Australia Blog
News and notes from Google Down Under
Shellebrating Christmas Island’s extraordinary nature with Street View and Google Earth
Tuesday, April 24, 2018
In December, we
took the Street View trekker
to Christmas Island, a remote tropical territory of Australia just south of Indonesia. With
Parks Australia
,
we joined the island’s red crabs as they marched in the millions from the forest to the sea for their annual migration.
Now it’s time to shellebrate.
Starting today on
Google Maps Street View
and
Google Earth
, you can explore
Christmas Island
and
Cocos (Keeling) Islands’
unique wildlife, dazzling ocean vistas and lush rainforests, including the grand finale of the red crab migration—the spawning.
The red crabs wait all year for this very moment—and the precise alignment of the rains, moon and tides—to release their eggs at the coastal waters.
Christmas Island’s remote location makes it home to a wild and diverse ecosystem—including 600 species of tropical fish, 14 species of terrestrial crabs, more than 100 bird species and four native reptile species. Exploring its wetlands and blowholes and coastline, you can see for yourself why the island is often called “Australia’s Galapagos.”
A view of
Dolly Beach
, home to a stunning coral reef and turtles.
A scenic walking trail in the Dales wetlands
—a dense rainforest crawling with the island’s endemic blue crabs (Tip: Walk uphill on Street View and you’ll find a waterfall).
The Blowholes
, where the
waves blast water through eroded cliffs.
A view of
Direction Island Beach
, part of Cocos (Keeling) Islands which is home to diverse marine life, including coral, reef sharks and parrotfish.
Christmas Island’s nature and wildlife is so treasured and protected that the crabs have right of way.
R
oads are often closed
during the migration, and Parks Australia have erected fences to direct the crabs to safe crossing points with under-road passes, or fly-over bridges.
N
ow you can join the island’s 45 million red crabs as they crawl along the forest floor, climb the cliffs and finally, spawn at the water’s edge.
The red crabs starting their journey in the forest,
on the way to
Merrial
Beach.
The crabs crawling on the
Ethel Beach ramp.
Crabs climbing down the cliffs to
Merrial Beach
The crabs arriving to spawn at
Ethel Beach
The crabs above
Ethel Beach
after the spawning
Scuttle over to
Street View
and
Google Earth
to experience the wonderland of wildlife on Christmas Island, and the white sand beaches of
Cocos (Keeling) Islands.
And as you step into this moment in time, we welcome you to join the crabs as they lead this magnificent dance of nature.
Posted by Camilla Ibrahim, Christmas Island Crab Advocate, Google Australia & New Zealand
Consumers will determine the future of news
Monday, April 23, 2018
In the 19th century, newspapers were rocked by a disruptive new technology. The telegraph allowed information to travel faster than ever before, worrying editors and journalists. Why would anyone read a newspaper if news could travel instantly through cables?
The telegraph meant readers expected news to be conveyed more efficiently. But the anticipated newspaper apocalypse never arrived. Far from bringing an end to the industry, the telegraph was co-opted by the best newspapers. Although the telegraph is obsolete today, the rapid and reliable delivery of information it enabled remains a hallmark of the newspaper industry.
Technology has shaped the way people consume news for centuries. Today, anyone with a smartphone can access an unprecedented number of news sources, while sharing content with friends and followers. Consumers are also using the Internet and mobile apps to engage with new forms of advertising, putting pressure on traditional ad-supported industries, including news publishers.
These changes in consumer and marketing behaviour have profound implications for traditional news business models. But they do not mean the death of journalism. In fact, our appetite for quality journalism is on the rise. According to
Enhanced Media Metrics Australia
, 90 per cent of Australians read Australian news media, and
readership has been increasing
.
I have read the
AFR
every day since high school. The way I read it has changed from print to a computer and now to a smartphone. What has remained constant is my need to be kept informed, whether on breaking business developments or the latest cricket results. Technology is the news industry’s strongest tool in satisfying the basic human need for good reporting.
We at Google are not content makers, we do not employ people to work as journalists, and we have no intention of becoming a news publisher. But we share an important common vision with the Australian news industry, which is to ensure that people have access to quality news and information. This is at the heart of our partnerships with publishers such as
Fairfax Media
. It is also why we support the
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s inquiry
. We have submitted our
response
and are ready to engage transparently and constructively with the Commission.
We are committed to securing journalism’s bright future in Australia by doing our part to make sure it works for newsrooms, news publishers and news consumers - and we are focusing on a number of areas.
First
, newsrooms are looking to engage audiences better, so we are expanding our
News Lab Fellowships
in Australia in partnership with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. We help journalists use technology to tell more compelling stories, and offer them insights on how their work resonates with readers through Google Analytics.
Second
, publishers are endeavouring to grow their business, so we are partnering with them to increase their revenue through digital advertising. We are also helping to promote subscriptions through the integration of subscription content in Search and offering a simple one-click sign-on called
Subscribe with Google
. With Flexible Sampling, publishers decide how much free sampling to offer their potential subscribers.
Third
, consumers are seeking more news on digital platforms, so we are improving the way Search delivers them to the most relevant and trusted sources. In the past calendar year, we directed more than 2 billion visits to Australian news websites — each visit an opportunity to gain a loyal subscriber.
Finally
, consumers are also seeking a better news consumption experience. People quit sites that take more than three seconds to load. So we are helping publishers create web pages that load in less than half a second with our open-source
Accelerated Mobile Pages
format.
And, at all times, people should have transparency and control over how their personal data is used. That’s a responsibility we take very seriously at Google, and we are encouraged that Australians are increasingly aware of how to access and change - even delete - the data they have shared with Google. In 2017, Australians visited
myaccount.google.com
more than 22 million times to understand what data they share with Google and how it is used to create a more relevant experience for them.
The way that people consume news may change, but the need for quality journalism does not. Our goal is to support newsrooms in meeting the evolving expectations of their audience. Ultimately, consumers will be the ones who decide whether news publishers flourish, but on present form there is every reason to believe that they will.
Jason Pellegrino, Managing Director, Google Australia
Puparazzi alert: Tips for your pet photos
Thursday, April 12, 2018
If you’re a pet owner, you've probably taken countless photos of your pooch. Here are a few pet-tential ways you can celebrate your pets with Google Photos:
Identify popular breeds with Google Lens
Recently, we made
Google Lens preview
available in Google Photos across Android and iOS. Now, when you take a photo of an animal—like a cute cat or dog—you can use Lens to help identify its breed and get more information.
Create a movie dedicated to your furry friend
Your pet may have a leading role in your life, but it’s time to show the rest of the world that your animal is a star. If your pet is ready for a big screen debut, open your Google Photos app, go to the Assistant tab, and click on the movie button. Then, if available, choose the Meow Movie or Doggie Movie option, select your pet, and we’ll compile the best photos of your four-legged pal into a movie, set to pet-themed music.
Label your pet to easily find photos of them
In most countries, you can label your cats and dogs so that you can search to quickly find photos of them. Or even better, you can find photos of that one time you dressed them up for Halloween by searching “Oliver hat” or pictures of them in the park by searching “Oliver park.”
Search by breed and emoji
Speaking of fast ways to find photos of your pets, you can also search by breed, species, or emoji — try
or
– or q
uickly search “pitbull” to rediscover photos of your sister’s cute canine.
Howevfur you pampurr your pets, we hope you can try out a few of the features that Google Photos has to off-fur.
Posted by Kristi Bohl, Product Manager and Cat Enthusiast, Google Photos
Hop through the school holidays with new Google Assistant experiences designed for families
Wednesday, April 11, 2018
School’s out! Whether you’re home making pancakes with the family or out on an adventure with the kids, we’ve added new experiences for the Google Assistant so you can learn, play and stay entertained with the family over the school holidays. Monday musical chairs? Tuesday night trivia? Saturday storytime? The Google Assistant has many games, activities and stories designed for families. And if you want to create your own personal trivia game to play with friends, you can try out one of our
Actions templates
. Talking to your Assistant screen-free is an easy way to be there – in the moment – spending time with loved ones. These experiences are available today in Australia with the Assistant on Google Home, other smart speakers and eligible phones.
Below are some things you can ask—just start with “Ok Google.”
Play
👯
"Play Lucky Trivia for Families”
“Play Musical Chairs”
“Play Musical Statues”
“Let’s play a game”
Learn
📖
“Play ABC Behind the News”
“Help me with my homework”
“Tell me a fun fact”
“How do you say “Let’s have cr
ê
pes for breakfast” in French?”
Entertain
“Let’s
make ANZAC biscuits”
“Play Kinderling Radio”
“Read The Complete Adventures of Blinky Bill”*
“Tell me a joke”
T
he new activities are rolling out today so you can go on a family adventure together. With their parent's permission, children under 13 can also have their own personalised Google Assistant experience when they log in with their own account, powered by
Family Link
. Family Link helps parents manage their child’s Google Account while they explore. And with Voice Match, your family can train the Assistant to recognise who’s speaking - up to six voices.
So round the family up this school holidays to unlock a world of magic!
Posted by Aisling Finch, Marketing Director, Google Australia & New Zealand
*Audiobook purchase via Google Play Books is required (
see more details here)
.
Just call us Googz
Sunday, April 1, 2018
We Aussies are a unique lot, on a unique land.
Since we arrived in Australia in 2002, our goal has been to build and adapt our products to best serve Aussies – whether you’re finding your way around town using Google Maps, or chatting with your Google Assistant about brekkie recipes.
And j
ust like our products, we’re always testing and iterating on our visual identity
to keep our communications
relevant, relatable and real
for Aussies. Over the years, w
e’ve played with our logo through Google Doodles celebrating various Australian icons – from
gumnut babies
to our
Great Barrier Reef
.
Recently, we’ve been prompted to examine how our brand might be shaped by rising popular culture and linguistic trends in Australia. We all know abbreviations are the hallmark of Australian English. And upon further analysis of this evolving dialect, we made a fascinating discovery: Just like Maccas, Aussies are increasingly calling us “Googz.”
We had a real
“yeah, nah” moment. That inspired us
to re
imagine our brand from the ground up, in partnership with leading Australian d
esigner
Jazza
. We conducted in-depth focus groups on beaches and in skate parks across Australia – and went back to the drawing board to define a new logo identity that would be authentic to Aussies, roll off the tongue but still anchored in our heritage.
After months of sketching, mood boarding, foraging and finger painting, we are delighted to unveil our shiny, new ‘Strayan logo:
In the end, we landed on exactly the same typography and colour palette, with a gorgeous, gumtree green, lowercase ‘z.’ We opted for the ‘z’ over an ‘s’ as the former felt unexpected and gave us snazzy typographic angles to work with. To get a glimpse into the design journey, check out Jazza’s video:
Starting today on April 1, you’ll see this new brand identity out in the wild - in Pyrmont and in our products. Just ask your Google Assistant “Ok Google, What’s your name?” on your
Google Home device or Assistant enabled iOS and Android phone.
With Jazza’s help, we’ve also produced some swanky swag:
To get your hands on these Googz goodz, head over to the
Google Store
.
UPDATE:
April Foolz
!
Posted by Gabi Conlon, Head of Brand, Google Australia & New Zealand
Building a stronger future for news
Wednesday, March 21, 2018
People come to Google looking for information they can trust, and that information often comes from the reporting of journalists and news organizations around the world. And while the demand for quality journalism is as high as it’s ever been, the business of journalism is under pressure, as publications around the world face challenges from an industry-wide transition to digital.
That matters deeply to Google. After all, our mission to build a more informed world is inherently tied to the reporting of journalists and news organizations. Our shared mission also reflects shared business interests. Platforms like Search and YouTube depend on a healthy ecosystem of publishers producing great digital content. That’s why it’s so important to us that we help you drive sustainable revenue and businesses. Last year, we paid US$12.6 billion to partners and we drove 10 billion clicks a month to publishers’ websites for free.
It’s also why over the years, we’ve worked closely with the news industry to address key challenges. We worked with the industry to launch the open-source
Accelerated Mobile Pages
Project to improve the mobile web, YouTube Player for Publishers to simplify video distribution and reduce costs,
Flexible Sampling
to help with discovery of news content on Google,
Google News Lab
to provide newsrooms with trainings and editorial partnerships, and the
Digital News Initiative
to drive innovation in the European news industry.
We invested a lot time and energy in these collaborations. But the hard truth is—all of this might not be enough. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish what’s true (and not true) online. Business models for journalism continue to change drastically. The rapid evolution of technology is challenging all institutions, including the news industry—to keep pace.
We need to do more. That’s why we’re launching the
Google News Initiative
(GNI), our effort to help journalism thrive in the digital age. The GNI signifies a major milestone in Google’s 15-year commitment to the news industry, and will bring together everything we do in collaboration with the industry—across products, partnerships, and programs—to help build a stronger future for news.
The GNI will build on these efforts and deepen our commitment to a news industry facing dramatic shifts in how journalism is created, consumed, and paid for. It’s focused on three objectives:
Elevate and strengthen quality journalism
Evolve business models to drive sustainable growth
Empower news organizations through technological innovation
Elevate and strengthen quality journalism
Over the past few years, we’ve worked with publishers to elevate accurate, quality content and stem the flow of misinformation and disinformation.
On our own platforms
, we’re focused on combating misinformation during breaking news situations. Bad actors often target breaking news on Google platforms, increasing the likelihood that people are exposed to inaccurate content. So we’ve trained our systems to recognize these events and adjust our signals toward more authoritative content. There are comparable challenges on YouTube, and we’re taking a similar approach, highlighting relevant content from verified news sources in a “Top News” shelf.
But we’re also working directly with news organizations to combat misinformation. We’re launching the Disinfo Lab alongside the
First Draft
to combat mis- and disinformation during elections and breaking news moments. Finally, to help consumers distinguish fact from fiction online, we’re teaming up with the Poynter Institute, Stanford University, and the Local Media Association to launch MediaWise, a U.S. project designed to improve digital information literacy for young consumers.
Disinfo Lab continues our work with First Draft, which includes last year’s CrossCheck FR. This is a photo from a verification training in the runup to the French elections last year.
Disinfo Lab continues our work with First Draft, which includes last year’s CrossCheck FR. This is a photo from a verification training in the runup to the French elections last year.
Evolve business models to drive sustainable growth
Over the last decade, we’ve worked closely with news organizations to grow their digital advertising revenue. In just the past few years, we’ve applied our advanced machine learning expertise to
automatically surface key insights
about revenue opportunities (generating recommendations worth over US$300 million in additional revenue) and supported the creation of faster, better ad experiences for the mobile web through AMP and native ads.
But consumers are willing to pay for digital news content, creating an opportunity to expand beyond ad revenue. Today we’re delivering on a vision outlined last year to enable publishers to diversify their revenue streams. We’re excited to launch Subscribe with Google, a way for people to easily subscribe to various news outlets, helping publishers engage readers across Google and the web. Our goal with Subscribe with Google is to ease the subscription process to get more readers consuming publishers’ journalism, as quickly as possible.
In October, at our Partner Leadership Summit, we told publishers about how we’re experimenting with ways to grow their subscriptions using Google data, machine learning, and DoubleClick infrastructure. We’re now in the early stages of testing a “Propensity to Subscribe” signal based on machine learning models in DoubleClick to make it easier for publishers to recognize potential subscribers, and to present them the right offer at the right time.
Of course, not every publication has the resources to dedicate a team to collect, analyze and understand their user data. News Consumer Insights, our new dashboard built on top of Google Analytics, will help news organizations of all sizes understand and segment their audiences with a subscriptions strategy in mind. At the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, this project led to a 150 percent increase in page views to their Subscribe pages and a month-over-month tripling of new digital subscription purchases.
Empower news organizations through technological innovation
We work with news organizations around the world to develop and deploy technology that improves newsroom efficiency, creates enriching storytelling experiences, and protects journalists from cyber attacks around the world. For example, we’re using our natural language processing API to help Hearst Newspapers sort, label and categorize more than 3,000 articles every day. We’ve also worked with the South China Morning Post to use Google Earth Studio to create immersive VR experiences that show the evolution of Hong Kong throughout history. With AMP Stories, which is now in beta, publishers can combine the speed of AMP with the rich, immersive storytelling of the open web. This is just the beginning. We want to continue working closely with publishers to experiment on new ways they can reach audiences and produce impactful storytelling.
Finally, we’re also launching today Outline, an open-source tool from Jigsaw that lets news organizations provide journalists more secure access to the internet. Outline makes it easy for news organizations to set up their own VPN on a private server—no tech savvy required.
Our commitment Over the next three years, we’re committing $300 million toward meeting these goals. We’re also deepening our commitment to building products that address the news industry’s most urgent needs. In the past, we’ve done this by working closely alongside the industry in product working groups, resulting in projects like AMP and the DNI. We’ll be expanding that model globally.
The commitments we’re making through the Google News Initiative demonstrate that news and quality journalism is a top priority for Google. We know that success can only be achieved by working together, and we look forward to collaborating with the news industry to build a stronger future for journalism.
Philipp Schindler, Google Chief Business Officer
Philipp Schindler
Chief Business Officer
Google
Footy fans, stay on the ball with Google
Wednesday, March 21, 2018
Since the beginning, Google’s mission has been to organise the world’s information. That mission is just as relevant today – and in Australia – as it was back then. From building our coverage of Australia on Google Maps, to
charting the Great Barrier Reef through underwater Street View
and
surfacing high-quality health information in Google Search,
we’re carrying out that mission in Australia in many ways.
We know that sport sparks the Aussie spirit like nothing else, and getting information about the sports and teams you love is important to keep you cheering, and across the action. And with the AFL, NRL and Australian Rugby seasons here, it’s the perfect time to gear up for the games that captivate our nation.
Starting today,
Aussie fans can check live scores, match results, upcoming fixtures, and ladders for their favourite footy codes, including AFL, NRL, and
Australian Rugby
, in Google Search and using the Google Assistant.
Whether you’re a Geelong Cats tragic, a Rabbitohs die-hard or a Reds fanatic – or even a newcomer to the game – here’s how you can follow all things
footy:
Stay ahead of the game
For the first time, you can get the key details you need for your pre-game planning – at a glance – in Google Search. You’ll be able to see the fixtures and game times in a nice, neat panel at the top of the Search Results Page on mobile or desktop.
You can also lean on your Google Assistant to keep you up to date through your Google Home device, or while you’re out and about on your mobile.
Just ask your Google Assistant “Ok Google,
when are the Brisbane Lions playing next
?”
Check live scores, as they happen
If you’re stuck in meetings or at the farmer’s market with the in-laws, you can stay in the game with up-to-the-minute scores for your team across AFL, NRL or
Australian Rugby
. Live scores will be available in a snapshot at the top of Google Search Results, so you can sneak a quick glance when you’re on the edge of your seat. With a simple voice command, you can also ask your Google Assistant to check the ladder to see if your team is safe.
Get the scoop on sport news
Looking for a download on on the latest sports stories? Stay up to date with news bulletins from ABC Sport, Fox Rugby and AFL News, thanks to Telstra. You can follow the news of all 18 AFL clubs by asking “Hey Google, play the Sydney Swans news” or “Play the West Coast Eagles news.” The AFL news briefings are updated once a day during the off-season, and twice a day in the regular season.
Get your Assistant cheering, joking and learning
Your Assistant is always learning, so it will understand your preferred team nicknames
and the sports you care about over time.
You can also ask your Assistant to tell you an AFL joke, or make season predictions by asking “Ok Google, who’s going to win the flag?.” And after the siren sounds on full time, say “Talk like a footballer” to get that classic post-match commentary full of the footy cliches we all know and secretly love.
Whether you are celebrating a win or lamenting a loss, we hope these updates offer some useful and fun ways help you keep up to date and get your game on!
Posted by Aisling Finch, Marketing Director, Google Australia & New Zealand
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