Beyond clear-cut blackhat webspam, the second-biggest category of spam that Google deals with is hacked sites. The most common reaction we hear from webmasters is "The problem is with the Google search. There is nothing wrong with our website." That's a real quote from an email one site owner recently sent us. Sadly, it turns out that the site is almost always really hacked.

I've been reading a lot of the coverage of the Search plus Your World launch and I wanted to share my story and then clarify something. I love to stay up until early in the morning playing Werewolf . In early December I went to a journalism conference called "News Foo Camp" in Phoenix and played a lot of Werewolf. When I got back, for some reason I searched for [werewolf] " maybe I was thinking about making a custom deck of werewolf cards.

A lot of the time, I dispel misconceptions by leaving comments on blogs. That works great, except for the rare occasion when someone pretends to be me and leaves a rude, fake, or otherwise untrue blog comment. Over the previous decade, I've only seen 4-5 times where someone impersonated me. But in the last month, I've seen at least three nasty comments written by "fake Matt Cutts" impersonators.

Even though this year is nowhere near finished, a lot of people at Google are already thinking about things to launch next year. So I wanted to put the question out: what cool things would you like to see Google launch in 2012? For example, in 2011, we launched hundreds of search quality changes that might not be noticeable, along with a few high-impact changes. But we also added new ways to search, like the ability to search by image and search by voice .

Sometime soon I'm planning to record some new webmaster videos. I created a Google Moderator page where you can post video suggestions and vote topics up and down. Instead of short 1-2 minute video answers to quick questions, I'd like to try something new this time. I'd like to move toward making tutorials about how Google works and-more importantly-why Google works that way. I think videos that dive deeper like this video about robots.txt can be really helpful.

I answered an interesting rel=canonical question over email today and thought I'd blog about it. If you're not familiar with rel=canonical read these pages first. Then watch this video about rel=canonical vs. 301s, especially the second half: Okay, I sometimes get a question about whether Google will always use the url from rel=canonical as the preferred url. The answer is that we take rel=canonical urls as a strong hint,

This week brings the Google I/O conference . That page has a QR code that lets you install the official Google I/O Android app for the conference. The conference has a ton of great talks scheduled. You can learn everything from "Building Aggressively Compatible Android Games" to "Cloud Robotics" to "Designing and Implementing Android UIs for Phones and Tablets" to a Google Checkout talk to "Honeycomb Highlights" to "How to NFC," plus a ton more.

I'm always a fan of Googlers doing more communication and more videos, so when some fellow search quality folks made a video about working at Google, I said I'd be happy to post it: You can find out more info and apply to be a search engineer at Google if you're interested.

Steven Levy just wrote a new book about Google called In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives . It succeeds the most on the "how Google thinks" part-if you want to understand how Google thinks, get an overview of Google, or understand its impact on the world, this is the book for you. I think anyone interested in Google would enjoy this book. People who don't know much about Google will get a good overview.

I wanted to mention that Google's search quality team is hiring. We work on everything from synonyms and spell correction to core ranking, UI changes, evaluation, and yes-even webspam. The sorts of people that do really well in Google tend to be smart, personable, can work well in teams or independently, get things done, and take initiative. It helps to have a healthy balance of theory as well as the pragmatic ability to build/launch real systems.

If you have a lot of urls that you don't want in Google anymore, you can make the pages return a 404 and wait for Googlebot to recrawl/reindex the pages. This is often the best way. You can also block out an entire directory or a whole site in robots.txt and then use our url removal tool to remove the entire directory from Google's search results . What I would not recommend is sending tons )as in,

Google just launched two-factor authentication , and I believe everyone with a Google account should enable it. Two-factor authentication )also known as 2-step verification( relies on something you know )like a password( and something you have )like a cell phone(. Crackers have a harder time getting into your account, because even if they figure out your password, they still only have half of what they need.

I sometimes hear people say "Remember when Google launched and the results were so good? Google didn't have any spam back then. Man, I wish we could go back to those days." I know where those people are coming from. I was in grad school in 1999, and I remember that Google's quality blew me away after just a few searches. But it's a misconception that there was no spam on Google back then. Google in 2000 looked great in comparison with other engines at the time,

Earlier this week I was on a search panel with Harry Shum of Bing and Rich Skrenta of Blekko )and moderated by Vivek Wadhwa( and the video now live. It's forty minutes long, but it covers a lot of ground: One big point of discussion is whether Bing copies Google's search results. I'm going to try to address this earnestly; if snarky is what you want, Stephen Colbert will oblige you . First off, let me say that I respect all the people at Bing.

I just wanted to give a quick update on one thing I mentioned in my search engine spam post. My post mentioned that "we're evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others' content and sites with low levels of original content." That change was approved at our weekly quality launch meeting last Thursday and launched earlier this week.

)Just as a reminder: while I am a Google employee, the following post is my personal opinion.( Recently I read a fascinating essay that I wanted to comment on. I found it via Ars Technica and it discusses "search neutrality" )PDF link, but I promise it's worth it(. It's written by James Grimmelmann , an associate professor at New York Law School. The New York Times called Grimmelmann "one of the most vocal critics" of the proposed Google Books agreement,

It's that time again! Next week I'll record some new webmaster videos. I created a Google Moderator page where you can post questions or suggestions and vote topics up and down. I won't be able to answer every single question, but I'll tackle several popular ones plus a few of the more interesting questions. Please submit questions that lots of people would be interested in, not just a question about your specific site.