Posts tagged Interview
Interview Andy Chu, Director at Bing for Mobile
Mar 14th
Next week, SES New York will be taking place (March 19th – 23rd), and in the run-up to the event, I was digging around the list of exhibitors, because even though I won’t be able to attend, I like keeping an eye on these things – it can be a great gauge of the direction [...]
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Interview with Guest Blogger – Ann Smarty
Mar 1st
The SEO sphere always talks about modern ways of building quality links that are pointing back to the website. People use multiple techniques that help them build the authority of your website and at the same time it helps them get a quick boost in SERPs. Few of the top highlighted modern (high quality) link [...]
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[Interview] Changing Engines Mid-Flight: Q&A with Google Fellow Ben Gomes
Feb 29th
Last week, I talked to Google Search lead designer Jon Wiley about the process of designing Google’s iconic interface. What goes on behind that white box? For the second part of my interview series with the people who make Google Search, I talked to Google Fellow Ben Gomes. He’s one of the elite engineers addressing the never-ending array of challenges we users pose by asking ever-more-complicated questions of Google.
The first time I spoke to Ben, he was introducing me to a brand new Google concept called Search, plus Your World. This time, we were able to delve much deeper into the fundamentals of Web search. Computing power at Google’s scale is awesome to behold, and I asked Ben to take us along for a search query’s ride one step at a time.
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The Index
ReadWriteWeb: Where does search begin?
Ben Gomes: The journey of a query begins well before the user has typed in the query or even thought about the query. The first step of that journey is crawling and indexing the Web’s content.
We fetch tens to hundreds of billions of pages. When I first got here [in 1999], it was about 50 million pages, and that was the biggest index then. It’s hard to imagine, but it’s three orders of magnitude bigger today. We’re used to this sort of growth in the tech world, I suppose, but three orders of magnitude is still a heck of a lot.
We’re really quickly crawling the content that’s changing fast. The content that doesn’t change as fast, we don’t crawl as often. And then, we’ve gotten really good at bringing that data from the Web to the user in a very short period of time.
When I joined Google, it would take us about a month to crawl and build an index of about 50 million pages. Today, with real-time search, that can happen in some cases in less than a minute.
It’s like the index in the back of a book, but because its so large, it’s a lot more complex than that. You can think of it like this: Suppose you had to assemble a whole bunch of widgets from parts, and you have to do this repeatedly in the course of a day. What you would do before that is set those parts up optimally, so that you could assemble those widgets as quickly as possible when the time came.
“It’s providing you with that intimate feedback loop that allows you to understand what the Web is saying.”
Building an index is kind of like that. We have to set it up in such a way that it’s very quick for you to actually construct the result page at the moment the user asks for it. So, you type in the query “49ers,” and within a fraction of a second, you get back the search result page that says, “We found 52 million pages that matched, and here’s the top 10, and here’s another thousand.” That’s sort of the brawn of the whole system.
The Query
RWW: So what’s the brain behind the system?
BG: Ranking is the brain behind the system. What it does is, it looks at over 200 signals to determine which are the most relevant pages to your particular query. So as the user starts typing in the query, what happens? As you start typing, you notice auto-completions. These are predictions of what you might want to type. And with Google Instant, we begin to provide you with actual results right then. This is enabling you to formulate your query on the fly.
So you start typing “owl,” and in your mind “owl” is about the bird. But it turns out “owl” also refers to [the Online Writing Lab] at Purdue, it refers to other things on the Web that people talk about when they use the word “owl.” So you [finish] typing “owl bird,” and then you get what you want.
Google Instant enables you to formulate a better query by letting you see the results even as you’re typing. It’s providing you with that intimate feedback loop that allows you to understand what the Web is saying.
Understanding The Query
The scale of Google search:
- On average, a Google search query travels 750 miles each way, to and from the data center.
- 16 to 20% of queries that get asked every day have never been asked before.
- Google has answered 450 billion unique queries since 2003.
RWW: How does Google begin to understand the query?
BG: The query is sent back to Google through the Internet. Typically, this is a journey of over 750 miles in either direction. We have data centers all over the world, but, on average, your query travels about 1,500 miles.
Behind that, all this work we’ve done setting up the index now comes into play. We parse the query, we understand what your intent was, we [may] personalize the results, and then we send it off to our giant index and get back the top results for your query.
In addition to the results themselves, we need to create the presentation of those results, the titles and what we call the “snippets,” the two lines of text that you see. In order to do this, we look at the copy of the Web that we keep and find the most relevant parts of every page, bring up those two most relevant lines for your query and show those to you for each result.
This is also an enormous amount of computation. It’s going from the few words that you typed in to the result pages that we found, to find where on those pages is the text most relevant to your query.
In the case of Instant, we’re doing that as you’re typing, so the whole process is compounded. So this complex process of ranking is happening in the middle of your typing. If we did this naïvely, we’d be ranking almost 20 sets of results for every query you type, but we are more sophisticated about it. We do a lot of caching and so on.
Then, at the end of that, you get back this beautifully presented result page.
Overall, we put a huge amount of effort into speeding up the connection between your brain and that information you’re seeking.
Personalization
RWW: How do searches get personalized for the user?
It actually happens at every stage of the pipeline. When you start typing your query, if you’re signed in, the auto-completions will prefer queries that you’ve typed in before. If you’re in a given metro area, we will prefer queries that make sense to you in that metro area.
The second level it happens at is, when we process your query, we also take into account your Web history and so on in order to guess at your intent. During ranking, the process of actually looking at the documents, we also take into account personal signals that make sense for you, and when we search for your personal content in Search, plus Your World, we take into account your personal signals over there.
Finally, when we have the full set of results assembled, we then customize them for you.
So personalization of your results is deeply embedded right through the search process. Some of that is giving you the right context for things like date and place, and some of it is personalization based on your previous queries and so on.
Next page: How Google Search Changes Over Time
An Interview with Jordan Kasteler About His New Social Media Marketing Book
Feb 22nd
Jordan Kasteler has had quite the career. He was the Senior SEO Analyst at Overstock.com, a co-founder of Search and Social, the SVP of Content Development / Managing Partner of BlueGlass Interactive, Inc. the CMO at Steelcast and is now the Online Marketing Strategist at PETA. Jordan is extremely smart and has built a very [...]
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[Interview] Don’t Break Search: Q&A with Google Lead Designer Jon Wiley
Feb 20th
The design of the search page on Google.com is one of the most iconic in the Web’s history, but it’s in the midst of major changes. Google has redefined itself with Google+. Its notion of Web search as an index of pages has grown to include people, places and things. In addition to the search box, the page now has a share box. It takes great design to introduce all these new features and interactions to Google’s hundreds of millions of users.
At the same time, smartphones and tablets are changing the way users interact with the Web, and Google has to make that leap along with them. It has to strike a delicate balance between simplicity, consistency and usefulness. Fortunately, Google’s hundreds of millions of users provide mountains of data its designers can use to guide their decisions. I sat down with Jon Wiley, lead designer of Google Search since 2007, to learn more about how Google pushes its user experience forward.
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ReadWriteWeb: What was your first project at Google?
Jon Wiley: [T]he redesign that launched in early 2010. It introduced some of the additional tools for refining and filtering, and we launched a number of changes that simplified the results page.
Over time, we’ve also worked on a number of features and interactions, particularly Instant. Instant is probably one of the best examples of extreme power having to boil down to simplicity.
RWW: How much of that is on you as the designer, and how much of it is engineering? What’s the process for bringing a Google Search product or feature to life?
JW: We have a saying, which is “Don’t break search.” If you think about Instant, the basics of what you do in terms of searching on Google still work. You go to Google, you begin issuing a question or a query, you see whether or not you’re getting the results you’re looking for, and you make decisions about that.
That basic experience continues to exist. The difference is that we’ve made it a lot faster.
“When you do something wrong, people notice it, and they remember it. When you get it right, you’re fitting in with their expectations.”
We do a lot of user research, and we run a lot of experiments. The user research spans a pretty big spectrum. On the one hand, there’s a lot of generative, evaluative research. We go out into the field, talking to people, figuring out what kinds of questions they have about their world. What are things they want to know that we could provide as a search experience?
We [also] have research labs here on campus, and we invite users to come in and use the product. That’s much more qualitative research. Are we actually solving the user’s problem?
In the case of Instant, it was actually really interesting. When we were building the demos and walking through the process, a lot of people were really concerned about it. If you think about it, you start typing your query and suddenly the page changes. As fast as it was in terms of speeding up the conversation you have with the search results, we worried it was going to be distracting.
But it was actually really surprising. When we brought users in – and we just let them use the product; we didn’t really say anything about it – they would use Google search with Instant turned on, and after a moment, we would say, “Okay, well, tell us about your experience,” and they would say, “Well, I dunno, it’s Google.”
RWW: Users notice slow. They don’t notice fast.
JW: Exactly. When you do something wrong, people notice it, and they remember it. When you get it right, you’re fitting in with their expectations.
New Kinds of Questions & Answers
RWW: How does a product decision make its way into the design process?
It varies quite a bit. Sometimes new features or product directions can come from within the design team. This gets back to what I mentioned about our more exploratory research, generative research. We might go out in the field and just talk to users and figure out what kinds of problems they might have.
For instance, we did a study last year talking to people about questions they might have around medical issues. Medical queries [are] a really interesting space because there’s a high incentive to learn a lot of information. There’s a lot of judgment that has to happen in terms of the relevancy and quality of the content you can read on the Internet.
“We’re always continuously surprised by the kinds of questions people are asking and the kinds of answers they expect from Google search.”
There’s an understanding issue, there’s all these issues around… [the user's] awareness of this particular topic.
There’s some social issues at work. I might be doing the research for a family member or a friend.
We try to identify ways in which we can better support the users with these types of information. Maybe there’s a gap where they’re trying lots of different tools, or they’re not aware of tools that are available them in terms of search. So we try to figure out ways… to make a better tool here or make it more discoverable.
From a design perspective, we can take all that research and start telling stories. From there, we can talk to engineers and product managers and work together to create a solution, and then again it goes through that iterative process.
It can also come from other parts of Google. In engineering, they can come up with lots of interesting ways of looking at information. The ranking engineers and search quality engineers are looking at the sessions, they’re looking at where people are having a bad experience or the ranking could be better, and a lot of times, there might be an algorithmic solution there. But sometimes there’s a design solution. There’s something you have to do in order to communicate to users, “Here’s a better path for you.”
For instance, the auto-completions or predictions that we have as you type, we actually had that well before we had Instant. There’s a lot of algorithmic power that drives it. And there’s a lot of ways we can represent that to users in the UI. That’s where we partner up [with engineers] to create an experience that’s going to be simple and easy to use.
“I think of search as a conversation. Our users come to Google, and they ask questions, and Google has to respond. There’s a dialogue that happens there, and hopefully that dialogue turns into an answer.”
A lot of times, engineering might come with prototypes that express the idea that they have – “Problem, solution. Here it is.” – but it’s not always presented in a way that’s intuitive. So we partner with them to create something that is simple, intuitive and beautiful as well.
I think of search as a conversation. Our users come to Google, and they ask questions, and Google has to respond. There’s a dialogue that happens there, and hopefully that dialogue turns into an answer.
Next page: How Google Designed Search, plus Your World
[Interview] How Zynga Is Transforming Games With HTML5
Feb 10th
Social gaming platform Zynga takes a lot of flak for its overbearing management practices and obsession with metrics over user experience. While those rumors may or may not be true, there is more to Zynga than calculating sessions lengths and daily average users. In fact, Zynga’s Germany branch is one of the global leaders in HTML5 development and creating dynamic mobile Web games. We chatted with Zynga Germany CTO Paul Bakaus about how Zynga approaches HTML5, what are the limitations of the spec and if we will ever see a Facebook app store.
Zynga has a variety of open source HTML5 projects in GitHub along with several new HTML5 game releases, including Words With Friends and Zynga Poker Mobile Web. As many Web-based game developers will tell you, those are not easy to create. See below for our interview with Bakaus and what Zynga is doing to move the HTML5 spec and ecosystem forward.
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One of the things that I don’t recommend doing right now because it is just a matter of market share is going for WebGL. So, actual 3-D games have proved complicated at this point and it is also because the WebGL spec isn’t completely reading for consumption at this point, I think. Other than that I think today, even though there are some rough edges with the HTML5 spec because it wasn’t really created with games in mind, I think it is the right time now to start doing games. I don’t think anyone should stop building games right now or being kept up by people who say HTML5 is not ready.
Zynga’s HTML5 Products
There are now four HTML5-based Zynga games on the market: Words With Friends, FarmVille Express, Zynga Poker Mobile Web and CityVille Express. These games deliver load times comparable to native apps and, “utilize HTML5 tools such as WebSockets and CSS3 to deliver a seamless gaming experience and create fluid animations without slowing down game-play,” according to the company.
But there is more to Zynga’s contributions to HTML5 than just games. Its open source repository includes the Zynga Jukebox that helps game developers deal with the multi-layer audio limitations of HTML5 along with the Zynga Viewporter that has an essence of responsive design to it, fitting apps to the browsers they are in. One of the biggest problems, as Bakaus describes below, in HTML5 is seamless scrolling. The Zynga Scroller aims to eliminate that problem. Everybody talks about the great native scrolling in apps like Path. Bakaus hopes to give HTML5 the same capability.
Check out our interview with Bakaus below.
On background
A little bit about my background. I’m actually a developer myself. I started as a UI developer and back then we specialized in JavaScriot and UI and many years ago I joined the jQuery team, one of my first gigs, and became the creator of jQuery UI. So back then John Resig asked me if I could build the UI for jQuery. Started jQuery UI got a lot of notice from jQuery UI and started learning how JavaScript works and how people use elements on the Web and how to drive it with a reasonable performance. I then moved on to consumer projects in Japan to transform Flash applications to JavaScript and finally I started Dextrose in 2010 with a friend of mine for the purpose of creating HTML5 games.
Back then we were looking for the creation of a full blown HTML5 game community and realized that the tech was there but it wasn’t any shared tech build so we started building an HTML5 engine prototype that was called Aves Engine that would really show the world what we could do with HTML5. We put up YouTube videos and I was talking at conferences about it and really made a lot of impact back then as really the first (tie)-based HTML5 engine that would show what they Web could still offer in the future.
Later that year Zynga acquired us to work on the full blown product. So, we threw away our prototype and started from scratch for the real solution for game systems to use. So, now when we are in a place where we have built up our development studio here in Germany that focuses on delivering HTML5 tech for the whole company and we are producing tech of the future here. It is a lot of research and a lot of fun as well.
A lot of challenges of course but right now we are really at a point where we have a full blown engine. We started it in house and what we can do is super exciting and let’s hope that we can get out a lot of what we are doing here soon.
Zynga’s philosophy on HTML5
Every decision we make on tech is really to connect people through our games. So, we are really want to bring our games to anywhere our players are. I think there is not a conscious decision for one tech or another, it is really what can deliver the job best. At this point we really are looking at HTML5 to drive a lot of this because HTML5 gives us a lot of advantages that native and Flash programs just cannot give us. The cross-platform aspect of it, bringing the game to many people on different platforms is really what is killing it for us.
Also, usually you would have to port an existing game that runs on Web and native to smartphones and tablets and maybe something else as well. We don’t have to do with that HTML5 and that is super exciting.
Limitations of HTML5 for games
There are a couple of limitations, to be honest. There are certainly sound issues. Sound is still a trouble for many game devs. One of the things that I don’t recommend doing right now because it is just a matter of market share is going for WebGL. So, actual 3-D games have proved complicated at this point and it is also because the WebGL spec isn’t completely reading for consumption at this point, I think. Other than that I think today, even though there are some rough edges with the HTML5 spec because it wasn’t really created with games in mind, I think it is the right time now to start doing games. I don’t think anyone should stop building games right now or being kept up by people who say HTML5 is not ready. I think, you know, if you look back to the [1980s] when people were first creating games for the Atari and Commodore 64, we got so much less possibilities back then and people were really creative in creating games. There is so much more we can do already in HTML5 and I think the only thing left is developers jumping on it and trying not to be scared away. I think now is the time to build games.
What is keeping developers from embracing HTML5 right now?
I think there are a couple of reasons. One of them is for classical game engineers to jump on the open web stack might prove a little bit difficult because it is a completely different environment. Before, if you have been working on an XBox game for instance, there wouldn’t be any resolution difference or platform differences. There would be any cross platform code you would have to write. Writing a completely different code, not writing event-driven code like you would do with JavaScript. It is simply a very different mindset to start with.
Another big reason is that HTML5 wasn’t created with games in mind. HTML itself is really a presentational language originally meant to do documents. That is one of the things we are doing now as well, to actively work with the vendors in the W3C to work with game engineers and push for the spec in terms of game development. I think a lot of people are still scared by the fact that it is not a language that was created for game. I think that is mostly the reason.
Next page: Bakaus talks about the HTML5 ecosystem, is questioned on Zynga and/or Facebook app stores and when HTML5 games will hit an inflection point of popularity.
Exclusive: Interview With Inside Apple’s Adam Lashinsky [Video]
Feb 9th
On Friday, February 3, at the lovely Delancey St. Theater in San Francisco, ReadWriteWeb and our new home company, SAY Media, co-hosted a release party for Adam Lashinsky’s new book, Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired – And Secretive – Company Really Works. It was our first joint event since we joined SAY in December. RWW and SAY are working together to figure out the future of media, so a gathering to discuss a book about Apple was a great place to start.
Apple lives at the center of the worldwide technological transformation that’s underway, and Lashinsky’s new book sheds light on how the enigmatic company works. It profiles Apple’s leaders and their various styles and talents, it describes how the organization is woven around them, and it tells the stories of Apple insiders and outsiders at all levels.
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I got to sit down with Lashinsky for an interview about the book before MC David Richter opened it up to the whole audience. Our conversation touched on three aspects of Apple that tie the book together: the culture, the leaders and the products.
Lashinsky reveals many telling facts and anecdotes about Apple’s culture in the book. We discussed whether Apple’s obsession and perfectionism are creepy, and to what extent this is driven by the personalities of its leaders.
We considered the extreme secrecy imposed on Apple’s lower ranks and what effects that has on morale and the quality of work. We also thought about Apple’s unique sense of timing, taste and presentation that make it such a phenomenon in the culture at large.
Apple’s organization is centrally controlled by a closed group of leaders, and I asked Lashinsky about the importance of their personalities in the way the company operates. We discussed the extent to which Steve Jobs’ legacy shaped the culture and whether those shapes will hold after his passing.
Then we talked about Tim Cook’s new and starkly different style as CEO. Lashinsky has also referred to SVP of iOS Software Scott Forstall as a “CEO-in-waiting,” and the book points to the contrast between him and Cook as one of the upcoming dramas in Apple’s next chapter.
Finally, we looked at the products, the part of the company where Apple meets the public. We discussed the powerful influence of Jobs’ last products and how we’ll have to wait for the ones that come after him to see the real face of a post-Jobs Apple.
I found our conversation illuminating, and the whole evening was a lot of fun. Here’s the full video of my interview with Adam Lashinsky:
All photos and video by the excellent team at SAY Media
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How To Get Hired At A Top SEO Agency Part 4: What Not to Do in An Interview – Search Engine Journal
Feb 2nd
 Search Engine Journal |
How To Get Hired At A Top SEO Agency Part 4: What Not to Do in An Interview
Search Engine Journal The last question I asked our panel of SEO experts was “What is your best interview story Good, bad or funny?” Four of the five SEO experts told experiences of things that you should not do in an interview. This just shows how important it is to be … |
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Interview with Chris Winfield about BlueGlass LA
Feb 1st
As someone that has been to several BlueGlass events I have to say that the experience is extremely rewarding on many levels. The size of the conference gives you the ability to hang out with a small group of people for long periods of time. You not only get a chance to get to know [...]
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Interview with Ryan Jones: Big Brand SEO, Social Media & More
Jan 25th
Can You Tell Us About Your Current Job? I’m the Senior Search Strategist at Team Detroit. We’re a full service agency owned by WPP. I spend the majority of my time working on Ford, Lincoln and Ford’s other online properties. Our team deals with everything from high level strategy down to creating META data. In addition [...]
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