Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

I’ll still be at SES NYC next week, but posting might be light for the next few days. My wife and I were planning to go to New York a few days before SES NYC to see the city and catch a show (Spamalot, of course), but that will wait for another time. My wife’s grandmother died yesterday, so we’re flying out to North Carolina for the funeral on Saturday.

Last Friday, Google responded to the DOJ subpoena (the subpoena originally requested all URLs in Google’s index, and all queries to Google over a two-month period). The PDF of the response is here.

I did a declaration for Google on this case, so that’s all I’m going to say about about the subpoena at this time.

Update: Gary Price has posted the response from Google, including my declaration (PDF). Gary has also posted the government’s response.

I usually try to do actual posts rather than just pointing to another article. But Dean Kamen’s new water purification device is a really neat idea. If you haven’t heard about the Grameen Bank, you might want to check it out.

Speaking of the Search Engine Strategies conference, I was thinking of things that I meant to post about but haven’t yet, and I remembered reading this post about what a great job Charles Martin did at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago. Charles had never done any search engine conferences, so we sat and prepped for an hour or so about what SES is like and what questions he might get. And he knocked it out of the park: he spoke at two different sessions and even joked around with his co-panelists. Heck, he took better notes than I usually do at a conference, including writing down all the questions that people asked. Danny Sullivan recently sent word that Charles got high marks on audience feedback, too. Charles, thanks for representing Google at SES Chicago.

I often tell people that if I failed the “bus test” (that is, if I got hit by bus and didn’t survive), there would easily be 50 Googlers who could take my place and talk about webmaster issues, and I really think that’s true. Google does a pretty good job on webmaster communication, but we need to keep looking for ways to scale even more. It’s healthy to bring more technical Googlers into the rotation at conferences: we’re sending Brian to speak in Australia in March, and at Search Engine Strategies in New York I’ll be joined by software engineer Aaron (in addition to the loads of other Google speakers who will be there, and hopefully several other engineers; I know that some Sitemaps folks are coming too).

The last month or so especially, I’ve enjoyed talking to colleagues in the crawl and indexing teams, Sitemaps, and core quality about how Google could improve webmaster/engineering communications more. I’m excited about how far we’ve come, and we’ll keep looking for ways that we could scale up communication from the engineering side of Google.

I’ll be at Search Engine Strategies (SES) in New York City for the entire run of the conference on Feb. 27-Mar. 2, 2006. Here’s the sessions I plan to participate in:

• Lunch With The Google Engineers. Ask us what you want. I’ll be there with a Sitemaps person, and probably a couple other engineers will join in the fun too.
• Pundits on Search. It’ll be Robert Scoble from Microsoft; Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo; me; David Vise, author of The Google Story; and Zia Daniell Wigder from JupiterResearch. I’m looking forward to it.
• Probably Meet the Crawlers, too.

I might be on a few more that I’ve forgotten about right now. If so, I’ll update the list.

If you see me, please walk up and say hello. And feel free to give me feedback or suggestions, which I will log in my uber hipster PDA:

It costs $1.08 some places, but I know where to shop around. $0.99, baby. I hope to see lots of familiar (and new!) faces in New York!