How Search Off the Record tackles SEO and web development

0:10Hello and welcome to a new episode of Surge of the record, a podcast coming to you from the Google search team, where we talk all about search and maybe have some fun along the way. My name is Martin and today it's the 100th episode! Yes, and today with me is... Hey! Wait a minute. Hello?

0:35Where are they? They were supposed to be here. Wait! Oh no, no, no, no, no. They are all on vacation. Ha, ha, ha, ha. um oh you know what this is the 100th episode and no one's here this is it's outrageous okay you know what i'll call them i'm pretty sure they'll be fine with that okay let's see if we can get gary on the phone hello the owner of this particular telephone is currently engaged in an activity elsewhere. This activity may involve grappling with the fundamental questions of the universe, or it may involve grappling with a stubborn gem jar lid. The two are often indistinguishable in their complexity and level of frustration.

1:31Goodbye. Your message will now be recorded. All right, this is going well. All right. Okay, that's that's not a great start. I'll try that later. Sorry for that, listeners. Let's go with Lizzie.

1:50Oh, hi, Martin. Hi, Lizzie. How are you doing? Where are you? Actually, I'm out on a hike with my dog Molly in Graubunden. Ah, sorry for the interruption. It is for the podcast. We're passing by a patch of cows, actually. Let me pull over to the side so that the cowbell does not continue to disrupt this podcast recording. Okay, so what's up? To what do I owe the honor of this phone call? I was wondering if you had a favorite moment from one of our episodes. Let me see. I think the one that stands out the most to me, at least the one that's coming to my mind right away, was the one where we did dramatic readings of the SEO starter guide.

2:31just because the format and the concept was so silly and unhinged. And it was also one of the first episodes I joined in as a guest. And I remember being a lot more nervous about that than I am today. And since then, it's been several years and we've recorded so many more episodes, not just as a guest, but as a recurring host also.

2:59In a world of mobile devices, most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. The desktop version of a site might be difficult to view and use on a mobile device. As a result, having a mobile-ready site is critical to your online presence. In fact, starting in late 2016, Google has begun experiments to primarily use the mobile version of a site's content for ranking, parsing, structured data, and generating snippets.

3:38Three years later, we got to do another episode on the SEO Starter Guide because we picked up a project to revamp it. It's a document that's, I think, in the top three of page views for our site, and it just hadn't received much love in like 10, 15 years. We even did a podcast recording for that episode when we were actively working on rewriting that guide, which I really liked because I really feel like it's representative of the heart of Search Off the Record podcast, where we're really going behind the scenes on a project that's in progress and not complete yet. really shows like the inner workings in our thought process.

4:23There's particularly a part where I think Gary and I are discussing, debating, arguing, whether or not we should include anti-patterns in the documentation, whether it's worth it or not, like pros and cons. And I particularly liked that you can kind of see our thought process and that we hadn't come to a conclusion yet. For the listeners to avoid any spoilers, you can check the SEO starter guide after this episode to see whether or not we ended up including a section on that. But yeah, I hope you can find the clip. And I hope this helps. Okay, talk later. Yeah, that was a fun moment. So let me see if I can find the...

5:06You know what, this isn't live. Editor, roll!

5:13Site owners can use whatever meta tags they want. Like it doesn't really matter. It's just usually the problem is that they are expecting something from the meta tag to perform some magic with search engines. And usually those meta tags don't exist or they don't do anything. And including meta keywords. I think Google never actually used meta keywords. I will bet a banana that we never will. I feel very conflicted about documenting anti-patterns because we perhaps also give ideas about like new worries for site owners to think about. I mean, you've done myth-busting presentations in the past. One of the things in our myth-busting presentation is that using any other Google product will not influence your rankings in Google search.

5:55But the anti-pattern thing, it's imagining what our users already know. And should we address that like, hey, they might have heard this or read this thing before. And so we should tell them like, hey, actually, you don't need to do that. or by absence of information, is that enough? Because like Gary said, introducing a worry or like, oh, don't do this. They're like, wait, I never even thought about doing that. Like, what is this thing? Now I have to like go look into like, what is a meta, like I don't even know what a meta tag is. I think we don't actually talk about any other meta tags other than meta description.

6:27So it's almost like a concept that we're not like, oh, just go add a bunch of meta tags to your site. That's not something that we're even going into right now in the SEO starter guide because it's more, that's like a secondary, like phase two. Yeah, okay. I think that that makes sense to me at least because it's also kind of that aspect of like, if we say, oh, you don't need to use meta tags because they have no effect and people are like, why is Google telling us not to use these meta keywords? Yeah. Surely there's a secret reason. Right. Why they're trying to hoard these keywords to themselves.

7:04and we don't or by not mentioning it's like oh this is the secret to everything it's a conspiracy about why it's not there let me go look into it okay maybe i shouldn't have brought up this topic in that case i'm sorry like all of the listeners should just kind of like blur out the last 10 minutes walk it out of your memory we did not talk about meta keywords don't worry no meta keywords were harmed i just thought of something else the like for anti-patterns like if you think from chaos theory perspective, because that's the easiest thing that I can come up with right now, then technically anything will affect your rankings.

7:41Like a butterfly flaps its wings outside the train station and tomorrow your rankings will fall because of a series of cascading effects. So does that mean that we should document that the moon and the butterflies affect your rankings indirectly? Seasonality, I don't know. Well, seasonality, sure. Sure. Like the moon? I don't know. Okay. I think we should try to document things that have more of an objective effect than butterflies. Chaos theory is as objective as it gets.

8:16Okay. Let's see if we can get Gary on the phone.

8:24Hello. You have reached a communications terminal currently assigned to Gary. All right, this is going well. All right, okay, let's try Cherry instead. I wonder where she's hanging out.

8:42Hi, I was just relaxing. Ah, Cherry, it's me, Martin. Hi. Why are you calling? Did something blow up? Oh my God. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, nothing like that. You just happened to be on the podcast. I mean, where are you right now? I am on holiday. um looking at trees oh wait something's moving well i'm not quite sure what i'm looking at to be honest i'm definitely not scouting another venue for search central life if that's what you're thinking uh okay quick random question as you might know we're recording the 100th episode of a search of the record what's your favorite moment from search of the record so far anything that comes to mind?

9:26My favorite? Wow. 100. That's a lot of noise. I think this is a good time to admit that I don't really listen to them, to any of them. Right. Okay, that was... I mean, thanks for your candor, but that was not quite the answer I was expecting for our big celebration. Yeah. I mean, I've joined as a speaker two or three times, which is very lovely. But I'm just not a big podcast person in general. Nothing personal, really, against Search of the Record. I just prefer the sound of, well, whatever this is. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, but I do use them. Uh-huh. For what? To allow the penguins to sleep? No, I use them to not get fired.

10:20Like sometimes before a presentation, I'll listen to the relevant ones to see what's already been said externally. You know, so I don't accidentally say something that I shouldn't. For example, I found those that went deep about indexing very useful. Okay, so what you're saying is our podcast has kept you employed at least. Exactly. Oh, wait a second. This is a work call, isn't it? I'm supposed to be on vacation. Oh dear, Martin, you are suddenly breaking up. The network here is terrible. What? No, no, no, no. It sounds perfectly clear on my end here. No, no, you're fading. I think I'm going to go into a penguin tunnel.

11:07Very flappy. Sorry. Got to go. Congrats on the 100th. Bye. Okay. All right. Okay. You know what? I can work with that. Hold on. I think... Yeah, spilling the beans on caffeine. I think we have that from episode 7. Let's hear it.

11:38So, Gary, since we're in a podcast format now, would you be interested in going through some of those details around how search works, how indexing works here? MARK MANDELAVYSCHENKOVICHERSON - What kind of question is that? TINA WISDOMAVYSCHENKOVICHERSON - Tell us a little more about indexing, Gary. Come on. Let's do it. GARY GENSLERENOVICHERSON - Man, I wish I could, but I really don't want to. GARY GENSLERENOVICHERSON - You should do it. TINA WISDOMAVYSCHENKOVICHERSON - Tough luck, buttercup. You have to. Let's do it. Well, it's kind of, well, fine. OK. Let's talk about caffeine. Actually, that's a good topic because there was some confusion about that on Twitter as well.

12:14So maybe I can shed a light or two on that topic. Actually, we could do a breakdown of caffeine on these podcasts. OK. Yeah, we should. OK, let's do that. So yeah, we have caffeine. That's our indexing system. Only externally it's called caffeine. Internally, it has some other name. But that doesn't really matter. And it does many, many things. And I think that's actually not very clear externally, that it does many things. For people, it's just like we have the crawler, which is Googlebot, and then that goes to something, something Google magic. Well, people know that it gets rendered. And then something, something Google magic.

12:55And then we have an index. Now, we can actually break down that Google magic. And people in general know that Google magic or could figure it out if they wanted to. But that Google magic is essentially what caffeine is doing. Basically ingesting, picking up whatever is produced by Googlebot, which is a protocol buffer. You can look it up on your favorite search engine, what a protocol buffer is. And then that protocol buffer is picked up by caffeine. and then we collect signals, blah, blah, blah. And then we add the information that caffeine produced into our index. Now, what's happening inside caffeine?

13:40Well, the very first step is that protocol buffer ingestion. Basically, it picks up the protocol buffer and starts processing it. The very first step after ingestion is conversion. What does that mean? Well, it's conversion. Basically, it converts, right? What to what? Do you have a problem with the word? No, I'm just like, OK, we have a protocol buffer, which has all the information that it needs. What does it convert there? Does it convert the protocol buffer into a different format? Or? Well, that too. But first, we have to, for example, normalize the HTML. Ah-ha. Because as you may have heard or noticed, the internet is generally broken HTML-wise.

14:22But we still try to make sense of it. Now, if you have really broken HTML, then, that's kind of hard. So we push all the HTML through an HTML lexer. Again, search for the name. You can figure out what that is. But basically, we normalize the HTML. And then it's much easier to process it. And then there comes the hot stepper, h1, h2, h3, h4. I know. So all these header tags are also normalized. Through rendering, we try to understand the styling that was applied on the H tag. So we can determine the relative importance of the H tags compared to each other.

15:11All right, now. Now.

15:20Hello, you have reached a communications terminal. Oh, come on. All right. Ah, John is probably around. Let's see if I can get him on the phone.

15:38Hello, hello. Ah, John. Oh, hi, Martin. Good to talk to you. It's so great to hear from you. And wow, I haven't had a phone call in ages. What a surprise. How and where are you? I'm currently in the office working on an important document. It looks like a script, maybe for podcast episode. I'm just going to turn around really slow and double check that you're not hovering behind me. Anyway, what can I help you with? All right. Okay. I'm just collecting people's favorite moments from the podcast. Do you have anything that comes to mind? Wow. It's really hard to pinpoint a specific moment. There's so many episodes that I found fun and interesting.

16:20As we say, we've been having fun with these. So let me think. Not that I don't like the episodes with just a team, but I really enjoy the ones where we have a guest joining us, bringing insights into things that are new and different. It doesn't have to be a technical or heavy-duty SEO thing, whatever that is. For example, I love the episode with Jessica Yu from the Google Doodles team. It's a world I never thought much about, but where there's obviously a lot of thought and care needed to help make things that users love to find. So delightful. Such a unique part of the Google search engine. I loved it.

16:57Oh yeah, the Doodles one. Oh yeah, that's a really good one. That was wild stuff, and I think I've seen so many Doodles and never really thought about it either. And I do remember that episode. Let me find that. Episode 84 with Jessica Yu from the Doodles team. Let me find that. That was nice. Let's have a listen together, shall we?

17:19So Doodles and Delight, can you tell us a little bit about what does it mean to be the lead of Google Doodles? Are you hand drawing them? Are you uploading them to the search results page? what is involved there? Okay. Yeah, sure. So I lead up several teams that are devoted to bringing joy to our users and our audience. And so there are doodles, which hopefully you're familiar with, but they are the changes to the logo that we've done since the beginning of Google and that sometimes have interactive games or experiences behind them and sometimes just bring it to a related search page. And then there are Easter eggs, which are more hidden and are on specific search pages.

18:03So if you do the search, like do a barrel roll, your whole page will spin or skew or things like that. Or you'll see even sort of larger interactive experiences come out depending on what you search. And then we also work on sort of in-product delight. So some animations or some celebrations of things that are sort of much more integrated moments. Does this also include some of the smaller things like the search loop type stuff where it's like, did you mean this and it navigates back? So it doesn't necessarily need to be like a big flashy animated thing. It could be like something small. Totally.

18:42Right. Like if you search recursion, it says, did you mean recursion? That one. So good. Yes. Do you ever have Easter eggs inside the doodles themselves? Like an inception kind of thing? yes yes we do actually i think the most obvious thing is that we have a universe of beloved characters that we bring back um through several things so one of the most popular ones is weather frog um so if you use google weather on certain platforms you'll see this little frog on the bottom and he's like wearing sunglasses and sunning if it's hot out and sunny or he's got an umbrella if it's you know raining in your area um so that was created by a doodler on our team several several years ago and he has appeared in some of the doodle games you know uh competing for in different sports or getting a boba or whatever and then likewise in one of the halloween games that we did, there was a cat, Mimomo, that was inspired by one of the doodlers' actual cats.

19:54And he has appeared in various games as well, and obviously in various Halloweens afterwards, Black Cat. And so, yeah, you'll see that a few of these characters coming back in different contexts. They're all friends. Is this something that's planned or is it like happen organically it happened organically it's just our team being funny you can see the reaction on the internet people love it we get fan art you know for these characters we joke that we want to create a line of plushies um I don't think that's a business google will get into but um you know it's uh it was done initially just for our own entertainment But it's been a fun sort of inside joke with our deepest fans.

20:55Come on, Gary. Come on, come on.

21:01Please. Hello. You have reached a communications terminal currently assigned to Gary. The occupants of this residence are at this precise moment experiencing a profound state of unavailableness. This state is not entirely unlike the state of being available, but with the notable and, for you, inconvenient absence of the people you wish to speak to. Wait, that's a different answering. What? Gary! What? Hello, Gary. I'm calling for the 100th episode of SOTR, and I wanted to ask about your favorite moment. Why? Because I like you, and you're part of Search of the Record, and I want to hear which was your favorite moment.

21:50But why? Because that's what nice people do. We wanted to have a look back at all the things that we already experienced and did in this podcast, and I value your opinion. Okay. I don't buy that What do you need this for? You're going to use my voice to Break into my house No I already did that, I don't do the same trick twice Oh, okay What was the question? My question was, this is the 100th episode And from the previous 99 Which one was your favorite moment? Interesting You have a favorite moment, no? I don't have favorites um let's go with that one episode where we were bantering about javascript just the two of us you and i oh that was a lovely one that was a good episode yeah that was a nice one because i could talk nasty about javascript you enjoyed that didn't you wait a minute i do that all the time anyway all right i'll i'll find the wait i'm on i'm on vacation i'm not i'm not supposed to work and you're calling about work martin yeah explain yourself i'm sorry but i really needed your help on this and thank you so much for helping me okay can i can i can i do something nice for you once you were back?

23:20Well, you could hang up now. Okay, fine. Thank you so much, Gary. Have a great rest of your vacation and hopefully see you soon. Bye. Bye. Okay, he hung up already. All right. Okay. So right, right, right, right, right. Let's find that snippet where we talk about JavaScript. If I remember from episode 24, there was a nice moment where we had this episode where we talked about JavaScript, which was aptly called Let's Talk JavaScript. So let's do that now.

23:56Why, why, why is scoping so stupid in JavaScript? It's not stupid. Come on. Just because it's slightly different from most programming languages doesn't mean that it's stupid. It's counterintuitive. That's true. Okay, I give you that point. it is counterintuitive thank you hoisting i think that comes back to historical reasons should we actually explain scoping and hoisting before we go ahead so with scoping scoping is about where a thing lives so in code you have variables which are basically little placeholders where you give a name to some sort of value so for instance you might have a variable called name in that you would store, I don't know, Anna, for instance.

24:45And then later on, you can use that to do things. For a very, very simple example, you have a login form with a username and a password. And you want to send that username password combination to the server to actually do a login. You will probably have a variable named username and one named password. And then you have some code that takes whatever has been put into the input fields for username and password and stores it in these variables. to then later on send a request to the server using these variables. And whenever you would type into the input field again, you would update the variables so that you always send whatever has been just typed into the input fields to the server.