Google Matt Cutts

gPC

2007-12-01T06:33:00.000-08:00

You may have seen that Everex launched a $200 computer that runs Linux. It looks like Wal-Mart sold out of them, but not to worry: more are on the way.

Why should you be interested? Well, instead of Windows, it comes installed with gOS, which is a version of Ubuntu that is customized to work well with web-based tools from Google, Facebook, and Skype.

First, the box. The “gPC” stands for Green PC, not Google PC as some people have thought:

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Solicitations in the mail

2007-12-01T06:29:00.000-08:00

Matt Cutts says

I still hear from people who get confused by solicitations in the mail. Here’s an example one:

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California wildfire relief

2007-10-27T23:45:00.000-07:00

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..

2007-10-27T23:41:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-27T23:39:00.000-07:00

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...)

Useful Google feature: better date search

2007-09-13T03:19:00.000-07:00

As Google has gotten fresher, our advanced search page started showing more useful options for restricting searches by date. The shortest time frame used to be something like three months; now you can look for things that are less than 24 hours old.

What GoogleOS noticed is that the advanced date search affects a url parameter called “as_qdr” and Chitu figured out some of the possible values:

The nice thing is that you can change the value of as_qdr to custom intervals. Here are all the possible values of the as_qdr parameter:

d[number] - past number of days (e.g.: d10)
w[number] - past number of weeks
y[number] - past number of years
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Hack your iPhone: toolchains and cross-compilers

2007-09-05T10:21:00.000-07:00

The iPhone can run “web apps” very easily. These web apps are really just specially-crafted web pages that take advantage of the iPhone’s built-in web browser. Such web apps can be very cool, but they don’t provide the full functionality that you can get from an actual executable program running on the iPhone. A “native app” that runs on the iPhone can read the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer, for example.

So lots of people want to write independent/third-party native apps that run on the iPhone. The problem is that while Apple hasn’t squashed the development of native apps, they haven’t helped, either. For example, Apple hasn’t provided a toolchain to compile programs for the iPhone. (Read more...)

Clearing out my tabs

2007-08-27T10:04:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-15T21:32:00.000-07:00

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.

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Closing the loop on malware

2007-08-15T21:29:00.000-07:00

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...)

Short bits

2007-07-29T02:49:00.000-07:00

- This one’s kinda fun. Rand Fishkin was in town, so we invited him over to the Googleplex. We arranged on a simple trade: we’d feed him if he’d give a talk about search/SEO from his perspective. (Read more...)

Webmaster console adds message center

2007-07-19T08:06:00.000-07:00

Remember when we had to pause emailing webmasters because someone was trying to spoof emails and pretending to be emailing from Google? I’m really happy that the Webmaster Central team has come up with a great way to address the problem: they’ve added a webmaster message center to the webmaster console. (Read more...)

How to configure Synergy in six steps

2007-07-16T22:44:00.000-07:00

What is Synergy? It’s a program that lets you share a virtual desktop between two different computers. With one mouse and keyboard, you can control two computers, and even move your mouse from one desktop to the other. It’s almost like the computers are welded together. (Read more...)

Screen power tips: .screenrc

2007-07-11T22:45:00.000-07:00

Power user tips:

screen -ls will list the current screen sessions running on a machine.
Control-a Control-a will toggle between your current shell and your previous shell.
Control-a d will detach a session.
Control-a ” will show all the current shells. Use the up/down cursor keys and then press enter to select a shell.

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A quick tutorial on screen

2007-07-10T08:55:00.000-07:00

Suppose you want to run a program persistently (even if a terminal window closes, for example). For that, you might use the nohup command. But what if you want to start a command-line session on one computer and then go home and resume that session? For something like that, you’ll want to use screen. Screen is also really handy because you can have multiple shells running in one terminal window. (Read more...)

Udi Manber interview

2007-07-09T23:15:00.000-07:00

Eric Enge posted an interesting interview with Udi Manber of Google (Udi is a VP of Engineering at Google). Udi mentions that the goal of personalization is to improve overall search relevance (not to make SEO harder). Udi also talked about trying to make Google’s search algorithms more elegant: (Read more...)

Comments on Thomas Claburn’s piece

2007-07-03T21:46:00.000-07:00

Thomas Claburn over at InformationWeek just wrote an article entitled “Is Google’s Spam Fight a Sham?” (Read more...)

Company blogging 101

2007-07-02T04:35:00.000-07:00

Here’s a short summary of the recent Google blogging brouhaha:

- Google has a new health advertising blog. This weekend Lauren Turner, a Google employee, did a relatively negative post about the movie Sicko. She also mentioned that health care companies that disagreed with Sicko could use advertising to get their viewpoint out.
- Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped called foul.
- When I read the post myself, I thought “Hmm. That was a bit impolitic. I’ll sit out round one of the reaction. Let’s see how this goes.”
- Lots of bloggers piled on negative commentaries.
- Lauren quickly did a second post this weekend to clarify that she was giving a personal opinion of Sicko, not Google’s opinion.

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Comments on our webmaster guidelines?

2007-06-29T02:42:00.000-07:00

Google recently beefed up our webmaster quality guidelines with more info, examples, etc. Normally I’d start the conversation and highlight important points. Let’s turn it around this time. Check out the additional (Read more...)

Back from Foo Camp...

2007-06-26T04:04:00.000-07:00

I’m back from Foo Camp 2007 but omigod, I’m so sleepy that I’m seeing double. I stayed up until ~4 a.m. Friday night and 5:30 a.m. last night, and breakfast started at 8 a.m. Some of the late night time was chatting with people and some of it was the Werewolf game. No way around it — getting up for work tomorrow morning is going to (Read more...)

The role of humans in Google search

2007-06-26T04:02:00.000-07:00

Randy Stross wrote an interesting article for the New York Times about search with a human touch, and I wanted to talk about the role of people in Google search. On this post, you get not one but *two* disclaimers. It’s all part of my read-one-disclaimer, get-a-free-disclaimer program! (Read more...)