Google AdWords Introduces Google Gadget Ads, a New Interactive Ad Format

Engaging and flexible ad units give advertisers a new way to communicate with users online

Honda featured the band "Fall Out Boy" in a Google Gadget Ad, which contained several dozen videos of the band and could be added to nearly any website including iGoogle.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (September 19, 2007) – Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced the introduction of Google Gadget Ads™, a new interactive ad format that is currently in an expanded beta with a select group of AdWords™ advertisers worldwide. Gadget ads – non-traditional ad units with interactive, rich media capabilities – not only enable advertisers to target audiences in a flexible and timely manner via regular updates within the ad unit, but also allow users to engage with ad content in a way static ads haven’t facilitated in the past.

Gadget ads can incorporate real-time data feeds, images, video and much more in a single creative unit and can be developed using Flash, HTML or a combination of both. Designed to act more like content than a typical ad, they run on the Google™ content network, competing alongside text, image and video ads for placement. They support both cost-per-click and cost-per-impression pricing models, and offer a variety of contextual, site, geographic and demographic targeting options to ensure the ads reach relevant users with precision and scale. Gadget ads are also built on an open platform, allowing anybody from individual advertisers to agencies to set up and run ads on the Google content network, the world’s largest global online ad network. Plus, gadget ads will not command any serving or hosting costs.

Feedback from preliminary beta participants, including brand advertisers such as Pepsi-Cola North America’s Sierra Mist, Intel, Honda, Six Flags and Paramount Vantage, has been overwhelmingly positive. Advertisers are enthusiastic about this fresh marketing solution that empowers them to interact with targeted users through rich, dynamic and engaging content.

"We’re always looking for new ways to engage with our consumers," said John Vail, director, interactive marketing, Pepsi-Cola North America. "Google Gadget Ads allowed us to reach the right audience at the right time, with an interactive message that brought our light-hearted Sierra Mist campaign, ‘Squeeze More out of Summer,’ to life."

"New and cutting-edge advertising opportunities are always of interest to Intel," said Stephanie Dillard, global marketing manager at Intel. "Google Gadget Ads provided a unique and efficient means to further promote our Centrino Duo campaign. Our goal was to enhance visibility and engagement with the consumer while taking in key learnings of Google’s evolutionary advertising offerings. We look forward to utilizing the interactive gadget ad format with our new ‘Chips’ campaign that shifts focus back on the processor."

"The introduction of this new advertising format provides advertisers and agencies worldwide with an imaginative, dynamic way to interact with consumers," said Susan Wojcicki, Google’s vice president of product management. "Google Gadget Ads are built on an open platform that enables distribution across the Google content network and can be shared on iGoogle and other personalized web pages."

In addition, users can build active communities with gadget ads by sharing them with each other and placing them on nearly any webpage, including personalized iGoogle pages. These portability and sharing capabilities simultaneously generate additional free traffic and help foster a sense of community between advertisers and users. Detailed interaction reports allow marketers to track dozens of actions within the creative unit and optimize toward their goals. To learn more about Google Gadget Ads, visit www.google.com/adwords/gadgetads/.

About Google Inc.

Google’s innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google’s targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.google.com.

Media Contacts:

Diana Adair
Google
dianaa@google.com
650-253-1347

Deanna Yick
Google
dyick@google.com
650-253-6499

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Google, Google Gadget Ads, and AdWords are trademarks of Google Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other company and product names may be trademarks of respective companies with which they are associated.

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Google AdSense for Mobile unlocks the potential of the mobile advertising market

Announcement
September 17, 2007

The mobile device is fast becoming the world’s most popular gateway to information. In fact, there are currently more mobile devices worldwide than personal computers and televisions combined.

As part of our ongoing efforts to develop new ways for users to find the information they need anytime and anywhere, Google announced today the availability of AdSense™ for Mobile, a program that contextually targets ads to mobile website content. AdSense for Mobile also allows AdSense publishing partners the ability to earn revenue from their mobile websites through the targeted placement of mobile text ads. With this program, advertisers can connect with the growing number of mobile publishers, ultimately providing users with an enhanced mobile experience that helps them find what they are looking for more quickly and efficiently on the go.

AdSense for Mobile is intended for AdSense partners who have created websites specifically for mobile browsers, and who want to monetize their mobile content via contextual advertising. Like Google’s other AdSense products, mobile text ads run on an auction model. The system automatically reviews the content of publishers’ mobile websites and delivers text ads that are relevant to the websites’ audience and content. Publishers earn money whenever mobile users click on the ads.

With this new program, the unmatched reach of the Google content network is extended to the mobile platform. AdSense for Mobile provides a valuable way to connect mobile users with the right ad at the right time as they seek information on the go. AdSense for Mobile is now available to all mobile publishers in 13 countries worldwide.

For more information, please see: adsense.blogspot.com.

AdSense for Mobile will be available in the following countries: US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and Japan (available in the coming weeks).

Google and AdSense are trademarks of Google Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

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Collaboration in the Cloud Gets Richer with Presentations Added to Google Docs

Announcement
September 17, 2007

As part of its ongoing efforts to enable users to take advantage of the web for sharing and collaborating, Google today added features for presentations to the Google Docs application. At documents.google.com, users can create simple web-based presentations that others can update and view from their own computers, even at the same time. The presentation feature of Google Docs is also available to businesses, schools and organizations using Google Apps to offer communication and collaboration tools to their users.

Presentations are a natural addition for Google Docs, as they are usually created with the intention of being shared. Web-based, collaborative presentations offer users much-needed relief from manually managing and compiling group members’ input in separate attachments, and they make it possible for multiple users to view a set of slides while a moderator controls the presentation. Users will see that these features are still in simple, early stages; the Google Docs team is making them available today in response to strong user demand for presentation-sharing, and updates and improvements will continue to roll out over the coming months.

Google Docs is an innovative, web-based platform for creating, sharing, storing, and publishing documents; it now includes capabilities for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Starting today, users can:

• Create and keep presentations in one place on the web that’s accessible anytime, from any Internet connected computer.
• Manage, update and share presentations with colleagues by sending them a simple email invitation.
• Edit together online and in real-time, or contribute at different times to the same presentation on the web.
• Present and control slide shows for all viewers over the web, with no special setup required. Chat with viewers in real-time via integrated chat.
• Import existing presentations to get started quickly.
• Quickly publish presentations to the general public or individuals of their choice.

"This new presentation feature to Google Docs will be an extremely useful tool to our users and gives us an easy way to – literally – get on the same page," said Scott Smith, vice president, Envirolet Environmental Sanitation and Google Apps administrator for Sancor Industries. "In our business the better the process for sharing information is, the better we can illustrate to our customers the value of our products."

"From student groups to sales teams, people are turning to the web for help improving both personal and group productivity," said Sam Schillace, director of engineering, Google Docs. "Putting documents in the cloud surrounded by easy to use features for collaboration and sharing can save people hours of inefficiency and frustration and even enable new ways of working together."

Google Docs (the new, simpler name for what was called Google Docs & Spreadsheets) is available free at documents.google.com. Millions of people all over the world use it daily in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Czech, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Turkish, Polish, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Indonesian.

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Google.org launches $10 million request for investment proposals to advance sustainable transportation solutions

Announcement
September 12, 2007

Since Google.org launched the RechargeIT initiative in June as part of our efforts to stop global warming (www.google.org/recharge/), a lot has happened in the world of plug-in vehicles. Automakers have made key announcements about future plans for plug-ins. Our grantee the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), along with Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), released a comprehensive assessment (www.epri-reports.org/) that found that widespread use of plug-in hybrids in the U.S. could dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The charge for electrified transportation is heating up, and we couldn’t be more excited. But consumers still can’t buy plug-in vehicles – and that’s a problem. It’s time for us to put some money where our mouth is and help accelerate mass commercialization of plug-in vehicles.

Today, Google.org has issued a request for proposals to the tune of $10 million in order to advance sustainable transportation solutions (www.google.org/recharge/rfp/). We are inviting entrepreneurs and companies to show us their best ideas on how they can contribute to this important cause. We need catalytic investments to support technologies, products and services that are critical to accelerating plug-in vehicle commercialization. That is why we have structured this RFP to offer investment dollars to for-profit companies to promote social and environmental change. The severity of global warming requires solutions from NGOs, governments, individuals and (very importantly) the private sector. We have already made $1 million in grants to a group of outstanding non-profit organizations (see www.google.org/recharge/partners.html), and want to expand our impact by spurring innovation in the private sector. While $10 million is a fraction of the total investment needed to transform our transportation sector, we hope this RFP will help catalyze a broader response. We need the automakers to bring these cars to market, but plug-in vehicles also need an entire ecosystem of companies flourish.

We realize that this type of open call for proposals is not the usual model for investment, but we wanted to use a process that was open to new ideas and new entrants. Part of our goal is to get as many people as possible to work on solutions to our vehicle emissions challenges. We welcome and expect to receive submissions from a wide variety of companies – from cutting edge battery technologies to innovative service businesses – and from companies of all sizes. We also encourage participants from all over the world to submit proposals. This is a global challenge, and it will take all of us to solve it.

This open RFP process is a new approach to mission-focused investing, and we’re interested to see what we can learn from it, both in terms of opportunities and gaps that exist in this space today, as well as ways that we can improve on this solicitation process for future investments. Our focus on learning is the primary reason we decided to narrow this first RFP to investments in private companies, rather than a combination of grants and investments.

We will continue to make grants as part of RechargeIT and other programs, but we’re excited today to announce our first foray into investments. To learn more, read the RFP at www.google.org/recharge/rfp/.

For photos of Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin with RechargeIT vehicles, visit the Press Center at www.google.com/press/images.html#org. For broadcast-standard video and other multimedia files visit the Multimedia Press Room at www.thenewsmarket.com/google.

Google.org is the philanthropic arm of Google Inc. Google.org aspires to use the power of information to help people better their lives. We are an experiment in active philanthropy. In addition to financial resources, we are able to engage Google’s entire family of people and partners, information technologies and other resources to address three major growing global problems: climate change (www.google.org/climate.html), global public health (www.google.org/publichealth.html), and economic development and poverty (www.google.org/development.html).

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New Features from Google Book Search Help Readers Organize and Find Books

Announcement
September 6, 2007

As more and more books are added to the Book Search index, readers have been asking for more ways to search, organize and use this growing digital collection. In response, we’ve recently launched several new features to make Google Book Search a more useful tool:

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• Create and search your own library: Google knows search, and with My Library, we’re extending that functionality to your personal book collection. Now you can build your own library on Google Book Search, which you can organize, annotate, and of course, full text search through the books you select. We see this as a new and powerful tool to help users organize and navigate their books. For example, a student could build a collection out of all his sources for an upcoming term paper, and then use Google Book Search to quickly find which book and page contains a needed reference. In another scenario, a frequent traveler might search her Google Book Search library of guide books to figure out which book in her offline collection offers the most information about an obscure town so she can take it along on her next trip.
• Share your expertise: While you’re creating your library, you can also annotate it by adding labels, writing reviews, and rating books. Then share your collection with others by sending them a link to your library in Google Book Search. You can even set up RSS feeds with friends so that they’re alerted when you add new books to your collection.
• Explore Popular passages: Through our own searches in Google Book Search, we’ve become interested in how authors are quoting one another. Our new ‘Popular Passages’ feature displays quotations or other excerpts of a book that appear in lots of other books. For example, here’s a quote that appears in more than 140 books from 1759-2007:

"An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made; Imitations are often a sort of manufacture, wrought up by those mechanics, art and labour, out of pre-existent materials…" -Edward Young

By exploring popular passage links, you can see how an excerpt has been used throughout time and discover the connections between books.

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• Select, Clip and Post Text: We’ve added a feature to let you clip and post selections of text from out-of-copyright books so you can share your favorite passages or quotes with others. Click on the ‘share this clip’ icon in the blue navigation bar, highlight the text, and then choose whether to post it to Blogger, Google Notebook, or get the URL to embed the clip wherever you’d like to display the passage.
• Refine your search: In addition to the new features that let you interact with books, we’ve also added search refinement links on the results pages. These links point you toward categories of booksthat match your search and give you a new way to peruse the index.

As we continue to digitize the world’s books and the index grows. We hope that these new features inspire you to explore, organize and share your book finds on Google Book Search.

You can try out Google Book Search by visiting books.google.com.

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