Xmas list from Pandia

My wife is back in town, so expect my blog post volume to plummet as I regain a life. My family is coming in for Christmas next week as well, and (I’m just guessing here) they’ll want to talk to me and visit, not just watch me type on a laptop.

My favorite post over the last couple days is from Pandia, entitled “What we want from Google this Christmas”. It’s addressed to “Santa Brin” and talks about 15 things they’d like from Google. A couple of the requests will never happen; on #7, we slowed down external PageRank updates because if you do them more often than every 3-4 months, SEOs pay too much attention to the PageRank bar, and not enough to the over 100 other factors that go into our scoring. But several items really resonated with Googlers here. My favorite part is the tone. Per and Susanne don’t slather on praise or criticism. They just mention several things that they as intelligent people would like Google to do. As I hope I’ve made clear, it’s great that people care so much about search that they’ll give us constructive advice for free.

Adam Lasnik said it best when we were discussing Pandia’s list: “I found myself nodding my head several times in agreement.” I think I can take care of one of them right now: #16, a Google travel mug. Per or Susanne, if you leave a comment from a new, unique email address with “DO NOT APPROVE – THIS COMMENT CONTAINS THE SECRET ADDRESS OF PANDIA HEADQUARTERS” I’ll ask Adam to take care of it. πŸ™‚

75 Responses to Xmas list from Pandia (Leave a comment)

  1. DO NOT APPROVE – THIS COMMENT CONTAINS THE SECRET ADDRESS OF PANDIA HEADQUARTERS

    just kidding…hope you have a great Christmas with your family… if you want you can swing one of those Google travel mugs to me even though I don’t know the secret address πŸ™‚

  2. “SEOs pay too much attention to the PageRank bar, and not enough to the over 100 other factors that go into our scoring…” — does that mean that A) SEOs were right to pay attention to the little green fairy dust in the first place? and B) does that mean we should not pay attention to the “more than 300 signals”?

  3. Matt

    “we slowed down external PageRank updates because if you do them more often than every 3-4 months, SEOs pay too much attention to the PageRank bar, and not enough to the over 100 other factors that go into our scoring.”

    In several cases its not the SEOs but rather the sites owners (or the employers in case a SEO is an employee) who pay much attention to PR bar and regard it as very important factor. And in general the poor SEOs are continuosly bombarded with a very typical question which only a Matt Cutts can reply to; Hey Mr. SEO! When will be the next PR bar update πŸ˜‰

    I guess we all need to participate in a “Understanding Google Scoring” education campaign πŸ™‚

  4. Sorry but I have to agree heart and soul with point #14. Get out of China.

    I know I know… I can go on about this till the cows come home “it would be financial suicide no to be “in bed” with the China”. Or would it? and this is probably one of the things that will never happen.

    But its a free world and I can say what I like and Google will do as it pleases. Right? Wrong. I am lucky to live in a free country and maybe the people at the top of Google have forgot how lucky they are to have such freedom.

    IMO Google is doing more harm then good by doing what the Chinese dictatorship wants. Google is making the base for dictatorship stronger by supporting it and doing what it wants. If everybody just ignored the government and did as they pleased the government would be nothing more then a screaming child throwing a temper tantrum.

    My trust rank in you went through the roof! when you stood up to the U.S. Government and would not hand over our personal details even when your peers did the exact opposite and you stood little chance of winning. That took guts! financial and otherwise. But I see none of that in what you are doing in China. So maybe that trust rank is missed placed because although you protected 1 million people you have equally turned your back on 1 Billion.

    “I will tell the WHOLE truth and NOTHING BUT the truth.” Well you can’t really say that now can you Google. You spread the lies of the Chinese government and all the information is censored so it’s not the whole truth ether.

    The same applies to this: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Organized maybe but universally accessible it is not… And you can’t call it useful ether when it is censored.

    China needs you as much as you need it. If it didn’t it would not have let you in, in the first place. Use that advantage!

    If you pull out of China you stand to lose a lot money wise and in the race to be the first, best, most known and used…. Short term.

    I remember someone saying we invest in a lot of small things that in the long term only stands a 1 in 10 chance of making a Billion dollars. Well if we all band together and force China to turn a leaf you can think of it as your best long term investment yet. And you didn’t have to spend anything. Just do the right thing.

    And please don’t tell me you are frightened you will lose the race if you are not at the start with everybody else!? Scared are ya…. Google… really? If there is one thing I have about you it’s faith you will be (and are) the best in your field. You don’t need me to tell you that. You were the underdog once before, but you still managed to pull it off and surprise us…. again and again.

    I am less then a drop in the sea when we look at the big picture but you Google, you are in a unique position to help people and make a change for the better.

    This post is all very moralistic but I sorry Google started it by saying they will always take the moralistic high ground and Do No Evil.

    My apologies to Matt. This might not be the best place for this post and it is not his fault what Google as a whole does. Every time I have said you I mean Google.

    Ferkel

  5. Hi!
    my note at:
    β€œWhat we want from Google this Christmas”-15 features and improvements Pandia wants from Google this Xmas. -it has 16 features/points :-).

    point 4: big, because all the good information are in danger to drowning,
    my proposal make a button in the serps like similar/cached and work with it as a fundament/hint.

    as I said this here some days ago: point 8 is my absolute favorite wish.

    and to point 7- please ad more information to the bar, please use more colours there, that we can identyfy easily in which category you think the site belongs.

    point 13: YEAH! gives us rules and let us work for/with you instead tis useless DMOZ/ODP

    to point 14: I say NO, because it is better to work on changes than to boycott; thats too simple.

    my 17. point if there are more than 100 other factors which goes in your scoring please tell us some not so secret details.

    If I sees a SERP-URL in my stats and it seemed to me the Serp points to my site because of a misunderstanding, I try to work on this site to make it better next time (to deliver the content if it is possible).

    my 18. would be point is lets think and work forward and together, not against another!

    Greetings Karl Heinz

  6. Stuff I’d like from Google:

    – Labels for outgoing mail in GMail
    – Proper Outlook Calendar and priority flags support in GMail and Google Calendar
    – GMail with IMAP
    – Picasa Web without Picasa
    – More high res stuff of the UK in Google Maps (Msn is beating you here)
    – Google custom search without having to use an IFRAME
    – Blog search to be made more prominent
    – Maps/local to be front page on Google UK
    – Better support of UK English
    – Export from a GMail account to a Google Apps for Domain account (I really really want this! :))
    – Even more support for open source projects, for example, more support for getting things like contentEditable working in Firefox (stuff that you’ll find useful, why not get it on the desktops of millions of users directly?)

    …and finally…

    Rockall Island recognised on Google Maps!

    Patent search rocks btw πŸ™‚

  7. Oh, and here’s a major one:

    – Web search API that doesn’t suck (sorry, but it has to be said – lots of improvements possible here)

  8. More:

    – Support for OpenSearch (it’s in IE7 and Firefox 2 you know!)
    – Better management and ability to delete personal data held by Google
    – No keeping of search histories past a certain date, something like five years. You’re just going to get legislated against to make you do this if you don’t do it voluntarily.
    – Turn up to courts in places like Belgium so you don’t end up losing stupid lawsuits πŸ™‚
    – More Matt Cutts’ (or more free holidays for your wife ;))!

  9. That was a great a post (15 things) and I know something that I really appreciated was from Yahoo.

    For the first year anniversary of “Answers” they offered gifts to us depending on your level of participation. I think that was brilliant and it certainly made me feel all warm and fuzzy. (Although all i got was a water bottle if I had been just a smidgen more active I could’ve had a hat.)

  10. What I want for Christmas is for Google to flesh out Webmaster Central !

    Webmaster Central as it now stands is a great start, and it moves toward making life easier for us, but it could still do so much more to improve understanding between webmasters and Google…

  11. Here’s a a simple and easy Christmas wish, Matt…

    A blog post or video giving a much more detailed understanding of the new Supplemental index. It was mentioned a while ago, and you thought it was a good idea.

  12. My wish for Christmas is “Google, please rise again your stock prices, I promise I will ‘SELL'” πŸ™‚

  13. Ian –

    Not sure what you mean by “Labels for Outgoing Mail in Gmail”. I currently label all my outgoing mail in Gmail (well that needs to be labeled) by creating the necessary filter. For instance, any email that I send to a coworker, I created a filter where the To filed contains @employer.com and then applies the appropriate “Work” label.

    Which reminds me, a nice little tip that I added to my Gmail accounts was an Attachment label that gets applied to all messages that have an attachment. Definitely helps prune the mailbox from growing out of control and possibly something the Gmail team might want to take a look at so users can, if they felt so inclined, lower their disk space used. I know I wiped over 100 MBs of useless attachments from my main Gmail account that other day and woouldn’t have been able to do so if not for my Attachment label.

  14. Coffee Mug Idea: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dude-youre-getting-a-mini/

    Some people either don’t listen or are just slow learners. =P

  15. Here’s what I’d like to see:

    Search that supports regular expressions.

    Case sensitive search (I still wanna know how many sites use “internet” vs “Internet”… i hate capitalizing it)

    Better UI on Writely and Analytics. Writley’s is inconsistent (some things are buttons, some are tabs, some are links, some links change to tabs after you click them, some are at the top, some at the bottom. Analytics is terrible. How am I to know what “webmaster vs marketer” means? I get confused over what report is where and I’ve held both of those titles professionaly.

    also if there’s a way to view “only google search terms” vs “only msn search terms” i’m not seeing it. I’d like that.

    more product synergy. Why are /webmasters, analytics, adsense, and adwords all seperate. Why can’t one thing track my adsense earnings, adwords spending, and tell me my average profit or loss per visitor, per search term, per referer etc. I’d be nice to know if 50% of my adwords visitors click adsense links (then it means I’m targetting the wrong terms… as they’re not converting into sales)

    an “information vs transactional” refine your search so I don’ t have to sort through a ton of crap.

    A notifier icon in the search results that the site is going to bug me to log in (NYT, WSJ, WMW, etc)

    That’s enough for now… but those are the things I’d really like to see.

  16. This is silly, but what I want from Google for Christmas is to have the cool Google logos extended to the personalized home page as well.

    For those of us who use the great personalized home page, we miss out on all those great logos.

  17. Here is a good idea for you, see as i like and many do to love what you write about on this blog i have the answer to keep us happy and your family happy as well. Why cant you do loads of posts up front and then time stamp them for one each day. You could say do 30 posts put them all in but timestamp them for same time every single day one a day keeps us happy. Pretty please tiger.

  18. Regarding numbers 1 and 2: There’s a Greasemonkey script which lets you customize the Google “more box” and the service links at the top of Gmail, Calendar, etc.

    http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-11-28.html#n27

  19. ahhh my favorite time of the year when we discuss how we would like to see Google improve. Matt, thanks for allowing us to share our wishes here.

    At the top of my Google wishlist..

    Get rid of the PageRank indicator completely. Too many webmasters make SEO and linking decisions based on PR instead of making decisions that benefit their end users experience. It’s time to put the PR cat back in the bag already.

    Also at the top of my wishlist is to see Google produce a Certified Product whereas site operators could pay Google a reasonable fee to receive timely and accurate data when they feel their site may have been penalized by Google. This would be useful for sites that may have used an unscrupulous SEO. This would also be especially useful for *portal sites* (or sites that don’t operate in a specific niche) that legitimately conduct business (and obtain links from and link out to) with a broad range of sites in market segments that may be viewed as irrelevant by Google – but actually does benefits their end users.

  20. forgot one more.. I would also like to see Google enforce their published Terms and Conditions with regards to commercial services which blatantly publish PageRank data for commercial profit.

  21. Joel, I’m not quite ready to ask for feedback yet. Normally I wait for the beginning of the year.

  22. A Christmas update from Santa Google and next year the same videos with info.. would be nice

  23. ack sorry I jumped the gun.

  24. Okay, just how many comments have you received with “DO NOT APPROVE – THIS COMMENT CONTAINS THE SECRET ADDRESS OF PANDIA HEADQUARTERS” in it?

  25. Personally I’d like to see a much simpler solution in terms of PageRank, just to get it out of people’s heads and get rid of all the silly link exchanges. And the idea is real simple: replace it with a button on the toolbar that is one of three colours.

    1) Green – indexed, not banned.
    2) Orange – not indexed.
    3) Red – banned.

    Think of how many stupid “why is my site banned?” when it’s not questions that would answer, and think of how many other stupid “how do I increase my PageRank” questions that would avoid? (Yes, I know it wouldn’t avoid all of them, there are idiots 10 years later who would STILL ask…but let’s get rid of some of them.)

    Why not do that?

    (Oh, and I want a Matt Cutts bobblehead doll with a hockey helmet so that I can pull the head back and smack people in front of me with it for Christmas. Maybe it can have a stick too and I can do a mini-can-opener move. Come on Matt, how about a doll?)

  26. Also at the top of my wishlist is to see Google produce a Certified Product whereas site operators could pay Google a reasonable fee to receive timely and accurate data when they feel their site may have been penalized by Google. This would be useful for sites that may have used an unscrupulous SEO. This would also be especially useful for *portal sites* (or sites that don’t operate in a specific niche) that legitimately conduct business (and obtain links from and link out to) with a broad range of sites in market segments that may be viewed as irrelevant by Google – but actually does benefits their end users.

    That wouldn’t work, Joel. It’s a good idea, but it wouldn’t work, and here’s why:

    Hi, I’m Bob the Blackhat SEO.

    I’m going to register reallygreatshoppingsite.com as a domain, under a false name and address (or a legit business name and an address not associated with Bob the Blackhat SEO).

    Then, I’m going to host it on an IP or server not associated with Bob the Blackhat SEO.

    Once that’s done, I’ll build a shopping cart site, pretend to sell products (or I might even go so far as to make a dropship arrangement with a wholesaler…it isn’t that hard to do), and link to the bottom: SEO Services by Bob the Blackhat SEO.

    Cart’s all built? Great, now it’s time to try hiding text using a variety of different techniques, both with regular HTML and CSS. There are a myriad of different ways to do this, and I’ll try ’em all!

    Last but not least, I promote the site and subscribe to the big G service that will tell me what techniques have received a penalty so I know not to try them on my real sites.

    The things that didn’t work? I won’t use those anymore.
    The things that did? Well, it’s time to apply them to my own sites and my clients’ sites.

    What has big G done in this scenario? They sold a giant spoonful of the secret sauce to someone who will use it to their own advantage, and at the expense of the end user.

  27. I’d have to agree with Pandia about fixing the link: command. Not because I have a desperate need to use it, but due to the endless posts in the Google Webmaster help asking why links to their site aren’t showing up. This Christmas, think about all the poor regulars of that group that keep having to bang their heads against walls the several times a day it gets asked about. We’d thank you for it. πŸ˜‰

  28. I tried to read pandia’s wishlist and got lost somewhere between items 5 and 6. the only wish that made sense to me was the google travel mug. i want that tooo!! πŸ™‚

  29. Matt,
    Please improve image search. Its busted and archaic. I guess google could use Neven vision to improve the quality of image search. Develop a ranking algo for images. And yes, the image labeler doesn’t work..

  30. Sorry about my last comment, I hit the submit button a tad bit early.

    I was looking through your blogs to see if you’ve posted any comments/suggestions on how the google crawlers index sites that are developed using ajax/dhtml, where the html is generated client side vs server side.

    I’ve been reading about cloaking and how its frowned upon by the google crawler guidelines, but I don’t see any other alternative for dhtml sites.

    Is it really a bad thing to send back a static version of the page thats server side rendered when the page is being requesed by the google crawler? Granted, this is technically considered cloaking, but the only reason the server is sending back a different page (with the same content) is because the regular page can’t be crawled.

    Tips?

  31. I got a few

    1. Google Adsense for Domains is good but most programs that use it has it geotargetted. It works well if you have domains targetted for the US because related content can get indexed by some (mainly other) search engines. The problem is since the program is geotargetted, most of the crawlers for the major search engines even the international versions come from a US IP. If I have a Japanese domain that I want to get indexed that uses a service that uses Google’s Adsense for Domains, it will only index what can be seen by the crawlers from the US. None of the crawlers originate from Japan so Japanese content isn’t indexed.

    2. I’d love a bit more IDN compatibility in things like Analytics, Google Sitemaps (At least). I can read native Japanese way better than Punycode.

  32. Hey Harith, I’m waiting for the seo-friendly f/oss open source search engine.
    It will be the killer app.

  33. I’m not against Google censoring search results for China, but if Sergey feels he needs go along with government media controls your philosophy is no longer do nothing evil…in practice.

  34. Rose Water

    “Hey Harith, I’m waiting for the seo-friendly f/oss open source search engine.
    It will be the killer app.”

    But Google is the most SEO friendly search engine on planet. You just need to read and follow Google Webmaster Guidelines, join relevant discussions on related forums as WMW and visit Matt’s blog more often (also try to read what he usually writes between the lines) πŸ˜‰

  35. GMail invariably freezes/crashes my iMac running the classic OS 9.2.2 with Netscape 7.02. I realize that GMail is still in beta for a reason but for Chrismas I’d like GMail to at least be usable on my system even if not all the features are available due to obselesence.

  36. This post is so marked as the sweetest post read this year – great PR Matt..

    Off Topic – You can delete if you want

    About 3 years ago, we had a guy out here (Vegas) represented Google West Coast, his name was Tim, he sent me a Google Lamp and hats and shirts – great guy. But, Tim had directed me to someone at Google to speak to regarding Adwords. Early January 2007 I need to run a mid-heavy adwords schedule and would like some assistance from the adwords department like they did before. Can you recommend someone I can contact within Google? By the way, I just recently got invited into the beta optimization which I will use, but I personally prefer to work with someone that can help make this go smoothly. I have several adword accounts, but can’t recall the last time I spoke with someone in Adwords.

    Sorry for the personal msg, just had no way to email ya directly!

  37. Merry Xmas everyone!

    Ferkel69 and #14 are completely wrong about Chinese censorship. 95%+ of the censored sites in China are porn or other such sites. I think most people would agree that not having these listed in the search results is a good thing.

    I wish people would really try and understand a topic before they rant on about it (I live in China).

    If the US blocked Al Queda sites, you would understand and think it fair. The other remaining sites that China blocks are things that they believe would undermine the stability of the country – which in turn would threaten the lives of over 1.3 billion people. There are frustrations such as Wikipedia and the BBC being black listed, but hey, I can still read CNN, or The Times… it’s far better to let Google into the country than leave it upto far lesser (and easily manipulated) search engines such as Baidu to dictate a website’s worth.

    So Google… you’re not that evil in China. Keep it up.

    But you are a little bit evil with Adwords, and i certainly would like to see click fraud tackled. I’m not sure how much of a problem this is, but certainly if I pay even a penny to you through someone being naughty, that’s a penny too much.

    You’re quite evil with Adsense, and letting loads of awful people makes loads of money off it… or maybe they’re just all lying about it to sell their ebooks.

    Also you’re a teensy bit evil with the fact that you force nice people like me do SEO work on their site, when I should be concentrating on my customers. It seems that unless you understand the inner workings of Google, your site is doomed to fail, even if it’s an absolute gem. So please be very clear about what we should and shouldn’t do.

    But I think overall you’ve been quite a good little Google this year, certainly Google Earth and Google Books shows that you really are interested in sharing knowledge without necessarily making a profit from it.

    Your present? Well I’ll continue to use you for another year, and carry on spending far too much money on Adwords.

    Happy New year too.

  38. What I want from Google for xmas.
    Let’s see. Umm, a job in A2

  39. If I could ask google for something for Christmas??

    Ahh, G-Bay….. Would love to see froogle/googlebase start with auctions….

  40. I think for next April fools joke Google should release a new tool bar with a Trust Rank Indicator that has negative values and make the Page Rank Indicator swing violently every few seconds 1 second its up to 10 the next its at 0

  41. A question to Matt.

    I really like Google and what it is. I think it’s the greatest search motor in the world, but Google is the only one present today ! So my question is :
    Don’t you think who control the information control the past and the futur ? and How to be sure that google will always be quite egual too every one ?

  42. I think a good present from Google to everyone would be: Finish up all their web apps and get them out of BETA! I, for one, can’t wait to see the final version of GMail πŸ™‚

  43. Oh Matt,

    Indeed, the picture frame was pretty cool. And the rubberized non-stick Google cellphone boosters were also pretty nice to give out to my parents (although not as cool as the Google googly-eyed stuffed fish keychains, which my dog REALLY loved).

    There’s really only ONE thing I want from Google this Christmas: some kind of response to why an honest site was dropped completely from the Google index without warning. Nothing seems to be working to help put the site where it belongs.

    I spoke with Adam (& Vanessa’s Sitemaps team) about it at SES–he mentioned he’d get back to me, but he must be too busy. (posting on the forums hasn’t helped–they said he hadn’t been there in a couple of weeks either).

    Any thoughts on what I can do when nothing seems to work anymore Santa Matt??

  44. Hmmmm…

    Well, perhaps a call to Santa’s Executive Elves – Article Origination Division…

    I was just wondering whether Google could come up with a way to identify the “original” article or content web page…kind of something like the Google Sitemaps Verification process…you know, write an article or web page, post it on your site, register it with Google via a similar UI, download a verification file or meta tag…the first site to verify gains recognition as “originator”…then, whenever Google has to sort through the 100 or more duplications of articles (either PR sites or scrapers), it takes into consideration a “verification factor”…not solely always serving up the page first but, giving the originator’s page a bit of a boost for that search…I realise that it would be much more complicated and there are lots of holes that could be taken advantage of but…maybe this might get the propeller heads thinking…

    Have a great Christmas…and remember to hug your family more than you hug your laptop…at least for the season anyway…

  45. HI!

    2 Abhilash: I can find your site with PR4 under the term: SEO With a Little Brown Sugar at #1 and 2 of 186.000, so what is your real problem?

    Greetings Karl Heinz

  46. Nothing wrong with being different but all I want for xmas is for you to fix Gmail

    Tagging conversations together isnt very helpful they end up a mess, but an ability for me to create
    folders would be, User flexibility in how you structure your Gmail account although not related to SERPS would be the best thing G could do

    Partnership with Godaddy? Does that read as beta test before the acquistion?

  47. Sorry for my last intervention, I was drunk. Forget it.
    But I keep thinking that google control the information on internet and believe it’s dangerous.

  48. What I want to see is the simple form of Google Checkout handle a multiple product sale.

    Merry Christmas
    Ted

  49. “Sorry for my last intervention, I was drunk.”

    Don’ worry. Thats human.

    However, may be its time for Matt to install on his blog an “Alcohol Test Filter” πŸ™‚

  50. I just thought of something that could be added to this list: a separate search for RSS feeds and a removal from regular SERPs. That can’t be good for the ordinary user types who wouldn’t know what to do with an RSS feed.

    http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLF,GGLF:2006-19,GGLF:en&q=Internet+archive+collections

    That’s not something I would normally search for, but it’s the only thing I could think of as an example (see the tracey.archive.org result). I find it happens about once every 50-100 searches though.

  51. With no wish to engage in undue flattery, I think you’ve done some of what is requested on the list in terms of fighting spam.

    When I’m looking for information I find the worst spamming (or least relevant results, which can be the result of something other than spamming) when I perform relatively long searches (mutiple search terms) for state-specific information, and the mere mention of a state name on a page can bring it up as relevant. One site, seemingly aware of this, includes text on every page to the effect of, “These pages relate primarily to the following States:” – followed by an A-Z (er, A-W) list of every state. So my simple little Christmas wish would be for Google to adjust its algorithm such that if a page lists every state, rather than concluding “This is relevant to every state on this list”, it would instead conclude “This is a general page oriented toward the U.S., but I shouldn’t flag it as relevant to any particular state based on this information alone.”

  52. Matt, when you do another SEO-related post, I would be interested in hearing your take on Google’s new initiative against link baiting, as announced on the Webmaster Central Blog this weekend.

  53. Celebrating 1 year birtday of BigDaddy!

    May be Matt will have time to post a BigDaddy weather report. Wish to know whether BigDaddy has lived up to the expectations of the folks at the plex, and what should we expect to see deployed on BigDaddy during 2007. More detailes about Google Datacenters (new and old ones) would also be highly appreciated.

  54. Reveal what the other 100 factors are and maybe people will stop concentrating on the little green bar.

  55. “Reveal what the other 100 factors are and maybe people will stop concentrating on the little green bar.”

    You know, it’s not like Matt and other Googlers (going all the way back to Larry and Sergey) haven’t discussed many of those factors openly, plainly, and clearly through the years.

    You could try looking outside the SEO forums, FAQs, and tutorials for information on what Google does. Theirs is the best documented of all the algorithms.

  56. Does that fact that I had the same idea as panda make me genius or a fool?
    “As they say great minds think alike, and fools seldom differ”

    Here is my 5 ideas, hopefully some of them are more doable than panda’s (I hope) but I think I did leave it a bit late to post with only a week left for google to do anything…

    http://jambecorp.blogspot.com/2006/12/5-things-google-should-give-us-all-for.html

    My comments on some other ideas posted here:

    China: My opinion is that Google made the right decision, better to give them something rather than nothing. I alway think the best way to influence someone is to become their friend. Friends have a lot better chance of helping people change than enemies. So help them fight the fight against porn, hatred and other illegal things. But slowly help China to see the value of open and free information.

    Opensearch/RSS: That would be great! Not holding my breath, although you do have dewitt clinton working for you now.

    Backlinks, Pagerank, etc: I’d love to be able to see that data. It is a pity that people abuse it though.

    Bookmarking: Yeah, I think google could do a lot better than they are now. To be honest I’m pretty happy with del.icio.us at the moment. What I would to see is someone doing something with that data to make search better.

    Fancy search operators: I think things like NEAR, inurl, prefer, etc are all good things to support. It doesn’t really effect the usability to non technical users and to the few people who do use them they would be really helpful. Of course you have to balance up the cost of creating/maintaining the functinonality vs the money it might back you in the long run (which I’m guessing wouldn’t be that much more).
    On that note though, don’t forget the power of the long tail.

  57. Another thing I am not sure if people have mention in this discussion yet, is the ability to link google feedreader to an external OPML file. And/Or to publish a universally accessible version of the google reader one (with a privacy option of course) so that it could be re-used by other systems.

  58. Don’t know where my previous posts went, but I’d still like a compose link on the personal page, and some Google logo wallpaper.

  59. DO NOT APPROVE – THIS COMMENT CONTAINS THE SECRET ADDRESS OF PANDIA HEADQUARTERS

    Thank you for putting it plainly and simply Matt!

    I do have a Christmas Wish from Google (besides a mug), could you please add the ability to search in reader? I follow over 60 feeds and when I want to find references to another feed on the same topic, it can be difficult to find. The Reader is a great product and a valuable tool, thank you for providing it!

  60. Matt;

    I received a lovely Christmas card from Yahoo today and normally would have been touched by such an outpouring of pre-printed love, but found myself immediately saddened by the idea that Google didn’t send me one. This led me to the conclusion that although I would love a Xmas card from Google, I would be beside myself if I were to receive one from you (not to mention all of the Glory in showing it off to all of my geeky friends.) Therefore, I ask you with the humblest of yuletide wishes, please send me some sort of Xmas greeting. πŸ˜€

    Your all-time biggest fan,

    Audrey – The Matt Cutts Makes Me Google Girl

    P.S. – Feel free to make fun of me now, fellow commenters and SEO geeky types alike! ;p

  61. I won’t make fun of you. I’ll just tell the cops that you’re stalking Matt. πŸ˜‰

  62. Wait;

    This is the time of year for giving not receiving. We need ask what would Google and Matt want for Christmas.

    The end times must be near when SEO-Jocks are getting groupies.

    and what is “Makes me Google” anyway

  63. Audrey, where would such a hypothetical Christmas card go to? πŸ™‚

  64. Three things I would love to see for Christmas from Google:
    (Note they go from serious to ‘yeah you wish’.)

    1. Adsense + Analytics integration for very advanced tracking of ads / channel performance, CTR etc. I *love* statistics. Must see more numbers!

    2. Last year received a lovely leather case with laptop accessories (I literally bought a laptop 2 days before that, it was awesome) – but the mouse doesn’t work πŸ™ We received a couple of these kits at work and they worked for everybody but me. Of course I didn’t discover it until I badly needed to use it πŸ˜‰ I tend to be ‘blessed’ with usually acquiring broken things.
    (Gotta hate touch pads.)
    Pity the Google logo rubbed off from the USB pen very rapidly as well, as that just made it cool. (A 256mb USB pen with a Google logo on it looks way nicer then a 2 GB nondescript one.)
    Anyway, rattling on too much now – An item which has a more persistent Google logo on it is definitely on my list. An idea for next xmass for your clients: Google Coffee mugs with people their names printed on them – you can’t get more personalized! (That would be a hot wanna-have.)

    3. A link for a day from the Google.nl homepage (.com / .co.uk are obviously bigger but as I am Dutch from origin (living in the UK) I have a very close connection to Google.nl – in fact I search mostly with the nl engine at home.) to my ‘website’ (little project I am toying with to get Joomla more Google-friendly) with some witty anchor text.
    (I wonder how many people actually tried acquiring such a link? Love to hear the proposals you have received from businesses/other people in this regard, I am sure somebody must have tried. Post something funny!)

    Obviously the best xmas present you could give anybody is to redirect your search results to somebodies adsense for search. Hmmm. *Dreams on.*

  65. No more X-mas lists, Matt. I want my bobblehead. πŸ˜€

  66. P.S. – Yes, I am aware of the fact that this posted for everyone to see.. Guess I’m hoping he’ll edit my address out before I get any hate mail! HA!

  67. I just want to know how plastic trees become heavily scented unless you spray that fake snow stuff on them.

  68. By the way, Audrey, FYI for the future: if you don’t want a comment auto-approved, use a different name and email and URL. I personally use IE for regular posting, and FF with different contact info on the rare occasions I feel the need to post something to Matt privately. You may want to do something similar, for the sake of avoiding publicly revealing info you don’t want revealed. πŸ˜‰

  69. Hehe, way to go Audrey πŸ˜‰

  70. How about a Google Desktop update that will allow the indexing of gAIM logs. not sure why the software cant index these HTML files.

  71. Terrence, you can always develop it:
    http://desktop.google.com/developer.html

  72. Audrey, I deleted the post–sorry that your email was previously approved so it showed up, but it’s gone now.

  73. Thanks Matt. Hope you saved the contact info for future reference though. πŸ™‚

  74. The Google mugs have arrived. But wait, there are two of them! Wasn’t there only one holy grail?

    Thank you very much, guys!

    Per and Susanne
    Pandia

    For picture, see http://www.pandia.com/sew/369-google-mug.html

css.php