The video is about an hour long, but I hope it’s a pretty good use of your time if you’re interested in search engine optimization. Enjoy!

The video is about an hour long, but I hope it’s a pretty good use of your time if you’re interested in search engine optimization. Enjoy!

I believe encrypted search is an important option for Google searchers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked for secure search in the past (see this post from 2009), and I credit them for helping to put this on Google’s radar. Another inspiration that helped to spark this project was Cory Doctorow’s book “Little Brother.” It was one of my favorite books of 2008 and while I won’t go into the book’s plot here, it’s a quick, fun read. “Little Brother” also makes a compelling case for encrypting HTTP traffic on the web.

Some people don’t yet fully understand how SSL search works. I saw one commenter say “If they still pass in the search parameters in the URL (Get), what’s the point? People can still see what you queried, if they made them “post” messages it might actually do something.” It’s important to realize that even though you as a surfer can see the query in the url, the sites between your browser and Google can’t. Google OS demonstrated that by sniffing a regular HTTP query and an HTTPS query in Wireshark to show that the query can’t be seen going over the wire.

Thanks to all the people at Google who did the all the hard work and heavy lifting to deliver this. One of the main engineers behind the effort was Evan Roseman, a member of the webspam team who you might have met at previous search conferences. In fact, Evan was originally scheduled to be on our site review session at Google I/O this past Thursday, but we decided that launching SSL search took priority. I also wanted to say thanks and congratulations to the other Googlers (for example Andrew Widdowson and Murali Viswanathan, but also many, many others) who generously gave their time and effort to make the launch happen and happen smoothly. You might think that switching on SSL for websearch is easy, but for a website with the complexity and scale of Google, it’s really not. The launch wouldn’t have happened without a ton of assistance from Googlers from many parts of the company, and I sincerely appreciate it.

I hope you enjoy https://www.google.com and find it useful.

I’m going to update the buzz as news comes out; if you’re following on the web instead of on Buzz, you might need to hit reload to see updates.

Watch the live-stream video at http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleDevelopers by the way.

Watch the live-stream video at http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleDevelopers by the way.

Lots of folks will be live-blogging or waving. Here is a different live wave with Gina Trapani, Kevin Marks, Leo Laporte, and Adam Pash, for example.

Danny Sullivan will be live-blogging the keynote over on Search Engine Land. I believe that Tom Krazit is live-blogging the keynote for CNET too.

Here goes my live-wave:

Just a reminder: please leave your question on the Google Moderator page, not in the comments here. When you leave a question on the moderator page, people can vote for the questions and I can see which questions people are most interested in.

By the way, if you’re attending Google I/O you’ll probably want to install the very spiff Android app for it. You can search for [Google I/O] in the Android Market. And if you want to know what to expect in the SEO site review session, here’s the video from the panel we did last year:

If you see me at Google I/O, please say hello and tell me what you wish Google would do that we’re not doing.

Google has always cared about search quality in dozens of languages, not just English. We’re trying a new experiment in webspam: we decided to identify five languages where we’d really like to drill down into webspam, solicit spam reports in those languages, and pay even more attention to spam reports in those languages over the next couple months. If you know of spam in these languages, we’d especially like to hear about it.

The five languages where we’re asking for spam reports are Thai, Indonesian, Romanian, Czech, and Farsi. Of course, we always welcome webspam reports — in any language! — at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport but we’d be especially interested to hear about spam in Thai, Indonesian, Romanian, Czech, and Farsi. If you know of webspam in those languages, please let us know, and thanks!

You can fix this annoyance in Chrome. Right-click on the address bar and select “Edit Search Engines…” (You can also edit the search engines via the Options menu.) You can either edit the Google option or add a new entry; I added a new entry. I set the URL field to be “{google:baseURL}search?q=%s” (without the quotes).

Now when you search for [flowers] the url is just http://www.google.com/search?q=flowers . Ah, nice clean urls in the browser bar.

At the SMX West search conference I did an Ignite talk about Google’s SEO audit that it did on itself. This was part of a global week of Ignite talks. An Ignite talk has 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds, for a total of five minutes. Thanks to Aya Zook and Vanessa Fox for organizing, and Brady Forrest (the creator of Ignite) for being the emcee. To help you get the full experience, I’m embedding the video below, then the slides I used (complete with auto-advance every 15 seconds), so you can watch the slides while you listen to the audio:

Don’t miss the other Ignite talks from SMX! There’s some gems in there.

Also at SMX West, I did a live streaming video interview with Mike McDonald of WebProNews. I think the interview had 1800 live viewers, and at the end we took questions from Twitter users. (In the beginning I look like a jerk staring at my phone, but that’s because I was trying to tweet about the interview so that people would know they could watch). We covered some new ground in this video.

We also had a fun “Ask the Search Engines” panel with representatives from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. You can read the Lisa Barone live-blogging write-up if you want.

In the background was the normal amount of webmaster videos and blog posts. Around the same time as the conference, I also did a post on a Google blog about how Google communicates with webmasters and tries to be really transparent about Google works.

The SMX show was also a pretty good week for webmasters. We’re alerting webmasters more often when they get hacked, we released an SEO audit of google.com so that everyone could benefit from the advice, we pushed forward on the ability to crawl AJAX, and we added delegation to the webmaster console.

After the conference, the new stuff hasn’t stopped:
- The webmaster tools team added the ability to verify a site using the domain name system (DNS). If editing a meta tag or uploading a file on your website is hard (maybe because you have an unusual content management system), then DNS verification can be handy.
- We announced that we’re going to start emailing webmasters if we believe their site is serving malware.
- Earlier this week, the webmaster tools team added a bunch more data into our Top Search Queries features.

And of course we’ve had a ton of informational blog posts on the official Google webmaster blog. If you don’t read and subscribe to that blog, you should.