Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

On Sunday morning I moved to a new webhost, trying to get a little more speed–my blog was kinda poky. Let me know if you see particular problems. Assuming nothing is horribly broken, I’ll feel fine about doing a “how to move your site to a new host and not break things in Google” post.

Holy crap! The lead vehicle in the DARPA Grand Challenge (autonomous robotic vehicles) has already made it 87 89 miles into a 131 mile course! Last year they were lucky to get 7-8 miles. Looks like the best online coverage is at http://www.grandchallenge.org/ . This sounds like more fun than Battlebots–does anyone know if this is on TV anywhere?

I tend to get into Halloween every other year or so. A few years ago, I went as Charlie, our chef who cooked for the Grateful Dead, and who is now opening up his own restaurant called Calafia. Here’s what it looked like:

Recently I was in San Francisco and ran across a bright orange sport jacket. Hmm. Mikkel deMib Svendsen is known at conferences for wearing his trademark orange blazer:

How would an orange blazer it look on me? (This is before The Great Shave.) Let’s see:

Meh. Maybe among SEO/webmaster folks, but nobody else would get it. What do you think I should go as for Halloween? Or what are you planning? By the way, my vote for best Halloween costumes goes to cockeyed.com. I think I’ve spent about five hours reading his site over the years.

I should know better by now. There was an important milestone at work that I wanted to reach. Googlers are a pretty motivated group of people–normally they don’t need any extra reasons to work hard. And the goal was set pretty high. But to provide a little bit of extra excitement, I promised that if we met that milestone, the group could do whatever they wanted to my scruffy little goatee. If you had seen me before about 5pm yesterday, I would have looked something like this:

But the group met their goals, so yesterday we took a couple hours out from work, went bowling, and then the goatee was shredded. But my colleagues weren’t content to shave it all off–nooo. They had to go for the handlebar look:

If I squint and look tough, maybe people will think I’m that American Chopper guy? I’m at home right now, but I’ll be wearing it at work today. Googlers, feel free to stop by and mock. I’m just happy with the progress we made toward our goal.

This is why I love having a blog. Here’s a story that includes a quote from me from a Web 2.0 panel:

For example, Google’s AdSense program, which places contextual ads on sites and shares revenue with bloggers, can be improved by engaging publishers and their audiences, blogger and media guru Jeff Jarvis said at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

“Google is at the lower level of the value chain now. We can raise the value chain and get more money,” said Mr. Jarvis, who led a panel entitled “Web 2.0 Ad Models.”

Google’s Matt Cutts, one of the first engineers on the search engine’s advertising team, agreed.

“There’s a ton of room left for experimentation,” he said. “If someone comes up with something better than AdSense and kills it, the world will be a better place.”

What I mean by that is that competition makes things better for users and publishers. If someone comes along and competes fairly and does a better job than Google (on search, or on advertising, or on AdSense)–good! That means the world of users is getting a ton of benefit. If Google takes its eye off the ball in core areas such as search and advertising, and then someone else does things better: it’s still a win for users. Just to be clear, I think Google is keeping a very sharp focus on our core areas.

Neil Gaiman recently stopped by Google and he said it much better. What he said was along the lines of: Google has changed the world in lots of odd and interesting ways. And even five or ten years from now, if Google disappears or dies, the world will still be a better place for things that Google has done. I do believe that.

By the way, there’s another quote from me in that Red Herring story: “If you view ads as a necessary evil, it will color the experience.” What I was trying to say is that Google doesn’t view ads as a necessary evil to make money. We view showing ads as another type of search–one in which relevancy is just as important as web search. To me, ads shouldn’t be this unwanted thing you have to show on the side of your site; for many searches, the ads can be just as helpful as organic search results, and we should always try to make ads a useful service to our users, not just a “necessary evil.”

Anyway, in case those quotes sounded strange, I wanted to give a little more background. My laptop is so about to run out of juice, so more tidbits from Web 2.0 will have to wait for when I get home.