The above video is a recreation of a talk rendered by Matt Cutts at PubCon in Las Vegas in November 2009. The talk titled “State of the Index” dwells with Google’s efforts in the passing year in helping users, web developers, and webmasters to perform better. Matt starts off by talking about the commitment Google showed last year to make itself more user-friendly. The launch of web browser Chrome, Mobile OS Android and Collaboration Platform Wave with each having large open-source components have made web surfing more exciting and enjoyable.

The introduction of Music OneBox, which allows using an artist’s name and a song name for searching, is definitely going to bring cheer to music enthusiasts. Music OneBox enables users to easily buy MP3 of songs in addition to playing the songs. Music OneBox also comes with a brand-new feature, which gives users the power to search for songs using the song lyrics. The recently launched Google Squared has the capabilities to redefine web searching as it permits users to get relevant results for almost anything they type in.

With Google Social Search, you can use keywords to retrieve related content posted online by fellow web surfers who belong to your social circle. Having a Google profile makes it easy to use Google Social Search. The Show Options feature of Google allows users to customize their search in virtually any way they want. Google’s Wonder Wheel feature presents users with a variety of data related with a keyword search. Now, Matt Cutts turns his attention to Google’s efforts in the passing year aimed at making things easier for web developers.

In 2010, Google could make loading speed of websites one of the factors considered while assigning page ranks to them as a fast-loading site definitely improves the user-friendliness. Visiting Page Speed on Google Code will enable web developers to access all the tools Google has created for them to make their sites fast-loading. Matt advices to visit webpagetest.org as this site helps developers to know about the loading times of each individual component of their websites. Although this site is not a part of Google, it gives developers information on all the changes that will make their sites fast-loading.

Closure, as assortment of tools introduced by Google recently empowers web developers to perform more efficiently. Closure acts as a compiler, library and templating system. Library, with 180 UI elements among other things helps developers to save java script creating time and compiler helps developers to make their java script more compact. Some of the UI elements like DatePicker are the same as those used by Google.

2009 saw Google coming out with more products and services from its kitty. Courtesy efan78.com

Google Web Toolkit (again a project from Google Code), used by Google Wave and Google AdWords, which comes with many reusable components, enables users to compile Java codes easier and more effectively. AJAX Libraries API tool from Google provides latest Ajax versions, which will allow developers to set up highly secure websites. Finally, Matt shifts his focus to things that show Google’s concern for providing webmasters with tools and resources that will make them better equipped and more powerful. rel=canonical, introduced by Google in February 2009, embraced by all major search engines, permits a webmaster to inform search engines that two websites are the same and links to them should be added up. The Ignore url parameters feature of Google allows webmasters to eliminate unnecessary parameters. With Fetch as Googlebot tool, webmasters can ask Google to show them what Googlebot saw when it traversed their sites or a page in their sites. This tool will help webmasters spot and remove hacked content. The Better Malware Warnings tool informs webmasters exactly what is giving rise to malware in their sites so that they will be able to get rid of the malware cause more easily.

The Message Forwarding feature forwards, in the form of emails, the messages received by a webmaster in the Webmaster Counsel. Google’s Keyword details feature gives webmasters the opportunity to know the top sites that are acting as competitors to them for a particular keyword. The four things that Google did that are intended for Better Communication are Google Webmaster Blog, SEO Beginner’s Guide, We don’t use key word meta tags, which helps webmaster to escape lawsuits and Webmaster console: 40 languages. Webmasters can get Google’s latest helpful stuff by visiting Google Webmaster Central on YouTube.

Matt Cutts ends the video by briefing about Google Caffiene and doing a bit of prediction for the future. Google Caffiene is constituted by a new indexing architecture and it is more flexible and faster. Hacking and malware are going to rise and Google will take steps to minimize their influence as much as possible. He also lists the four things that must be given attention to among the things that have been described in this video. They are doing social search, making site fast-loading, utilizing webmaster console and subscribing to official blog and video channel.

As published in Financial Times on November 22, 2009, Microsoft is in talks with various news publishing companies like News Corp who owns The Wall Street Journal (in US), The Times (in UK), Daily Telegraph (in Australia) etc to have them de-index or remove their content from Google. In return, these media companies will get paid!

If that happens, we all would be really interested to see how will Google react. Will they pay more than what Microsoft offered? And if they do, we will see a new money making opportunity for the media companies to pull back their sinking ship. If search engines starts fighting for the exclusive rights of the content, we will be in a new era of web search.

Microsoft is in talks with News Corp to De-index its pages from Google

We may even hit the era where more players join the search engine war. Every warrior shows the unique content. So if I want to read health news, I will go to, say, healthyengine.com (a fictitious search engine which publishes exclusive news about health industry) instead of Google because Google does not have the rights to publish those news!

“While Validation may be good internally (for your website/organization), we have to make sure that the number of bytes returned to the users is as small as possible”, and added, that “Google does NOT provide any boost in ranking to pages that are validated”.

Now, those two sentences probably sum up the interview, and require some explaining, notwithstanding how casually they have been quoted. But first, a background check. The W3C validation is a service provided by the World Wide Web Consortium that prescribes a set of HTML coding standards for web pages. The service also allows coders to check for any markup errors in the pages authored by them. The objective of the HTML validation standards is similar to the objective behind traditional accounting practices or programming conventions – to produce Web pages that are:

1. Neat (user-friendly)
2. Accessible (from different devices)
3. Compatible (with different multimedia formats)
4. Manageable
5. Universally understood (similar displays on different browsers), and
6. Easy to update.

Despite all the apparent advantages, a majority of web pages on the internet are not validated. In fact, w3c and wikipedia confirm that less than 20% of the major search engine and browser websites are validated and error free.

A good number of search engine homepages are not w3c validated themselves

Reason: What Google says in the interview.

If you were to design a web page, the most primary of your targets will be:

a) to keep the page loading times as low as possible; and

b) to ensure that your page is compatible with all common browsers in the market.

And the prospect of tweaking with your optimized HTML coding to even slightly increase your page size or decrease compatibility with browsers, is something that is generally seen as avoidable, in spite of however form of validation that may bring to your page. Also, the SEO benefits that are often stated in support of W3C validation are indirect and unquantifiable, at best, and validated pages receive no special attention from Search Engines; as affirmed by Google. The spokesperson also went on record saying that, “We would love if a Googler would spend 20% time trying to make sure we validate, and I think we can validate and still have a small page size.” Clearly, Google thinks of validation as frivolous or something that occupies a secondary priority at best.

Image Courtesy: Rob Cottingham & cvwdesign.com

For rhetoric, when a major web entity doesn’t care to validate, would you? Let us know what you think about it. If you liked reading this post on the KPMRS blog, do subscribe to our feed now!