Hey everybody, the intent of the blog post wasn't to say "everything is hunky dory." Spam on Google is up compared to a few months ago, which is why I said there had been an uptick in spam. Our overall relevancy is better than in the past, but not the part of relevancy related to spam. The rest of the post was trying to say that we hear the complaints and we're working on improvements. The revamp to our doc-level classifier launched in the last few weeks, and a change related to scraped content was approved this week and will launch soon. We're testing other ideas to improve things too.
Actually, if you're talking about cexx.org, we detected that your main root page was hacked. Because of the hacked content, we removed the site from our index and tried to contact you at abuse at cexx.org. Here, check out this archive.org link and view the source yourself: http://web.archive.org/web/20091027195941/www.cexx.org/main.htm
What do you want when you do the search [advanced]? There's a conference called AdvancED that we show at #1. I see our advanced search help pages at #2, Advanced search from AltaVista at #3, SMX Advanced (a conference I've spoken at before) at #4, and Advanced Auto Parts at #5. That's a pretty darn good set of search results for an ambiguous query like [advanced].
Just to reply directly to this comment: this code is part of the User metrics service and is *completely opt-in*. User metrics and crash reporting is very helpful to improve Chrome in the future, but it's off by default. So this code does not run unless you deliberately choose to run it.
Hi TheJasper, that's my blog. Sorry if it came across as an advertisement. I knew that people would be interested in what communication happens between the browser and google.com, so I wanted to provide a list of all the communication so that people wouldn't worry. Even if something changed in the future, with an open-source browser people would immediately notice. The fact that Chrome is open-source lets anybody verify the code, and if they don't like it, they can take the code under the BSD license and do something different.
By the way, Google has already changed the language in the EULA that was mentioned in the summary, so people don't need to worry about that, either.
If you're interested, I did a blog post documenting the communication between Chrome and Google at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/
The short answer is that there's nothing sinister there, and Google doesn't get information on the urls you visit as you surf around the web.
I'm a software engineer at Google and I can debunk the notion that Google wants the rights to everything you touch in Google Chrome. We don't, and we'll either clarify officially soon or change the Terms of Service to make that very clear. All things considered, there wasn't much FUD surrounding the launch of Google Chrome, but I'm more than happy to put this conspiracy theory to rest.
Hey, if you go back and read the PageRank papers, you'll see that it doesn't help you to just get a lot of links from bad sites. That was one of the points of the original mathematics.
So your friend might think he's improving his rank at Google, but he's really just wasting time. But if it makes him happy, who are we to criticize?
Hey, I appreciate the effort to test-drive Google's ad program, but the author doesn't have much experience with tweaking ads. Here's a couple URLs where people have done better studies:
I've used AdWords very effectively. The secret that I discovered is to start with very specific phrases (Google calls it an exact match) and get a very high clickthrough. Then trade off more traffic for lower clickthrough.
Slashdot Mirror
For folks that are interested, the original blog post about our freshness change is here: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-search.html
Hey everybody, the intent of the blog post wasn't to say "everything is hunky dory." Spam on Google is up compared to a few months ago, which is why I said there had been an uptick in spam. Our overall relevancy is better than in the past, but not the part of relevancy related to spam. The rest of the post was trying to say that we hear the complaints and we're working on improvements. The revamp to our doc-level classifier launched in the last few weeks, and a change related to scraped content was approved this week and will launch soon. We're testing other ideas to improve things too.
Actually, if you're talking about cexx.org, we detected that your main root page was hacked. Because of the hacked content, we removed the site from our index and tried to contact you at abuse at cexx.org. Here, check out this archive.org link and view the source yourself: http://web.archive.org/web/20091027195941/www.cexx.org/main.htm
I tried to say that spam had gone up recently, and tried to talk about what we're planning to do about it.
What do you want when you do the search [advanced]? There's a conference called AdvancED that we show at #1. I see our advanced search help pages at #2, Advanced search from AltaVista at #3, SMX Advanced (a conference I've spoken at before) at #4, and Advanced Auto Parts at #5. That's a pretty darn good set of search results for an ambiguous query like [advanced].
What were some concrete searches that didn't work for you?
Google does have this in Google News, e.g. see http://news.google.com/news/settings?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en if you're logged into a Google Account, but web search doesn't have a way to do this right now.
Empty search results are against our quality guidelines: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/empty-review-sites/ I asked my team to check into this.
Just to reply directly to this comment: this code is part of the User metrics service and is *completely opt-in*. User metrics and crash reporting is very helpful to improve Chrome in the future, but it's off by default. So this code does not run unless you deliberately choose to run it.
Hi TheJasper, that's my blog. Sorry if it came across as an advertisement. I knew that people would be interested in what communication happens between the browser and google.com, so I wanted to provide a list of all the communication so that people wouldn't worry. Even if something changed in the future, with an open-source browser people would immediately notice. The fact that Chrome is open-source lets anybody verify the code, and if they don't like it, they can take the code under the BSD license and do something different.
By the way, Google has already changed the language in the EULA that was mentioned in the summary, so people don't need to worry about that, either.
If you're interested, I did a blog post documenting the communication between Chrome and Google at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/ The short answer is that there's nothing sinister there, and Google doesn't get information on the urls you visit as you surf around the web.
I'm a software engineer at Google and I can debunk the notion that Google wants the rights to everything you touch in Google Chrome. We don't, and we'll either clarify officially soon or change the Terms of Service to make that very clear. All things considered, there wasn't much FUD surrounding the launch of Google Chrome, but I'm more than happy to put this conspiracy theory to rest.
Google has a specific policy of not trapping users' data, so you can back up almost any data you have at Google. Here are some helpful links:
How to back up almost any Google service:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/12/creating-backup-for-your-google-account.html
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/not-trapping-users-data-good/
Backup a Blogger blog:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-to-backup-blogger-blog.html
Backup Google bookmarks:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/06/export-your-google-bookmarks.html
Backup your Gmail with getmail:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/backup-gmail-in-linux-with-getmail/
So your friend might think he's improving his rank at Google, but he's really just wasting time. But if it makes him happy, who are we to criticize?
Comparison with GoTo, Lycos, and Sprinks
How Moreover got 10.21% Clickthrough on Ads
I've used AdWords very effectively. The secret that I discovered is to start with very specific phrases (Google calls it an exact match) and get a very high clickthrough. Then trade off more traffic for lower clickthrough.