Alla Gringaus

Web Fonts Performance

A technical deep-dive on Web Fonts: how they work, the data formats, performance optimizations, and tips and tricks for making your site both fast and pretty at the same time – turns out, these two goals are not mutually exclusive!

Content Experiments with Analytics

The Google Analytics just added Content Experiments, which helps you run experiments on your website to see what page content and designs are most effective. With the help of a setup wizard, you can develop several versions of a webpage, each of which will be shown to different visitors. Analytics then determines which one of those versions is best for your site. (Some of you might recognize this functionality from Website Optimizer, which is now being rolled into Analytics.)

You can also find more info on the Google Analytics Blog: http://goo.gl/ulUHZ

Google’s Knowledge Graph

Language can be ambiguous—do you mean Taj Mahal the monument, or Taj Mahal the musician? Now Google understands the difference, and can narrow your search results just to the one you mean—just click on one of the links to see that particular slice of results

A few curious things about Google

Josh Tyrangiel, formerly managing editor of TIME magazine, presently editor of Bloomberg Business Week, interviewed Google’s Marissa Mayer, who joined Google  in 1999 as a  Stanford University grad. She shared a few anecdotal facts about Google:

•  Google’s basic, white home page wasn’t conceived as some sort of ode to minimalism—it was pure necessity. “We don’t have a webmaster and I don’t do HTML,” Mayer recalls Google co-founder Sergey Brin saying.

•  Mayer almost killed the idea of targeting ads against users’ e-mails, having initially considered the idea “creepy.” A colleague working an all-nighter ignored her rejection of the idea, and ads-in-e-mail later turned into Google’s AdSense, a multi-billion dollar business.

•  Google has calculated that an ad on its home page would cost at least $10 million, if not more. Don’t get excited—the space isn’t for sale.

•  Most Google pages sport a small copyright notice at the bottom. It’s not necessary, but company leaders installed the symbol after initial test users did nothing but stare at the home page, “waiting for the rest of it to load,” Mayer said. The symbol was a sign that the minimal page was loaded, ready for a search.

•  Mayer once had an intense fascination with Motorola’s circa-1996 StarTAC mobile phone and bought used models on eBay to build a collection. (Google is now buying Motorola; there’s no connection.)

Google’s Metaweb – Smartest Data Organization

Metaweb, a formerly San Francisco startup, now Google’s company (2010) helps smartest search engine to find and distinguish different words that may have different values like Paris may be Paris France or Paris Hilton. The complicated mechanics of metaweb uses semantic relationships between people and things from around the web, including websites, ebooks, information about movies, and businesses – all combined in open Freebase database maintained by Google. In other words, Metaweb maintains Freebase.

via Freebase.com – Metaweb (the company) has developed Metaweb (the database and API). Freebase (the open global structured knowledge base) is a high-profile public instantiation of the Metaweb technology. This manual documents general Metaweb services and APIs, and relies on Freebase for example data and applications. The services and APIs are applicable beyond Freebase, however, and you’ll find that this manual uses the name “Metaweb” far more than it does the name “Freebase”.