Great colleagues

Speaking of the Search Engine Strategies conference, I was thinking of things that I meant to post about but haven’t yet, and I remembered reading this post about what a great job Charles Martin did at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago. Charles had never done any search engine conferences, so we sat and prepped for an hour or so about what SES is like and what questions he might get. And he knocked it out of the park: he spoke at two different sessions and even joked around with his co-panelists. Heck, he took better notes than I usually do at a conference, including writing down all the questions that people asked. Danny Sullivan recently sent word that Charles got high marks on audience feedback, too. Charles, thanks for representing Google at SES Chicago.

I often tell people that if I failed the “bus test” (that is, if I got hit by bus and didn’t survive), there would easily be 50 Googlers who could take my place and talk about webmaster issues, and I really think that’s true. Google does a pretty good job on webmaster communication, but we need to keep looking for ways to scale even more. It’s healthy to bring more technical Googlers into the rotation at conferences: we’re sending Brian to speak in Australia in March, and at Search Engine Strategies in New York I’ll be joined by software engineer Aaron (in addition to the loads of other Google speakers who will be there, and hopefully several other engineers; I know that some Sitemaps folks are coming too).

The last month or so especially, I’ve enjoyed talking to colleagues in the crawl and indexing teams, Sitemaps, and core quality about how Google could improve webmaster/engineering communications more. I’m excited about how far we’ve come, and we’ll keep looking for ways that we could scale up communication from the engineering side of Google.