I have a SEO crush on Matt Cutts!

Here are a series of interviews by Matt Cutts, Google's SEO Guru. He discusses Chrome and Firefox. Matt also discusses SEO and how some believe it is SPAM. He talks about some of the sneaky SEO diseptive techniques and some of the highlights of working at Google. Thanks for sharing Matt!

Happy 10 Years Google Doodle

The Google doodle tradition started a long time ago (in summer 1999, in fact) when Larry and Sergey put a stick figure on the homepage to signify that they were out of the office at Burning Man. Nothing against stick figures, but our logo designs have become rather more varied since then. Today you'll see a special design that commemorates our 10th birthday. We've incorporated a little bit of history by using the original Google logo from 1998. And since everyone keeps asking what we'd like for our birthday (besides cake and party hats) -- the first thing we thought of was a nice new server rack.

Larry Page to FCC: Free the "white spaces" spectrum by election day

Following a previous visit to D.C. earlier this year, Google co-founder Larry Page hit Capitol Hill today with a simple message to the Federal Communications Commission: after five years of testing and discussion, it is time to free the vacant "white spaces" spectrum for affordable, nationwide high-speed wireless Internet connectivity.

With the FCC likely to release its report on the field testing process shortly, Larry called on the FCC to issue a final order regarding the vacant spectrum by election day in early November. And, he noted, it's not just technology companies like Google, Microsoft and Dell who care about putting the unused spectrum to use for broadband. Larry announced that as of this week, more than 16,000 citizens have sent petitions to the FCC through Free The Airwaves, our campaign to bring Internet users together around this important issue (if you haven't yet signed the petition, I hope that you'll join us in sending a clear message to the FCC).

Facing a room full of congressional staff as well as demonstrations from companies like Motorola and Shared Spectrum Company, Larry highlighted the tremendous potential that this spectrum holds for improving communications and boosting our economy. This spectrum, which can cover vast distances, could be used to connect underserved rural and urban communities to the Internet, at perhaps a tenth of the cost of today's municipal wi-fi projects. Additionally, the FCC could unleash considerable economic activity -- both in R&D as well as greater broadband connectivity -- by allowing innovaters to tap this underutilized resource.

Finally, Larry addressed the ways in which TV broadcasters and wireless microphone companies have unfortunately injected politics into the FCC's testing process, referring to August tests at FedEx Field just outside of D.C. and at the Majestic Theater in New York City. Those tests were intended to assess whether white space device prototypes could sense the presence of wireless microphone signals. However actions suggest that wireless microphone operators actually transmitted not on their normal channels but instead on channels occupied by TV broadcast signals. For instance during the Fed Ex Field test, wireless microphones were improperly used on the very station that carried the broadcast of the game. As a result, the white spaces devices naturally could not detect the microphone signals, as they were hidden by the much more powerful TV signals. The White Spaces Coalition, of which Google is a member, offered a filing with the FCC in late August pointing out what had happened in the test.

The time for discussion and testing is coming to a close, and the time for action is now.

Marketing Blog - How Google Earth Helped Win A Gold Medal

Google Earth is getting a nice plug from Olympic Gold Medal cyclist Kristin Armstrong. When she did her time trials in December, 2007 in China, she took along her husband’s GPS unit to capture the elevation along the route. Then she used that data to find the best training route back home. In a guest post on the Google Lat-Long blog, she writes:

After returning home to Boise, Idaho, I exported the GPS data to several different formats, one of which I was able to launch with Google Earth. I was then able to trace the entire course from the comfort of my home half a world away and find a similar route to train on back in Boise. This capability along with having the elevation profile proved invaluable in my preparation for my Gold Medal race.

Google proves that once again, information is a competitive advantage.

Marketing Blog - Back to school with google: Bring the political process to life in your classroom

It's back-to-school season in the U.S. and social studies teachers everywhere are excited about the November elections and all of the ways that politics has evolved since even just four years ago. Technology is advancing. Internet fundraising has brought all kinds of new small donors into the political process, social networking is helping campaigns and citizens organize themselves in new ways, and YouTube, which didn't even exist four years ago, has swept the political dialogue.

With technology producing such dramatic changes in American politics, we want to make sure it's easy for teachers to bring some of the best Internet tools into the classroom to help students get engaged. Working with the National Student/Parent Mock Election, we've pulled together a site called Elections Tools for Teachers where you can find descriptions and suggested learning activities for tools like YouTube, Google Maps, Elections Video Search and Power Readers, which we announced here yesterday.

We want students to walk away from their engagement in this election with a sense of excitement about our democratic process and with the belief that their voices matter. As Gloria Kirshner, president of the Mock Election has said, "In the classrooms of today are the Presidents, Senators, Congress members and, most important, the voters of tomorrow. Whether we are sending these children to the White House or to the polls, we hope to send them with a deep understanding of 'government of the people, by the people, and for the people.'"

Please let us know if you find Elections Tools for Teachers helpful in your teaching, and we hope you'll enroll your students in this year's National Mock Election on October 30th.

Posted by Galen Panger & Cristin Frodella, Google Educators Team

Marketing Blog - Google Docs has over 1 million users on campuses worldwide

Google Apps is rapidly gaining momentum in education. We now have more than a million people on campuses worldwide actively using Google's suite of email, calendar and docs to share information and study. This makes perfect sense. Schools have always been a proving ground for innovative ideas. And as we prepare for the new school year, we are happy to welcome more than a dozen universities across the U.S., joining the thousands of other schools that have already embraced cloud computing in education. Here are the new additions:

• Collin County Community College District
• Francis Marion University
• George Washington University
• Indiana University
• Kean University
• Kent State University
• Kishwaukee College
• Loyola Marymount University
• Montgomery County Community College
• New Jersey Institute of Technology
• University of Florida
• University of San Diego
• University of Virginia

This is really just the beginning. As we continue working to make it easier to communicate and collaborate online, we are going to meet with some of the top technology experts -- the students themselves. For the entire month of September, we are heading "App to School" by embarking on a cross-country bus tour to visit campuses, listen to students and learn more about how cloud computing is helping education. Please check out our Enterprise blog for more info.

Marketing Blog - Cuil - The New Search Engine - Everyone's Talking About

If you read the news today you could not have missed it. Cuil, pronounced "Cool" the new search engine. I myself, am slightly unimpressed mostly with the layout and the results so far.

Like Google, Cuil starts out with a very nondescript front page where you enter your search term, though Cuil sports a black background to differentiate it from Google right up front. That's where the differences start, and it gets better from there.

Rather than displaying search results in the plain-Jane text that Google does, Cuil brings back a very nice looking and well organized multi-column page including a thumbnail of a header, portrait or graphic from that link's page. Well, sometimes it does but it's not always accurate. On a search for my name, Cuil associated a picture of James Mitchell Ashley (can't say I've sported a suit like that in some time) and a cowboy dude from what looks like an album cover. Obviously Cuil has some perfecting to do but I like where it's going.

What else is different about Cuil? They say they don't analyze their users, they analyze web pages, ranking them for relevancy, inter-relationships and coherency, not just popularity. (Hmm...I'm not a search algorithm expert but that could mean just about anything.) They also say Cuil searches 3x the web pages as Google and 10x more than Microsoft Live Search. Cuil also organizes results into tabs. I've often wonder why Google couldn't distinguish the difference between Fender guitars and fender benders.

Look Ma, no advertising. No signs of that yet in Cuil's search results but you'd have to guess that's in Cuil's future as usage builds up. I've only just tried Cuil so I don't have much hands on experience with it to say whether I like or hate it yet.

One more thing. Cuil lists a general council on their exec team. Not that I want to get any nasty-grams from some lawyer but I always question when startups have full time legal council. Seems to me there's usually two reasons: either there's lots of business contracts to work on, or you're expecting enough IP disputes or litigation from competitors (Google?) that it's better to start stocking up the war chest early. Don't know if I'm right but that's what make sense to me.

Let me know what you think of Cuil, if you use it, think its a waste or like what you see.

Submitted by Mitchell Ashley on Mon, 07/28/2008 - 2:07pm.