Google Product Helping Blog

If your holiday shopping plan this season involves grabbing a spare minute on your phone to hunt for presents while you�re standing in line or on the train to work, you�re not alone. More than half of holiday shoppers say they plan to use their smartphones in free moments throughout the day to get their holiday list done. As we wake up to what has become the day for online deal hunting�Cyber Monday�we took a look at the top gifts trending on Google Search to help you shop smarter in those spare moments. Here�s a look at online shopping search trends across the U.S., to give you ideas of what your loved ones might like to find under the tree. Source: Google Shopping Data, U.S., Oct 2015 vs. Oct 2014 Drones are now toys:  Drones are no longer expensive playthings for the tech-savvy. Search for �toy drone� and you�ll find countless inexpensive, easy-to-use devices available from department stores and toy stores. And they�re popular�nationwide, shopping searches for drones are up 80...

In just a few hours, people across the U.S. will be settling in for a day of food, family and football as they celebrate Thanksgiving. As the day of gluttony and gratitude comes closer, people have been turning to Google to plan the big meal, get cooking tips and more. Here�s a look at some of the top Turkey Day searches�for more, see Google Trends . The reason for the season In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, people turn to Google to learn more about the origins of the holiday and its traditions, both new and old. Top questions include �Why did the pilgrims celebrate the first Thanksgiving?� and �What president made Thanksgiving a national holiday?� The other reason for the season Gratitude may be in the name, but food is the centerpiece of Thanksgiving. For weeks now people have been searching for recipes to wow their relatives this Thursday, from classics like cranberry relish and mashed potatoes to turkey alternatives like lasagna and beef stew. Here�s a look at the top recipe...

Starting today you can explore more than 30 historical sites throughout Jordan in Google Street View. To tell you more, read today�s guest blog post, by Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan. -Ed. What a great day for Jordan and Jordanians! Thanks to Google Street View, we can now share the rich, proud and varied history of our country with anyone who has an Internet connection. With more than 30 historical sites available to explore virtually, people all over the world now have a window into our beautiful Kingdom in the heart of the Middle East. Throughout the ages, ancient civilizations have left their footprints in Jordan. Reminders of the Silk Road which linked the regions of the world in commerce. Ancient cities, such as the Romans� Jerash and the Nabateans� Petra. Significant religious sites, like Mount Nebo and the River Jordan. And, to this day, we continue to discover such footprints. With Google Street View, would-be visitors, or those just curious to learn more about...

The first memory I have of watching a movie is with my dad. I was around four years old, and one afternoon he fired up our bulky, '80s-style front-projection TV and the Betamax, and popped in Star Wars . Of course, it was *amazing*, and I've watched the original trilogy a dozen times since. It probably isn't a surprise that there are tons of Star Wars fans like me here at Google. You can regularly spot Darth Vaders , dogs dressed like Yoda , and even the occasional stormtrooper , roaming the halls of our data centers (probably still looking for those droids). So when we first heard about Episode VII , we started thinking about what a Google tribute to these epic stories might look like: �Wouldn't it be cool if there was some sort of Star Wars thingy in Search? The Millennium Falcon in Cardboard would be sweet! What if Google Translate could decipher galactic languages?"... and on, and on, and on. As this list of ideas grew, so too did the band of passionate engi...

If you head over to Google+ today, you�ll see that things look a little different. Since we last posted , we�ve spent a lot of time listening to what people using Google+ had to say. There were two features they kept coming back to: Communities , which now average 1.2 million new joins per day, and Collections , which launched just five months ago and is growing even faster. Whether it�s the Nonfiction Addiction Community, where people can be found discussing the best in Crime or Travel storytelling, or the Watch Project Collection, where more than 40,000 people are following an antique watch hobbyist, these are the places on Google+ where people around the world are spending their time discovering and sharing things they love. And so we�ve reimagined Google+ to help them do that. Today, we�re starting to introduce a fully redesigned Google+ that puts Communities and Collections front and center. Now focused around interests, the new Google+ is much simpler. And it�s more mobile-frie...

It�s that time of year again. Next week, tens of millions of us will hit the roads, consume millions of pounds of turkey, and then spend billions on Black Friday deals. Google Maps looked at Thanksgiving trends from the last three years to uncover the most useful information to make your holiday plans go a little bit easier. Whether you�re traveling, doing some last-minute grocery shopping, or Black Friday deal-dashing, here�s our day-by-day guide to braving the holiday crowds. Tuesday: No travel day leading up to the holiday is going to be a breeze, but if you can, start driving Tuesday rather than Wednesday. Yes, it�s still the second-worst travel day of the week, but according to Google Maps searches, for the last three years Wednesday has been the worst travel day�with the exceptions of Boston (Tuesday), and Honolulu, Providence and San Francisco (all Saturday). Wednesday: Americans are pretty predictable when it comes to the holidays: for the third year in a row, �ham shop� was ...

I am a veteran and a Googler. I retired in 2012 after a 25-year career in the military, and this week with Google.org, I helped bring veterans with disabilities, and those otherwise unable to travel, their first virtual reality experience. On Thursday morning, we filmed the NYC Veteran�s Day Parade in 360-degree video, and with Google Cardboard , brought together veterans and their families at VA hospitals from Palo Alto, California , to Pryor, Oklahoma to experience the nation's largest Veterans Day parade in virtual reality as if they were there, marching. These #UnitedWeMarch events will continue over the next few days, at VA hospitals around the country. The virtual parade video is available on YouTube 360 (desktop), the YouTube app (mobile) and via Google Cardboard (also mobile). It was incredible to reconnect with other veterans and even better to see their reactions to the virtual parade. One Marine who served in Vietnam even remarked, "You just took me away from thi...

Roughly 60 percent of the world is without Internet today, and even where online access is available, it can still be spotty. That means that quick and easy access to information is still not possible for a majority of the population. This is a huge problem, especially as people attempt to navigate and explore the world around them, so Google Maps is taking steps to help people across the globe find directions and get where they�re going, even when they don�t have an Internet connection. Now you can download an area of the world to your phone, and the next time you find there�s no connectivity�whether it�s a country road or an underground parking garage�Google Maps will continue to work seamlessly. Whereas before you could simply view an area of the map offline, now you can get turn-by-turn driving directions, search for specific destinations, and find useful information about places, like hours of operation, contact information or ratings. You can download an area by searching for a c...

Just a couple of years ago, you couldn�t talk to the Google app through the noise of a city sidewalk, or read a sign in Russian using Google Translate, or instantly find pictures of your Labradoodle in Google Photos. Our apps just weren�t smart enough. But in a short amount of time they've gotten much, much smarter. Now, thanks to machine learning, you can do all those things pretty easily, and a lot more. But even with all the progress we've made with machine learning, it could still work much better. So we�ve built an entirely new machine learning system, which we call � TensorFlow .� TensorFlow is faster, smarter, and more flexible than our old system, so it can be adapted much more easily to new products and research. It�s a highly scalable machine learning system�it can run on a single smartphone or across thousands of computers in datacenters. We use TensorFlow for everything from speech recognition in the Google app, to Smart Reply in Inbox, to search in Google Photos....

We love highlighting great stories about women�s achievements in science and technology. When the story involves a 1940s Hollywood star-turned-inventor who helped develop technologies we all use with our smartphones today � well, we just have to share it with the world. Today on Google�s homepage we�re celebrating Hedy Lamarr, the Austrian-born actress Hollywood once dubbed �the most beautiful woman in the world.� Lamarr�s own story reads like a movie script: bored by the film industry and feeling typecast, Lamarr was more interested in helping the Allied war effort as World War II broke out than in the roles she was being offered. She had some background in military munitions (yes, really), and together with a composer friend, George Antheil, used the principles of how pianos worked (yep, pianos) to identify a way to prevent German submarines from jamming Ally radio signals. The patent for �frequency hopping� Lamarr co-authored laid the groundwork for widely-used technologies...

When it comes to computer science, millions of girls are being left out of the conversation. Despite earning the majority of bachelor's degrees in the U.S., women earn fewer than 20 percent of computer science degrees, with serious implications for our economy and for women at large. The problem of getting girls more interested in tech has many sources, but according to Google�s own research , one of them is optics. Girls don�t see positive role models of other girls and women in popular culture. In a study of popular films in 11 countries, fewer than 20 percent of computer science or tech roles were held by women. As someone who runs a company at the intersection of technology and media, I want to help change the perceptions of women and technology we see today. So, as part of our Made with Code and media perception initiatives, I�m excited that we�re supporting award-winning documentary filmmaker Lesley Chilcott �of �An Inconvenient Truth� and �Waiting for Superman� fame�on her...