COVID-19: What Google is doing to help

Google has taken a number of steps to help during the coronavirus pandemic. It has created a set of free resources on its COVID-19 pages, which include:

• Links to accurate health information from bodies such as the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
• Providing heatmaps and lists of affected areas and coronavirus searches by country.
• Linking to its resources, such as distance learning resources for schools, and resources for business.
• Increased support for its G Suite and G Suite for Learning customers through the provision of free access to Hangouts Meet video conferencing. This allows a greater number of connections per call, livetstreaming abilities, and the ability to save recorded meetings to Google Drive. Usually only available to Enterprise customers, Google has made them available for free until 1 July 2020.
• Google subsidiary YouTube has taken various steps to helps users access information about the coronavirus, prevent disinformation and harmful content, and to help reduce the strain on networks. These include:
  • Presenting visitors to its home page with a banner which directs them to a reputable source of information. (In the UK, users are given the link to the NHS resources. Elsewhere, they may be directed to the World Health Organization or a similar body.)
  • Working to quickly remove videos which contain disinformation about COVID-19 or suggest alternatives to medical treatment.
  • Switching all video traffic in Europe to standard definition for 30 days from 19 March. The reduction in video quality aims to help networks handle greatly increased demand as many people work from home or self isolate.
  • Launching Learn@Home: a website with learning resources and other content for families. Initially available in English, YouTube is aiming to add other languages quickly.
• Providing playlists of educational content, study tips and more through YouTube Learning. Initially available in English; Italian, French, Korean, Spanish, Japanese and other languages will be added soon.
• Creating the Study With Me playlist to help reduce feelings of isolation as students learn at home.

More information on YouTube’s efforts is available here.

On 17 March, a joint statement was issued by Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube in which they pledged to elevate authoritative content across all their platforms and jointly combat fraud and misinformation about the coronavirus.

A joint industry statement on COVID-19 from Microsoft, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube: pic.twitter.com/uKEXvjMuBi

— Microsoft (@Microsoft) March 17, 2020

Google is also making a hosted repository of public datasets free to access and query through its COVID-19 Public Dataset Program. These public dataset include those from the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and more. It is also enabling researchers to train advanced machine learning models using that data within its BigQuery cloud ‘data warehouse’ at no additional cost through BigQueryML. The data included in the program will be public and freely available; and the program will run until September 15, 2020. Learn more about the program here.