Clearing out my tabs

Matt Cutts says,

I always end up with a ton of open tabs in my browser. Here’s some of the things I’ve enjoyed, but won’t do a full-scale blog post about. You might have missed these the first time around:

- Mike Grehan noticed a Google experiment to let users suggest urls to Google for specific searches. If you repeat the search, your suggestion will show up at #1 for you. Google is always running a bunch of experiments; I just like the idea of users contributing suggestions to Google.
- I noticed two good articles about using AdWords well. The first one is from Amy Konefal. She walks you through separate bids for content vs. search ads; the ability to not show ads to sites you choose to exclude; Google’s Placement Performance reports, and how to check the return-on-investment (ROI) for individual sites; (Read more...)

Talk like a Googler: parts of a url

Here’s a valid URL which has lots of components:

http://video.google.co.uk:80/videoplay?docid=-7246927612831078230&hl=en#00h02m30s

Here are some of the components of the url:

• The protocol is http. Other protocols include https, ftp, etc.
  

• The host or hostname is video.google.co.uk.
  

• The subdomain is video.
  

• The domain name is google.co.uk.
  

• The top-level domain or TLD is uk. The uk domain is also referred to as a country-code top-level domain or ccTLD. For google.com, the TLD would be com.
  

• The second-level domain (SLD) is co.uk.
  

• The port is 80, which is the default port for web servers. Other ports are possible; a web server can listen on port 8000, for example. When the port is 80, most people leave out the port.
  

(Read more...)

Closing the loop on malware

Suppose you worked at a search engine and someone dropped a high-accuracy way to detect malware on the web in your lap (see this USENIX paper [PDF] for some of the details)? Is it better to start protecting users immediately, or to wait until your solution is perfectly polished for both users and site owners? Remember that the longer you delay, the more users potentially visit malware-laden web pages and get infected themselves.

Google chose to protect users first and then quickly iterate to improve things for site owners. I think that’s the right choice, but it’s still a tough question. Google started flagging sites where we detected malware in August of last year. This February, the webmaster console team and Google’s anti-malware team took a big step toward closing the loop for webmasters: (Read more...)