Bringing you the Knowledge Graph in Bengali: things, not strings
When someone conducts a search, they want an answer, not trillions of webpages to scroll through. To help Bengali speakers discover new information quickly, we’re now making the Google Knowledge Graph available in Bengali language. So next time when you’re searching for cricket legend Sourav Ganguly in Bengali, we’ll show you things, not strings – and you’ll instantly get information that’s relevant to your query such as Sourav’s date of birth, his number as an active cricket player, or links to his profile on social media.
The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more. It’s not just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook, it’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. The Knowledge Graph is currently available in 41 languages, mapping out how more than 1 billion things in the real world are connected, and over 70 billion facts about them. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web, improving results over time.
Making spelling in Bengali easier
Search is a lot about discovery–learning something new about the world, having fun, and getting inspired. But especially when you’re on the go or in a rush, it’s all too easy to misspell that thing you were searching for. To help you get answers even when you misspelled a word, we now support spell correction for Bengali queries. So whenever a typo made its way into your search query, we’ll be there to help, suggesting similar queries.
The image on the right hand side shows you the new search experience with spell correction in blue
We’ve begun to gradually roll-out the Knowledge Graph in Bengali to users around the world. We hope that this update, together with the spell correction in Bengali, will make Search an even better experience for the millions of Bengali speakers around the world.
Posted by Weizhao Wang, Software Engineer and Enzam Hossain, Software Engineer
Whenever you want to let someone know where you are, just open the side menu or tap the blue dot that represents where you are. Tap “Share location” and then select who to share with and how long to share—and you're done! You can share your real-time location with your Google contacts, or even share with friends and family by sending a link on your favorite messenger apps. When you’re sharing your location, the people you’ve chosen to share with will see you on their map. And you’ll see an icon above the compass on your own map reminding you that you’re actively sharing your location. You can change your mind and stop sharing at any time—it’s entirely up to you.
Next time you’re on your way or running late, you can share your real-time location and trip progress from navigation as well. During your next trip, tap the “More” button on the bottom on the navigation screen, and then tap “Share trip.” When you share your trip with people, they’ll see your expected arrival time and can follow your journey as you head towards your destination. Sharing automatically ends when you arrive.
Location sharing on Google Maps is rolling out worldwide over the coming week, and you’ll be able to quickly let your friends and family know where you are and when you’ll get where you’re going. The answer to “where are you?” is only a tap away.
Posted by Sanket Gupta, Program Manager, Google Maps
Want to reach somewhere and wondering which bus to take or which bus routes go to your destination? To help you better plan your commute around the city, and make it easier for you to get an overview of public transportation around you, we are expanding the transit feature on Google Maps to seven more Indian cities including Chandigarh, Lucknow, Vadodara, Indore, Mysore, Surat and Coimbatore.
With today’s update, the transit feature is now available in sixteen Indian cities – the seven newly added cities as well as Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad.
Google Transit is a feature on Google Maps designed to help you plan your commute with only a couple of taps. For instance, if you’re going to Sukhna Lake in Chandigarh, just search for Sukhna Lake and Google Maps will show you how to get there from your current location. We’ll now show you bus routes and stops, including details such as departure and arrival times, the names of bus stands, and even where to change buses. You can scroll through the options and tap on the one that is most convenient for you, making it easier for you to know when to leave to arrive on time. Google Transit is available on Google Maps for Android and iOS as well as through your browser.
To try out the feature, just follow these steps:
Open Google Maps for Mobile on your Android or iOS device
Enter your destination and click the "get directions" icon. If it’s not already selected, tap the "transit" icon (the little tram) to view times, bus numbers, routes and more.
Google Maps is your guide to the world around you, and this launch is part of our effort to reflect the real world and provide you with relevant information about your surroundings. Google Maps globally provides over 1 billion km worth of transit results every day and has schedules for more than 2.5 million public transit stops worldwide. Google Transit is now available for hundreds of cities across dozens of countries, with new partners joining all the time.
Posted by Sanket Gupta, Program Manager, Google Maps
Let’s say you’re looking to buy a new rug: you want to be able to quickly check the store’s rating and reviews as you search on Google. Seller Ratings showcase a star rating on search ads based on reviews received from users like you.
Help others by contributing your own review
Additionally, if you’re ready to buy that new rug, and the online store you’re buying from is integrated with Google Customer Reviews, you’ll have the option to share your own review with the online community. Reviews collected via Google Customer Reviews contribute to a store’s seller rating and help others along their shopping journey too.
Interested in getting a seller rating for your business?
If you run a business, integrating withGoogle Customer Reviews will help you earn a seller rating by collecting valuable feedback from your customers. You can follow our onboarding and integrationguide to sign up for Google Customer Reviews and complete the simple setup process.
Posted by Aaron Berger and Jorge Cueto, Product Managers at Google
During my keynote talk at Next ‘17, I emphasized the importance of democratizing AI. We must lower the barriers of entry to AI and make it available to the largest community of developers, users and enterprises, so they can apply it to their own unique needs. With Kaggle joining the Google Cloud team, we can accelerate this mission.
Kaggle and Google Cloud will continue to support machine learning training and deployment services, while offering the community the ability to store and query large datasets.
I’m thrilled to welcome Kaggle to the team. Kaggle and Google Cloud will foster a thriving community of machine learning developers and data scientists, giving them direct access to the most advanced cloud machine learning environment.
I can’t wait to see what machine learning problems you solve and the breakthroughs you achieve.
Posted by, Fei-Fei Li, Chief Scientist, Google Cloud AI and Machine Learning
SAP has a long history at the center of business and technology. More than 345,000 customers worldwide, including 87% of the Forbes Global 2000, work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively with SAP’s broad suite of products. With this partnership we’re offering SAP customers the opportunity to leverage Google Cloud to accelerate their digital transformation and convert data into actionable insights and business outcomes.
SAP applications in the cloud
The SAP HANA database is now certified on GCP. This certification enables customers to run mission-critical SAP applications and databases like SAP HANA on GCP through ongoing certifications and integrations. One example of this work is the accelerated availability of certain performance enhancements to ensure that GCP delivers optimal performance for SAP HANA.
The partnership also represents the start of a close engineering collaboration between SAP and Google. Google Cloud is the first public cloud vendor to make SAP HANA express edition available to developers in an on-demand deployment model. Developers can now use SAP HANA express edition to build custom enterprise applications on GCP with the flexibility of on-demand, near instantaneous deployment leveraging Google Cloud Launcher. In addition, we are also working closely with SAP to make SAP Cloud Platform available on GCP.
The SAP Cloud Platform’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution now supports G Suite and GCP. The integration with Google allows customers to easily and securely connect SAP with Google’s productivity suite G Suite or GCP and give access to their users to any application from any device at any time.
Machine learning for the enterprise
Machine learning is top of mind for enterprise CIOs and developers alike, and Google is leading the industry to expand access to machine learning’s benefits. Google Cloud solutions include APIs covering speech, text, image, translation and infrastructure for large-scale training and delivery of machine learning capabilities. Google and SAP intend to collaborate on building machine learning features into intelligent applications like conversational apps that guide users through complex workflows and transactions. This is just one example of how the Google Cloud and SAP partnership will enable digital business transformation using the power of machine learning, with deeper technology integrations to come.
Integrations in productivity apps
Google Cloud and SAP will drive greater integration across joint applications. These integrations will enable seamless experiences such as the combination of Gmail with SAP Cloud for Customer, a CRM solution that allow users to link email conversations, search for duplicate contacts and creating new leads, opportunities, tasks and visits directly from Gmail. Other integrations include Calendar with Concur Tripit, and Sheets with SAP BusinessObjects Cloud. Colgate-Palmolive, a long-standing SAP customer, is already seeing the benefits of the combined strength of G Suite and SAP.
Colgate-Palmolive has a focused IT strategy that relies on a small number of strategic partners, including SAP and Google Cloud. Colgate chose to partner with SAP and Google Cloud because both are innovative and approach work collaboratively. They've been working with SAP for 23 years and moved all employees to G Suite suite in 2016 (about 28,000 people globally). The implementation took only six months and, after only three months, they’re already working differently, collaborating more easily.
Colgate gets tremendous value from the work they do with Google and SAP, individually. They’re excited about the numerous opportunities ahead given a tighter Google / SAP partnership. Examples include combining Google’s machine learning with SAP’s business process expertise as well as integrating SAP’s Digital Boardroom, a co-innovation between SAP and Colgate, with Google Slides.
Greater visibility and control
Enterprise customers moving from on-premise to public cloud environments wish to retain insight and control over the access to their sensitive data, while at the same time benefiting from the agility, scale and global presence of a public cloud platform. GCP provides a rich set of capabilities around access control, auditing and encryption key management to enable customers to defend against external attacks and manage insider access risk.
We're now working with SAP to develop a governance, risk management and compliance solution that provides visibility and control over how data is handled on GCP, including how administrative access is granted by the cloud provider. For customers desiring an independent entity overseeing the handling of their data on a public cloud, SAP plans to act as a data custodian for their data on Google Cloud Platform.
We look forward to all the ways we can bring the innovation, scale and reliability of Google Cloud to the already invaluable tools SAP provides to hundreds of thousands businesses around the world
Posted by Nan Boden, Head of Global Technology Partners, Google Cloud
Recognising the need to skill these businesses and support their journey to digital, earlier this year, we announced a large scale training program - Digital Unlocked. Through this program, we aim to make quality digital training available to every single small business in India that wants it. We also launched Primer, a free mobile app designed to teach digital marketing skills in a quick, easy and interactive way.
Continuing with our commitment to partner with India’s small and medium businesses, today I am excited to announce SMB Heroes. SMB Heroes is a nationwide program designed to recognize and celebrate SMBs that have embraced digital successfully. The program comprises three categories - Business Innovation through Digital, Impacting Change through Digital and Woman Business Leader. Starting today and until April 24, businesses from across the country can submit their nominations on the SMB Heroes website - g.co/smbheroes. Following this, one winner from each category will be shortlisted for five major zones, culminating in a national finale in Delhi later this year.
We are enthused about the opportunity to celebrate the amazing work that many Indian businesses are already doing, as well as the ability to provide a roadmap for other businesses to learn and chart their own path to success.
Posted by Shalini Girish, Director - Google Marketing Solutions, Google India
