Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

When referring to those little widgets like MyBlogLog that spruce up a page, do you say “flair” or “flare”? The first place I heard the term was Office Space, and they call it flair:

Peter: What are pieces of flair?

Joanna: That’s where you know, suspenders and buttons and all sorts of stuff. We’re, uh, we’re actually required to wear fifteen pieces of flair.

But then FeedBurner refers to their product to add widgets at the bottom of feeds as FeedFlare. Not to nitpick (alright, it’s a nitpick), but I think Feedburner picked the wrong flare. It should be FeedFlair, right? Okay, too much with the nitpicking. I’ll stop.

The judge in the KinderStart case granted Google’s motion to dismiss without leave to amend:

The instant case has been intensively litigated for more than eleven months. Under these circumstances, the Court concludes that there is no reasonable likelihood that KinderStart will cure the defects in the SAC [second amended complaint] by further amendment. Accordingly, the motion to dismiss will be granted without leave to amend.

I believe the judge also granted Google’s motion for sanctions against the plaintiff and the plaintiff’s attorney:

The Court concludes that the allegation that Google sells priority placement in its results should not have been made based upon the limited information identified by Yu [the attorney for the plaintiff]. As presented to the Court on this motion, Yu’s purported evidence is either double hearsay or hearsay speculation as to the “mysterious” causes of improvement in a website’s position in Google’s search results. Yu provides no evidence that would support KinderStart’s broad attacks on the objectivity of Google’s search results contained in SAC ¶¶ 130-31, 135. The Court concludes that the allegations are sanctionable under Rule 11 because they are factually baseless and because Yu failed to perform an adequate investigation before filing them.

I did a declaration in this case, so I’m not going to comment on it. I’m leaving comments off for this post as well.

If you read my blog, you know I’m a Google Reader fan. Reader is pretty good with podcast feeds, because it lets you play the podcast right there in the browser.

But that’s not how I like to get my fix of the Daily SearchCast. I like to listen to Danny Sullivan and his co-host du jour in my car during my daily commute. To make that happen, I use Juice, which is a really nice program to save podcasts on your local hard drive. I’ve only used it on Windows, but it’s open-source (and written in Python!), so there are downloads for Mac and Linux as well.

Juice’s interface is clean, if not 100% intuitive. But the program gets the job done well. I made a directory called “Podcasts,” set Juice to download into that directory, and added the feed for the SearchCast to Juice. That’s it — it’s pretty much set and forget. You can set Juice to always run in the background, so it will check for new podcasts and download them when a new file is available.

When I’m ready to fill up with podcasts again, it’s literally less than a minute to walk away chock full of good stuff to listen to. My computer has a card reader, so when I’m ready for more podcasts for my drive into work, I pop an SD card directly into the card reader, copy all the previously downloaded podcasts onto the SD card, and remove the card. If you want to save your podcasts to one computer, I definitely recommend that you give Juice a try.

P.S. I got a chance to be a first-time co-host with Danny on the February 26th, 2007 SearchCast. I promise that I was much less snarky on that podcast, and even complimented Yahoo’s movie shortcuts.

This post has a snarkiness level of 6 out of 10. If your body can’t handle me being snarky on rare occasions, you should leave now. Because I noticed a few interesting non-Google tidbits in search news this week.

Barry found a claim that if you participate in Yahoo’s premium pay-for-inclusion program (say that five times fast), you get to submit your choice of “Quick Links” for your site’s listing in Yahoo’s organic search results. I haven’t seen an official confirmation from Yahoo about whether this is true.

Meanwhile, John Battelle uncovered a Microsoft offer for companies to install a browser helper object (BHO) on company computers to measure search usage, and Microsoft will offer service credits for deployment and training services from Microsoft:

Moderate and high promotions include “In-house training session on ‘how to get the most from web search’ using Windows Live Search,” “Remove all existing toolbars,” “Set Homepage to Live Search,” and “Email message of encouragement from CEO.” IE 7 is mandatory for the program, as one might expect.

The program has been confirmed by Microsoft.

What else? I feel the need to include something about Ask. Ah, here’s something. Ask funded an “information revolution” campaign. The site was advertised in the London Tube, for example, but going to information-revolution.org didn’t initially reveal who was behind the site. Well, a few people dug into it and the site was quickly tied to Ask in a variety of ways. The company behind the site wasn’t that big of a secret, because going to the UK version of Ask and searching for Google would show you a link to the information-revolution.org site, complete with a man on puppet strings, before a searcher would get any information or links about Google:

(That done-by-hand widget in Ask’s search results is called a Smart Answer. Ask appears to have pulled their “puppet” Smart Answer, so I’m using the image from Danny’s write-up.)

I can guess what a few people are saying: “Matt, why would this surprise me? I mean, the previous Ask ad campaign called me a monkey for not using them, right? So this seems like an improvement. Is there some additional, ironic twist that would make this more compelling?”

Okay, I’ve been waiting for someone else to notice this, but it’s been several days now, so I guess I’ll have to be the snarky one. The whole point of information-revolution.org is to remind people to try out other search engines, right? Well, I decided to see how well Ask had indexed its own ad campaign site. First, let’s see how Google did:

19 results. The domain only has a few pages, so that looks about right to me. Ask keeps pressing everyone to try them, so let’s try the same search on Ask:

Doh! Ask doesn’t have even a single page from its own ad campaign site, and Google indexes the “information revolution” much better than Ask does. So this entire advertising campaign puts Ask in an awkward position:
- If Ask crawls the domain now, it’s open to questions of search favoritism, e.g. “Did Ask do any special crawling for information-revolution.org that other webmasters don’t get?”
- If Ask doesn’t crawl the domain, the whole campaign may collapse in self-referential irony. Every time you see a TV commercial urging “search sleepers” to wake up or posters advertising the revolution, people may instead chat about how Ask did worse than most competitors on the domain that it created (Yahoo had three results when I checked today and Live had zero results).

Personally, I’m just thankful that Ask dropped its “you are a puppet” Smart Answer when you search on Ask for Google.

P.S. Happy St. Patrick’s Day to everyone, including my colleagues at the Dublin office in Ireland. You get to experience the day in the right place. I hear that the best cure for snarkiness is some green beer.

Update: It turns out that Ask doesn’t support using the “site:” command just by itself — you have to add at least one additional word. I learn something new every day. Doing the search [site:information-revolution.org information] shows that Ask has one page from the site, but with kind of a weird snippet. Hmm. Uh oh. In fact, it looks like Ask has an older copy of the information-revolution.org root page, and there’s some pretty strange stuff in that copy. Here’s one snippet:

And another:

And another:

Jim or Gary, I think you’re going to want to ask about the first version of the site that the agency put up. The first version of the site looks pretty interesting, judging from the snippets above.

A couple search interviews you may not have caught the first time:

I enjoyed doing this interview with Richard MacManus. I still have an email interview with a blogger that I’m trying to finish that started in September 2006, so in general I decline trying to do email interviews these days. Just about the only way I can find time is if we sit down to talk and then transcribe it. Gord stopped by the Googleplex for this interview, for example.

There have been lots of other interesting search interviews going on, of course. I enjoyed seeing that Eric Enge and John Marshall spoke about click fraud in a half-hour podcast. Found via SEW.

Personally, I’d love to see someone interview Niels Provos, the creator of SpyBye. It’s a tool that helps webmasters spot malware on their site. You set spybye.org as your proxy and then as you click around on your website, the proxy will download your pages and scan the pages for viruses/malware using an open-source virus scanner. And if you don’t want to set spybye.org as your proxy, you can download and run your own copy. Another nice tool from the same fellow who did ScanSSH, which is a nice open-source tool for securing your network; it can check for SSH servers, open proxies, etc.