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A blog subscriber reminded me today that I was yet to announce the winner of our SMX Sydney pass giveaway competition. Oops! Sorry about that. Totally slipped my mind to make the announcement on 25 March as promised as I was busy preparing for - you guessed it - SMX Sydney!
So without further ado or procrastination, the winner of the free pass to SMX Sydney is none other than…
Jennifer Cluff
To win, Jennifer answered this:
“What question would you like to hear Danny Sullivan ask Google’s Marissa Mayer at the Keynote Conversation on Day 1 of SMX Sydney?”
with this:
“How does Google technically perform censorship?”
CONGRATULATIONS Jennifer. You just scored yourself a Premium Pass to the SMX Sydney conference worth AUD 1,650. I’ll be in touch via email with instructions for accessing your pass. I’ll also be passing this question on to conference organizers to give to Danny Sullivan for the keynote address.
Thanks for the great question and be sure to stop by the Search Engine College booth for a free t-shirt.
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SiteProNews have now published my 2 part article based on the Webstock 2008 presentation by Google’s Senior Research Scientist, Dr. Craig Nevill-Manning.
Here’s Part 1 and Part 2.
In his presentation, Craig, who is New Zealand born and bred, explained how Google uses science to develop more precise search techniques. I found his talk absolutely riveting and typed frantically during the whole thing in my hurry to blog it.
Here are a couple of classic excerpts:
Google used to do a terrible job of defining terms. Craig noticed people were searching for “definition of…”, or “what is a….” etc so he wanted the search engine to provide better results for these searches. He found lots of web pages that contained glossaries and definitions, so he hacked up a Perl script to get the glossary formats.
The first recall results were only 50 percent accurate. He wanted to improve this rate, so he did some experiments with the data. But he could never reach an accuracy level he was happy with. It was later he realized that most of the questions people actually needed answers to could be answered with his crappy little Perl script. He concluded that 100 percent accuracy is not important, that scale is much more important.
Craig says that once a week, a person at each data center has a list of all the failed hard disks and walks around the datacenter with a pile of hard drives, replacing them one at a time. Velcro is Google’s secret weapon! All Google’s hard disks are velcroed in. This allows super quick service and replacement time. So curiously, there is no downside to hardware failures at Google, because they are expected and managed via scale.
Fascinating stuff!
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SMX Sydney is gearing up to be the “must-attend” search engine marketing event of the year in Australia and there has been a lot of social media buzz and anticipation leading up to it.
To add to the excitement, because Search Engine College is sponsoring the event, we’ve scored a free conference pass for one lucky reader of this blog.
To win the free pass, simply answer this:
“What question would you like to hear Danny Sullivan ask Google’s Marissa Mayer at the Keynote Conversation on Day 1 of SMX Sydney?”
For your chance to win, contact us with your details and include your answer to the above question in the “comments” section of the form. Make sure you include an email address so we can contact you if you win! The answer I like the best will win a free pass to SMX Sydney. The winner will be announced on this blog on March 25.
In the meantime, if you’re planning on attending SMX Sydney and you haven’t registered yet, below is a coupon code that will give you 15 percent off the full conference ticket price:
SMX08-SECVIP
This is a short-term deal so register right now! And don’t forget, in the exhibit hall, we’ll be handing out Search Engine College t-shirts and $100 discount coupons which conference attendees can use towards a course of their choice. So if you’re planning on attending SMX Sydney, please stop by our booth to say hi and pick up your discount coupon and free t-shirt.
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Ready to laugh out loud? Check out the funny SMX trailer put together by Mike McDonald and his crew from WebProNews.
Although persons outside the search industry probably won’t get the punch line, the video is well worth a few laughs. Nice production job guys!
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Search Marketing Expo (SMX) is coming to Sydney for the first time this April and the anticipation is already building. The speaker line-up alone is enough to make jaws drop:
* Danny Sullivan, Editor in Chief - Searchengineland.com
* Frederick Valley, Adwords Evangelist, Google Inc.
* Gord Hotchkiss, President & CEO - Enquiro
* Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience - Google Inc.
* Rand Fishkin, Director - SEOmoz
As one of the sponsors of the conference, my team and I at Search Engine College are particularly excited to see what Danny and his hardworking local crew (Hi Barry!) have planned for their first SMX event Down Under. It will also be the first time we’ve ever exhibited at a major search conference so we’ve been in preparation mode for some time. Our exhibition fees include a booth but not fit-out or marketing materials and there’s a lot to organize!
The great news is that as sponsors, we’ve secured an exclusive discount that we can pass on to Search Engine College students and readers of this blog, PLUS we’ve also scored a free conference pass to one lucky blog reader. But more about the free pass in a later post. In the meantime, if you’re planning on attending SMX Sydney and you haven’t registered yet, today’s your lucky day. Below is a coupon code that will give you 15 percent off the full conference ticket price:
SMX08-SECVIP
I’m not sure when this coupon is set to expire, but I got the impression that it was a short-term deal. So go and register, quick!
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