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Google Businesses The Internet

Google Techs, Webmasters Mingle 86

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-don't-know-those-dance-moves dept.
Steve Nixon writes "Free-flowing beer, live music, karaoke and arcade games kept the party raging at the Googleplex the other night, but the real action was unfolding inside a sterile conference room at Google's headquarters. That's where the cunning internet entrepreneurs who constantly try to manipulate Google's search engine results for a competitive edge were trying to make the most of a rare opportunity to match wits face-to-face with the company's top engineers."
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Google Techs, Webmasters Mingle More

Google Techs, Webmasters Mingle

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  • Wow (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cybrthng ( 22291 ) on Sunday August 21, 2005 @11:10AM (#13366437) Homepage Journal
    Another google story?

    Cool as it is, it just aint that cool.

    Mod me down if you want, call me biased but there is tons of other "news for nerds" besides some corporation who is after your dollar.

    For some cool search news, Nutch .07 just came out - http://nutch.org/ [nutch.org] - i'm loading it up on mozdex through next week :)

    • It's the yahoo tech news feed (Score:5, Informative)

      by DavidNWelton ( 142216 ) on Sunday August 21, 2005 @11:15AM (#13366461) Homepage
      As seen here:

      http://news.yahoo.com/i/528 [yahoo.com]

      a fairly good percentage of these go on to appear as slashdot stories.
      • They also have an RSS feed and for Klipfolio users, the Klip is here [klipfarm.com]. You can click setup in the Klip to get just yahoo tech news. Not a bad site.
      • a fairly good percentage of these go on to appear as slashdot stories.

        While the rest come from BoingBoing and other similar sites.

        • In case you haven't noticed, Slashdot is like Playboy -- you're missing the point if you read it for the articles. You can get links to news stories anywhere; Slashdot is worth reading because of the comments. Nowhere else do I notice such a high concentration of interesting commentary, and because of that, I read it every day.

          If you don't like it, just read BoingBoing and comment there. The Slashdot community can probably live without your complaining.
          • In case you haven't noticed, Slashdot is like Playboy -- you're missing the point if you read it for the articles.

            (Looks at user ID for jrockway (229604))

            (Looks at user ID for Spoing (152917))

            Nope. I didn't miss anything.

            If you don't like it, just read BoingBoing and comment there. The Slashdot community can probably live without your complaining.

            I do, though, have no clue what you're talking about.

          • Are we reading the same comments?

          • In case you haven't noticed, Slashdot is like Playboy -- you're missing the point if you read it for the articles. You can get links to news stories anywhere; Slashdot is worth reading because of the comments.

            Irrelevant, pointless articles lead to a dull conversation about nothing at all.

            You just about always have to have a good and topical story posted before you'll find any good comments.

            When was the last time you saw an insightful technical comment attached to a slashvertisement story?

    • I agree ... Google had a PR/Marketing event, everyone had a few beers, listened to some music, talked business, and generally had a good time ... like most companies do periodically ... so not so big of deal ... but Google is on one heck of a roll, so all the power to 'em. I was disappointed that GoogleGirl [relaxzoolander.com] didn't show up - maybe I'll invite her to my next birthday party [komar.org] ;-)

    • Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Alex P Keaton in da ( 882660 ) on Sunday August 21, 2005 @11:28AM (#13366507) Homepage
      It is just the nature of the beast- Throw in a tech company and a normal story about a company PR/Picnic event becomes tech news. This same story, but at GM or Toyota would be in an automotive trade journal. A normal small town library event that would usually be relegated to page 10 of a small town weekly newspaper ends up in political magazines if a politician shows up. It is just the way it is.
      It is an interesting story for me, even if I would never ever admit it, because secretly, I would like to party at the googleplex. But I would never admit it. The same way most men would like to party at the Playboy Mansion, many nerds (like me) would love to party at the googleplex. And the Playboy Mansion.
    • Yeah... did you happen to notice the little "Search this site with Google" box on the Nutch homepage? I'm a *little* wary of a search spider that doesn't even index its own homepage!
    • But in the top right corner there's still a "search this site with google" (http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/ [apache.org]).

      How cute!

  • Plagiarism (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Steve Nixon writes
    No, Steve Nixon didn't write any of that. The Associated Press did, and Steve Nixon copied and pasted it into the story submit box.

  • Site was slow (Score:3, Informative)

    by tourettes ( 97445 ) on Sunday August 21, 2005 @11:12AM (#13366448)
    Site was slow when i tried to load it, here's the copy:

    MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Free-flowing beer, live music, karaoke and arcade games kept the party raging at the Googleplex the other night, but the real action was unfolding inside a sterile conference room at Google's headquarters.
    That's where the cunning internet entrepreneurs who constantly try to manipulate Google's search engine results for a competitive edge were trying to make the most of a rare opportunity to match wits face-to-face with the company's top engineers.
    Google's code-talking experts, despite putting on a show of being helpful, weren't about to reveal their "secret sauce" -- Google's tightly guarded formula for ranking websites.
    But that didn't zap the energy from the "Google Dance" -- an annual summer party that's become a metaphor for the behind-the-scenes twists and turns that can cause websites to rise and fall in Google's search results. For the millions of websites without a well-known domain name, those rankings can mean the difference between success or failure because Google's search engine drives so much of the internet's traffic.
    "Being on the first page of Google's results is like gold," said website consultant Gordon Liametz, one of the roughly 2,000 guests at this year's party, held earlier this month at Google's colorful corporate campus.
    The webmasters and their consultants paid particularly close attention to Google engineer Matt Cutts, the company's main liaison with the webmaster community and this party's star attraction.
    "That's the Mick Jagger of search!" exclaimed e-marketing strategist Seth Wilde as he strolled by Cutts and his audience of webmasters.
    Cutts, who has worked at Google for five years, sees it differently. "I feel more like the Rick Moranis of search because I end up dealing with so many quirky and weird cases," he said.
    With so much at stake, low-ranked websites spend much time and money trying to elevate their standing, even if they must resort to deception. The tactics include "keyword stuffing" -- peppering a web page with phrases associated with a specific topic such as "laptop computers" in hopes of duping the software "spiders" that troll the internet to feed Google's growing search index.
    It's a risky strategy because Google and other search engines penalize websites that get caught gratuitously repeating the same word. In the worst cases, the offending websites are deleted from the index so they don't show up in search results at all.
    Sometimes webmasters collude to populate their sites with a large number of incoming links from other sites. This approach makes a site appear more authoritative and popular than it really is and thus rise in rankings.
    Such dirty tricks pollute the search results with websites that have little to do with a user's request, frustrating consumers, diminishing Google's credibility and threatening to undermine the company's profits by driving users to its rivals.
    Not surprisingly, Google works hard to thwart the mischief makers, sometimes branded as "Black Hats" because of their subterfuge. Engineers frequently tweak the algorithms that determine the rankings, sometimes causing websites perched at the top to fall a few notches or, worse, even plunge to the back pages of the results.
    Google's reshuffling raised so many anxieties that webmasters in 2002 began to name the changes after hurricanes and infamous events. One particularly unpopular change Google rolled out in 2003 was dubbed "Florida" after the muddled ballot count in the 2000 presidential election.
    Hoping to ease the tensions with webmasters, Google hatched the idea of its "dance" party during an annual search engine convention held in Silicon Valley, just a few miles from Google's headquarters. The company invited some of the Black Hats, effectively welcoming the foxes into the hen house.
    "Google realized it was never going to get rid of these (Black Hats), so it decided it may as well work with them," Chris Winfield, a Google Dance party veteran who runs 1
  • Didn't many people request to restrict G news to just 4 a day.

  • If I were google (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    1. Identify search engine manipulators
    2. Invite them to a party
    3. Poison their drinks
    4. optional - Cut them open, staple their guts to their forheads, take pictures and send to their moms.
    5. Profit.

  • Clusty (Score:5, Interesting)

    by superpulpsicle ( 533373 ) on Sunday August 21, 2005 @11:15AM (#13366459)
    That's why I like www.clusty.com. Everyone is concerned about elevating their website so that they are the first page/topranking of Google's results. For example the word "RAM", is memory, animal and technically sex related.

    Clusty would have split into 3 separate cluster trees. In google it would just be out of balance.

    • And don't forget, automotive as in the trademark of one of the largest corporations in the world... Dodge.
      http://www.dodge.com/ram_truck/ram_truck_flash.ht m l [dodge.com]
      Hard to believe Diamler Chrysler couldn't get it in the top ten of a Google search for Ram.
      http://www.google.com/search?q=RAM&sourceid=mozill a-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client= firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official [google.com]
      One must wonder, now that computers are a home appliance for the masses, if the majorit

      • Re:Clusty (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Google is doing an inconsistent job lately of associating trademarks with their owner companies. I was looking into espresso machines a few days ago, and noticed that when I looked up "La Pavoni" on Google, the actual company website at lapavoni.com was nowhere to be found among the usual flood of reseller spam.

        It looks like the recent GoogleDance has corrected this particular problem, though, since it's now the first non-sponsored link. But I've seen the same problem before when trying to use Google to f

      • Re:Clusty (Score:5, Informative)

        by Paul Carver ( 4555 ) on Sunday August 21, 2005 @11:46AM (#13366555)
        I just searched Google for dodge ram and every single result related to Dodge Ram trucks. The official sites were at the top, including sponsered links, and there were lots of other relatated sites. Nothing non-truck related on the first page.

        Looks to me like Google functions flawlessly in this case. If a person can't be bothered to type dodge when it's a Dodge Ram they're looking for that sounds to me like PEBKAC.

        That would be like going to any of the mapping web sites and typing in your street name without city or state. Just dumb. Names get reused, deal with it, be specific.
        • guess what? a lot of people can't be bothered. they are the majority of users and most importantly, they are the majority of paying users.

          yes, a lot of users could use some lessons in using the search engine. but, no, it's not the right attitude for the SEs to sit on a high chair and demand users get smarter when users are the ones paying their bills.

        • Are you high? RTFP, he mentions NOTHING about trucks or Dodge.

          You can mod me down, but how does this reply get a "4" for Informative?
        • "Just Dumb. Deal With it"
          Uh, Ok.
          If a person can't be bothered to type dodge when it's a Dodge Ram they're looking for that sounds to me like PEBKAC.
          What if someone is looking up who makes a Ram, because they don't know the manufacturer. I hate to tell you this, but people who make a lot of money and have good products, realize that users aren't experts, and cater to them.
          • What if someone is looking up who makes a Ram, because they don't know the manufacturer.

            Luckily, a search for ram truck [google.com] also gets you the Dodge web site as the first result.

      • "Hard to believe Diamler Chrysler couldn't get it in the top ten of a Google search for Ram."

        It's not hard to believe at all - that's a stunning example of empathic myopeia.

        Walk up to ten people at random on the street and say "Ram. What am I talking about?".

        You'll get answers like "sheep", "computer memory", "to push" and "I don't know - what the fuck are you talking about". I guarantee not one person will say "an obscure model of truck made by Dodge".

        Jesus - even if they've ever heard of a Dodge Ram (wh
    • I find Dial doesn't dry my skin like Ivory soap...

      someone asked didn't they?

  • But... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BuddyJesus ( 835123 ) <forceoftheschmo@gmail . c om> on Sunday August 21, 2005 @11:16AM (#13366462) Homepage Journal
    What were the actual results of them going face to face? I mean, it's great to talk about all of that free beer and arcade games, but I think at the very least people here on slashdot would like to know how Google vs. Exploiters turned out.

  • Evil? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by codeshack ( 753630 ) on Sunday August 21, 2005 @11:18AM (#13366470)
    So apparently "don't be evil" doesn't explicitly prohibit consorting with evil, inviting evil over for cocktails, having a few drinks with evil and in a moment of passion revealing heretofore unknown details of PageRank... If Google's livelihood is contingent on destroying these people, I hope they put something in the fruit punch...

    • Re:Evil? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by SuperBanana ( 662181 )
      If Google's livelihood is contingent on destroying these people, I hope they put something in the fruit punch...

      More like they're trying to convert people to buy adspace, I suspect.

      Funny how they'll throw these people a kegger, but they won't answer emails from "small" webmasters like me. We've been using Google search for a couple of years, and we have almost a decade and a half worth of email archives. We're the oldest internet resource for owners of a certain brand of cars, and we are widely consid

      • They're about one install of htdig away from a big "fuck you" in the form of a complete block via robots.txt, a redirect on any hit with a google referral, etc.[1]

        [1] See also: cutting off your nose to spite your face.
    • Ummm...
      Keep your friends close,
      and your enemies closer?
    • keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

  • Say What? (Score:5, Informative)

    by hawkeye_82 ( 845771 ) on Sunday August 21, 2005 @11:18AM (#13366472) Journal
    What exactly is this article about?
    I mean, it reads like a random collection of thoughts about Google.
    IMO, not one iota of useful information.
    News for nerds? Very debatable.
    Stuff that matters? Certainly not.

    --
    hawkeye

  • At some point... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by confusion ( 14388 ) on Sunday August 21, 2005 @11:39AM (#13366536) Homepage
    ...does google's popularity start to wane? There's a growing sense of frustration with them, and I've found that many other search engines yield better results, so it is a matter of time before internet users at large start using something else?

    Granted, I think the reasons that their results are not good is that there are SO many of these black hats trying to pollute their index, so in a sense, they are falling victim to their own success.

    Jerry
    http://www.cyvin.org/ [cyvin.org]
    • Google's popularity is certainly not waning, their proportion of all searches went from 48% a year ago to 56% this year (for july at least), they're rolling out google earth, gmail, froogle, orkut, search history, video search, google maps, and a myriad of other services. Their only notable mistakes were
      a)the web accelerator debacle
      b)certain recent enhancements to their search algorithms which seem not to have affected the searches visibly.

      Google, as a public company, certainly cannot be 100% good. Their "d
    • Oh really? Name one. Prove it.

    • There's a growing sense of frustration with them, and I've found that many other search engines yield better results, so it is a matter of time before internet users at large start using something else?

      I find just the opposite.

      I don't really like gmail. I barely ever use froogle. I can't remember the last time I used Groups or the Directory. Maps is nice but it gives me completely wrong directions from time to time.

      The only reason I like google is because it's a very good search engine. All the other se

  • Pointless (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hexi ( 716384 ) on Sunday August 21, 2005 @11:57AM (#13366585)
    What is the point of the article? What is new in the article? Why is this on slashdot? What the hell?

  • You love it (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Of course this news post mattered, and you liked reading it. If you logged in this morning and there was no new news story, you would be upset. If there was a slew of interesting news that happened between last night and this morning, then this story would not have been posted. Because nothing happened, we get this. And I thank /. for giving me something to read with my morning coffee.

    If this story was so stupid, pointless, and a waste of time, then how would you describe your comments to it? When I get to

  • server troubles lately (Score:5, Funny)

    by supernova87a ( 532540 ) <kepler1@@@hotmail...com> on Sunday August 21, 2005 @12:04PM (#13366614)
    "Free-flowing beer, live music, karaoke and arcade games kept the party raging at the Googleplex the other night..."

    is that why gmail has been down for the last two days?
    • The google staff had a hangover the next day so the mail server was out of wack as well :)
    • It's been up for me. Just slow.

    • Re:server troubles lately (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A somewhat-related annecdote:

      Back in 1999 before the crash of the internet economy when everyone fully intended to be retired before the age of 40, I was working at one of the poster-children for the internet revolution. The day of the IPO, the lead sysadmin made some router changes intended to make it more difficult for persons outside the company network to access company servers. He ended up making a mistake that resulted in much of the production network being inaccessible from the office network.

      In a
  • Maybe with all the partying, that is why my adsense questions haven't been answered.
  • Wired doesn't have "stories" of their own any more, since they laid off all their reporters. This story is from the Associated Press. So don't link to Tired.
  • Google Mechs, Webmasters Tingle
    • Only if the party was revealed as a secret test of their new Google-branded bipedal weapons platforms, and they'd chased down and electrocuted all the SEOers with voltage-whips.

      If so I, for one, welcome out mech-riding electro-whip weilding Google overlords.
  • And here are the pictures of the Google Dance 2005: http://www.google.com/googledance2005/ [google.com]
  • If you don't like Google go to another website, but sooner or later you will realise that Google is god when it comes to internet search, despite Yahoo! claiming to be bigger.

    Why hate Google?
    Too Slow (unlikely),
    No results (people are constantly looking for a 1 resulted search GoogleWhack [googlewhack.com]),
    Bad GUI (it's clean and simple),
    No custom page layouts (check Google IG [google.com]).

    Come on people, Google has everything you need and more, why hate it?
  • well hey. thank you there /. editors for another article that really doesn't tell us anything. i'm enticed by the link you threw in there as well.

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