Oct 10, 2011 at 2:33pm ET by Pamela Parker

In an announcement fittingly posted on her own blog, Karen Wickre, Google's senior manager of global communications & public affairs, says she has left the company. Wickre launched and masterminded the company's blog strategy during her nine-year tenure at the company. Her farewell was something of a love letter to Google and the experiences she's had there. While she didn't say what her next step would be, she said it would be a "plunge into an exciting new realm." "If you know me you know 'starry-eyed' isn't the first descriptor that comes to mind," she wrote. "But trust me: Googl [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Google: Employees

Former Google Search Reps Start Search Quality Alliance

Oct 10, 2011 at 1:12pm ET by Barry Schwartz

A new site just launched under the name Search Quality Alliance, which is currently made up of five companies that offer SEO and web services. The big punch line here is that these five companies are all founded by former Google Search Quality representatives. As it states on the website: Search Quality Alliance is a group of former Google Search Quality team members who offer Search Engine Consulting Solutions on an international scale with local expertise. From collaboration in international SEO projects, to Google & SEO workshops, to developing new tools including testing and sha [...]

Santorum & Google’s Search Quality Czar Matt Cutts Makes The Colbert Report

Sep 27, 2011 at 10:11am ET by Elisabeth Osmeloski

The search industry is getting a little more mainstream recognition every day, as tonight's episode of The Colbert Report picked on Google's handling of the Spreading Santorum situation. This time the target was software engineer Matt Cutts, long known to search industry insiders as head of Google's Web Spam and search quality team, he doesn't often get the same national media spotlight as Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin or Larry Page. But as the man responsible for weeding out poor quality content from Google results, Cutts made the late night news desk. First notified of his Comedy Centra [...]

Zuckerberg Passes Brin & Page On Forbes’ Rich List

Sep 22, 2011 at 9:33am ET by Matt McGee

Scoreboard: Facebook guy - 1, Google guys - 0. Or, more accurately: Facebook guy - $17.5 billion, Google guys - $16.7 billion (each). Those are the estimated net worths of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, as reported in the latest edition of the Forbes 400 Rich List -- a ranking of the wealthiest 400 people in America. Forbes counts Zuckerberg as the biggest gainer on this year's list, with his net worth jumping from $6.9 billion last year to $17.5 billion now. It's also the first time that Zuckerberg has been listed ahead of Brin and [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Facebook | Google: Employees

Google Customer Support Surprise: Phone Reps Handling 10,000 Calls A Week From 60 Countries

Sep 5, 2011 at 11:31am ET by Greg Sterling

Google has long received mixed-to-negative criticism for its customer service -- or lack thereof. But Francoise Brougher is changing all that. Perhaps the least well-known senior executive outside Google, the VP of Global Advertising and Product Operations has quietly built an impressive telephone customer support organization for Google AdWords advertisers. Telephone support for AdWords was first announced earlier this year in April and it saw some coverage. However since that time Google has been silent about it. I spoke to Brougher roughly a week ago and was surprised to hear how large [...]

Google Hiring Spam Fighters In Dublin

Aug 23, 2011 at 1:25pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Kaspar Szymanski from Google's search quality team announced on the Google Webmaster blog that his office is hiring Search Quality Associates to work in the Dublin, Ireland office. Search Quality Associates are basically Google web spam fighters. They are responsible for digging deep into site code, investigating site issues, looking for search quality issues and bugs. Kaspar explained that "looking at a site's source code should not scare you." Of course being a fan of search engines, especially Google is a plus. But most importantly, you need to share in Google's "aversion to websp [...]

Carter Maslan, The Face Of Google Places, Leaving The Company

Jun 22, 2011 at 8:12am ET by Greg Sterling

Carter Maslan has been the patient and good-natured face of Google Maps and Places at innumerable conferences and events over the past several years. He's endured a regular onslaught of questions about missing features and local SEO frustrations surrounding Google's increasingly important suite of local products. Now he's leaving Google. I got word of this yesterday from a Google partner and then I later confirmed it in an email exchange with Maslan himself. He's leaving the company on good terms and said he "loved" his work at Google. However he has something else he wants to pursue. [...]

Google CEO Larry Page Plays Nice With Investors At Annual Meeting

Jun 3, 2011 at 11:44am ET by Greg Sterling

Many on Wall Street think that Larry Page hasn't been visible or accessible enough. In part because of investor uncertainty about the former and current Google CEO (and a number of other factors) Google's share price has dropped about $100 since Page took over from Eric Schmidt in April. During the company's first quarterly earnings call about a month ago, as new CEO, Page made a very brief appearance at the top of the call, read some prepared remarks and left matters to his CFO and several others. Immediately there was criticism from some investors that Page was too "aloof." I agree tha [...]

The Matt Cutts Debunking Flowchart

May 31, 2011 at 2:54pm ET by Danny Sullivan

I've got a long-standing promise to Google's Matt Cutts that I'd one day do a flowchart to illustrate his decision process about when he decides to debunk some crazy allegation against Google. With a bumper crop of debunking going on by Matt, it's time to deliver on that promise. Below, the Matt Cutts Debunking Flowchart: Dubbed "The Greenspan Of Google" by Businessweek recently, Matt's officially the head of Google's web spam fighting team. Unofficially, he serves as Google number one fire putter outer. For years, he's debunked claims against Google, or at least tried to communicate th [...]

PayPal Sues Google, Sees Powerful Threat To Its Future In Google Wallet

May 27, 2011 at 9:01am ET by Greg Sterling

In California it's almost impossible to stop a key employee from jumping ship to a rival company. The law heavily favors the employee's right to earn a living and typically won't permit the former employer to prevent the employee from working for a rival. California law does, however, protect "trade secrets" and will sometimes permit company A to block a former employee from working in an identical role at rival company B if trade secrets are implicated or at stake. This is the scenario at the heart of a lawsuit announced yesterday by eBay/PayPal against Google following the public intro [...]

Steven Levy, Author Of In The Plex, Interviewed By Google’s Matt Cutts

May 25, 2011 at 9:22am ET by Barry Schwartz

Steven Levy, the author of In The Plex, was interviewed in one of the recent "Google Talks" by Matt Cutts. Steven Levy wrote one of, if not the most, revealing books on how Google works as a company in his book. So I found it incredibly interesting to watch a Googler interview the individual who interviewed Google for several years to write his book. Levy actually was a keynote speaker at SMX West a few months ago. Here is the video: I love Matt's reaction to when Steven Levy complains how original content gets outranked by larger publishers. You can find that clip 39 minutes an [...]

Google, Smartphone Contacts & Social Graphs: Has Eric Schmidt Crossed The Creepy Line Again?

May 19, 2011 at 5:29pm ET by Matt McGee

Things have been a little quiet -- perhaps even boring -- since Eric Schmidt stepped down as Google's CEO to become the company's Executive Chairman. The strange quotes and not-so-funny attempts at cracking privacy-related jokes have slowed down in the past couple months. But Schmidt may have just added another one to his collection of so-called "creepy" quotes. It's in an article/interview from London's Evening Standard. The reporter asks Schmidt the obligatory question about Facebook and social networking and, in the process of explaining Google's approach to social, Schmidt appears t [...]

Google Continues Expansion, Leases Additional 600,000 SQ Feet In Mountain View

May 18, 2011 at 9:21am ET by Barry Schwartz

Mercury News reports Google entered an agreement to lease an additional campus with nine building and up to 630,000 additional square feet of space in Mountain View. The new building is right across Highway 101. "We had two other major companies interested in our project, and we had been in discussions with them for several months, and then Google came along and was much more intense," said John Lovewell, partner with Keenan Lovewell Ventures, the owner of "The Quad" campus on Ellis Street. "They were ready to make a commitment -- a specific commitment -- very quickly, and that's why w [...]

Google’s Human Text File: google.com/human.txt

May 9, 2011 at 10:02am ET by Barry Schwartz

Go to google.com/human.txt and you will find a text file recruiting new Google engineers to the company. The file reads: Google is built by a large team of engineers, designers, researchers, robots, and others in many different sites across the globe. It is updated continuously, and built with more tools and technologies than we can shake a stick at. If you'd like to help us out, see google.com/jobs. The reason this is cute is because of the concept behind the robots.txt file. Clearly, Google is looking for smart, funny and geeky individuals to hire. This reminds me of when the [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Google: Employees

Amid Talent War Apple, Google, Adobe Sued For Conspiring To “Fix” Employee Salaries

May 6, 2011 at 9:54am ET by Greg Sterling

Last year, after an investigation, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) concluded that a number of tech companies, including Apple and Google, violated antitrust laws when they agreed not to poach and cold call each others' employees. The DOJ obtained a settlement that "prevents [the companies] from entering into no solicitation agreements for employees" for five years. The DOJ settlement didn't offer any compensation to the "victims" of the companies' activities: the employees. Now, as you might imagine, there's a class-action lawsuit on behalf of employees of the defendant companies. (Plain [...]

“Knowledge” Replaces “Search” For Google

May 3, 2011 at 8:49pm ET by Greg Sterling

Google's no longer in the "search" business -- it's now in the "knowledge" business. OK, not exactly. TechCrunch points to a April 11, 2011 SEC filing that discloses a job-title change for Alan Eustace, Google’s Senior Vice President, Engineering & Research. He has become Google’s Senior Vice President, Knowledge. It was widely believed that Eustace was promoted to "SVP of Search," with the product-centric reorg that recently happened: SVP of Search — Alan Eustace SVP of Advertising — Susan Wojcicki SVP of Mobile/Android — Andy Rubin SVP of YouTube — Salar Kama [...]

Does Google Have A Class System For Googlers?

May 2, 2011 at 9:35am ET by Barry Schwartz

Former Googler, Andrew Norman Wilson posted a very interesting video on his blog about a group of Google employees who were portrayed as a "lower class" of Googlers. These Googlers were primarily responsible for the Google Book project where they manually scanned books all day. Andrew Wilson documented how these Googlers worked, starting their day at 4 am and leaving at 2:15 pm every day. He also said they were hired by not only Google but also by Transvideo Studios. The building they worked at was near the other Google buildings in Mountain View, California and was building number 3.141 [...]

Amazing Early Google Video Shows Boyish Larry & Sergey, Bored Employees Who Would Become Millionaires

Apr 27, 2011 at 9:56am ET by Greg Sterling

With management changes and numerous other efforts Google is trying to "get back to its startup roots." So how about a video from when Google was really a startup. On the Xooglers blog (and below) is a video of a "TGIF meeting." Taken in 1999 by Doug Edwards, who was then the director of consumer marketing and brand management for Google, it almost plays like a scene from the NBC show "The Office." The video presents a pretty routine employee meeting: announcements are made, some new employees are introduced and an informal birthday party happens. According to Edwards' blog post the comp [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Google: Employees | Google: General | Top News

Google’s Larry Page, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Make 2011 TIME 100 List

Apr 25, 2011 at 7:32pm ET by Matt McGee

Two of the biggest names in search are on the 2011 TIME 100 -- the magazine's choices for the most influential people in the world: Google CEO Larry Page and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. In the short Zuckerberg essay, April Capone - the mayor of East Haven, Conn., tells the story of how she donated a kidney to one of her constituents who had put out a call for donors on Facebook. The Page profile has Stanford computer science professor Terry Winograd remembering what it was like to have both Google co-founders (Page and Sergey Brin) in class. At the top of the TIME list is Wael [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Facebook | Google: Employees

What’s It Like To Be A Google Search Engineer?

Apr 18, 2011 at 11:22am ET by Barry Schwartz

As you may know, Google is hiring search quality engineers. They are hiring across the board in search, including synonyms and spell correction, core ranking, UI changes, evaluation, and webspam. To apply, fill out this form. As part of their hiring efforts, Google has released a video named Search Engineering at Google. Some of your favorite Googlers are featured in the film, including Othar Hansson, Trystan Upstill, and Corey Anderson. They all describe what it is like to work at Google as a software engineer in search. Here is the video: Related Stories: Google T [...]

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