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Sunday, December 9, 2012
Google Apps customer notice
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Google App Engine Leaving Preview
In May at Google I/O we announced that Google App Engine would be
leaving Preview status later this year. As part of Google's long-term
commitment to App Engine, we are also updating our policies, pricing
and support model to reflect its status as a fully supported Google
product. We plan to roll this out in the second half of September but
we wanted to let you know what this will mean for you and your App
Engine applications. Please be aware that the timeline may change, but
you can keep up to date on our progress on the App Engine blog. We
plan to send a second email once the new pricing is in effect.
For all paid applications using the High Replication Datastore (HRD),
we will be introducing a new 99.95% uptime SLA. The current draft form
of the SLA can be found at http://code.google.com/appengine/sla.html.
For apps not using HRD, we will also soon release a tool that will
assist with the migration from Master/Slave (M/S) to HRD (you can sign
up to be in the Trusted Tester for the tool here:
http://goo.gl/3jrXu). We would like to emphasize that the SLA only
applies to applications that have both signed up to be a paid App and
use the HRD Datastore.
App Engine has a 3 year deprecation policy. This policy applies to the
entire App Engine platform with the exception of "trusted tester" and
"experimental" APIs. This is intended to allow you to develop your app
with confidence knowing that you will have sufficient notice if we
plan to make any backward-incompatible API changes that will impact
your application.
We will be updating the Terms of Service with language more geared
towards businesses. A draft of the new ToS can be found at
http://code.google.com/appengine/updated_terms.html.
We are introducing new Premier Accounts that will have access to
Operational Support, invoice-based billing, and allow companies to
create as many applications as they need for $500 per account per
month (plus usage fees). If you are interested in a Premier Account,
please contact us at appengine_premier_requests@google.com.
We will be moving to a new pricing structure that ensures ongoing
support of App Engine. Details of the new structure can be found at
http://www.google.com/enterprise/cloud/appengine/pricing.html. This
includes lowering the free quotas for all Apps. Almost all
applications will be billed more under the new pricing. Once App
Engine leaves preview this pricing will immediately go into effect,
but we've done a few things to ease the transition:
If you sign up for billing or update your budget between now and
October 31st we will give you a $50 credit.
In order to help you understand your future costs we are now providing
a side by side comparison of your old bill to what your new bill would
be. You can find these in your Admin Console under "Billing history"
by clicking on any of your "Usage Reports". Please review this
information. It's important that you study this projected billing and
begin any application tuning that you want to be in effect prior to
the new bill taking effect.
We have created an Optimization Article to help you determine how you
could optimize your application to reduce your costs under the new
model.
We have created a Billing FAQ based on the questions many of our
customers have had about the new pricing model.
The new pricing model charges are based on the number of instances you
have running. This is largely dictated by the App Engine Scheduler,
but for Python we will not be supporting concurrent requests until
Python 2.7 is live. Because of this, and to allow all developers to
adjust to concurrent requests, we have reduced the price of all
Frontend Instance Hours by 50% until November 20th.
Finally, if you have any additional questions or concerns please
contact us at appengine_updated_pricing@google.com.
In order to graduate from Preview status, we've made and continue to
make large investments in platform features, scalability, and
stability that your applications will benefit from. Thank you for your
support, commitment, and feedback on App Engine as it has developed.
We look forward to working with you for years to come!
Thank You,
The App Engine Team
© 2011 Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043
You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update
you about important changes to your Google App Engine account.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Official Google Blog: Search more securely with encrypted Google web search
Search more securely with encrypted Google web search
Years ago Google added SSL encryption to products ranging from Gmail to Google Docs and others, and we continue to enable encryption on more services. Like banking and e-commerce sites, Google's encryption extends beyond login passwords to the entire service. This session-wide encryption is a significant privacy advantage over systems that only encrypt login pages and credit card information. Early this year, we took an important step forward by making SSL the default setting for all Gmail users. And today we're gradually rolling out a new choice to search more securely at https://www.google.com.
When you search on https://www.google.com, an encrypted connection is created between your browser and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network. The service includes a modified logo to help indicate that you're searching using SSL and that you may encounter a somewhat different Google search experience, but as always, remember to check the start of the address bar for "https" and your browser lock indicators:
Today's release comes with a "beta" label for a few reasons. First, it currently covers only the core Google web search product. To help avoid misunderstanding, when you search using SSL, you won't see links to offerings like Image Search and Maps that, for the most part, don't support SSL at this time. Also, since SSL connections require additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server, your experience with search over SSL might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience. What won't change is that you will still get the same great search results.A few notes to remember: Google will still maintain search data to improve your search quality and to provide better service. Searching over SSL doesn't reduce the data sent to Google — it only hides that data from third parties who seek it. And clicking on any of the web results, including Google universal search results for unsupported services like Google Images, could take you out of SSL mode. Our hope is that more websites and services will add support for SSL to help create a better and more consistent experience for you.
We think users will appreciate this new option for searching. It's a helpful addition to users' online privacy and security, and we'll continue to add encryption support for more search offerings. To learn more about using the feature, refer to our help article on search over SSL.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
A new approach to China
First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.
Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.
Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.
We have already used information gained from this attack to make infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for our users. In terms of individual users, we would advise people to deploy reputable anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on their computers, to install patches for their operating systems and to update their web browsers. Always be cautious when clicking on links appearing in instant messages and emails, or when asked to share personal information like passwords online. You can read more here about our cyber-security recommendations. People wanting to learn more about these kinds of attacks can read this U.S. government report (PDF), Nart Villeneuve's blog and this presentation on the GhostNet spying incident.
We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China's economic reform programs and its citizens' entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.
We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that "we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China."
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.
Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
I came back
Thursday, August 14, 2008
To infinity and beyond? No!
Sent to you by xingxing via Google Reader:
Recently, we started notifying site owners when we discover this problem on their web sites. Like most messages we send, you'll find them in Webmaster Tools in the Message Center. You'll probably want to know right away if Googlebot has this problem - or other problems - crawling your sites. So verify your site with Webmaster Tools, and check the Message Center every now and then.
Examples of an infinite space
The classic example of an "infinite space" is a calendar with a "Next Month" link. It may be possible to keep following those "Next Month" links forever! Of course, that's not what you want Googlebot to do. Googlebot is smart enough to figure out some of those on its own, but there are a lot of ways to create an infinite space and we may not detect all of them.
Another common scenario is websites which provide for filtering a set of search results in many ways. A shopping site might allow for finding clothing items by filtering on category, price, color, brand, style, etc. The number of possible combinations of filters can grow exponentially. This can produce thousands of URLs, all finding some subset of the items sold. This may be convenient for your users, but is not so helpful for the Googlebot, which just wants to find everything - once!
Correcting infinite space issues
Our Webmaster Tools Help article describes more ways infinite spaces can arise, and provides recommendations on how to avoid the problem. One fix is to eliminate whole categories of dynamically generated links using your robots.txt file. The Help Center has lots of information on how to use robots.txt. If you do that, don't forget to verify that Googlebot can find all your content some other way. Another option is to block those problematic links with a "nofollow" link attribute. If you'd like more information on "nofollow" links, check out the Webmaster Help Center.
Written by Torrey Hoffman, Webmaster Tools team
Things you can do from here:
- Subscribe to Google Webmaster Central Blog using Google Reader
- Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites
How to start a multilingual site
Sent to you by xingxing via Google Reader:
Site structure
The first thing you'll want to consider is if it makes sense for you to buy country-specific top-level domains (TLD) for all the countries you plan to serve. So your domains might be ilovebackpacking.co.uk, ichlieberucksackreisen.de, and irdemochilero.es.es. This option is beneficial if you want to target the countries that each TLD is associated with, a method known as geo targeting. Note that this is different from language targeting, which we will get into a little more later. Let's say your German content is specifically for users from Germany and not as relevant for German-speaking users in Austria or Switzerland. In this case, you'd want to register a domain on the .de TLD. German users will identify your site as a local one they are more likely to trust. On the other hand, it can be pretty expensive to buy domains on the country-specific TLDs, and it's more of a pain to update and maintain multiple domains. So if your time and resources are limited, consider buying one non-country-specific domain, which hosts all the different versions of your website. In this case, we recommend either of these two options:
- Put the content of every language in a different subdomain. For our example, you would have en.example.com, de.example.com, and es.example.com.
- Put the content of every language in a different subdirectory. This is easier to handle when updating and maintaining your site. For our example, you would have example.com/en/, example.com/de/, and example.com/es/.
Geographic targeting vs. Language targeting
As mentioned above, if your content is especially targeted towards a particular region in the world, you can use the Set Geographic Target tool in Webmaster Tools. It allows you to set different geographic targets for different subdirectories or subdomains (e.g., /de/ for Germany).
If you want to reach all speakers of a particular language around the world, you probably don't want to limit yourself to a specific geographic location. This is known as language targeting, and in this case, you don't want to use the geographic target tool.
Content organization
The same content in different languages is not considered duplicate content. Just make sure you keep things organized. If you follow one of the site structure recommendations mentioned above, this should be pretty straightforward. Avoid mixing languages on each page, as this may confuse Googlebot as well as your users. Keep navigation and content in the same language on each page.
If you want to check how many of your pages are recognized in a certain language, you can perform a language-specific site search. For example, if you go to google.de and do a site search on google.com, choose the option below the search box to only display German results.
Posted by Charlene Perez and Juliane Stiller, Search Quality Team
Things you can do from here:
- Subscribe to Google Webmaster Central Blog using Google Reader
- Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites