We made a video about how Google handles the robots.txt file. You can watch it if you want:This answers a couple questions such as:- Why is my url showing up in Google when I blocked it in robots.txt? Did you fetch that url?- How do I make that url disappear from Google?I hope the video [...]
Googler Douwe Osinga has a great personal project that demonstrates the Google Chart API. Just by clicking a few boxes, you can make an image to show the countries (or states in the USA) that you’ve been to. Here’s where I’ve been in the United States:Clearly I need to do a trip across the northern [...]
I was glad to see that the FTC unanimously approved new guidelines regarding endorsements and testimonials. The updated guidelines affirm the principle that material connections behind endorsements should be disclosed. This seems like a great time to offer my own disclosure information.I am currently an employee of Google. I receive a salary from them and [...]
A few weeks ago we had a visitor at the Googleplex: Rob Hof, the Silicon Valley bureau chief at BusinessWeek. Rob talked to a bunch of Googlers and sat in on one of our weekly quality-leads meetings. The resulting story is out now. The first part of the story covers some of the challenges facing [...]
In September I didn’t do a 30 day challenge because, frankly, I had a lot of work that I really needed to crunch through at the Googleplex and I didn’t have much spare time. But October is a new month, and so it’s time for a new 30 day challenge.For October, I’m not going to [...]
[I wrote this in January 2008 but never posted it. I think people might still want to read this, so I'm posting it now.]In an election year, everybody gets a little more sensitive about politics, so I wanted a write a pre-emptive post in case anyone accuses Google of political bias in our search results [...]
[A couple things to note: 1. This is a purely personal blog post--like other blogs posts I do, I haven't run it by anyone else at Google. 2. I'm writing it quickly because I have a lot of work to do. If I get something wrong, please let me know and I'll correct it.]This morning [...]
We went ahead and did this post on the official Google webmaster blog to make it super official, but I wanted to echo the point here as well: Google does not use the keywords meta tag in our web search.To this day, you still see courts mistakenly believe that meta tags occupy a pivotal role [...]
All of us could use some help increasing our productivity. So I’m going to share one of my best productivity secrets. This secret can literally CHANGE YOUR LIFE!!! Are you ready?Step 1. Buy a productivity book.Any productivity book will do. I use a book called “The Now Habit.” It doesn’t matter what book you order [...]
I was talking to an excellent new Googler that joined from Yahoo this week, and that reminded me that I meant to do this post a little while ago. So I’ll keep this post short and sweet: if you’re an excellent Yahoo engineer with solid experience in search, Google is hiring. If you want to [...]
