Category: Columns

Matt is the man who the SEO/SEM world looks to for answers around most things Google related. Over the past month Melanie and I have been having a wide-ranging email exchange with him on spam, the role of humans at Google, and other things. Here’s the result:

Let’s say you decide to leave Google and are asked to write an exact job description for a replacement to do exactly what you do now. What does it say? (We told Matt to be honest, or his options will not vest!)

My official job is to direct the webspam team at Google. Webspam is essentially when someone tries to trick a search engine into ranking higher than they should. A few people will try almost anything, up to and including the mythical GooglePray meta tag, to rank higher. Our team attempts to help high-quality sites while preventing deceptive techniques from working.

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A while back I posted a note asking you all who you’d like to see interviewed here on Searchblog. The top vote getter was Bill Gross, of Goto/Overture, Picasa, Knowledge Adventure, and Snap fame. (He also starred in Chapter 5 of my book). Bill was gracious enough to agree to an email interview, and even more gracious to agree to answer some of your questions in the comments section, when time permits.

As those of who who’ve read The Search know, I’m a fan of Bill and his work. From Chapter 5:

By his own account, Gross has been starting companies since he was

thirteen. His problem was never ideas. No, he, in fact, has way too

many of those. His problem was scale—how could he possibly start

companies as quickly as he could dream them up?

Gross started in a linear fashion, building companies one at a

time. He’d grow them till he got bored or distracted (or both); then

he’d sell them. He funded his first year of college by selling solar en-

ergy conversion kits through ads in the back of Popular Mechanics.

While still an undergraduate (at the California Institute of Technol-

ogy in Pasadena), Gross hacked up a new high-fidelity speaker de-

sign and launched GNP, Inc., to sell his creations (GNP stood for

Gross National Products—an indication of Gross’s sense of humor

as well as an underdeveloped sense of modesty).

But Gross had reason to boast: GNP, Inc., grew to claim number

seventy-five on Inc. magazine’s 1985 list of the 500 Fastest-Growing

Companies. When he graduated, he sold the speaker business to his

college partners and started a software company that presaged much

of the rest of his life’s work. The company, GNP Development, al-

lowed computer users to type natural language commands that the

computer would translate into the arcane code needed to execute spe-

cific tasks. In other words, Gross’s company created a program that

in essence let you “talk” to the computer in plain English, as opposed

to computer code. Gross’s program was a small step toward Silver-

stein’s Star Trekinterface (as discussed in Chapter 1)—the holy grail

of nearly everyone in search today.



Searchblog: You’ve had tremendous success over your career, and in particular with search (Magellan, Goto/Overture, Picasa, etc.). But the world has woken up to search – and Google seems to gain market share monthly. Yet you are trying to once again take on the world with Snap. What makes you feel like there’s still an opportunity there?



Grosss: I’ve always thought that search is extremely important, but my interest in it has always been very personal in that I’ve always been trying to make things that “I” would really want. With Magellan, I wanted to be able to view my files faster than DOS allowed back then. With Goto, I wanted a way to remove the spam at that time from the Top 10 listings at the search results I was seeing. The pay model seemed like the best way to do it, and although ridiculed at first, really took off. And then again with Picasa, we really wanted a way to browse and organize our photos better than the PC-based tools allowed at that time.

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My interview with AOL’s Jonathan Miller is up now on CNN/B2.0.

Excerpts:

..it’s true that too much of our innovation was locked behind the subscriber wall. It was less than a year ago that AOL moved out onto the Web, launching AOL.com, which is such a good broadband portal that our friends at Yahoo (Charts) have redesigned their homepage to look a whole lot like it.

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I’m still not used to the idea that my stuff at Business 2.0 is not behind a paywall. But it ain’t. Here’s my interview with Ray Ozzie. From it:

When the deal went down, people wondered, Was it Groove that was getting acquired, or was it Ray Ozzie?



The answer’s “Yes.”

At such a big company, there’s so much to tackle. What did you do first?



The first few months I spent doing what anyone who sells a company should do – make sure the acquiring party doesn’t screw up the acquisition. Fortunately the culture that we had built at Groove matched the Microsoft Office development culture, and Groove will be part of Office moving forward. After a few months, I started spending a lot more time in Redmond. Before doing anything, I just wanted to get to know people and understand the map of projects. It’s very broad. Every organization is the product of its leaders and its culture and the negative and positive things that have happened to it over time. So I tried to just learn from people there.

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This is from my Biz 2 column, which just posted on CNNMoney.

From it:

So you’ve left Yahoo, with thousands of employees, to run a company with–how many people?



“There’s five of us.”

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You may recall my interview with Gary Flake, which ran earlier this month. I titled that “A Frank Interview With…” and mentioned that it would be one of a series, and just to show I’m not slacking off, here’s the second edition.

This time our victim is Jim Lanzone, Senior Vice President & General Manager of Ask.com. I’ve known Jim for quite a while, and always appreciated his passion for defending, well, the underdog. Read on to see what I mean…..

Google recently acknowledged that it finds the approach Ask has taken with Zoom at least worthy of a hire. What do you make of that?

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Today marks the first of what I hope will become a regular series of Q&A interviews on Searchblog. The format is simple – I send an opening question to the luminary in question via email, they respond, and we go from there. First up is Gary Flake, a veteran of Overture, Yahoo and now Microsoft’s vaunted research labs (he’s founder and director of the new “Live Labs.”) Gary and I have known each other since I first began work on the book, and he’s always had a refreshingly frank outlook. I expected that to be tempered by a year at the world’s largest (and oft-criticized) software company, but I was wrong. If anything, Gary has become more outspoken. I’ve bolded the really juicy bits, but see for yourself….

You’ve been at Microsoft for nearly a year now. Are you satisfied with the pace of development on the core search product?

Broadly speaking, yes, but there is always room for improvement. We’ve been laying a foundation for the past year, trying to solve the hardest problems first. Frankly, we’ve left some low-lying fruit hanging on the vine, so to speak. On the good side, we have a rock-solid 64-bit backend architecture (probably the only one in the industry) that can scale almost indefinitely on multiple dimensions. Our relevance framework, built with machine learning technology from Microsoft Research, is now picking up steam and is getting close to parity with the competition. We even have some real product differentiation that we’ve just launched with virtual earth maps, search macros, and the image search experience. But to be honest, we pretty much blew it with the GUI for the past year. Why? There’s no good reason, really. The truth is we’ve had so much going on over the past year that it was simply more fun to focus on the core issues first, which is a mistake typical of engineers. I think the whole industry has been in a bit of a rut with respect to the user experience, and we are more guilty than most, but the good news is that there is a lot of room for improvement and we are now in pretty good shape to experiment more.

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Way back in 2002, Josh Quittner, who is a pal and also the Editor of Business 2.0, took a risk on a down-and-out dot-com publishing exec and contracted me to write a column for his magazine, the only one left after the Standard and its ilk bit the dust. But when I got the Time Inc. contract (B2’s owners,) I was bereft. I had an issue with the fact that what I wrote would be behind AOL/TW’s paywall. So I requested, nice as pie, that I be able to post my columns here, on this site. Josh agreed, and the rest is history.

Well, all that’s moot now. CNNMoney is picking up my column, and all of B2 for that matter, and it’s all free.

Here’s everything I ever wrote for Josh!



Enjoy, I sure as heck will!