What cool new websearch ideas should Google launch in 2012?

Even though this year is nowhere near finished, a lot of people at Google are already thinking about things to launch next year. So I wanted to put the question out: what cool things would you like to see Google launch in 2012?
For example, in 2011, we launched hundreds of search quality changes that might not be noticeable, along with a few high-impact changes. But we also added new ways to search, like the ability to search by image and search by voice. We’ve beefed up our social search, and continued to make search faster.
So take a minute to think about potential search features, products, or changes that we could launch next year. As a user (not as an SEO/webmaster/publisher), what cool piece of technology would you like to see Google launch in 2012?
By:  Matt Cutts

Google search quality is hiring

I wanted to mention that Google’s search quality team is hiring. We work on everything from synonyms and spell correction to core ranking, UI changes, evaluation, and yes–even webspam. The sorts of people that do really well in Google tend to be smart, personable, can work well in teams or independently, get things done, and take initiative. It helps to have a healthy balance of theory as well as the pragmatic ability to build/launch real systems.
If you’re a smart engineer who wants to work on interesting problems across the scale of the entire web, why not reach out?
drop us an email? Contact joinsearch at google.com to reach the recruiters in search quality directly.
The best way to apply is to through our search engineering page. If you’re a great engineer who would like to work at Google in search, I hope you’ll apply! (The majority of people in the search quality group are based in Mountain View, California, by the way.)
By: Matt Cutts

Review: In The Plex, by Steven Levy

Steven Levy just wrote a new book about Google called In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. It succeeds the most on the “how Google thinks” part–if you want to understand how Google thinks, get an overview of Google, or understand its impact on the world, this is the book for you.
I think anyone interested in Google would enjoy this book. People who don’t know much about Google will get a good overview. People who are really interested in Google or the search industry will get a better understanding of how Google thinks. And even if you’re an expert, you’ll probably learn a few new tidbits. For example, Levy reveals the identity of GoogleGuy, the Google representative who answered questions from webmasters as early as 2001. You’ll also hear about inside-Google allusions like Audrey Fino or Emerald Sea.
Given that Levy isn’t a computer scientist or a Googler, I wasn’t sure how deftly he would internalize or explain how Google looks at the world, but for the most part he nails it. The book, like many accounts of Google, emphasizes the company’s focus on making decisions based on data and logic. At some points I felt that Levy pushed this point too hard. On the other hand, I recently had a conversation with a Google colleague about Lady Gaga, and the word “scalability” cropped up a lot more than you would expect for a conversation about a pop star. I don’t think Google is full of purely left-brained eggheads, but I’m willing to concede that compared to the average population, we probably skew further in that direction than most places.
Reading the book, I realized how much you could write about the different facets of Google. Even in 400+ pages, some topics get short shrift; it felt like Levy covered Google News in a single, condensed paragraph. But Levy gives complete and clear explanations for the parts of Google that receive his focus.

Search Engineering at Google

I’m always a fan of Googlers doing more communication and more videos, so when some fellow search quality folks made a video about working at Google, I said I’d be happy to post it:

You can find out more info and apply to be a search engineer at Google if you’re interested.
By: Matt Cutts

Google I/O 2011!!1!

This week brings the Google I/O conference. That page has a QR code that lets you install the official Google I/O Android app for the conference.
The conference has a ton of great talks scheduled. You can learn everything from “Building Aggressively Compatible Android Games” to “Cloud Robotics” to “Designing and Implementing Android UIs for Phones and Tablets” to a Google Checkout talk to “Honeycomb Highlights” to “How to NFC,” plus a ton more. Want to hear about Python from Guido van Rossum? He’ll be there. Want to hear how the Google Pac-Man logo happened? Those folks will be there. Web Fonts? Uh huh. You can even meet the Google Ventures team for some VC speed dating.
I’ll be doing an Ignite talk at 5pm on Tuesday about “Trying Something New for 30 Days.” If you see me at Google I/O, come up and say hello!
You can also follow @googleio on Twitter, and the hash tag is #io2011.
Even if you can’t make it to Google I/O in person, a lot of the talks will be livestreamed. They just announced that the keynotes will be about Android and Chrome. I think the videos of the talks should be up fairly quickly as well: the official blog post claims “Recorded videos from all sessions across eight product tracks will be available within 24 hours after the conference.” Here’s the session videos from 2010, for example. Hope to see you at I/O!
By: Matt Cutts

A rel=canonical corner case

I answered an interesting rel=canonical question over email today and thought I’d blog about it. If you’re not familiar with rel=canonical read these pages first. Then watch this video about rel=canonical vs. 301s, especially the second half:

Okay, I sometimes get a question about whether Google will always use the url from rel=canonical as the preferred url. The answer is that we take rel=canonical urls as a strong hint, but in some cases we won’t use them:

- For example, if we think you’re shooting yourself in the foot by accident (pointing a rel=canonical toward a non-existent/404 page), we’d reserve the right not to use the destination url you specify with rel=canonical.
- Another example where we might not go with your rel=canonical preference: if we think your website has been hacked and the hacker added a malicious rel=canonical. I recently tweeted about that case. On the “bright” side, if a hacker can control your website enough to insert a rel=canonical tag, they usually do far more malicious things like insert malware, hidden or malicious links/text, etc.
I wanted to talk today about another case in which we won’t use rel=canonical. First off, here’s a thought exercise: should Google trust rel=canonical if we see it in the body of the HTML? The answer is no, because some websites let people edit content or HTML on pages of the site. If Google trusted rel=canonical in the HTML body, we’d see far more attacks where people would drop a rel=canonical on part of a web page to try to hijack it.
Okay, so now we come to another corner case where we probably won’t trust a rel=canonical: if we see weird stuff in your HEAD section. For example, if you start to insert regular text or other tags that we normally only see in the BODY of HTML into the HEAD of a document, we may assume that someone just forgot to close the HEAD section. We don’t allow rel=canonical in the BODY (because as I mentioned, people would spam that), so we might not trust rel=canonical in those cases, especially if it comes after the regular text or tags that we normally only see in the BODY of a page.
But in general, as long as your HEAD looks fairly normal, things should be fine. If you really want to be safe, you can make sure that the rel=canonical is the first or one of the first things in the HEAD section. Again, things should be fine either way, but if you want an easy rule of thumb: put the rel=canonical toward the top of the HEAD.
By: Matt Cutts

Goal: getting email under control

Each year I try to settle on a small set of big goals for the year. Last year my big goal was to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. This year, I settled on 2-3 goals I wanted to achieve:
1. Go skydiving. I was with a group of ~15 people in January and we realized that no one in the room had gone skydiving or run a marathon. Both sounded fun, so I made them goals for this year. I met some great folks at Foo Camp a couple weeks ago who had been skydiving, and this past weekend we went skydiving together:

It was a lot of fun; I’d recommend skydiving to anyone. You’re up high enough that a fear of heights doesn’t come into play… much. (If you live in the Bay Area, I went to Bay Area Skydiving in Byron, California and had a great experience.)
2. Run a marathon. This goal came from the same group in January where no one had run a marathon. I’ve been training for a couple months now and I’m up to nine miles on my long runs. Unless I’m injured, I think I’ll run a marathon this year. (By the way, USA FIT is a great organization in a bunch of U.S. cities where people get together to train for running a marathon.)
3. Get my email under control. This is a recent goal, but it might be the most important. Email is flawed in a lot of ways. Some wise people have referred to it as a “to-do list that anyone can add to.” It’s typically a poor use of time: you’re often talking to someone 1:1 when those cycles would be better spent working on something that will help a broader range of people or to realize a broader goal. Emails can take a long time to craft compared to other ways to communicate. Email is near-universal, but it lacks good ways for better processing or prioritizing (e.g. “show me the five least useful mailing lists” I get). Lots of email is sent to too many people or is just trying to find the right person to ask a question. Email also encourages us to pay attention to things that are urgent at the expense of things that are important.
Like most people in the tech industry, email has grown into monster for me in a lot of ways. I recently had a day without meetings, and I ended up spending the entire day replying to email, and still only took care of the email that I’d received that day. That’s just not sustainable–even a little more email would mean that I could never catch up–and that’s time that I’m not talking with my team, or thinking about new ways to improve search quality, or making videos or blog posts that can benefit a lot of people.
I’ve tried various email challenges before, e.g. not replying to outside emails for 30 days or not replying to emails after 10 p.m. I don’t know what my final solution to email will be, but this is a heads-up notice that I’m going to try a bunch of things until I find a better balance. I suspect that the final answer may be fairly radical, so if you’re hoping for an email reply from me, you should probably lower your expectations to zero. I’m going to try not replying to outside-Google emails for a while and then adjust things more over time.
Email is a big part of the problem, but I’ll probably have to say “no” more often as well. Please be patient with me while I try to recalibrate. I want to make sure that I spend my work time in the best way I can.
By:  Matt Cutts

Submit video topics for mid-2011

This submission round is now closed–thanks!
Sometime soon I’m planning to record some new webmaster videos. I created a Google Moderator page where you can post video suggestions and vote topics up and down.
Instead of short 1-2 minute video answers to quick questions, I’d like to try something new this time. I’d like to move toward making tutorials about how Google works and–more importantly–why Google works that way. I think videos that dive deeper like this video about robots.txt can be really helpful. So if there’s a meaty topic that you’d like to hear more about, please head over to the Google Moderator page and ask about it!
Just a reminder: please ask your questions on Moderator, not in the comments here. When you suggest a topic on the moderator page, people can vote for the questions and I can see which questions people are most interested in.

BY:  Matt Cutts