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Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

neat fun stuff

Chrome support for GreasemonkeyToday

Back in December, I happened to click on a Greasemonkey script in Chrome and was shocked that it just worked. At the time, I wrote a note within Google that said

Whoa. I just clicked on a Greasemonkey script in the latest dev version of Chrome (4.0.266.0 on Linux). Chrome offered to install the GM script, so I said okay. The script ran perfectly in Chrome with no changes at all! I don’t know how many Greasemonkey scripts will run in Chrome unchanged, but at least some will.

Last week brought that news as an official announcement. My guess is that scripts that don’t use specific Greasemonkey APIs should be fine.

(Side-note: I found a good post from November that claims that ~60% of Greasemonkey scripts don’t use any sort of special API calls at all. The top API calls appear to be GM_getValue and GM_setValue (16.5% of Greasemonkey scripts), plus GM_xmlhttpRequest (15.5% of Greasemonkey scripts). It’s unclear which of these functions might be worth supporting. Some could have security implications (GM_xmlhttpRequest). Others like the get/setValue functions could be done by using other ways to store data.)

So this is cool. There’s a good chance that your favorite Greasemonkey script might just work in Chrome. Personally, I

Improving Arabic searches and talking more about rankingFebruary 2

Moustafa Hammad and Mohamed Elhawary, a couple engineers in our search quality group, just did a nice post about improving Arabic language searches:

Our algorithm employs rules of Arabic spelling and grammar along with signals from historical search data to decide when to leave out spaces between words or when to remove unnecessarily repeated letters. Now, when you type a query leaving out spaces or repeating a letter, we’ll return better results based not only on what you typed, but also on what our algorithm understands is the “correct” query.

There’s a few nice things about this post besides the direct improvement on Arabic language searches. For one, this post joins other recent posts that pull back a little bit of the curtain on the 400+ ranking changes that we make every year. I hope that we keep doing these posts.

Another nice thing is that the post talks about the impact of the improvement (10% of Arabic language queries are affected by this change). For the recent blog post about how Google uses synonyms in ranking, Steven Baker me

Installing Android development environment on Ubuntu 9.04January 30

I wanted to play with writing Android apps on my home Linux computer, which is currently running Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). These are mostly notes for myself, so don’t feel guilty if you skip this post.

- Make sure your system is up-to-date:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

- Install Java

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

- Switch Sun to be the default version of Java. It’s much faster than the built-in version, at least when I tried it.

sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

- Make a directory, e.g. mkdir ~/android

- Download Eclipse from http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/ (I chose the “Eclipse Classic 3.5.1″ version). Move the code into that directory, then unpack it. Unpacking is enough–the software runs in place and doesn’t have to be installed onto the system other than unpacking it.

mv eclipse-SDK-3.5.1-linux-gtk.tar.gz ~/android
cd ~/android
tar xzvf eclipse-SDK-3.5.1-linux-gtk.tar.gz

- Download the latest Android SDK from http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html and move it into that directory, then unpack it. I believe unpacking is enough–the software runs in place and doesn’t h

Keep an eye on changing pagesJanuary 25

Google just launched a nice feature on Google Reader: the ability to keep an eye on pages for changes. This works even if the page doesn’t have its own RSS feed. This sort of thing is very handy. You could use it to spot new things on a privacy policy page or watch for changes in the executives page at another search engine.

Check out the blog post, but it’s easy to use: just add any url to Google Reader.

PubCon 2009 talk: State of the IndexJanuary 22

If you followed @googlewmc on Twitter you would already know about this, but I recently recreated my “State of the Index” talk from PubCon in November 2009. Here’s the video of the talk below:

And here are the slides if you’d like to follow along:

The talk is almost half an hour, so I hope you enjoy it and learn something new!