Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

The other day I realized that I enter my haircut appointments into Google Calendar, so I can search for “haircut OR (the place I get my hair cut)” and see when I’ve gotten my hair cut:

Then I was reading Google Apps Hacks and Hack 25 caught my eye: “Show the difference between two dates”. A formula like “=INT(A2-A1)” will automatically compute how many days passed between the date listed in cell A1 and the date listed in cell A2.

If you copy and paste a date from Google Calendar’s search results into a cell, it will automatically format a nice string like “May 2, 2007″ to “5/2/2007″. So it was easy to copy/paste when I got haircuts into a Google Spreadsheet. Then I used the date formula to compute the number of days between haircuts. As Philipp Lenssen points out in his book, once you’ve entered the date difference formula “=INT(A2-A1)” in one cell, you can click the cell to highlight it and then use the handle in the lower right of the cell to copy the formula. Just like that, you can see how long you waited between each haircut:

Then it’s just 2-3 mouse clicks to add a graph of the time between haircuts. And if you use the “=AVERAGE(B3:B10)” formula, you can see that on average I wait 45.75 days between haircuts, or about 6-7 weeks.

This tip does have some practical value. When the haircut place asks “Do you want to make your next appointment?” you’ll know how far ahead to schedule your next haircut so that you don’t get too shaggy.

If you didn’t attend Web 2.0, you can watch my ten-minute keynote about “What Google Knows About Spam” (and several other keynotes) on blip.tv. I’ll embed the keynote below as well.

The only thing I don’t like about conference speaking is preparing slides. When I use slides at a talk, I almost always make a custom presentation. That’s why I prefer Q&A sessions; making slides is too much work.

To make the process easier this time, I tried using Google Docs to create the presentation, and then saving my Docs presentation in PowerPoint (PPT) so that the conference could easily project the slides. The “Save as PPT” feature worked perfectly for me — go Google Docs team! Here are the slides in PowerPoint (PPT) form.

In case you want to see the slides yourself, here they are in embedded form:

In addition to simple PowerPoint exporting, it’s also easy to embed a Docs presentation on your own web page.

[Thanks to Tracy O for cc-licensing the "money" image that I used in the presentation.]

I’ve always meant to do a post to say that search engine optimization (SEO) is not spam and that Google doesn’t hate SEO, but I never seem to get around to it. This presentation gave me a chance to slip those facts into the minds of several thousand tech-savvy folks.

Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) just announced that they now power AdSense for Search. Another nice new change is that if you provide a Sitemap, Google will use that to improve the coverage of the custom search engine.

Now let me nip one idea in the bud, because I can already feel a few people thinking it: this is not a backdoor way to get more pages in Google’s index or to improve your search ranking. The official blog post mentions that. But I think this is a win for webmasters all around. If you use AdSense for search, the product is now better and more tweakable. And if you provide a sitemap, your custom search can get much better as those urls are incorporated into a CSE-specific index.

I’ll just give you a quick anecdote to point out how easy-to-use this product is becoming. My Mom runs a charity that has a web site, and she asked me about site search. We had this email exchange over the course of several hours:

Mom: I wonder if I can add a gadget to search our website like I see on other websites. Is that hard?
Me: This is what people use to add a search box to their site: http://www.google.com/cse/
Mom: It works. I have a search button on my blog!

At my grad school, the goal was to create something so useful that a faculty member would want to use it, and so easy that a faculty member could use it. As the email exchange above shows, Google Custom Search Engine is so easy, it’s Mom-approved.

The Custom Search Engine team keeps pushing the technology further and further, and these two changes are major improvements. If you haven’t taken a look at using CSE for your site search recently, it’s worth taking a fresh look.

Last week at the Web 2.0 Expo I decided to walk the exhibition floor. Niall Kennedy and I checked out the inflatable Google booth, we gave feedback to the WordPress folks, and we came to rest in the Yahoo booth, where it was nice to see Jeremy Zawodny and catch up a little bit.

After a few minutes of talking, I noticed the O’Reilly booth just a few yards away. I’m a sucker for O’Reilly books, so I moseyed over to check out the selection. Lo and behold, they had the new Google Apps Hacks book by Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped! I had pre-ordered the book on Amazon a while ago and it still hadn’t arrived at that point. I’d like to think that the O’Reilly folks carried the books straight from the printing presses right to the booth. If so, I was one of the first people in the U.S. to buy a copy last Thursday.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I’ve had a while to read the book. My verdict? It’s really good. Part of my job is to know obscure things about Google, yet several of the hacks in this book discussed tricks that I didn’t know. Google Docs lets you do find-and-replace and use regular expressions?! Yup, and hack 13 gives several handy expressions to use. Very few people know (hack 26) that Google Spreadsheets can magically take cell values such as “red,” “yellow” and “blue” and fill in more colors. Even fewer people know that this “MagicFill” feature is powered by Google Sets. The net effect is that you can start with two words like “seo” and “sem” and get this back:

Search engine optimizers will love hack 27, which tells how to import data from a web page into Google Spreadsheets automatically. The list of tricks goes on and on, from creating new scratch Gmail addresses in two different ways (hack 53) to configuring things so that a right-click with your mouse lets you access either the browser menu or the context menu from an application like Google Docs (hack 125).

What’s especially good about this book?
- A lot of these tips are very fresh, e.g. discussing how to get a Google Site, which just launched a couple months or so ago.
- Search engine optimizers and bloggers will enjoy chapter 12, which includes tips on SEO, using Google Analytics, and how to follow discussions online.
- Most chapters end with a discussion of alternatives to Google products. These hacks serve the reader well by intelligently discussing the pros and cons of other products (e.g. Flickr or Mint).

What’s bad?
- The usage of margins is a little strange. Most pages have a wide blank margin. On some pages, tips and extra tricks appear in the margin. But some pages also have figures in the margin. I’m not sure why figures sometimes appear in the margin and sometimes don’t.
- You always wish for more coverage of your favorite things. The Google Chart API gets half a tip when it really is quite worthy of a tip or two in its own right. But the book has to stop at some point.

One interesting tidbit is that the working title of this book was Google Office Hacks. It rang up with that title on my O’Reilly receipt and that’s the title I see when I enter the ISBN number into Google Books:

But I think the name “Google Apps Hacks” is not only more accurate but more fun, so I’m glad they changed the title. Another interesting tidbit is that Philipp Lenssen wrote this book using Google Docs.

Should you buy this book? If you read my blog on a regular basis, you’d probably like it. This book would be an especially good match for:
- people that want to run a small business or startup more productively for less money
- hackers and people that like to tinker with web services
- people that enjoyed the original Google Hacks book
- power users or webmasters that want to learn about Google’s products and how to get more out of them

If you’re looking to get a gift for a non-savvy to less savvy user, I’d recommend Rule the Web. But if you’re looking for a gift for a savvy user, anyone with an interest in Google, or someone that uses Gmail/Google Calendar/Google Docs/Google Spreadsheets, then I’d definitely recommend this book.

One of my pet peeves is when a “Hacks” book turns out to be more like a user manual. That’s not an issue with this book — it really does show you lots of cool ways to hack, mod, tune, and tweak Google Apps. Google Apps Hacks is packed full of ideas that can keep you busy for quite a while. I expect this book to be a hot seller at the O’Reilly store during Maker Faire this weekend.

This link was cool, but it generates a graph like this:

With a little modification, I made this graph:

I like my picture a little better. It was quite simple to make this diagram, and Google provides a free graph-drawing tool that you can use on your own site with a single url — no account or login is needed! Let’s break down how I made this image:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart? Loads an image from Google Chart

cht=p Chart type is a pie chart

&chtt=Percentage%20of%20Google%20Chart%20Which%20Resembles%20Pac-man Chart title

&chs=550×250 Chart size

&chd=t:10,80,10 Chart data. This is the only tricky bit. The pie chart starts from the “x-axis” of the pie. The “t:” means that the data is in text format with numbers between 0.0 and 100.0. Going clockwise, the pie chart is 10 units of non-Pacman, then 80 units of Pacman, then another 10 units of non-Pacman. The Google Graph API guide adds “Note: For text encoding, scale your data by converting it into percentages of the largest value in your data set.”

You don’t have to scale your max value to 100, but let’s do it for fun. My maximum value is 80, so to scale 80 to 100 I’d multiply my numbers by 1.25. I tried a value of “12.5,100,12.5″ and it generated an identical Pacman graph. You can even make a funky graph using 12.5 for gray, then use eight yellow slices of 12.5 units each (which add up to 100), and then finish off with a final 12.5 of gray:

I like using the values 10,80,10 more. If your numbers add up to 100 then the data points are just the percentage of the pie chart: 10%, then 80%, then 10%. So 20% of the graph is gray and 80% is yellow. That’s easier for me to remember. Okay, I geeked out a bit there, sorry. Back to the graph.

&chco=FAFAFA,FFFF00,FAFAFA Chart colors. The non-Pacman bits are the color #FAFAFA, while the Pacman color is #FFFF00.

&chl=Does%20not%20resemble%20Pac-man|Resembles%20Pac-man Chart labels

I really like this graph-drawing service because anyone on the web can use it for free without even registering. For example, I used a Google-o-meter graph in a recent post:

I almost wanted to call this post “Stupid Google Tricks.” What fun diagrams can you imagine making with the Google Chart service?