There’s a post up on the Google webmaster blog that discusses a change to reduce the impact of Googlebombs. If you’ve never heard of a “Googlebomb,” Danny gives some in-depth Googlebomb background and context over at Search Engine Land. Special thanks to Ryan and Kendra for putting in a little 20% time on Googlebombs.

I realized that I didn’t mention that Google Image Search got a makeover. The focus is on the thumbnails, but as you mouse over an image, you get more info. It looks like this: If you haven’t taken image search for a spin in a while, now is a good time. In other news, the new version [...]

I’m going to SES London 2007. I’ll be hanging at the conference (which runs Tuesday February 13th to Thursday February 15th), and I’ll do a Keynote Conversation with Chris Sherman that Wednesday. If you’re at the conference, please come up and say hello!

I was reading Loren’s write up on a new link selling service from V7N. He points out an interesting claim from the company, which says Contextual Links @ V7N are undetectable to search engines. Whether it be by human or algorithmic filtering, our links are impossible to detect. Additionally, an enforced non-disclosure agreement prevents both publishers [...]

Okay, I’ve caught up on all but five feeds now. 90 posts on Search Engine Land in a week? Danny and friends, you’re killing me here. Two of my favorite posts that I’ve seen so far show that Google is listening to feedback: - Jeremy Zawodny complained that his Gmail spam filter wasn’t working [...]

A recent post on the CIO blog got my attention: Some website operators are complaining that Google is flagging their sites as containing malicious software when they believe their sites are harmless. …. “We have no bad software or installs or anything that would indicate a need to ban people from viewing our site,” wrote Matt Blatchley, [...]

Completely independent of the recent algorithm to minimize the impact of Googlebombs, we continue to do data pushes on a near-daily basis where some people can see their rankings change: I said to expect those (roughly monthly) updates to become more of a daily thing. That data refresh became more frequent (roughly daily instead of every [...]

Okay, I’m curious about something. When Google wrote a 17 page white paper about flaws in click fraud studies, how many people here read it from start to finish? If you didn’t get a chance to read it back then, you’re in luck. Shuman Ghosemajumder, a product manager at Google, summarizes the high-order bits in [...]

The website for this year’s Superbowl stadium, www.dolphinstadium.com, was recently hacked so that visitors to that page with unpatched Windows computers downloaded a keylogger and malware that allows full backdoor control. It’s fixed now, but it’s a good idea to make sure whatever computer you use to browse is patched. As a webmaster, hacked sites [...]

One of the common requests I hear from webmasters is “Why doesn’t Google show me most or all of my backlinks?” Well, as of today, Google’s webmaster console will now let you see your site’s backlinks. Major props to the webmaster console team for this new feature. A few things to know: - The backlink tool [...]

I’m getting ready to head to SES London 2007 soon. I hope to see lots of search folks there! My wife and father-in-law are coming too, which is practically a recipe for interesting hijinks. I’ve been trying to get on a London sleep schedule by getting up earlier and earlier each morning, and varying [...]

A while ago I did a post about a site that was getting the malware interstitial on Google. They said “We don’t have any bad software on our domain” and I was all, like, “Psst, buddy, check out these urls.” But that’s not really a scalable approach. Now the webmaster console team has added [...]

I’m mostly caught up on my feeds. It was relatively quiet the last couple weeks, but I’ve seen 2-3 things I wanted to talk about in the last couple days or so. First, WebProNews ran this post that claims that Google is selling PageRank 7 links. My quick take: when you dig into it, it turns out [...]

(Philipp Lenssen and I started talking about cloaking in a corner of the web, and I figured it would make sense to talk about cloaking in a separate post. Consider this a me-typing-this-quickly post, but better to get something down than to not get a chance to talk about it.) Cloaking is serving different content to [...]

You may have heard of Peter Norvig, who is the Director of Research at Google. He’s the guy that did the Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint presentation. Or you might have used his artificial intelligence textbook in college. Recently Peter used several folks’ logs (including mine) as a baseline to estimate the skew in Alexa due [...]

When users get what they want from you quickly and easily, they’re more likely to come back next time. (Shh. Don’t tell anyone else this vital secret.) Part of that is feeling that they aren’t “trapped”–that they can leave you behind if they want. That’s why I was happy about Eric Schmidt’s quote from the Web [...]

Bill Slawski did one of my favorite blog posts this week. He pointed to a Rolling Stone article that discusses how Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame is leading several people on a merry web chase to uncover websites from a bleak, dystopian future. Starting from bolded letters in concert T-shirts, searchers quickly find sites [...]

I was reading an interesting question on Google’s webmaster help group that was posted a few weeks ago. The question was Is there any official Google statement regarding that search result on one’s own site ought to be disallowed from indexing (e.g. via robots.txt)? and the questioner went on to mention that YouTube’s search results were showing up in [...]

This post has a snarkiness level of 6 out of 10. If your body can’t handle me being snarky on rare occasions, you should leave now. Because I noticed a few interesting non-Google tidbits in search news this week. Barry found a claim that if you participate in Yahoo’s premium pay-for-inclusion program (say that [...]

A couple search interviews you may not have caught the first time: I enjoyed doing this interview with Richard MacManus. I still have an email interview with a blogger that I’m trying to finish that started in September 2006, so in general I decline trying to do email interviews these days. Just about the only way [...]

The judge in the KinderStart case granted Google’s motion to dismiss without leave to amend: The instant case has been intensively litigated for more than eleven months. Under these circumstances, the Court concludes that there is no reasonable likelihood that KinderStart will cure the defects in the SAC [second amended complaint] by further amendment. Accordingly, the [...]

It’s almost not worth mentioning, but I know one website noticed this, so I’ll talk about it. Last week there was an update to how we canonicalize a small number of urls. What is “canonicalization” again? Read this previous post, or see this post by John Andrews to see all the ways that you can [...]

The judge in the KinderStart case granted Google’s motion to dismiss without leave to amend: The instant case has been intensively litigated for more than eleven months. Under these circumstances, the Court concludes that there is no reasonable likelihood that KinderStart will cure the defects in the SAC [second amended complaint] by further amendment. Accordingly, the [...]

This post has a snarkiness level of 6 out of 10. If your body can’t handle me being snarky on rare occasions, you should leave now. Because I noticed a few interesting non-Google tidbits in search news this week. Barry found a claim that if you participate in Yahoo’s premium pay-for-inclusion program (say that [...]

A couple search interviews you may not have caught the first time: I enjoyed doing this interview with Richard MacManus. I still have an email interview with a blogger that I’m trying to finish that started in September 2006, so in general I decline trying to do email interviews these days. Just about the only way [...]

It’s almost not worth mentioning, but I know one website noticed this, so I’ll talk about it. Last week there was an update to how we canonicalize a small number of urls. What is “canonicalization” again? Read this previous post, or see this post by John Andrews to see all the ways that you can [...]

Hey everybody, I talked about my travel plans earlier this year and wanted to give you a quick update. I’m staying at home for SES NYC 2007, still planning on taking a fair chunk of May off, and planning to hit the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) conference in June. Why am I skipping SES NYC? Well, [...]

If you blog, you should get the Linkify bookmarklet that Laurence Gonsalves wrote. How does it work? It’s an easy 2 step process: 1. Drag the Linkify bookmarket to your personal toolbar. 2. Dang! There is no step 2! Sorry about that. I, um, got mixed up. There’s just one step. Now how do you use it? Well, see [...]

By the way, if you think botnets are intriguing, you’ll enjoy this post by Google software engineer Neil Daswani. It’s about a recent USENIX paper (PDF link) in which Neil and other Googlers talk about Clickbot.A, which was a bot that clicked on Google ads last year. The high-order bit is that “Google identified all clicks [...]

One thing I heard at SES London was that people wanted a way to report paid links specifically. I’d like to get a few paid link reports anyway because I’m excited about trying some ideas here at Google to augment our existing algorithms. Google may provide a special form for paid link reports at some [...]

By the way, in case it isn’t clear from my previous post about hidden links and disclosure of paid links, I agree 100% with Matt Mullenweg’s post about sponsored themes in WordPress.

Most people understand hidden text is something like white text on a white background, and know to steer clear of it. Let me show you an example of a hidden link. Normally a hidden link could be in several forms: - hidden text that also happens to be hyperlinked, e.g. white text on a white background, [...]

AIRWeb 2007 has released which papers they’ve accepted; Bill Slawski has posted the full list of papers, with links to the papers, over at Search Engine Land. I was on the program committee and helped review papers, but I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to make it to the WWW conference or the AIRWeb [...]

This is just a reminder that if you see a problem with your site, one of the first places you may want to look is our webmaster console. In some cases, Google can alert site owners in the webmaster console if we see an issue for things like hidden text. In a case that I [...]

For now, I’m just going to say “hot damn.” The smart folks on the webmaster console team have migrated Google’s url removal tool into the webmaster console. Along the way, it’s picking up a *lot* of nice new functionality. I’ll talk about it more pretty soon, because I have a fun story to tell, but [...]

For now, I’m just going to say “hot damn.” The smart folks on the webmaster console team have migrated Google’s url removal tool into the webmaster console. Along the way, it’s picking up a *lot* of nice new functionality. I’ll talk about it more pretty soon, because I have a fun story to tell, but [...]

This is just a reminder that if you see a problem with your site, one of the first places you may want to look is our webmaster console. In some cases, Google can alert site owners in the webmaster console if we see an issue for things like hidden text. In a case that I [...]

AIRWeb 2007 has released which papers they’ve accepted; Bill Slawski has posted the full list of papers, with links to the papers, over at Search Engine Land. I was on the program committee and helped review papers, but I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to make it to the WWW conference or the AIRWeb [...]

By the way, if you think botnets are intriguing, you’ll enjoy this post by Google software engineer Neil Daswani. It’s about a recent USENIX paper (PDF link) in which Neil and other Googlers talk about Clickbot.A, which was a bot that clicked on Google ads last year. The high-order bit is that “Google identified all clicks [...]

One thing I heard at SES London was that people wanted a way to report paid links specifically. I’d like to get a few paid link reports anyway because I’m excited about trying some ideas here at Google to augment our existing algorithms. Google may provide a special form for paid link reports at some [...]

By the way, in case it isn’t clear from my previous post about hidden links and disclosure of paid links, I agree 100% with Matt Mullenweg’s post about sponsored themes in WordPress.

For now, I’m just going to say “hot damn.” The smart folks on the webmaster console team have migrated Google’s url removal tool into the webmaster console. Along the way, it’s picking up a *lot* of nice new functionality. I’ll talk about it more pretty soon, because I have a fun story to tell, but [...]

This is just a reminder that if you see a problem with your site, one of the first places you may want to look is our webmaster console. In some cases, Google can alert site owners in the webmaster console if we see an issue for things like hidden text. In a case that I [...]

AIRWeb 2007 has released which papers they’ve accepted; Bill Slawski has posted the full list of papers, with links to the papers, over at Search Engine Land. I was on the program committee and helped review papers, but I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to make it to the WWW conference or the AIRWeb [...]

By the way, if you think botnets are intriguing, you’ll enjoy this post by Google software engineer Neil Daswani. It’s about a recent USENIX paper (PDF link) in which Neil and other Googlers talk about Clickbot.A, which was a bot that clicked on Google ads last year. The high-order bit is that “Google identified all clicks [...]

One thing I heard at SES London was that people wanted a way to report paid links specifically. I’d like to get a few paid link reports anyway because I’m excited about trying some ideas here at Google to augment our existing algorithms. Google may provide a special form for paid link reports at some [...]

Let’s talk about Google’s new web history feature for a minute. This is a product that helps personalize your search results and it’s useful for that alone, but I wanted to highlight a couple examples of other ways it can be handy. Example 1: What was that helpful site? A month ago, my wife was working [...]

In my previous post I talked about some useful things I’d discovered about Google’s Web History feature. As you might expect, several commenters asked about various aspects of privacy for Web History. I gave a quick response in my comments, but I figured that I would also write my comments as a separate post so [...]

In my previous post I talked about some useful things I’d discovered about Google’s Web History feature. As you might expect, several commenters asked about various aspects of privacy for Web History. I gave a quick response in my comments, but I figured that I would also write my comments as a separate post so [...]

Let’s talk about Google’s new web history feature for a minute. This is a product that helps personalize your search results and it’s useful for that alone, but I wanted to highlight a couple examples of other ways it can be handy. Example 1: What was that helpful site? A month ago, my wife was working [...]

Andy Greenberg wrote an article for Forbes entitled “Condemned To Google Hell” about supplemental results. I was getting ready to go on vacation, so I didn’t have a chance to talk to Andy, and now I wish that I had. It’s easy to read the article and come away with the impression that Google’s supplemental [...]

(Also marking this one as a Google post so people don’t wonder where I went.) Technically my vacation started a few days ago (I’ve already been in Kentucky for a while catching up with family), but I wanted to let folks know that I’ll be posting less for a few weeks. Last year I didn’t blog [...]

Normally I like Nick Carr a lot, but the headline on his most recent article (”Google preparing to police web”) didn’t strike me as accurate. If Nick needs some background on how Google handles urls that potentially spread malware, maybe other people would benefit as well. I dropped a comment on Nick’s post that I’ll [...]

Normally I like Nick Carr a lot, but the headline on his most recent article (”Google preparing to police web”) didn’t strike me as accurate. If Nick needs some background on how Google handles urls that potentially spread malware, maybe other people would benefit as well. I dropped a comment on Nick’s post that I’ll [...]

(Also marking this one as a Google post so people don’t wonder where I went.) Technically my vacation started a few days ago (I’ve already been in Kentucky for a while catching up with family), but I wanted to let folks know that I’ll be posting less for a few weeks. Last year I didn’t blog [...]

Andy Greenberg wrote an article for Forbes entitled “Condemned To Google Hell” about supplemental results. I was getting ready to go on vacation, so I didn’t have a chance to talk to Andy, and now I wish that I had. It’s easy to read the article and come away with the impression that Google’s supplemental [...]

I’m late to talk about this one, but today is Google Developer Day. It’s wild that thousands of developers are converging in Mountain View alone, and Google is doing presentations in 10 cities around the world. The Mountain View sessions are being held in the San Jose Convention Center, and you can see the full [...]

I’m in town for SMX Seattle. I’ve never been to Seattle before. Here are some of the things I’ve found myself thinking so far: - Wow, that car rental person was nice. I’ve never had someone joke with me while renting a car before. - Aaaahh! A gigantic mountain is about to fall on me!!! Jeez, what [...]

(This is all my personal opinion.) To be completely honest, I was a little worried about Saul Hansell, a journalist for the New York Times, sitting in on some of our confidential quality meetings at Google. Even though everything was off-the-record, you can’t help but be slightly nervous talking about evaluation methodologies and confidential projects with [...]

I’m back from SMX Seattle. It was wonderful to visit with familiar folks. I met a lot of neat new people too. I plan to spend the next week or so talking with folks at Google and seeing just how much email stacked up while I was on vacation. Catching up with my team [...]

Sigh. Google as a company takes privacy very seriously. I personally feel strongly about protecting our users’ privacy. So I’m frustrated by a recent study that Privacy International did, and I want to know if I’m off-base in my reaction. I got back home from SMX and I’m surfing the web when I see this [...]

Two or three weeks ago, the European Union Article 29 Working Party sent Google a letter asking about some of Google’s privacy practices. Google responded to the letter in a blog post today and made its entire response letter available (PDF link). The two pieces of news I see are: - Google previously committed to anonymize its [...]

In case you haven’t seen it, Vanessa Fox has decided to leave Google. I’m really sad to see her go, but the work she’s done has really helped webmasters and Google. In the years that Vanessa has been at Google, she’s helped to launch and improve the webmaster console, communicate policy and get feedback with [...]

Here’s a power-searcher tip that didn’t get much attention the first time around, so I wanted to mention it. Tara Calashain recently wrote about changes to Google’s date search features. Previously, I believe Google estimated the age of a url as the last time that we fetched that page. Given how quickly Google refreshes its main [...]

Gah. I’ll never catch up on email; might as well blog a little bit. I had a really good time in Seattle. I got to meet many more members of the Google Kirkland office, go up in the Space Needle, visit the Science Fiction Museum, walk around Pike Place Market, and even see a [...]

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! My disclaimers are: - This particular post is [...]

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 info in the webmaster guidelines — what do you see that is unclear? Are there places where you think the wording is poor [...]

Thomas Claburn over at InformationWeek just wrote an article entitled “Is Google’s Spam Fight a Sham?” I had a bunch of spam-related work to do this morning, so I just dashed out a 15 minute reply. Of course, InformationWeek’s comment system wouldn’t let me post the comment, saying The comment was rejected by the system. Please [...]

Earlier this year I posted my rough plans for the first half of 2007. This is what the schedule is looking like for the second half: June 4-5: SMX Seattle. Already did this (duh!), but part of the reason for this post is so that down the road I can remember what I did. [...]

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: [W]e have projects that their sole purpose [...]

I’m in a bug meeting tomorrow, so I thought I’d do a follow-up to this bug post from a while ago. The same rules of thumb apply: 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 [...]

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. Now there’s an authenticated [...]

What do you want to see the Webmaster Central team do next? About 10 months ago, Google Blogoscoped asked what people wanted next. It’s time to ask that question again, because the team has made great progress. From the original thread: - See the backlinks for my site: DONE. Site owners can now see their own [...]

Alex Chiu claims to have invented an immortality device: Wow, who wouldn’t want to stay young forever? But there’s a snag. Alex claims that Google doesn’t include alexchiu.com in its index because, you know, Google is trying to suppress the immortality device. Here’s part of what one of his pages says: I wonder if there could be [...]

- 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. I think everyone benefited. You can read his trip write-up. - Mitchell Baker is asking for suggestions on [...]

When I joined Google in early 2000, we had a stretch where we didn’t update our index for 3-4 months or more. At the time, that wasn’t bad for a search engine; I remember one search engine around then that wasn’t updated for over a year. Starting in mid-2000, Google updated our index pretty much [...]

Okay, I’ve got a bunch of pointers to summarize my WordCamp 2007 talk. First off, here’s the PowerPoint deck that I presented. Google’s PR team was kind enough to verify that it was okay to release. I made the slides from scratch (not even a Google template), so there shouldn’t be any problems with notes in [...]

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? [...]

Let’s dissect the parts of a URL (uniform resource locator). I’ll tell you how we typically refer to different parts of a URL at Google. 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 [...]

Whether you call it blended search, 3D search (Ask’s name), or universal search, it has the potential to surface as many relevant results as other hot search topics such as personalization. At SES yesterday, I sat in the back of the Universal Search session. There are good write-ups on the PowerPoint and presentations, but not [...]

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 [...]

If you didn’t see this post about better date-based searching by Ionut Alex Chitu, I highly recommend that you check it out. 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 [...]

Google Reader just added search! Yay! Suppose you remembered that someone did a cool post comparing PageRank to Play-Doh. Just do a search and you’ll remember that it was Rhea writing on Search Engine Journal: I’m going to be using Google Reader’s new search a lot. What are some of the things you’ll do with [...]

I’m really late giving thoughts on SES San Jose 2007, but better late than never! For much of 2007, we’ve been working to get more Googlers doing different types of communication. I really saw that effort bear fruit in San Jose. From the webspam team, Greg Grothaus and Shashi Thakur were first-time SES speakers [...]

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 [...]

Last week, Aaron Wall had a guest post on Search Engine Land that originally had the headline “How To Buy A #1 Organic Search Ranking On Google.” Then today I was reading Aaron Wall’s guest post on Google Blogoscoped where he makes a couple unusual claims, such as that “SEO = spam” in Google’s opinion [...]

One of my favorite computer science papers is a 1990 paper titled “An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities”. The authors discovered that if they piped random junk into UNIX command-line programs, a remarkable number of them crashed. Why? The random input triggered bugs, some of which had probably hidden for years. Up [...]

Earlier this year, I was reading about 100 feeds in Google Reader. When I went on vacation for a few weeks, I cut back to about 30 feeds. But I thought I’d be smart about the 70 feeds that I stopped reading. Instead of unsubscribing from those 70 feeds completely, I made an “unread” folder [...]

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 [...]

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 Friday, Google Operating System noticed that Google Reader will tell you Google Reader subscriber numbers for a blog when you search to add a new feed. It didn’t take long for different folks to start collecting subscriber numbers for different blogs. I haven’t asked the Reader team about this, but it looks like this [...]

Okay, go read this post on the Google webmaster blog. In fact, if you read my site, you really should add the Official Google webmaster blog feed to your list of subscriptions, because that blog is almost 100% SEO/webmaster-related posts, and it is official. Done reading? Okay, I’ll give you my personal take on why [...]

This is pretty cool. Google launched App Engine, which lets you write code for a web application, then Google takes care of the scaling/failover/logistics-type issues. You can store your data in a Google Bigtable using the Google File System (GFS). There’s a bunch of App Engine APIs to simplify things like sending email and fetching [...]

I’m crunching on a bunch of work stuff today, but I wanted to point out this official Google blog post briefly: Since we closed the acquisition of DoubleClick on March 11, we’ve been immersed in integration planning for each of our products and business units. Recently we completed this process for the DoubleClick Performics businesses, and [...]

Update: This post was an April Fool’s joke as well. I was hoping to catch people off-guard by doing a late-night post after all the other pranks were out there. Clicking on the video link just gets you rickrolled in a creative way. Okay, I admit that my “I’m tired of April Fool’s” post was just [...]

Last week at the Web 2.0 Expo I decided to walk the exhibition floor. Niall Kennedy and I checked out the inflatable Google booth, we gave feedback to the WordPress folks, and we came to rest in the Yahoo booth, where it was nice to see Jeremy Zawodny and catch up a little bit. After a [...]

This link was cool, but it generates a graph like this: With a little modification, I made this graph: I like my picture a little better. It was quite simple to make this diagram, and Google provides a free graph-drawing tool that you can use on your own site with a single url — no account or [...]

This weekend I did a Q&A session at the Domain Roundtable Conference. It was an hour and a half of answering various questions. Rand Fishkin and John Andrews both did write-ups of the session. Rand and John were both on an SEO panel after me, which I enjoyed. This was my first domain-related conference, and the [...]

Google just announced a cool addition to Google News. If you search for a person’s name on Google News, you can see statements where that person has been quoted by a news source. For example, search on Google News for [Arnold Schwarzenegger] and you’ll see It’s like how smart the feature is. It can correctly [...]

Popular Mechanics asks 20 questions of Udi Manber, who is a VP of Engineering at Google on core search quality. My favorite: There have been a lot of fads in search of late, such as Human Assisted Search and contextual search. Do those get folded into search as a whole? What are real trends in search [...]