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...)

Useful Google feature: better date search

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
(Read more...)

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...)

Short bits

- 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

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...)

Screen power tips: .screenrc

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.

(Read more...)

A quick tutorial on screen

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

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...)

Company blogging 101

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.

(Read more...)