Wednesday 20 March 2013

Why did interflora get kicked off Google search rankings?


Here is a good question and answer from SXSW 2013 regarding why Interflora got kicked off the Google search ranking in advance of mothers day;


Question from David de Niese: UK there was a case regarding Interflora http://www.interflora.co.uk, where Google kicked Interflora off the search index, Interflora were probably responsible for that in some way as well, no doubt. But ultimately Matt was responsible for every mother in the UK not getting flowers for mothers day this year. What it does proof is that the algorithms that you use have a large material impact on every company in the world. How long do you think the work that you guys do will remain unregulated? 

Answer from Matt Cutts from Google: How long do I think the work we do will remain unregulated? That's an interesting question; I'm just a web spam guy, I'm not a lawyer, so let me prefix it with that. I've actually had the enjoyment of talking to regulators on both sides of the Atlantic, right, for FTC and EC. And so far that's gone relatively well. From our perspectives we try to make sure we run the search engine, we run google, just like you guys would run the search engine, like you would run Google if you were in charge. And so we have pretty clear guidelines like don't cloak, don't do sneaky javascript redirects, don't make doorways, don't buy links that pass page rank cos those violate FTC guidelines and the UK fair-trade guidelines and all that stuff. 

We force that on both small and large companies. But you don't always here about it because when we take action on large companies, we're not as more likely to talk about that as we don't always talk about it when we take action against a small company. So last week for example we and earlier this week we took action on 98,000 sites, that were all part of a link network. We don't feel the need to call those sites out, right. And we're probably not going to say this site did badly, this site didn't do badly.

But I'm actually kind of heartened that when people like the FTC come in, and look through 9 million documents then about how Google works, you know there was a great article by Tim Woo who was at the FTC and said the regulators were doing their job, they looked at what was going on, and apparently didn't find anything worth pursuing. For working at Google for 13 years I think we try to do a pretty principle job. So you know whether it's a big or small company, whether it's a site that sells flowers, or whether it's a mom or pop, we try an enforce our guidelines consistently. 

Sunday 17 March 2013

The Rules of Subtraction @ SXSW


"The world of business and commerce has never been more complex. We live in a constant state of stimulation and distraction. The choices and features we face daily are overwhelming. Living a “simple life” is no longer an option. The desire to tune out the noise is overpowering, driving users and consumers to seek experiences that address that desire.
Business success in this new age of excess everything demands the ability to design those experiences, through the mastery of a surprising new skill: Subtraction.
Enter The Laws of Subtraction.
Filled with examples drawn from industrial design, art, business, and science, this talk makes a compelling case for a new approach, one based on the paradoxical notion of gaining by taking away.
This talk outlines six simple rules for winning in the age of excess everything, and delivers a single yet powerful idea:
In business and in life, when you remove just the right things in just the right way, something very good happens."
My Notes
  • The session was not a book reading... rather a story
  • Working for a Japanese car company the author learnt a lot of these techniques
  • Showed an example of a E with whitespace to indicate the letter. Once you know what it is you can’t unshift your knowledge of it

  • Example of the Fedex arrow :-)

  • Example of the Sopranos ending, not an ending ... put clues in the episode as to what had happened in the ending. People re-watched the show a number of times. Then 3 endings came on the internet...
  • An example of a bicycle with a hole in the middle, being the leading most comfortable bicycle seat, rather than other manufacturers who have been adding more and more support, in contrast this company took away.
  • Given an example of a car - toyota - they wanted personalisation - $15K car, stripped down all the facilities and added as options
  • Added another $15k of options on it - all about what was added (what was left out)
  • Traffic intersections - removed all the traffic signs and signals at high traffic intersections in towns. Video given for the intersection - looked crazy. Completely “unambiguous and uncertain” Therefore people slow down and look at human beings. Twice traffic flow, accidents almost zero or at least cut in half.
  • Example of the Mona lisa - a lot of mystery about the smile... Somato - blurry, removed the distinct lines from around eyes and mouth ... and so each time you look at it the smile changes. 
  • Comic books, comicon, what makes comics so magical is not what is drawn... it’s in the gutter (the space between the panels). Takes two images and mashes them together, and generates what has happened in the space between - you make up the animation in your own mind.
  • iPhone 2007 magical ... implementation of this - big part misisng - the physical keyboard, most compelling part, big big hype. Usually meant lots of information and leaks. There was no advertising, or leaks or advertising. The radio silence, sparked the imagination of the world. By the time the iPhone went on sale, 20m had expressed desire to purchase - it has tipped. Limiting information fires the imagination.
  • OutBurger - drive through, 1947 it started, simple menu ... only about 4 things, and it’s still the same way. What’s not there, not is there. Secret menu!!!! 2-3 other items on the secret menu. E.g. flying dutchman, animal style or grilled cheese, etc....... ! Limiting of information and constraint of not changing menu.
  • Put in a policy that less work will make you more productive ... e.g. in a company stopped people working one evening. Breaks - not working, make you more progressive.
  • “stand still when the hippos charge” - if you run you will die. Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something.
  • The full slides can be found here: http://matthewemay.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/SXSW.pdf
  • The author is called Matthew May
  • Check out the book - Laws of Subtraction http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0071795618

Saturday 16 March 2013

Time capsule unrecognised volume error and not restarting

I tried backing up today and got a "unrecognised volume error" - that my disk had changed identity and a question whether I wanted to proceed to use the current disk. I chose yes but the backup failed.

So I tried powering off the Time Capsule as I thought that would resolve the issue. Only the time capsule rebooted with an orange light and was making strange clicking noises. I left this for 10 minutes but it still didn't reboot. And there was no connection to the Time Capsule through Airport Utility and no wifi.

So I thought I'd give it another reboot, this time it seemed to get further as after 5 minutes it was making some loading sounds then it stopped making noise and was still on orange, with no Airport Utility connection or wifi.

At this point I googled for the issue and there were lots of reports of Time Capsules dying without any kind of solution.

I was now thinking I may need to buy a new Time Capsule. But before doing that I thought I'd ask Apple Care for assistance. On the website I put in a problem with backing up on my MacBookPro (which has Apple Care) and I was able to get them to call me immediately.

Initially the support analyst asked me to do a software update on my Mac, then I explained I had rebooted the Time Capsule and it was showing an orange light (and I had no wifi), he then said we need to fix that issue first. Then the support analyst instructed me how to do a reset/reboot by pressing in a small button at the rear of the Time Capsule (I didn't know about this!). Unfortunately after several attempts that didn't seem to do anything - it was meant to make the light start flashing.

Anyway the next step was to unplug the Time Capsule and leave for 10 seconds and plug it in again. Miraculously the Time Capsule started flashing an orange light, making booting sounds and then it went green. I checked the computer and there was wifi and the Airport Utility could talk to the Time Capsule. I then kicked off a backup and this time it worked.

Thank you Apple Care!

Sunday 10 March 2013

The Making of Doom at SXSW 2013

The intro;


"Few games can match the ubiquity and legacy of Doom, the seminal first-person shooter that ushered in thousands of mods, clones, and successors. Nearly every significant FPS, from Resistance to Half-Life, Call of Duty to Halo, owes its success in part to the Id Software game. Programmer, Game Designer, Level Designer and Doom II final boss John Romero will deliver a postmortem on the game showing never-before-seen material, memorializing its immersive but nerve-wracking 3D environments, networked multiplayer deathmatches, Satanic imagery and themes, Barney WADs, exploding barrels, and BFG 9000. Romero was a co-founder of id Software, among other companies, and also worked on other significant shooters like Wolfenstein 3D and Quake...."



Presented by John Romero

What a wonderful treat, the charismatic creator of Doom and Wolfenstein 3D gave an hour's presentation on the journey to produce the game. From the evolution of earlier games, such as building an earlier game for the difficult to programme EGA to Wolfenstein 3D through to the development of the amazing (for the time 3D engine) and realisation what they could do with it.



They were playing a lot of dungeons and dragons at the time, and really wanted to create something with demons in it - which was a big inspiration for Doom. The 3D engine they developed allowed more complex environments to be created with exterior and interior, and large rooms with variable height ceilings, and non-orthogonal walls. John tells of the guy that was producing level designs initially was developing levels that looked like Wolfenstein - and an early tech demo video showed how it was looking at that point, then he was instructed to build some military looking buildings / levels but these were really boring, so John experimented with creating something much more interesting. Another really cool aspect of the engine was the lighting, and ability to get shadows to fade out the environment in the distance.



Earlier demos show how the environments and level design was developing, and they showed some of the levels with the enemy characters without AI. The UI around the game window went through many iterations, a lot of the detail was dropped. The bobbing of the gun came in which looks cool. One of the creators modelled the shot gun reload on themselves. The chainsaw was a broken chainsaw borrowed off one of their girl friends, the shotgun was a toy bought from Toys r Us! The characters were designed by a wonderful artist, initially in clay - but these were found to melt under the light, so they moved to latex and plastic. They used a Lazy-susan to rotate the characters and record them into the computer.



They talked some what about the Apple pre-cursor computer the Next - and on one of these they spent $11K! I didn't quite follow how this was used in the development... initially they were just using the hints information, but I understand they developed a lot of the graphics on this. They developed the Doom bible which was lost, but they managed to recover a copy and re-digitise it.


The day before launch there was a big press gathering around congress with complaints that video games are too violent and the next day they released Doom!



During the launch they uploaded to a university's servers which made them crash several times due to user load, and before launch they were heavily spammed on usenet from angry gamers awaiting it's launch, as the makers held back the launch due to a critical bug which they had to resolve. Basically the game over-clocked the computer somehow - I didn't quite follow this, but the tick should have been 8 times a second, and they increased this to 100 times a second, to enable them to do all the music and the animation and creating of a high frame rate. Anyway they were setting a value to FFF, and it was trying to increment, but there is not higher value - so the system would just wait and cause the whole computer to freeze. By setting the value back to 0 it would ensure the computer wouldn't hang. They resolved this and released the software. Interesting they provided it to shops for free and told them to offer it for $10 and they could keep the money.

The screenshots, graphics and video demos were wonderful, and it was nostalgic and wonderful, and what a treat to be able to attend this lecture.




Saturday 9 March 2013

SXSW Google and Bing how to improve your search rankings

Good Q&A with Google and Bing regarding how to improve your search rankings. All about SEO/Search Engine Optimisation. Interesting points that came up;

  • Facebook has a robots.txt file which blocks all web-crawling of their site. And Google mentioned that they have been blocked by Google. Whereas Bing has a partnership with Facebook. Could that be a big concern for Google. Especially in light of;
  • Facebook Graph search - does that worry Google or Bing, they didn't really answer that one very directly, they just made some comments about them waiting and seeing and it could be interesting. Whereas I think it could spell quite a problem for Google...
  • They re-iterated before contacting them in order to understand a problem on your site in terms of site ranking then you should make sure you are fully utilising the web master tools as they will reveal a lot of the problems / issues and how to fix them.
  • Interesting discussion around when a site has gained a poor reputation, or you've taken over a domain with a poor reputation, you can request a "re-inclusion" request (after you've rebuilt the site and distanced yourself from the site before) - this will effectively wipe the slate clean and get you re-listed on Google.
  • Interesting discussion about content behind a login - what's in front and behind the login or paywall should be the same, outside should be a subset. If you offer a completely different experience internally then this is known as "cloaking" and is frowned upon. The guy from Bing also explained you should do a spreadsheet of all the links/content on your site and place a value on all those links, and you need to flip it round and see how you can get a subset of your most valuable content outside the login, in order to help attract users in to the site.
  • Note you can setup local listings options for your site, to reflect for a business, where the local region(s) for that business is.
  • If you are having problems with content not getting crawled or appearing in search, use the "fetch as googlebot" and "fetch as bingbot" tools to see what the crawlers are seeing.
  • Utilising schema.org to mark up your website is a good idea, as it helps the search engines understand your sites content and index it appropriately (and display it appropriately) it doesn't get you higher on the search rankings though.
  • They repeatedly talked about how you can perform better on search when you are in a domain dominated by larger players - and that is to pick a niche keyword(s) and build a reputation around that, and then expand from there. Also the suggested phrases at the bottom of search can help you decide what keyword phrases to focus on.