Last week while I attended AdTech in San Francisco, I had a few hours to zip down to Mountain View and get a tour of the main Google campus.  We met up with Eric Higgins, who is a longtime friend of Pear’s CTO, Vid Luther.  He and Eric worked together back in the early days of Network Solutions.  Eric was most gracious, answering just about any question we would ask, letting us take tons of photos (of common areas, of course), and spending nearly 3 hours with us.  Thanks to Eric for the amazing tour!

Yes, the food is free.

You may have heard that all employees of Google get free food.  This is most certainly true, and it is fantastic, healthy food.  There is cuisines from nearly ever Continent on the planet, including some of the best sushi and Indian food I’ve ever had.  We loaded up our trays (me and Wes Wilson from Upstack), but it was hard not to look like guests.  I suppose you can tell a guest from a regular employee, because we had 3 or 4 plates stacked up with so many different foods it made no sense at all.  What was cool was that each table in the cafeteria had a set of Lego blocks on them so people could brainstorm and play as they ate.  As we toured the campus, it seemed like every other turn there was a coffee station, Odwalla refrigerators stacked with the natural stuff, and they even had the “real Coke” – you know, the stuff that’s “echo en Mexico” and uses real sugar?  Yeah, that stuff is awesome.  Apparently there is breakfast, lunch and dinner served there daily, so no wonder no one wants to leave.  Evidently, Google pays roughly $55M per year to provide free food to their 10,000+ employees in the main campus.

The 20% rule

Another rumor you may have heard about Google is that they allow each employee to spend 20% of their time (that’s one day a week) working on something unrelated to their current projects or tasks.  In fact, not only is this true, but it is how several of Google’s 100+ products were developed.  It was how GMail was developed – people needed an easier way to do email.  What’s interesting, and inspiring about all of this, is that Eric admits that 90-95% of what the engineers/programmers will come up with is junk – it will never be commercialized.  But, they learned a whole lot in the process, and there is usually that 5-10% of the time where they just knock something out of the park.  The moral of the story here is that allowing your employees to stimulate their minds with other things can inadvertently inspire them to make what their working on a whole lot better.  We saw a lot of things around the campus that was built in this 20% free time, such as this real-time search monitor.  It continuously scrolls with random searches from all over the world in every language imaginable (someone wants  be “eloping in myrtle beach” soon).

Hours, Fun & fitness

As we walked about the campus, lots of folks were riding their bikes.  Some were playing a volleyball game in the center of the complex, as they offer a full workout gym free of charge to anyone who wants to use it.  Many people also bring their dogs to work, and we saw several.  The unwritten rule is that as long as your office mates are not allergic, and they are generally tame, anyone can bring their dog to work.  I think you can bring your kids too, but I didn’t see any there.  Most people start their day at Google between 10 and 10:30a.  There are no hard and fast rules on when you have to start or end your day, although some business units who have client related business have to start at normal business hours.  Since a lot of people commute from San Francisco via train or bus, it can take 40 minutes to 1 hour to get to the campus, hence the later starting times.  Many of the people leave around 7 or even 8pm, and many continue to work from home.  Check out the cool bikes they have.  It’s a 6-seater where 5 pedal and 1 steers….cool!  These folks really love their jobs:)

A Tour of Google is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools ad software company.

On Tuesday, Google released their SEO Report Card where they did an extensive evaluation of themselves in terms of search engine optimization. The result? Well, not so good. Even Business Insider agrees that Google fails to eat their own dog food by noting that only 10% of their own product pages conform to the proper title tag protocol. Even if you type in “search engine” into Google, they come up as the 5th result, and it’s not even google.com, but a different beta product. I wonder if that’s on purpose.

So if Google sucks at SEO, why do their other products rank #1 for so many search terms? Is Google using their own algorithm on their products, or are they overriding it when it’s convenient?

Search for “apps.” Google Apps is the top listing, not Apple.

Search for “documents.” Google Docs is the top listing, beating out several government related sites.

Search for “video.” The number one position? Google Video. Who the hell uses that anymore? And where is the Google-owned YouTube? Maybe again, this is on purpose.

So, is it possible that Google is purposely not listing themselves on keywords such as “search engine” and “video” to deter attention, and then quietly ranking themselves number one for all of their other products? Sure it is. The search giant, according to HitsLink who publishes search engine market share data, is still commanding an 86% market share for search, and are clearly using the “freemium” model to get high adoption rates on their free products so you’ll eventually buy their advertising – their cash cow. Compare that to Bing’s 3.4% market share despite the millions they’ve been spending in advertising. Nobody seemed to switch overnight from Google to Bing.

Nevertheless, the Google SEO Report Card gives insight into what the search engine thinks is important. Here are a few highlights:

1. Google does not consider the meta description for rankings. It is purely for humans to read what the page is about, so you should write those to grab attention, not to rank higher. (Although, we still see the search keyword highlighted in SERP, so we’re not totally convinced it’s worthless).

2. Google finally says how site links are determined. Ever notice those listings that have links to the site under the title and description? They say that using a hierarchial site structure, descriptive anchor text and avoiding deep nesting of content behind many sub-directories will get you there.

3. Clearly, duplicate content is an issue. In the report, they stress the importance of using the rel=”canonical” attribute to determine the preferred page. They prefer that you consolidate your non-canonical versions and 301 direct them to the canonical version. Of course, that screws up your tracking in Analytics if you are creating multiple instances of a page for marketing – it won’t track visitors on a page before the 301 redirect.

Even Google Sucks at SEO is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools ad software company.

Microsoft released it’s new search engine yesterday called Bing.  There is no doubt that with the original MSN, then search.live.com, and now this, that Microsoft has had their share of identity crisis over the years.

According to last week’s article on TechCrunch, their search algorithm is supposed to be “an order of magnitude” greater than the last engine.  When you do a search for “costa rica” for example, you get a similar layout to Google with sponsored links across the top and side and organic listings underneath, but there is more.  There is a side column on the left (the layout changes depending on topic) with Related Searches and your Search History.  Under the organic listings, it begins to further breakout more semantically related terms such as “costa rica map”, “costa rica vacations”, “costa rica weather” and more, and then finally concludes the page with Images and Video.  You end up getting a lot more on the page than the typical 10 results that Google returns.  Therefore, there is less paging through 3-5 pages trying to find what you want.

Comparison: Microsoft Bing vs. Google

I wanted to do a quick comparison between Bing and Google for a less “sexy” term, but one that is near and dear to our hearts:) – “free seo analysis”

Here is what the Bing search results page looks like:

Looks very similar to a Google results page with 10 results, some space for sponsored links, but includes a “related searches” section over on the left column.  This could be useful not only to a user, but also to an SEO as we now know the other terms that the search engine is categorizing, so we can optimize for these terms as well.

Here is what the Google search result page looks like for the same term:

Similar layout, but totally different results, which you may expect.  Only 40% of the listings are common between the two search engines, with the other 60% of the listing being completely different between the two.

While our Website Analyzer tool ranks 5th in Bing, beating out Hubspot’s Website Grader, we are nowhere to be found on Google until page 2, position 7.  And then SEOmoz, a highly reputable and popular SEO site gets a high #4 position on Google, and nothing on Bing.

So it begs the question, do we “over-optimize” for Google?  Bing is getting a lot of attention, and Microsoft is reportedly dumping $100M into an ad campaign to promote it – will Google lose their prestigious title as the dominant search engine, or is this simply a bunch of hype?

Time will tell, and so will my traffic numbers

Microsoft Bing: Will This New Search Engine Outperform Google? is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools ad software company.