For Halloween this year I asked people on Google+ what I should be for Halloween, and someone suggested going as the blackhat stick man from xkcd. You know, this guy: That sounded like a good challenge. I finished the costume and taped a video, but unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to get the video [...]

I made a Portal turret for my Halloween pumpkin! I was trying to think of things to carve: vampire Android? R2-D2? Zoidberg? Then I thought: I could do a character from Portal 2! I was going to carve something like GLaDOS or Wheatley, but then I realized that a portal turret would be perfect: To [...]

Okay, I’m starting up a new 30 day challenge: I’m going to eat vegan for the next 30 days. That means no meat, dairy, or eggs. I’m curious to see how it will go. Read the full story Related Blogs

Even though this year is nowhere near finished, a lot of people at Google are already thinking about things to launch next year. So I wanted to put the question out: what cool things would you like to see Google launch in 2012? For example, in 2011, we launched hundreds of search quality changes that [...]

I’ve been out of town (hiking in Yosemite and traveling to the East Coast) for two out of the last three weeks, so things are a bit crazy. Besides the usual email overload, there’s a project at work–not related to webspam–that will need some attention for the next 4-5 weeks. I’m triaging email as best [...]

For the next week or so, I’m going to be hiking in the back country of Yosemite. That’s assuming that my legs hold up: after finishing the San Francisco Marathon at the end of July, my knees and ankles have been a little creaky recently. I’ve been trying to get my email under control in [...]

Sometime soon I’m planning to record some new webmaster videos. I created a Google Moderator page where you can post video suggestions and vote topics up and down. Instead of short 1-2 minute video answers to quick questions, I’d like to try something new this time. I’d like to move toward making tutorials about how [...]

It’s summertime, so I’m looking for a bunch of fun books to read. I just ordered two books by John Scalzi (Fuzzy Nation and The God Engines), two books by Dean Karnazes because I’m training to run a marathon (Run!: 26.2 Stories of Blisters and Bliss and Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner), plus [...]

Each year I try to settle on a small set of big goals for the year. Last year my big goal was to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. This year, I settled on 2-3 goals I wanted to achieve: 1. Go skydiving. I was with a group of ~15 people in January and we realized that no [...]

I answered an interesting rel=canonical question over email today and thought I’d blog about it. If you’re not familiar with rel=canonical read these pages first. Then watch this video about rel=canonical vs. 301s, especially the second half: Okay, I sometimes get a question about whether Google will always use the url from rel=canonical as the [...]