Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

The other day I realized that I enter my haircut appointments into Google Calendar, so I can search for “haircut OR (the place I get my hair cut)” and see when I’ve gotten my hair cut:

Then I was reading Google Apps Hacks and Hack 25 caught my eye: “Show the difference between two dates”. A formula like “=INT(A2-A1)” will automatically compute how many days passed between the date listed in cell A1 and the date listed in cell A2.

If you copy and paste a date from Google Calendar’s search results into a cell, it will automatically format a nice string like “May 2, 2007″ to “5/2/2007″. So it was easy to copy/paste when I got haircuts into a Google Spreadsheet. Then I used the date formula to compute the number of days between haircuts. As Philipp Lenssen points out in his book, once you’ve entered the date difference formula “=INT(A2-A1)” in one cell, you can click the cell to highlight it and then use the handle in the lower right of the cell to copy the formula. Just like that, you can see how long you waited between each haircut:

Then it’s just 2-3 mouse clicks to add a graph of the time between haircuts. And if you use the “=AVERAGE(B3:B10)” formula, you can see that on average I wait 45.75 days between haircuts, or about 6-7 weeks.

This tip does have some practical value. When the haircut place asks “Do you want to make your next appointment?” you’ll know how far ahead to schedule your next haircut so that you don’t get too shaggy.

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If you didn’t attend Web 2.0, you can watch my ten-minute keynote about “What Google Knows About Spam” (and several other keynotes) on blip.tv. I’ll embed the keynote below as well.

The only thing I don’t like about conference speaking is preparing slides. When I use slides at a talk, I almost always make a custom presentation. That’s why I prefer Q&A sessions; making slides is too much work.

To make the process easier this time, I tried using Google Docs to create the presentation, and then saving my Docs presentation in PowerPoint (PPT) so that the conference could easily project the slides. The “Save as PPT” feature worked perfectly for me — go Google Docs team! Here are the slides in PowerPoint (PPT) form.

In case you want to see the slides yourself, here they are in embedded form:

In addition to simple PowerPoint exporting, it’s also easy to embed a Docs presentation on your own web page.

[Thanks to Tracy O for cc-licensing the "money" image that I used in the presentation.]

I’ve always meant to do a post to say that search engine optimization (SEO) is not spam and that Google doesn’t hate SEO, but I never seem to get around to it. This presentation gave me a chance to slip those facts into the minds of several thousand tech-savvy folks.

Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) just announced that they now power AdSense for Search. Another nice new change is that if you provide a Sitemap, Google will use that to improve the coverage of the custom search engine.

Now let me nip one idea in the bud, because I can already feel a few people thinking it: this is not a backdoor way to get more pages in Google’s index or to improve your search ranking. The official blog post mentions that. But I think this is a win for webmasters all around. If you use AdSense for search, the product is now better and more tweakable. And if you provide a sitemap, your custom search can get much better as those urls are incorporated into a CSE-specific index.

I’ll just give you a quick anecdote to point out how easy-to-use this product is becoming. My Mom runs a charity that has a web site, and she asked me about site search. We had this email exchange over the course of several hours:

Mom: I wonder if I can add a gadget to search our website like I see on other websites. Is that hard?
Me: This is what people use to add a search box to their site: http://www.google.com/cse/
Mom: It works. I have a search button on my blog!

At my grad school, the goal was to create something so useful that a faculty member would want to use it, and so easy that a faculty member could use it. As the email exchange above shows, Google Custom Search Engine is so easy, it’s Mom-approved.

The Custom Search Engine team keeps pushing the technology further and further, and these two changes are major improvements. If you haven’t taken a look at using CSE for your site search recently, it’s worth taking a fresh look.

Man, I love Maker Faire. It’s almost as if Burning Man mated with Slashdot. Here are afew of the fun things I saw today.

In the Craft area someone showed the credit cards that they accepted, but the credit card sign was hand-made:

Also in the Craft zone was a “postcard machine.” It was a person sitting inside a booth pretending to be a machine. You could select the postcard you wanted and push two dollars through the slot. The person in the booth would make beeping and booping noises and then slip a custom postcard into your hand:

Outside, several people were driving around in mobile muffins:

Not to be outdone, someone had decorated their art car entirely with pens and markers:

I forget where I saw this, but someone had made a Q*bert quilt:

Finally, I enjoyed this art installation about the “newspaper of the future.” It was a standard newspaper machine but had an LCD monitor that showed optimistic headlines:

Good stuff. I bought a pair of Monkeylectric LED Bike light sets, so that should be fun.