Last week I was in Las Vegas for PubCon, a conference for publishers, and I wanted to share the slides from my main presentation:
When I get a chance, I’ll also re-create the talk on video and share the video with you, but in the mean time Lisa Barone did a nice live write-up and coverage of the Q&A.
It’s always nice to see SEOs and webmasters that I’ve gotten to know from search conferences. For example, one night featured the traditional SEO Werewolf game, except with blackhats as the werewolves and whitehats as the villagers. Somehow in the middle of that party, we decided that if someone submitted a spam site during my site review session, I could shave Evan Fishkin’s head.
Sure enough, someone submitted a spammy site for review, and you can view the resulting haircut in this image gallery. Afterwards, I asked if anyone else wanted their head shaved, and Nelson James volunteered. I shaved hair while people asked questions, and it was a lot of fun:
Update: See the bottom of this post for newer information.
I’ve been having an ongoing bad experience with U.S. Airways over their Dividend Miles. I’d accumulated about 15,000 miles with them and the miles were about to expire. I didn’t have any trips coming up, so I looked for a way to redeem those frequent flyer miles before they expired. U.S. Airways provided a way to subscribe to magazine and newspapers using miles — great! I signed up to get a bunch of magazines and dutifully waited the several weeks that it would take for magazines to start showing up. But instead of newspapers and magazines, I started to get little white post cards back in the mail. The first one let me know that I wouldn’t be getting The Economist:
Bummer. Then I found out that I wouldn’t be getting the Wall Street Journal:
Bigger bummer. But after a while, I started to notice a trend. See if you can tell what the trend was:
Doh!
Doh!
Doh!
Doh!
Doh!
Doh!
That’s right — not a single magazine or newpaper showed up. Instead, eight different times I was told that an “overwhelming response” meant that title wasn’t available.
So where do things stand now? Well, in the 4-10 weeks that I had to wait for the subscriptions to start, those 15,000 frequent flier miles expired. I can’t try to subscribe to any other magazines or even donate the miles to charity at this point.
To add a cherry on top, I keep getting emails from U.S. Airways, which apparently can’t understand why I would let my miles expire and would be happy to sign me up for a credit card to resurrect those miles from the dead:
You know what, U.S. Airways? Just keep the miles. Or better yet, if anyone from the U.S. Airways Dividend Miles program sees this post and wants to do something nice, please donate those miles to charity.
If you fly with U.S. Airways, be aware that redeeming miles for magazine/newspaper subscriptions might not work as well as you’d like. And will I be avoiding 321mags.com (which now redirects to magazineoutlet.com) in the future? Yes, I will be avoiding them.
Update: Some new developments have happened since I wrote this blog post. US Airways wrote the day after I blogged to apologize for a bad experience, said that they’d investigate what happened, and then they reinstated the miles. That’s about as much as I could ask for, and I appreciate their response. I donated the miles to charity.
A couple days later, the vendor for the “Magazines for Miles” program contacted me. They said that when they verified the zip code for the magazines with the zip code on file with the airline, it didn’t match, so the order was sent to the airline for verification. When US Airways confirmed my address, the vendor re-processed the order. But then by the time the order reached US Airways for decrementing, the miles had already expired, so the order was cancelled. Due to a different glitch, the cancellation notice implied that the magazine inventory wasn’t available. The magazine vendor offered to send the magazines now, but I declined. I’d already donated the miles to charity and that’s enough to resolve the situation in my mind.
As a software engineer, I can easily imagine this happening. I guess the takeaway as a flier would be to use your miles before they get too close to expiring.
At Google I/O a few weeks ago I did a site review session with fellow Google colleagues Brian White and Greg Grothaus. The video from that session is live now and I’ll include it below:
About 38 minutes in, the session morphed into a general Q&A. So even if you don’t care about site reviews, the Q&A might be interesting to you. Video aren’t perfect (for example, it’s much harder for someone watching a video to skim quickly). But I love that I can do a two-minute video by just talking for two minutes. Compare that to any blog post which seems to take me at least an hour.
P.S. If you like this session, you might be interested to know that most Google I/O sessions were recorded and are available on video. For example, one of my favorite sessions was watching Aaron Boodman (author of Greasemonkey) talk about how to write extensions for Chrome. The amount of information available from the full session list is pretty amazing. That’s not even counting the Google Wave announcement, which has been viewed about 2.5 million times.
Google launched 3-4 new features at Searchology today. You can read about Search Options, Google Squared, Rich Snippets, or Sky Map in my previous post. But I also pay attention to the small things that Google said. I noticed several tidbits that I don’t think we’ve said in public before.
- Pat Riley mentioned a couple internal code names for spell-check features. There’s the normal “Did you mean:” spellcheck link in red at the top of the search results. Then there’s a more aggressive feature (internal Google codename: “Chameleon”) that does mid-page suggestions:
Finally, there’s an even more aggressive feature (internal Google code name: “Spellmeleon”) for when we really think the user messed up. In that case, we’ll include a couple results for the corrected query first, then results for the user’s original query. Take the query [ipodd] for example. Our algorithms strongly suggest that the user meant to type “ipod” so we’ll include those search results first.
By the way, if you’re a power searcher and you really did want “ipodd” then you can do the query [+ipodd] with a ‘+’ character in front of the word that you want to match exactly. Let me just say that Spellmeleon makes life *so* much better for my webspam team. Tons of spammers target typos and misspelled queries all the time. If users see a couple of valid results before they see results for a misspelled/typo query, well, lets just say that users are exposed to a lot less webspam in Google. I’m a big fan of Spellmeleon.
- Pat Riley also mentioned that if you do some of these search improvements in a naive way, the additional server load is equivalent to if Germany and France just appeared out of nowhere and started sending all their daily searches to Google. So you have to do some smart things to make this search improvement viable.
- Scott Huffman revealed that mobile search results are blended between results from the mobile web and results from the regular/normal web. Makes sense, but not everyone knows that.
- Marissa Mayer mentioned that about 1 in 4 searches triggers a universal/blended search result.
- Marissa also mentioned that 40% of searches on any given day are repeat searches for that user (I’m not sure if that means repeated that day, or just repeated compared to past searches). She mentioned that to explain why SearchWiki can be useful, because if you’re repeating a search, you may want to customize the results to your taste. Marissa also said SearchWiki receives hundreds of thousands of annotations each day.
- Someone asked how important is it to search video with a text search query? Google did this for political videos during the election and I’d really like to see more in this area. Together with fellow Googler Wysz, I’ve made about 50 videos to answer common webmaster questions. Right now it’s a pain to create caption files for those videos. If Google could give me a rough speech-to-text transcript (with timecodes) and let me edit the transcript to correct errors, that would be fantastic. Then someone in Turkey could read my videos even if they didn’t understand English. I would love that.
- TechCrunch got some video of Google Squared. The whole video is interesting, but the part that I thought was funny was 4 minutes, 12 seconds into the video where the Google demo person signs into Google Squared and Michael Arrington does the polite “password lookaway” and looks at Steve Gillmor, who is also doing the polite password lookaway.
- Finally, Tara Calashain asks for a custom date range form (hear hear!) and then points out something I missed. Once you move into searching with date ranges, you can sort Google results by date. This opens up lots of options for power searchers. Here’s a search for [hubble telescope] with sort-by-date selected:
That’s pretty useful.
- If you want to see the slides from Searchology, it looks like Yvo Schaap took the time to snapshot each slide as it appeared. Until/unless Google releases the slide deck, that’s where you can see the slides unofficially. My favorite is slide #8.
