Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

If you’re a techie person, email is essential but it’s hard to stay on top of all of it. If you use Gmail and Firefox, here’s a few tips to get email under control.

The first tip is remedial: keep most mailing list emails out of your inbox. I already prune as much of my Gmail inbox email as I can. I subscribe to a bunch of mailing lists, but add filters like “If the email is to some-mailinglist, skip the inbox.” That way it doesn’t clutter my inbox (which is my to-do list), but it still gets indexed so that I can search for it later.

Once you’ve done the first tip, you probably still end up with a lot of email. How can you prioritize the most important emails, such as the emails from people that you work closely with? Here’s how:

1. Install Firefox and Greasemonkey. If you’re a techie, odds are you already have both of these running.
2. Go to this page and click on the “Saved Searches” link to install a Greasemonkey script that augments Gmail with persistent searches. This script was written by Mihai Parparita, a Google engineer who actually works on Google Reader, not Gmail.
3. Go into Gmail and you’ll see a new sidebar with several example searches. It looks like this:
   
   To run a saved search, just click on the search you want to run in the sidebar. Click on “Edit Searches” and add a new search for the team of people you work with.

How do you add a new search? It’s easy. Imagine that you work at Example.com and you work with a team of three people: Alice, Bob, and Carol. This search would find emails from any of those people that are still in your inbox and that are directly to you:

to:me AND label:inbox AND (from:alice@example.com OR from:bob@example.com OR from:carol@example.com)

So let’s click on “Edit Searches” in the sidebar and add this new search. Here’s what you’ll see:

Under the text “Create a new persistent search” fill in the “Label” field with something like “My team” and in the “Query” field, add a query like the one I mentioned, then click “Save Changes.” If you want, you can move your new saved search up to the top of the priority list (the script comes with a few default searches).

Now when you’re facing a bunch of email in your Gmail inbox, you can click on the “My team” link and you’ll see the most important emails that you need to respond to first. You can add quite a lot of people, too.

There are all sorts of other tricks you can do with labels and persistent searches. You could make a persistent search for different groups of people at work, or a search for email from your family.

Here’s one last tip. Suppose you work at Example.com and you get a mix of email from inside Example.com and from outside. You want to exclude any outside email (that is, any email that’s not from example.com). From the inbox, click on “Create a filter”. In the From: field, enter the rule -example.com . Then click “Next Step” and create a new label called “outside” and click to create the filter. After creating the filter and label, you can do queries like “to:me AND -label:outside AND label:inbox”. Now you easily can jump back and forth between handling internal and external email.

By the way, big props to the Gmail team for making a great web email product, the Firefox folks for making a great browser for Gmail plus the rest of the web, Aaron Boodman for his Greasemonkey script, and Mihai Parparita for his persistent searches script (Aaron and Mihai both work at Google). Oh, and I guess thanks also to the Google Code and open source team for offering the free source-code project hosting that Mihai is using for his scripts. All of these projects help a ton of people in day-to-day life and generate massive positive karma.

Okay, anybody else want to offer their best email/Gmail productivity tip?

Update: Paul Buchheit, one of the original architects of Gmail, dropped me a nice note to refine one of the tips above. Here’s the refinement, quoted with his permission:

Gmail query syntax is pretty flexible. You can rewrite
(from:alice@example.com OR from:bob@example.com OR from:carol@example.com)
as
from:(alice|bob|carol)@example.com

I learn something new every day. Thanks Paul!

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.

I picked up a good trick from Russ Taylor in grad school. He kept a “howto” directory, and any time he ended up doing a bit of research to find out how to do something, he’d document it in a tiny file in a howto directory. I picked up the habit, and in my personal howto directory at Google I now have 1750+ little files. They can be as simple as how to do a gnuplot with dates or how to restart a particular web server, or they can be as long as you like. In the worst case, just take the command you lovingly constructed and just copy and paste it into a text file. For example, I’ve got a file called “extract-tar-files-to-stdout” with one line:

tar -xOf freedb-complete-20040908.tar | grep DTITLE | less

These days, I’m trying to train myself to throw my how-to files up on the web instead.

A while ago, I was a little sick for a couple weeks with bronchitis, so I didn’t answer as much email for a couple weeks. I didn’t stop replying to email, I just didn’t answer as much. And in a couple weeks, I was 100 emails behind. So I took one day with no meetings and just tried to power through all my email. At the end of the day, I’d caught up with all my emails except for that day--but I was still down by 80 emails. Another 4-5 more hours later, I’d finally caught up with all my email.

Sure, I’d managed to help some people and report some bugs, but sheesh, it sucks to blow a day with no meetings scheduled.

How do you keep email under control?

Earlier today I had to cancel a dentist appointment. I looked in the file where I normally keep my contact info, but didn’t see the dentist’s phone number. So I searched for [mydentistsname cupertino] and up popped a Onebox with his business address, phone number, and a little Google map:

Then a bit later, someone asked me, “Which is bigger, a square pan that’s 8 inches on each side, or a round pan that’s 9 inches across?” I was on the computer, so I opened up a tab on the browser and typed into Google’s search box: pi*(4.5*4.5) as I’m mouthing the words “Let’s see, pi r squared, r is 9 divided by 2 so r is 4.5″. And Google says

which means that the square 8″ by 8″ pan is a little bigger at 64 square inches.

Every search engine can do some tricks like this. It’s just interesting that 5-6 years ago, I wouldn’t even think of hitting a search engine for stuff like this. 2-3 years ago, I didn’t realize what a difference it made to have all my email easily searchable. Six months ago, I didn’t know how handy it was to keep my Firefox bookmarks in sync. I suspect that in a few months, I won’t believe how handy it is to have a desktop search that lets me securely search for any webpage I’ve read in the past with just a couple keywords.

So the question is, what is waiting a few more years down the line? Maybe I won’t be able to imagine life before my documents sat in a magic Writely cloud where I could get to them from anywhere? Will cell phones evolve straight to internet-connected computers with an always-on broadband connection? Will people record their whole lives, because storage for audio and video will be so cheap?

What do you think will be the must-have gadgets in five years? What will the killer services be?