Berkshire Hathaway

My taste in financial advice runs toward the simple and the lessons I’ve learned the hard way. But I still like reading about investing/finance, and I recently read through the 2014 annual report for Berkshire Hathaway.

Given that it was the 50th anniversary of Warren Buffett taking charge of Berkshire, I have to admit that I expected more nuggets of wisdom. I did have two favorite quotes though. On page 19, Buffett writes “Huge institutional investors, viewed as a group, have long underperformed the unsophisticated index-fund investor who simply sits tight for decades.” So take it from Warren Buffett: broad-based index funds with low fees will outperform most active management. That’s something that most people saving for retirement–which should be almost everyone–should keep in mind.

The other quote I liked was on page 35: “In our view, it is madness to risk losing what you need in pursuing what you simply desire.” That’s some serious life wisdom there, not just good financial sense.

I have to say though, I was troubled by a recent report from the Center for Public Integrity and the Seattle Times. The report contends that Clayton Homes, a subsidiary of Berkshire, preys on vulnerable people in all kinds of ways, including predatory sales and lending practices. The article is long, but it’s worth reading all of it.

A follow-up post digs into Berkshire’s response to the story.

What would you like to see from Webmaster Tools in 2014?

A few years ago, I asked on my blog what people would like from Google’s free webmaster tools. It’s pretty cool to re-read that post now, because we’ve delivered on a lot of peoples’ requests.

At this point, our webmaster console will alert you to manual webspam actions that will directly affect your site. We’ve recently rolled out better visibility on website security issues, including radically improved resources for hacked site help. We’ve also improved the backlinks that we show to publishers and site owners. Along the way, we’ve also created a website that explains how search works, and Google has done dozens of “office hours” hangouts for websites. And we’re just about to hit 15 million views on ~500 different webmaster videos.

So here’s my question: what would you like to see from Webmaster Tools (or the larger team) in 2014? I’ll throw out a few ideas below, but please leave suggestions in the comments. Bear in mind that I’m not promising we’ll do any of these–this is just to get your mental juices going.

Some things that I could imagine people wanting:

  • Make it easier/faster to claim authorship or do authorship markup.
  • Improved reporting of spam, bugs, errors, or issues. Maybe people who do very good spam reports could be “deputized” so their future spam reports would be fast-tracked. Or perhaps a karma, cred, or peer-based system could bubble up the most important issues, bad search results, etc.
  • Option to download the web pages that Google has seen from your site, in case a catastrophe like a hard drive failure or a virus takes down your entire website.
  • Checklists or help for new businesses that are just starting out.
  • Periodic reports with advice on improving areas like mobile or page speed.
  • Send Google “fat pings” of content before publishing it on the web, to make it easier for Google to tell where content appeared first on the web.
  • Better tools for detecting or reporting duplicate content or scrapers.
  • Show pages that don’t validate.
  • Show the source pages that link to your 404 pages, so you can contact other sites and ask if they want to fix their broken links.
  • Or almost as nice: tell the pages on your website that lead to 404s or broken links, so that site owners can fix their own broken links.
  • Better or faster bulk url removal (maybe pages that match a specific phrase?).
  • Refreshing the existing data in Webmaster Tools faster or better.
  • Improve robots.txt checker to handle even longer files.
  • Ways for site owners to tell us more about their site: anything from country-level data to language to authorship to what content management system (CMS) you use on different parts of the site. That might help Google improve how it crawls different parts of a domain.

To be clear, this is just some personal brainstorming–I’m not saying that the Webmaster Tools team will work on any of these. What I’d really like to hear is what you would like to see in 2014, either in Webmaster Tools or from the larger team that works with webmasters and site owners.

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