Updated and more detailed Transparency Report

Our Transparency Report discloses the information that governments have asked for over the past six months. For our latest batch of data, covering July through December 2010, we wanted to improve the way we give you the information, so we’ve updated the look of the report and added more details.

We've highlighted some significant changes in the data and provided context about why those changes may have occurred during this reporting period. We’ve also made it easier for you to spot trends in the data yourself. For example, we’ve changed the format so you can now see data on a country-by-country basis. We’re also clearly disclosing the reasons why we’ve been asked to remove content—such as an allegation of defamation or hate speech.

For the first time, we’re also revealing the percentage of user data requests we’ve complied with in whole or in part. This gives you a better idea of how we’ve dealt with the requests we receive from government agencies—like local and federal police—for data about users of our services and products.

Our goal is to provide our users access to information and to protect the privacy of our users. Whenever we receive a request, we first check to make sure it meets both the letter and spirit of the law before complying. When possible, we notify affected users about requests for user data that may affect them. And, if we believe a request is overly broad, we will seek to narrow it.

We hope that our website improvements help you to see more clearly how the web is shaped by government influence and how Google responds to requests for information and removals.

Posted by Matt Braithwaite, Transparency Engineering

Inside the Big Tent

(Cross-posted from the European Public Policy Blog)

At our European Zeitgeist event, held annually near London, we traditionally erect a large marquee for a partner dinner and entertainment. This year we wondered if there was anything else we could do with the space once Zeitgeist was over. In that instant, the Big Tent was born.

Canvas aside, the term "big tent" has, of course, a political connotation. Wikipedia defines it as "seeking to attract people with diverse viewpoints...does not require adherence to some ideology as a criterion for membership." That just about sums up the idea behind last week’s Big Tent conference, which focused on debating some of the hot issues relating to the internet and society.

We invited the advocacy groups Privacy International and Index on Censorship—both of whom have criticised Google in the past—to partner with us in staging the debates, and sought diverse viewpoints among the speakers and the delegates.

Topics on the agenda included: what was the role of technology in the revolutions in the Middle East? What are the limits of free speech online? Do we need tougher privacy laws or are we in danger of stifling innovation? Can technology and access to information be used to help prevent conflict?

The result was a stimulating day of debate featuring the likes of Big Brother television producer Peter Bazalgette, Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts and the U.K. Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt alongside Googlers including Eric Schmidt, Google Ideas’ Jared Cohen and the Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim, and a highly engaged and knowledgeable audience of NGOs, policy advisers, tech businesses and journalists.



You can watch highlights on YouTube and see event feedback on Twitter. We hope to bring the Big Tent to other regions over the coming year.

Posted by Peter Barron, Director of External Relations, EMEA

Helping America’s startups grow

(Cross-posted on the Small Business Blog)

Every business starts out small—whether with an idea or the hanging of a shingle outside an office or storefront. Even Google was once a small business, operating out of a garage in Menlo Park, Calif. We’re proud of our success, but we’re even more proud of the role we’ve played helping a lot of other businesses grow. In fact, in 2009 Google search and advertising tools generated $54 billion of economic activity in the United States.

To further help new American businesses create economic growth, today we’re announcing a commitment of up to $100 million to the Startup America Partnership—an alliance of the country's most innovative entrepreneurs, corporations, foundations and other private sector leaders—for companies to promote their business with Google advertising over the next year.

Startup America participants will be able to use Google advertising platforms like AdWords and Boost and receive a $1,000 Google match for $1,000 spent between June 1, 2011 and June 1, 2012. Our chief economist Hal Varian has calculated that businesses make an average of $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend on AdWords, so we think this commitment will be especially powerful.

If you are (or know of) an entrepreneur that’s interested in getting involved with the Startup America Partnership, you can visit its Resource Center for more information. Our goal as a participant in this national initiative is to help entrepreneurs grow amazing businesses, and we believe our commitment will help them do it.

Posted by Claire Hughes Johnson, Vice President, Global Online Sales

Real-time traffic graphs for the Transparency Report

When we introduced the Transparency Report last year, we promised to keep looking for new and useful ways to display data about traffic to our services. In response to your requests, today we’re adding graphs for each region that show traffic patterns for all products in aggregate. These graphs will show data with a five-minute delay.

In this graph, for example, you’ll see that all of our services in Egypt were down from January 27 to February 1:

Starting today, you won’t have to sift through every single product graph to figure out if one or more services are inaccessible. You’ll get a snapshot up front. We’ve also added annotations for historical anomalies that we’ve seen in the traffic to our services. To see the graph for each cited incident, just click on the corresponding link.

As the Transparency Engineering team lead, part of my job is to ensure that we find, uncover and visualize datasets within Google that can help inform research and analysis on important topics. We believe that providing the facts can spark useful debate about the scope and authority of policy decisions around the globe.

We’ll continue to iterate, and we hope that the Report will help shed light on the accessibility and patterns of traffic to our services around the world.

Posted by Matt Braithwaite, Transparency Engineering Team Lead

Patents and innovation

The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents, which threatens to stifle innovation. Some of these lawsuits have been filed by people or companies that have never actually created anything; others are motivated by a desire to block competing products or profit from the success of a rival’s new technology. The patent system should reward those who create the most useful innovations for society, not those who stake bogus claims or file dubious lawsuits. It's for these reasons that Google has long argued in favor of real patent reform, which we believe will benefit users and the U.S. economy as a whole.

But as things stand today, one of a company’s best defenses against this kind of litigation is (ironically) to have a formidable patent portfolio, as this helps maintain your freedom to develop new products and services. Google is a relatively young company, and although we have a growing number of patents, many of our competitors have larger portfolios given their longer histories.

So after a lot of thought, we’ve decided to bid for Nortel’s patent portfolio in the company’s bankruptcy auction. Today, Nortel selected our bid as the “stalking-horse bid," which is the starting point against which others will bid prior to the auction. If successful, we hope this portfolio will not only create a disincentive for others to sue Google, but also help us, our partners and the open source community—which is integrally involved in projects like Android and Chrome—continue to innovate. In the absence of meaningful reform, we believe it's the best long-term solution for Google, our users and our partners.

Posted by Kent Walker, Senior Vice President & General Counsel