California wildfire relief

If you want to donate money for the people affected by wildfires in Southern California, Google has a page up. The Associated Press collected a good list of other organizations as well.

International bugs..

Matt Cutts says,

Every few weeks I like to call for Google bugs. I’ve got a joint meeting tomorrow with several people to talk about potential bugs, so if you know of any, feel free to mention them in the comments. To remind people of what I’m looking for, here’s the guidelines:

Just to be clear, pruning will be ruthless for this post: I only want to see specific queries that seem to show bugs, and the more concisely you can explain something, the better. I’ll probably keep just the first example of what looks like a bug. I’ve got a meeting at noon tomorrow to talk about search bugs, so I’ll probably lock the comments after that.

Please don’t include stuff like “it’s a bug that you (do something I don’t like, don’t index/rank my site as much as I want).” Instead, I’m looking for specific bug reports to pass on. (Read more...)

Engineering grouplets at Google

Google engineer Bharat Mediratta discussed some Google engineering customs in the New York Times yesterday. Bharat goes beyond 20% time to talk about some different aspects of being an engineer at Google:
Grouplets bring together like-minded engineers who care about things like documentation, improving our build system, or testing. It’s an informal process lets engineers contribute on the topics that they care about the most.
Sometimes we have “Fixit days” where every Google engineer is encouraged to tackle a specific topic. From the article: (Read more...)