Google's Engineering Philosophy

A slide from a presentation at last year's Google Engineering Open House listed 12 principles that guide programming at Google:

1. All developers work out of a ~single source depot; shared infrastructure!
2. A developer can fix bugs anywhere in the source tree.
3. Building a product takes 3 commands ("get, config, make")
4. Uniform coding style guidelines across company
5. Code reviews mandatory for all checkins
6. Pervasive unit testing, written by developers
7. Unit tests run continuously, email sent on failure
8. Powerful tools, shared company-wide
9. Rapid project cycles; developers change projects often; 20% time
10. Peer-driven review process; flat management structure
11. Transparency into projects, code, process, ideas, etc.
12. Dozens of offices around world => hire best people regardless of location

Adsense Optimization: How to apply Top Paying Keywords?

Applying top paying keywords in your website is quite similar to Search Engine Optimization. However, there are many differences as well. I have done in-depth research on the subject. On the basis of that research, I have marked the points you need to keep in mind while optimizing your website for maximum payouts through highest paying Adsense keywords. We will discuss how to apply top paying keywords as well as traffic pulling keywords to a webpage for maximum payouts and traffic. First of all, we must understand that Google Adsense bot (formally known as Google Mediabot) is a subset of Google's main crawler. The crawler detects the theme of the pages and makes an entry in the Google's index (a private index - not shown publicly) that records the theme of all the pages hosting Adsense script. In other words, Google Mediabot has the characteristics somewhat similar to Google's main crawler. There are two types of optimizations that you need to follow to make a web page search engine optimized. Same is the case with Adsense Optimization.
Internal Optimization : Internal Optimization includes Meta tags, Title Text, Optimization of content, and internal linking of your website. Here we will learn how to increase relevancy of ads and how to inject keywords that will help you get high paying ads. Internal Optimization has a high impact on the relevancy of ads and CTR. External Optimization : This includes the web pages that are giving links to you (external profile of your website), anchor text being used to link your website, and many more variables that search engines use to evaluate the authoritative importance of a web page. External Optimization helps bring relevant traffic to your website and enables you to earn more by getting more CTR (Click Thru Ratio).

How long does your webpage take to show high paying ads?

This is an important question that needs to be answered. As soon as you apply Adsense script in a webpage, it is visited by the Google Mediabot (within 2 hours to 48 hours, if the bot is free - immediately). Google Mediabot's responsibility is to evaluate the theme of the web page, and enable ads almost immediately so that your website traffic does not see FREE SERVICE ADS. The relevancy of ads increases as Google's main crawler visits your website and updates its index. Furthermore, you may observe an increase in the earnings as the PR of your website/web page increases. This means that in case of Google Adsense, the internal factors that affect the ads of a particular page are evaluated by Google Mediabot (but Google's main crawler can overwrite them). And on the other hand, the external factors are inspected by the Google Crawler over a period of time. Having said that, there are simply many many factors (including those which you cannot control) that affect your ads. We are going to discuss the factors that you can control. Lets take control!

Remember:

1. Relevancy of ads may increase as your page is indexed by Google.
2. EPC (Earnings Per Click) may increase as your PR increases.
3. It entirely depends upon you how well you promote your website and get maximum earnings from your website/web pages.
4. In case of Google, many variables are involved.

Digg Secrets Exposed - Tips to increase your story visibility on Digg

Digg.com is one of the most popular social tools which can increase your traffic significantly. A story which makes to digg frontpage recieves anywhere between 5000 - 10000 unique visitors very quickly. Many times its found that digg traffic led to bandwidth overflow and server shutdowns due to more memory use and concurrent MySQL connections. But getting to digg homepage is not at all a easy feat. There are many factors which leads to a story becoming popular on digg. Some people i notice try to ask friends to digg because they think that getting some diggs would get the ball rolling. Its true upto some extent. But a experiment will clear all the doubts. Goto Digg Homepage and see the top 10 stories, you will find that most of them have been submitted 10 - 20 mins ago, some of them make to 500 diggs in just 10 mins. Do those guys ask people to digg?, no never. It is actually a separate set of factors which controls the popularity of stories. Some of the most important digg related points are given below-

1. Importance of the Title and the Topic:- The title of the story must be eyecatching and tempting people to read it out. Perhaps the title is the single most important factor which leads to a person clicking the article and visiting the site. The second thing is the topic. If you write a 1000 words article on the topic “How is Diabetes Treated ?”, OR a 200 words on “Why is my company so great ?” it will probably never attract the interest of people. First thing is no one is going to read 1000 words on diabetes (a small fraction of digg users are suffering diabetes actually ) and probably no one will be interested to know why is your company so great. You need to write topics which immediately create a buzz in the eyes of the people and they are tempted to read it and after reading the first 50 words, they become so interested that they digg the story and read the other parts. Once few people dugg your story, it catches momentum, more people start digging it and within minutes it goes viral and turned into popular.

2. Keep the Content Short and Interesting :- No one would like to read a 1000 words article. People look for short informative, humorous and interesting pieces of content.

3. Numbered Lists are great :- It has been noticed that numbered lists work wonders on sites like digg.com. Interesting lists could be “10 Reasons you should eat a lot of choclates”, “17 Reasons why laptops are better than wives” , “15 Tricks to drive massive traffic to your website”, “101 Tips for successful blogging” etc. are found to hit the homepage instantly.

4. Your Digg Profile :- The single and the most important factor which carries 90% weight and is more important than all the above factors. Its is how strong your digg profile is. Okay take a bit time to read this piece from Rand Fishkin which says that Top 100 Digg Users Control 56% of Digg’s HomePage Content. Guess what ? it is true. If your digg profile is very strong, then you submit a story and and it instantly gets noticed by all famous digg users and undergoes a spontaneous reaction. So the next question is what does a strong profile mean and how to make your profile strong. Okay Christopher Finke has a list of top 100 digg users. Do have a quick look at the list and you will find what makes your profile strong. Its 5 things -

1. Number of stories submitted
2. Number of stories which became popular
3. Popularity Ratio which is the percentage of your submitted stories which became popular. Kevin Rose is the only person who has 100% popularity ratio. Means all the stories which he submitting went popular. Well for those who don’t know Kevin Rose is the founder - CEO if Digg :D
4. The number of stories you dugg
5. The number of distinct people who viewed your profile.

Out of these 5, point number 3 is the most important and point number 5 is least important. You can find all these numbers on your digg profile page right sidebar bottom.

Okay now the question arises is that, how do you build your profile very strong. The answer is simple, its social networking website so focus on the word social. Digg other’s popular stories, add good members to your friends list. Read and comment on other’s stories. Submit good stories to the site (Not necessarily from your own website). If you find a good story on on a big site like CNN, then submit it too. There are more chances that it will quickly make to front page. If it makes to the front page, people view your profile and you ass a friend increasing your credibility. If you follow these then after a few months, you will be able to make it to the top 50 digg users and then any story you submit will again undergo a spontaneous reaction providing you extreme high traffic on your fingertips.

Digg's new algorithm is destroying the digg 'middle class'

How many great stories are being missed because this flawed algorithm? It's hurting people for having loyal friends - digg decided "friend variety" is a good way to judge the quality of a story. And guess who has lots of random friends? Top users.

I'm the opposite: I submit news from *actual newspapers* but have a small ammount of loyal friends, so I'm punished.

It took 180 diggs for my Mccain story to frontpage. Yet Mrbabyman frontpaged with just 40 diggs recently. Kevin Rose admited it at the Digg Town Hall. (However yesterday Mrbabyman went 0 for 6.)

Of course digg should stop top users from spamming the frontpage, but "user variety" just isn't a good way to promote or punish digg stories.

Why Mozilla Firefox is So Popular?

If we want to understand the reasons behind Firefox success we have to find the origins of the browser. During, September 2002 the first version of the browser was released to the public called Phoenix. The browser was based on Gecko engine from Mozilla Suite. After, a number of releases the name was changed to Firebird but due to a legal dispute it was changed again to Firefox. This browser has received a great deal of publicity as an alternative browser to Internet Explorer.

There are many factors behind Firefox’s success but I think the added features and the marketing strategy make a whole lot difference in users’ adopting the software. Another thing, I want to add is that Internet Explorer after winning the battle with Netscape’s browser was left with no significant changes. Of course, this has changed with the upcoming new version of windows called Vista and a new version of Internet Explorer. I suppose Microsoft is trying to correct some omissions and bugs in various levels of the browser.

We are now going to explore the main features Firefox has at the moment. One of the main goal of the developers working in Firefox is enhanced usability and accessibility for the end user. Tabbed browsing, where you load many pages on the same window, is a valuable feature in Firefox as it can make your browsing a lot faster. Also, pop-up blocking eliminates those irritating ads and the user can easily find information on a particular page using the ‘find as you type’ feature. The built in search bar includes all the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo etc. and you can add more search engines if you want. People working on the accessibility of the browser have manged to make Firefox work with several screen readers, screen magnifiers and on-screen keyboards. These accessibility features can help people with impairments browse the Internet easier than before.

Another feature Firefox users like very much is that they can customize easily many aspects of the browser. Extensions such as the popular web developer or the Venkman debugger can be added to the browser and enhance the functionality of Firefox. Users, often like to have an appearance according to their preferences so they use different themes in Firefox. Therefore, themes are used to change the visual appearance of the browser.

Security is really important for end users and corporations. Both, want a secure browser that they can trust without the security holes of Internet Explorer and its ActiveX technology. Mozilla Firefox fulfills this requirement mainly by giving the opportunity to other developers to check the code for security bugs and using various successful security techniques and models such as the sandbox security model. In addition, the browser can be used in many different platforms and the source code is freely available for anyone to compile it and contribute to the project.

We have seen numerous features that Firefox has but I would like to talk a little bit about the marketing strategy that is used. The development of the browser is supported by search engines Google and Yahoo through partnerships and mostly by the open source community. Mozilla Foundation which is responsible for the development of the browser believes that community based marketing can be successful. They have proven their point by using a community based marketing web site called spreadfirefox.com. They were able to place an ad on New York Times through donations made by the community of developers and devotees during the release of Firefox 1.0.

The secret behind Firefox’s success is the valuable features available for the user and the enthusiastic community which helps financially through donations and spreads the word.