Official Google Australia Blog: Built in Sydney: Google Drive

For the last few years, many of us in Google’s Sydney office have been working on the latest new features for Google Docs. But a lot of them have been “under the hood” type pieces of engineering -- hard to explain to friends and family, or any non-technical crowd. Until today.

Yesterday’s launch of Google Drive is special to our team because many of our contributions are central to this evolution of Google Docs. These contributions include things like rendering files of many types in a browser, using optical character recognition (OCR) and other technologies to enable search across those files, social commenting, and the Drive app for Android.

The Google Docs team in the cloud — above Penrith!
Since late 2010, we’ve enabled users to upload any kind of file to Google Docs. Drive builds on that capability but adds technology to view and organise those files on the web. Also new in Drive: we’ve created visual thumbnails for all your files, which can be seen in the brand new “grid view” in Drive. Processing all these files for so many users requires massive computing power. This is a pretty cool challenge for any engineer and one of the reasons we enjoy working at Google.

Google Drive also better incorporates the optical character recognition technology that we developed in Sydney and originally launched in 2010. We’ve now extended this technology to search, so that the text in all the files you upload into Drive becomes searchable: not just file names, but all the text, even in images and scanned PDFs. Imagine if you’re a small business with thousands of documents stuffed into cardboard boxes and filing cabinets — now you can scan those documents, upload them to Drive, and search across them in seconds. The capability to search text across PDFs, image files, and other types of files is unique to Google Drive.

On top of that, the Sydney team has started to integrate the technology from Google Image Search and Google Goggles into Drive so you can search across your files for images related to a certain keyword — even if that keyword is not in the image’s title. For example, if you want to find a great photo you took of the Sydney Opera House, but you’ve not changed the file name from AUS5_009.jpg, you can find your photo simply by searching for “Sydney Opera House” or even “Australia”. We’re pretty proud of this feature, as we believe it’s an example of something only Google can do: bringing the power of cloud computing and web search technology together to create a magical and delightful way to find what you’re looking for, even within your personal files.

We’re also proud that the Android app for Google Drive — which lets you access your most important Docs on the go — was also developed in Sydney, as well as the social commenting feature that lets you discuss any Drive file you’ve shared with others.

Give Google Drive a go and let us know on the Google Australia Google+ page what you think — and what you think we should work on next!

Posted by Ken Hoetmer, Product Manager, on behalf of the Sydney Google Docs Engineers.