Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Enterprise Product Manager

So you have your shiny blue or yellow box up and running and life is good. As the searches keep coming, you begin to wonder.... How many of my users are clicking on the first search result? How many refine their search? How many use the Advanced search capabilities? How many click on a KeyMatch? How many have to click the Next page link? How many aren't finding what they want?

Now you can answer these and hundreds of other questions with the introduction of Advanced Search Reporting for your Google Mini or Google Search Appliance. Through a detailed analysis of what your users are clicking, you can now extract volumes of rich behavior detail that you can use to improve your search quality and their search experience.

For example, you might learn:


Owners of a Google Mini or Google Search Appliance can visit Google Enterprise Labs to download this feature today!

Posted by Dan Israel, Google Enterprise, Government Products

I recently reviewed an interesting case study about CrimeReports.com, a website that makes crime data from local law enforcement agencies available on the internet using Google Maps. CrimeReports.com is a partnership between a company called Public Engines and local police departments across the country -- from San Jose, CA to Washington, DC. These police departments wanted to make information about neighborhood safety directly available to the public, but did not have the resources to set this up themselves. Enter Public Engines, who built a service using the Google Maps API they are making available at a low cost to any interested police department.

In the past, local crime information could be difficult for citizens to find -- they could read police blotters in local newspapers or watch the evening news -- but it wasn't easy to see historical data or understand trends. By providing the data in a rich, visual interface, plus letting citizens get alerts if something new happens in their neighborhood -- CrimeReports.com makes information accessible to citizens in a much more useful way. If want to learn more, read the full case study.

The advent of new Internet technologies like blogs, wikis, & RSS makes it easier than ever for government to share information directly with the citizens they serve, without the need for any intermediaries. This sort of direct communication can be extremely valuable in letting citizens know what government officials are doing in their community. We're always on the look-out for other good examples of this; if you know of any, please share.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager, from my mobile phone

Being focused on helping people access, create, and share information, I shouldn't still be surprised by the stats about how people get online, but I am. For example, the count of personal computers worldwide is about to cross the 1 billion mark. That's a big number, but did you know that around 3 billion people have mobile phones? Nearly half the world's population already can, or may soon be able to, have the world's information in their pocket. Let that sink in for a moment....

And lots of people who go online with their phones aren't doing it that way for lack of a computer. Even with its small screen and squashed keyboard, my phone has become my web-connected device of choice in lots of situations. Like when I'm visiting a new city and need directions, when I want to send a quick email from a ski lift, or when it's just easier to reach into my pocket than fire up my MacBook.

These are some of the reasons why Google is committed to improving the mobile experience. The latest example, launched today, is Google Sync for mobile. This application for BlackBerry® smartphones keeps your Google Calendar in sync with your BlackBerry® calendar. So whether you update your schedule from your mobile device or from your computer, your agenda will be up to date however you decide to access your information later on.

You can download Google Sync for mobile by going to http://m.google.com/sync on your BlackBerry® browser. And for more about the other ways Google Apps users – including those without smartphones – can access their information on the go, check out the Google Apps mobile access overview.

Posted by Adam Swidler, Product Marketing Manager, Postini

Postini is a recent addition to Google that offers solutions that help enterprises make their existing email infrastructure more secure, compliant and productive. We process email for more than 35,000 businesses and 12 million end users, and block about 1 billion messages per day, which is a good sample size to report on global spam trends for businesses. In 2007, Postini data centers recorded the highest levels of spam and virus attacks in history. Much of this was fueled by an increase in the number of botnet computers being used to send spam. Botnets are networks of infected PCs, usually with broadband Internet connections that are co-opted by hackers and used to send spam and virus attacks. Often they are compromised without their owner's knowledge. We started to see these botnets kick in back in September of 2006. Since that time, spam volumes are up more than 163 percent. We saw a peak of activity in October 2007 where volume was a 263 percent increase from September 2006 and Postini blocked 47 billion spam messages, more than 320 Terabytes of spam (now that's a lot of spam). The average unprotected e-mail user would have received 32,000 spam messages in their in-boxes so far this year. Talk about lost productivity. In fact, Nucleus research estimates unchecked spam can cost a company up to $742 per user.

But what's really different this year is the innovation with which spammers attempted to evade detection by spam filters. In the early part of 2007, image spam was used heavily, with the spam content (such as "pharmaceuticals for sale," "hot stocks," etc) contained in an image attached to the message. Over the course of the year image spam declined and was replaced by PDF spam, document and spreadsheet spam and even multimedia spam. That's right - an audio file promoting a particular stock. We saw examples of compressed and password protected emails as well. All this effort to deliver spam content in email attachments had a significant impact on the size of spam overall. Taking 7.5 Kb as an average spam message size, an organization with 100 employees (that didn't use a hosted solution to block spam outside the firewall) would have wasted 22Gb of storage and bandwidth. Who wants that sitting on their servers?

The chart below shows the trend of the volume of spam rising throughout the year (blue line) and the peaks in the size of spam (orange line):



In Europe, spam volume was also up in 2007 and the percentage of email that is spam increased from 70% to 90% as shown below:




Virus attacks in 2007 were also at record levels and showed similar techniques to what we observed for spam email. In January 2007, the high profile "Storm" botnet got its start with an email that was spammed out with an executable file attached. In April and May, we saw virus emails with password protected executables attached and the password contained in the body of the email. In the late summer, we saw a huge spike of Storm virus attacks that used a blended threat - an email message with a URL that took the user to an infected website that then downloaded the Storm malware to the PC. The linkage between spam and viruses continued in 2007, with messages being spammed out from botnets with virus attacks intended to add more computers to the botnet. The chart below shows the Storm virus activity for 2007:



For 2008, this game of chess will continue, and the stakes may become even higher. While the number of threats may not increase, the complexity will. Businesses will be challenged to identify more types of malicious content and protect sensitive information against new methods of social engineering. So what does the forecast for next year looks like? Here are some of the trends we expect to see coming to a business near you in 2008:

• Spam volume will stabilize and could actually decrease in 2008 as spam attacks become more targeted and less of a pure volume game. As more and more spam content will be contained in attachments, we do expect that the overall size of spam will continue to increase.

• Virus attacks will continue to blend with spam and will focus more on identity theft. They will utilize increasingly sophisticated social engineering techniques that will be related to specific current events such as the Olympics, the Super Bowl, natural disasters etc. Virus attacks will become more targeted toward executives at specific companies and will appear to come from legitimate business agencies. Their goal will increasingly be to steal corporate and government data. We expect to see several of these types of attacks, leading to data breaches from commercial enterprises and government agencies. This may force some companies to modify their email practices, such as financial institutions not including any links in their email communications to customers.

• More businesses and organizations will implement specific policies that address outbound content in email and will deploy systems to monitor and enforce those policies to prevent sensitive or confidential data leaks.

• The growing need for managing consumer data privacy and retention policies globally will drive growth of encryption and archiving and hosted solutions will play a major role in reducing the cost and complexity.

• Identity theft attacks will increasingly be launched through web sites, especially those that enable user created content such as social networking sites, blogs and auction sites.

If you’d like to know more about Postini’s spam and virus trends, you can read our weekly summaries on the Postini Community Forum in the Threat Advisory board.

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Enterprise Product Manager

Do you have multiple Google Minis or Google Search Appliances? Many customers have several yellow and blue boxes spread across different departments, regions or even continents. Wouldn't it be great if you could easily see if there were other relevant search results from another Mini or GSA half way around the world?

Now, in just a few simple steps, you can create a OneBox that will call out to another Mini or GSA and bring back results in fractions of a second! For example:

Owners of a Google Mini or Google Search Appliance can visit Google Enterprise Labs to download this feature today!

Posted by Ryan Pollock, Product Marketing

Silicon.com recently published this case study about how Monarch Airlines set up Google Custom Search Business Edition on www.flymonarch.com to enable better customer self-service and reduce the number of customer support inquiries. As a result of deploying the search engine – which only costs $100 per year - Monarch saw a 30% decrease in the number of customer support inquiries. The case study cites a number of the great benefits of deploying Custom Search: speed, relevance, and customizability. Monarch also uses Google Analytics to understand how their site's visitors navigate.

If your website's search isn't yet powered by Google, learn more about CSBE.