Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

(I actually wrote this a couple months ago, and just forgot to post it. But I spent all day in meetings and catching up on email, so it’s the only bloggy love you’re going to get today.)

Ah, privacy policies. I get sentimental thinking about our very first one. It was so short and it served us well for several years. Battelle and others noticed that we recently updated our privacy policy. To my mind, these aren’t major changes, and as Gary Price notes, we do provide the previous versions of our privacy policy so that people can easily see any updates.

In my opinion, the major addition is a layered notice to give a clear overview for people in a hurry, but also more detail for people who are interested. That seems to growing in popularity these days, especially in Europe, e.g. http://www.thestandard.com/internetnews/002774.php .

My cat loves laser pointers. But the green laser pointer that I got as a splurge scares even her. Green laser light appears much brighter to your eye, so it’s really powerful (enough for conference presentations in a bright room). I went for the Jasper Now from Bigha. I would recommend the Jasper Now because its shape keeps you from pressing the button by accident. I would recommend the silver instead of the black, because when the black one gets scuffed up, the scratches look silver anyway. Bigha sent me an email with a coupon code, and I’m not going to use it, but someone should–these are good laser pointers. It’s valid if you buy the Jasper Always or the Jasper Now, you can use the coupon code “holiday40″ to get 40 bucks off the normal price ($129). To head off questions, no I don’t get any money or benefit if you buy a laser pointer. I just like the gadget, and they sent out an email with the coupon code. The email that they sent said that the coupon is good until tomorrow (Friday, Dec. 16, 2005). Don’t blame me if lots of people use that code and Jasper decides they don’t want to honor it, though.

Update: Somebody tried the discount and it didn’t work for them, so you may need to pay list price if you want green goodness.

Woohoo! Just in time for the holidays, Gmail added a simple way to go on vacation and set up autoresponding. It won’t respond to emails labeled as spam, and you can even choose to send autoreplies only to people in your contact list.

In my geek utopian dream, I could send a different vacation message to Googlers than to folks outside Google, but this will work for 99% of people.

A CNN poll claims Google is most significant thing in the World Wide Web’s history so far. But how can you trust it when they include “Webcams and photo sharing” but not blogging, RSS, XML, AJAX, or of course the Infinite Cat Project.

If you’re a Mattaholic, there are several places to get your fix. Here are a few in reverse chronological order:

• Nick Wilson gets in and picks around about blogger tools and recommendations for bloggers. Performancing just made it onto my Bloglines list because of the amount of technical detail they go into.
• Sarah McKay did a follow-up interview after PubCon. I also did an interview with Sarah on 4/26/2005 that’s on that same page. If you’ve got an MP3 player, there’s lots of fun stuff on Webmaster Radio. I admit that I hadn’t been listening until another Googler got me hooked, so I recently downloaded 2+ gigs of SEO mp3s to listen to. It’s a hoot to listen to SEO Rockstars in the car and hear them say “Now Matt, would you consider www.forwarding****.com a spam site?” It’s like my radio is talking to me.
• Philipp Lenssen did a fun interview, which included asking whether I have any connections to the NSA, Freemasons, Illuminati, etc.
• Aaron Wall kicked off this round with loooong interview about general SEO topics.

Aaron Pratt over at SEO Buzzbox has twigged to this method of getting lots of interesting content in return for asking questions, and he has interviewed SEOs galore. If you want to know more about Graywolf, you have to go there. Aaron, do nuevojefe and cornwall next! Personally, I’m about interviewed out. It’s gonna take me a few weeks before I have anything interesting to say again.

Update: Librarians rule. I was delighted to write an article for the first Google Librarian Newsletter. The article is an overview of how Google crawls, indexes, and ranks documents.