Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

One of the things I love about Google Reader is that they listen to feedback. But sometimes you gotta leave feedback behind and just work on fun stuff. Mihai Parparita recently posted about the new Google Reader Trends page.

Here’s what mine looks like:

That’s right, I’ve read 2000+ blog posts from 80+ feeds in the last 30 days. Booyah! I clicked on the “Time of day” tab in the top right corner so you can see that I do most of my feed reading in the morning.

The bottom left corner shows that I read pretty much every item in my feeds, and it also gives you an idea of which blogs post the most often. The bottom right corner can be used to see how many posts a day each feed does. But it also has what I call the “hall of shame” for feeds that haven’t been updated recently. Hmm, I see a few blackhats haven’t updated their blogs in a while.

This is a pretty addictive page; my first reaction is that I want to know how much time I’ve spent reading items in Google Reader. But on second thought, not only would that be hard to compute, but maybe I don’t really want to know.

Anybody want to share snapshots of their trends page? I’m curious how many feeds other folks like Barry or Ionut or Nathan or Loren or Robert Scoble or Haochi read.

Cron jobs need quiet operation; if a command generates output, you’ll get an email from cron with the command output. So if you want to fetch a file silently with wget or curl, use a command like this:

curl –silent –output output_filename http://example.com/urltofetch.html

wget –quiet –output-document output_filename http://example.com/urltofetch.html

There are shorter versions of these options, but using the verbose options will make code or cron jobs easier to understand if you come back to them. Be aware that urls with “&” in them can confuse wget at least, so depending on your shell (bash, csh, tcsh), you may need to put single or double quotes around the url.

Different Linux distributions package up software in different ways. RedHat uses .rpm files, while Debian and Ubuntu use .deb files. To convert a .rpm to a .deb file, you can use the alien program:

alien -k package.rpm

The -k option preserves the minor version number of a package (don’t worry about it, just do it or read the man page).

Installing a package in Debian or Ubuntu is also easy. To install a .deb file, you can type:

sudo dpkg -i packagename.deb

To uninstall a package, use

sudo dpkg -r packagename

I’ve got a meeting at noon to talk about potential bugs in search syntax or search results, so I’m re-opening this search bug report thread for a few hours. I’ll quote the original post to mention what I’m looking for:

Well, I thought it might be a good time to collect potential bug reports (not general comments, not questions, and not spam reports). If you know of a query that appears buggy, post it in a comment here. I’ll start the ball rolling.

(mentioned a few potential bugs and commented on them)

Just to be clear, pruning will be ruthless for this post: I only want to see specific queries that seem to show bugs, and the more concisely you can explain something, the better. I’ll probably keep just the first example of what looks like a bug. I’ve got a meeting at noon tomorrow to talk about search bugs, so I’ll probably lock the comments after that.

I’ll give an example of a potential bug. Someone recently said that the tilde operator wasn’t working. My response was that [~help] bolded other stuff besides “help” such as “support” and “tutorial” and “FAQ”, so I thought it was working. However, I believed the team turned off the [~help -help] functionality so that people wouldn’t just try to scrape synonyms from Google.

Please put bug reports in the original quality bugs thread. But again, please only comment about search quality bugs; I’ll prune general comments or spam reports or requests for posts or cat jokes.

How do you know if the holiday season was better or worse this year? Ask Visa (registration required):

Data from Visa is considered a reliable gauge of the economy because $17 out of every $100 is spent on its 500 million cards. Like monthly retail sales reports from the Department of Commerce, Visa’s holiday forecast includes spending on gasoline, grocery stores and restaurants.

Now that’s a metric! Sure, I can think of many ways a credit-card-based metric can be biased, but it’s probably a pretty interesting cross-section of economic activity. Now if Visa takes 1-2% of the transaction price, that would be $.17 out of every $100 spent in the U.S. going to Visa. Also not too shabby.