In a previous post I covered how to link to a specific timestamp in a YouTube video. The short version looks like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjDw3azfZWI#t=31m08s
The “#t=31m08s” takes you to 31 minutes and 8 seconds in a video. I just found out that you can also start embedded videos at a certain timestamp.
To do it on an embedded [...]

Google has been working on some new algorithms and tools to tackle linkspam and we’d like to ask for linkspam reports from you. If you’d like to tell us about web sites that appear to be using spammy links (e.g. paid links that pass PageRank, blog spammers, guestbook spammers, etc.), here’s how to send us [...]

Last year I tried to limit my travel but still ended up making about ten (!) trips in 2009. This year I’ve resolved to travel less for work. Right now, here’s my current speaking/travel plans for 2010:
March 2-4, 2010: SMX West, Santa Clara, CA. I’m doing a “Ask the Search Engines” panel.
May 19-20, 2010: Google [...]

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, [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Huh. This looks new. I headed over to investor.google.com to listen to the Google earnings call. Normally the webcast uses Windows Media Player or Real Player, but this time it looks like the earnings call is being hosted on a YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/GoogleIR instead. Cool. Go check it out if you want to listen along.
Added: [...]

Steve Baker, an engineer in the search quality group at Google, just did a nice post about synonyms on the Google blog. A lot of people seem to think that Google only does simple-minded matching of the users’ keywords with words that we indexed. The truth is that Google does a lot more sophisticated stuff [...]

Okay, we’re starting to release new webmaster videos. Normally you could follow me on Twitter to find out about each new video, but I’m on a Twitter diet until the end of January. So if you want to hear when new webmaster videos or webmaster blog posts come out, go follow @googlewmc on Twitter (that’s [...]