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Ever wonder what kind of questions a company like Google might ask you on an interview? You have heard all of the stories of the outlandish questions and the culture that surrounds everyone's favorite technology company. Read dozens of probable Google questions from hiring managers and people that have interviewed with Google.

 

Google Interview Questions: Product Marketing Manager

• Why do you want to join Google?
• What do you know about Google's product and technology?
• If you are Product Manager for Google's Adwords, how do you plan to market this?
• What would you say during an AdWords or AdSense product seminar?
• Who are Google competitors, and how does Google compete with them?
• Have you ever used Google's products? Gmail?
• What's a creative way of marketing Google's brand name and product?
• If you are the product marketing manager for Google's Gmail product, how do you plan to market it so as to achieve 100 million customers in 6 months?

Google Interview Questions: Product Manager

• How would you boost the GMail subscription base?
• What is the most efficient way to sort a million integers?
• How would you re-position Google's offerings to counteract competitive threats from Microsoft?
• How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
• You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?
• How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
• How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?
• Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.
• How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?
• You have to get from point A to point B. You don’t know if you can get there. What would you do?
• Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?
• Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What happens?
• In a country in which people only want boys, every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?
• If the probability of observing a car in 30 minutes on a highway is 0.95, what is the probability of observing a car in 10 minutes (assuming constant default probability)?
• If you look at a clock and the time is 3:15, what is the angle between the hour and the minute hands? (The answer to this is not zero!)
• Four people need to cross a rickety rope bridge to get back to their camp at night. Unfortunately, they only have one flashlight and it only has enough light left for seventeen minutes. The bridge is too dangerous to cross without a flashlight, and it's only strong enough to support two people at any given time. Each of the campers walks at a different speed. One can cross the bridge in 1 minute, another in 2 minutes, the third in 5 minutes, and the slow poke takes 10 minutes to cross. How do the campers make it across in 17 minutes?
• You are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including you and the friend. your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. would you accept the wager?
• How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?
• You have eight balls all of the same size. 7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?
• You have five pirates, ranked from 5 to 1 in descending order. The top pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among them. But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree with him, he gets killed. How should he allocate the gold in order to maximize his share but live to enjoy it? (Hint: One pirate ends up with 98 percent of the gold.)
• You are given 2 eggs. You have access to a 100-story building. Eggs can be very hard or very fragile means it may break if dropped from the first floor or may not even break if dropped from 100th floor. Both eggs are identical. You need to figure out the highest floor of a 100-story building an egg can be dropped without breaking. The question is how many drops you need to make. You are allowed to break 2 eggs in the process.
• Describe a technical problem you had and how you solved it.
• How would you design a simple search engine?
• Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco.
• There's a latency problem in South Africa. Diagnose it.
• What are three long term challenges facing google?

 

Yahoo's paid inclusion within their organic search engine results, also known as Yahoo Search Submit Pro or YSSP if you are into jargon, will be retired at the end of the year. For many online direct response online retailers, the YSSP program was a great performer. It is no secret that the organic algorithms between Google and Yahoo varied greatly, leaving SEO's with the ultimate question: Optimize for Google or Yahoo? For all SEO's that I know, this was an easy answer. Optimize to Google's high volume and let the paid marketers buy Yahoo paid inclusions. Win... Win...

 The YSSP out-performed most paid campaigns in terms of ROI, as it was seen by most as an organic result. So why then are they saying farewell to their old friend? This is of coarse due to the new Yahoo! / MSN (Bing) partnership. After January 1, Yahoo! will begin serving Microsoft's Bing search engine results. Those sites that are not indexable or crawlable will no longer be able to rank on the first page of Yahoo organic listings. An increasing factor in the value of this is also the incrimental increase in Bing funneled results. With Yahoo!, MSN, and Bing and serving the same results, SEO's will, for the first time, find it worth while to optimise to a non-Google algorithm. It is not to say that steps will be taken to enhance a landing page or site in a way that would detract from Google SERPs, but more likely emphasis will be made to utilize optimization strategies that will improve SERPs cross-channels. The SEO in me is definately excited about this new challange and the new learnings that can be made by SEOing for a semantic search algorithm like Bing. However, the SEMer in me will definately miss the old days of high ROI from this once successful paid channel. Farewell old friend YSSP... Thanks for all of the revenue you have brought me.

Before you can begin to optimize your website, you are going to need to gather data. A great tool for gathering this data is Google Analytics. Its free and sets up in 3 easy steps.

Install your tracking code and view reports within 24 hours.

To access your tracking code from within your Google Analytics account:

1. Go to the profile's Tracking Code page at https://www.google.com/analytics/settings/check_status_profile_handler
2. Copy your tracking code from the text box in the Instructions for adding tracking section
3. Paste the code snippet into every webpage you want to track immediately before the </body> tag. If you use a common template, you can enter it there.

Once you have added the tracking code, you can log into Google Analytics and view the status of your account. If you have added the tracking code correctly, you should see Receiving Data. To check status, simply log into your account and select 'edit'. The status is within the  Analytics Settings > Profile Settings section of your account.

To successfully complete the installation, access to your web pages, basic HTML editing knowledge, and ability to upload the tagged pages to your server are required. We recommend contacting your webmaster for assistance as needed.

If you are using Google Sites, we have integrated the Google Analytics tracking code for you. Please follow these directions for proper installation.

Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalized. If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites.

Design and content guidelines	Learn more...
Technical guidelines	Learn more...
Quality guidelines	Learn more...

When your site is ready:

• Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.


• Submit a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.


• Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.

Design and content guidelines

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• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.


• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.


• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.


• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.


• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.


• Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.


• Check for broken links and correct HTML.


• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.


• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).


• Review our image guidelines for best practices on publishing images.

Technical guidelines

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• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.


• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.


• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.


• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you're using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools.


• If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.


• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.


• Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.

Quality guidelines

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These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please report that site at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

Quality guidelines - basic principles

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."


• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"


• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.


• Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Quality guidelines - specific guidelines

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.


• Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.


• Don't send automated queries to Google.


• Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.


• Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.


• Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.


• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.


• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

Noteworthy Facts

• using on/off username from your phone only stops notifications to the place the command comes from; you'll still collect a person's updates on the web.
• using follow/leave username from your phone is the same as using on/off username
• following someone from a phone for the first time will also cause you to follow them on the web
• there is no way to stop following a person on the web without visiting their profile and removing them. The off, leave, stop, and quit commands will only disable updates for the device(s) from which they were sent.
• you don't have to use ON/OFF username from the phone, you can also set individual notifcations from a person's profile page, or check your following page and manage all phone notification settings there.

I see many blog posts asking how to customize the logo to the left of the URL. This custom logo is also known as a favicon. While it has little inherent value, it is noteworthy for branding and a nice little touch. As a true web marketer, I deem all of these incrimental improvements worthy of the effort.  After all, this customization can be completed in about 15-minutes utilizing a good favicon tool and 3 easy steps.  Of course, you will need a jpeg logo to start with.
 

I recommend using the Dynamic Drive favicon generator:

 

 After you've created a neat favicon, it's time to add it to your site. To do so, follow the below simple procedure:

On Friday May 15th a search engine that many have dubbed, "the Google Killer" launched. Wolfram Alpha may not initially cut into Google revenue, but its sophisticated algorithms promise to give avid Google searchers something to talk about. Wolfram Alpha was not designed to compete with Google head to head. It was designed to answer more difficult questions or those that need scientific calculation or reasoning.

WolframAlpha “takes serious scientific data and produces answers that simply don't exist as easily or as accessibly elsewhere,” he writes. “It can do calculus, regression analysis, and gene coding. In short it is the best calculator on the web.”

 

• But “too often it doesn’t have the best answers for basic questions and searches,” notes Erick Schonfeld in TechCrunch, who searched his own name. “It came back with the distance between Erick, Oklahoma and the town of Schonfeld in Germany.”
• Maybe the site’s just not “ready for prime time” yet, writes Michael Hickins in InformationWeek. “There's nothing more frustrating for a user than not getting the expected result from an online tool, and nothing worse for a website than to fail to live up to its own hype.”

I decided to give this new search engine the old search test that every experienced SEO always completes. A search of his or her own name. I was disappointed but not surprised when Wolfram Alpha returned the following for my search on 'gary burtka' - Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

 

It seems as though a change in how you see referring domains through Google is about to take effect. While those parties utilizing analytics should read the Google Analytics Blog and keep themselves and their clients posted of up coming changes and effects.

 The following is what I found on the Google Analytics Blog:

First, just a heads-up that if you don't analyze your own traffic logs, use Urchin web analytics software, or develop web analytics software, you probably don't need to read this post. We're writing this for the most geeky among us, because Google Analytics will not be affected by this information. On the other hand, we do want to let you know about some changes to Google search that are coming down the pike, before you start seeing (potentially) alarming headlines.

Starting this week, you may start seeing a new referring URL format for visitors coming from Google search result pages. Up to now, the usual referrer for clicks on search results for the term "flowers", for example, would be something like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search

Now you will start seeing some referrer strings that look like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

The key difference between these two urls is that instead of "/search?" the URL contains a "/url?". If you run your own analyses, be sure that you do not depend on the "/search?" portion of the URL to determine if a visit started with an organic search click. Google Analytics does not depend on the "/search?" string in the referrer, so users of Google Analytics will not notice a difference in their reports, but other analytics packages may need to adapt to this change in our referrer string to maintain accurate reports.

The new referrer URLs will initially only occur in a small percentage of searches. You should expect to see old and new forms of the URLs as this change gradually rolls out.

If you are using UTM-based tracking with Urchin Software, you'll want to stay tuned for a software update that we'll be making available soon. If you are using IP-Useragent based tracking with Urchin, you won't be affected since this form of tracking can successfully process both current and new referral strings.

Posted by Brett Crosby, Google Analytics Team

 

 

CHICAGO |The 13th annual Webby Award Nominations and Honorees have just been released and Newser has been selected as an Official Honoree for the News category in The 13^th Annual Webby Awards! We are very proud of this accomplishment as there is a vast amount of wonderful and interactive site throughout the web.

 

The International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences is pleased to announce the Nominees and Official Honorees for the 13th Annual Webby Awards. Nominees were selected by The Academy from nearly 10,000 entries representing all 50 states and 60 countries worldwide. Webby Winners and Webby People's Voice Winners -- announced on May 5, 2009 -- will be chosen from the five Nominees in each category. Official Honorees, selected for their outstanding caliber of work, represent fewer than 15% of the total entries received this year.

Catch some early press coverage of this year's Nominees on The Totally Rad Show (a 12th Annual Webby People's Voice Winner in Online Film & Video: Variety).

Congratulations to both Nominees and Official Honorees on a truly deserving accomplishment!

View the 13th Annual Webby Nominees
View the 13th Annual Webby Official Honorees

  Today also marks the launch of the Webby People's Voice Awards. The People's Voice Awards, Presented by Microsoft Silverlight, invite the public to participate in The Webby Awards by allowing them to vote for their favorite nominees between now and April 30. Make sure to lobby for your favorites along the way!

Vote now for the Webby People's Voice Awards