google Focused Research Award earlier this month. Andy's project promises major results in the areas of privacy and green computing research. We were also happy to welcome back former Google Visiting Faculty member Professor Hannah Bast (University of Freiburg). Hannah recently completed a year-long sabbatical with our Zurich development team for Transit in Google Maps, contributing major improvements to an application that started out as a 20 percent project and is now available in over 400 cities around the world. Privacy and security expert Dr. Frank Stajano (University of Cambridge) — our newest Visiting Faculty member — and Sara Adams, Anita Borg Scholar, former Google intern and current software engineer, joined us from the Munich office where they're working on privacy-related projects. We also had several Faculty Research Award winners in attendance, including Dr. Simon Harper (University of Manchester), Dr. Miles Osborne (University of Edinburgh), Lawrence Muchemi (University of Nairobi) and former Visiting Faculty member Dr. Hinrich Schuetze (University of Stuttgart). The Faculty Research Award supports academics working within universities on areas of mutual interest; for instance, Lawrence's Award-funded project creates a new mobile application development course for Kenyan students, while Hinrich and his Stuttgart team are improving search engine results by investigating the structure of queries. Hinrich, Lawrence and our other awardees offer examples of how partnerships can lead to amazing results, on local to global scales. We hope their stories inspired both academic and Googler attendees to take advantage of existing programs and help build new opportunities for all tech users.

Our engineering teams in EMEA and our academic partners have lots of work to do in 2010. This year's Faculty Summit offered an opportunity to explore new solutions, kick-start collaboration and prove, yet again, that our combined efforts always yield results far greater than the sum of their parts! For more information about how Google supports university programs and partnerships, check out our Google Research site and stay tuned for news of the North America Faculty Summit — planned for late July.

Posted by Nelson Mattos, VP, EMEA Product and Engineering

Google Flu Trends expands to 16 additional countries

If you're like us, you're probably thinking a lot about how this year's flu season might affect you and your community. To help you out, we at Google.org are excited to announce the expansion of Google Flu Trends to 16 additional countries, including much of Europe. We've also made the site available in 37 languages. Flu is a global threat, affecting millions worldwide each year, so we're pleased to make this tool available in more regions and languages.

Last November, we launched Google Flu Trends in the United States after finding a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. By tracking the popularity of certain Google search queries, we are able to estimate the level of flu, in near real-time. While some traditional flu surveillance systems may take days or weeks to collect and release data, Google search queries can be counted immediately. Google Flu Trends provides an additional surveillance tool that may help public health officials and the public make more informed decisions about preparing for the flu season.

In the past year, we've expanded our coverage to include Mexico, New Zealand and Australia and have continued to see a good correspondence between our estimates and official flu activity data. In fact, our analysis of last season shows that Google Flu Trends had a close 0.92 correlation with official U.S. flu data.

An important aspect of Google Flu Trends is that we filter out terms that may be popular because people hear about them in the news. What we do not use in the models is a term like [swine flu] since people are more likely to type that into Google because they want to know more information about it, given the news headlines, and not because they actually have H1N1 or swine flu. For more information about how we built this model, take a peek at this video:



If you visit Google Flu Trends for the U.S., you'll notice that the flu season is starting early this year. For tips on how to stay healthy this season, please visit our friends at the U.S. CDC and the ECDC.

Posted by Matt Mohebbi and Dan Vanderkam, Software Engineers

YouTube in 9 more domains

Posted by Sakina Arsiwala, International Manager, YouTube

The YouTube community began life speaking English, but thanks to the uniquely expressive medium of video, today there is a global village of content makers and viewers. With a noteworthy number of YouTube visitors now coming from outside the U.S., it's high time we go multilingual.

Today at a Google press event in Paris, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are announcing the launch of nine new domains in Brazil, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Ireland, and the UK.

In response to many requests, each new site is fully translated and localized for each country including content (Featured Videos, Director Videos, Promotions), as well as the interfaces, search, user support, and such community features as video ratings, sharing, and content flagging. And these new localized versions are built using Google search technology, so you can quickly find more of what you want to see. Perhaps best of all, you can continue to use youtube.com, or move to one of these localized sites -- and switch seamlessly between the two. Happy creating, viewing and sharing!

Update: Removed link to user content.

A picture's worth a thousand clicks

Posted by John Hanke, Director for Maps, Earth and Local

I am pleased to tell you that we've agreed to purchase Panoramio, a website based in Spain that links millions of photos with the exact geographical location where they were taken. (Our FAQ has all the details.)

Panoramio is a community photos website that enables digital photographers to geo-locate, store and organize their photographs -- and to view those photographs in Google Earth. Other users can search and browse Panoramio photos and suggest edits to the metadata associated with the photos. Panoramio also offers an API that enables web developers to embed Panoramio functionality into their websites.

Those of you already using Google Earth have no doubt noticed Panoramio's striking images documenting settings from all over the world, like moonscapes in Croatia, dramatic sunsets in Australia, and innovative architecture in the United Arab Emirates.

We've been working with Panoramio for some time -- its photos have been a default layer in Google Earth since the beginning of the year. This layer will remain in place as our teams work together toward further integrating this amazing content, generated by many, into our mapping technologies.