Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

I saw that Wendy’s had introduced a new spicy chicken sandwich, and I like spicy stuff, so I had to try it. It had pepper Jack cheese, spicy chipotle sauce, and jalapenos. So how did it measure up?

It wasn’t as spicy as I was hoping for. If you want a mass-market spicy sandwich, I’d opt for the spicy chicken sandwich from Jack In The Box.

Until recently, Silicon Valley had another option: the habanero hamburger. The Prince of Wales Pub recently closed, but for a long time, it was the spiciest burger in the valley. A few years ago, a Googler stumbled across this bit of valley history:

Eating a Habanero Hamburger was once a rite of passage for new and departing operating systems engineers at Silicon Graphics. The tradition is apparently still alive and well in the graphics group. Having set the Silicon Graphics company record for number of Habanero Hamburgers consumed, Brian Totty brought the fine tradition to Inktomi Corporation.

That sounded like a neat idea, so a few years ago several of us Googlers made a pilgrimage to the pub in San Mateo. To make a long story short, the habanero burger was painfully hot. The habanero part referred to a thick red paste that sat atop the burger patty. After we ate the burgers, the staff clued us in on a few tricks: ordering the burger with mayonnaise or a glass of milk would reduce the burn. Knowing that beforehand would have saved a day or two of intestinal discomfort. My wife couldn’t believe I was willing to eat an entire burger — but it was a good bonding experience with some fellow Googlers.

The pub is closed now, but there’s a video of someone eating a burger. If you watch it, you can see the burger heat from their facial expressions. The Prince of Wales Pub evidently closed in January 2007; does anyone know where else to get spicy food in Silicon Valley now?

(another post-without-particular-polishing)

You have to leave room in your life for serendipity sometimes. For example, without an accident, I never would have discovered the joy of bacon polenta. (All the people who say “Matt, I thought you were going low-carb?” can step off. I’m playing hockey today. I’ll skate it off.) The Google cafe may like to call it creamy polenta, but as a Southern boy, I just think of it as cheese grits. It’s even better with bacon. Mmmm. Bacon-y goodness.

Accidents in crawling/indexing/scoring happen too. Sometimes they’re happy: “If we turn this factor off, scoring gets better? Cool!”. Sometimes they’re unhappy: “What happened to this page?” One of my least favorite accidents is when someone reports a 301 or 302 problem. The heuristics we put into a place have greatly reduced complaints about “302 hijacking.” For the first time in ~1 month, I got an email about a “302 hijacking”. This case was especially interesting because I got an email from both sides: someone from the destination site wrote, and the source site also wrote to say “we didn’t mean for this to happen.” I take that as a kinda good sign; when I hear about it from both ends, 302 problems are hopefully much more rare. I passed the info on to the mailing list we have for that, and I’ve asked a colleague to email both sides when we get it debugged.

What do you do if you suspect a “302 hijacking” but don’t have my email address? There’s a convenient way that should get your report to the same engineering list, where it will get the same level of investigation. Go to http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py and click “I’m a webmaster inquiring about my website” then select “Why my site disappeared from the search results or dropped in ranking” and click continue. In the webform that you get to, make sure you put “canonicalpage” in the Subject line, then put the details in the Message body. Someone will route that message to an engineering mailing list where we dissect claims of canonicalization problems (that is, picking the wrong url).

I also got one email today about a site being indexed under both www.domain.com and domain.com. The proper procedure (assuming that you want www.domain.com to show up) is to make domain.com do a permanent (301) redirect to www.domain.com. The person that wrote said that we hadn’t crawled domain.com recently to find the 301/permanent redirect. I’d be curious to hear feedback (in the same way as the paragraph above) to see how many other people are running into this issue.

This is the second time I’ve worn my Ale8 1 T-shirt and it turned out to be a good day at work. I’m starting to think it’s lucky. Some people think that the height of being a Kentuckian is going to the Kentucky Derby. Nope–I know very few Kentuckians who drink mint juleps by choice. Real Kentuckians drink Ale 8-1. If you’ve never heard of it, consider yourself hipper than the people who won’t hear about it until Elizabethtown comes out.

Summer is the time for family and friends to come and visit, so I took a little while and tried to think about things to do and places to eat.

Some things to do in Silicon Valley and nearby:

• Sunday morning farmers’ market in Mountain View
• Take a tour of Google (okay, you need to know someone who works there, probably)
• Kitsch value: Intel Museum, Nickel City (arcade games are only a nickel, or even free!), San Jose flea market claims to be the world’s largest. There’s also an electronics flea market on the second Saturday of the summer months (e.g. Aug. 13, 2005) on the De Anza College campus parking lots. Meanwhile, De Anza has its own flea market on the first Saturday of the month (e.g. August 6, 2005).
• Shopping: Santana Row/Valley Fair, Stanford Shopping Center, maybe University Ave or Castro St
• San Jose: The Tech Museum, the Winchester Mystery House
• Computer Geeks: Weird Stuff, Fry’s (I like the Sunnyvale store), Digital Guru (tech bookstore right near the Sunnyvale Fry’s), Microcenter, Best Buy, CompUsa, Surplus Computers
• Pretty drives: Driving down Highway 1. Skyline Boulevard. Lick Observatory is only 20 miles away, but two hours of winding driving.
• San Francisco: the painted ladies, then drive the Haight, and end up in Golden Gate Park to see the Japanese Tea Garden and the botanical gardens, continue on to rent a boat on the lake in the park, then drive by Cliff House before finishing at the Palace of Fine Arts and the Exploratorium. Or hit the Museum of Modern Art before walking to Union Square for shopping and walk in Macy’s and Tiffany’s before walking through Chinatown on the way to Pier 39 and Alcatraz (while looking up at the crookedest street) and looping over to Ghirardelli Square, then finish with a trolley car ride back to Union Square. Or get dim sum and then drive across the Golden Gate Bridge (stopping on the other side to look back at the city) before proceeding on to Muir Woods and hiking around.
• Day trips: Santa Cruz (cold water, but nice boardwalk. Kitsch lovers might want to check out the Mystery Spot), Roaring Camp Railway, Carmel/Monterey (including the aquarium), or spend the day walking around Stanford and go up in the Hoover Tower, then check out the Stanford bookstore or the Rodin sculpture gardens.
• Overnight trips: Healdsburg is a nice introduction to the edge of wine country. You can also go canoeing on the Russian River in Healdsburg. The Point Reyes lighthouse is really pretty; we haven’t found a favorite place to stay up there yet. Lake Tahoe can be nice.
• Multiday trips: Yosemite is 5-6 hours away but is spectacular: rent a cabin in Camp Curry or stay in the Wawona hotel (their Sunday brunch is expensive but amazing). If you prefer to go up the coast, Eureka has a quaint downtown. If you make it up to Portland, be sure to spend some time in Powell’s bookstore.
• Hikes: Borel Hill, Rancho San Antonio, the Stanford Dish, Eagle Rock Loop in Alum Rock City Park in San Jose

Places to eat:

• Left at Albuquerque
• Amarin Thai
• Pho
• Tomatina
• Mexicali
• all along University Avenue in Palo Alto
• all along Castro St in Mountain View
• In and Out Burger or Clarke’s
• Chipotle in the Cherry Orchard (Ozzy Osbourne loves this food)
• BJ’s Brewhouse in Cupertino
• Benihana
• Cheesecake Factory
• Mongolian BBQ (in Santa Clara, the one that is not Sue’s)
• Evvia (Greek, Palo Alto)
• Picasso’s (Tapas, San Jose)
• Sushi Lovers or anything with a sushi boat, Seto Sushi (recommended by Linus Torvalds!), Miyake
• Dim Sum (San Francisco or Ming’s in Palo Alto)
• Original Pancake House in Los Altos, esp. for their coffee
• Ethiopan place (maybe on Homestead?)
• Banana Leaf in Milpitas
• Amber India
• Maybe Dave and Busters in Milpitas, just for the games ‘n’ stuff
• Mexican: Bueno Bueno in Mountain View, Burrito Real, La Bamba, La Costena, Fiesta del Mar, that one place on the south side of El Camino between Rengstorff and Shoreline, Taqueria los Charros