Let's enjoy the Bangkok from all of the world.

Have you given Buzz a try recently? Robert Scoble just asked if it was time to reconsider Buzz. Coincidentally I said almost the same thing in a question and answer session with Danny Sullivan last week at the SMX Advanced search conference.

I’ll repeat what I said last week. Do you remember when you first started on Twitter, and you didn’t know quite what to do with it? Who do I follow? What do I say? I didn’t really “get” Twitter for months. But as I found interesting people to follow and got the hang of it, I began to see the appeal of Twitter and started using it more often. I’ve noticed Buzz is tracing that same trajectory for me: an initial burst, followed by a bit of a slump, and then a steady climb as I found people that make Buzz interesting.

Buzz fits nicely between tweeting and blogging. Twitter is perfect when you want to share a link or a single crystalized idea. But Twitter isn’t as strong for group discussion or expressing medium- to long-form ideas. At the same time, blogging is great when you want a permalinked url that will stand the test of time, but it can be a real pain to write a blog post. I always feel like I have to polish my blog posts and it seems to take me at least an hour to write a blog post no matter what I say.

Buzz has the casual feel of Twitter, but you can dive into a topic pretty deeply. Buzz is easier than a blog post, but can look almost as polished. I find Buzz especially good for asking opinions, because the signal-to-noise ratio is (at least right now) quite high. I think Buzz is incredibly strong for internal company discussions too, so I’m looking forward to Buzz rolling into Google Apps.

If you haven’t checked out Buzz, or haven’t checked it out recently, you might want to give Buzz another look. You can follow me on Buzz if you’re interested; we’re having a nice discussion about favorite Chrome extensions right now.

I’m incredibly happy that Google has added the option to search over SSL by going to https://www.google.com/ — note the “s” in “https.” I’m writing this blog post in a hotel right now because I’m in Europe for a week doing a series of tech talks, but I could just as easily be working down at local Dublin cafe with an open WiFi hotspot. In both cases, I might want to do a private search that the hotel or local cafe can’t see. A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connection provides an encrypted tunnel between my browser and Google, so other people can’t sniff what I’m searching for.

I believe encrypted search is an important option for Google searchers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked for secure search in the past (see this post from 2009), and I credit them for helping to put this on Google’s radar. Another inspiration that helped to spark this project was Cory Doctorow’s book “Little Brother.” It was one of my favorite books of 2008 and while I won’t go into the book’s plot here, it’s a quick, fun read. “Little Brother” also makes a compelling case for encrypting HTTP traffic on the web.

Some people don’t yet fully understand how SSL search works. I saw one commenter say “If they still pass in the search parameters in the URL (Get), what’s the point? People can still see what you queried, if they made them “post” messages it might actually do something.” It’s important to realize that even though you as a surfer can see the query in the url, the sites between your browser and Google can’t. Google OS demonstrated that by sniffing a regular HTTP query and an HTTPS query in Wireshark to show that the query can’t be seen going over the wire.

Thanks to all the people at Google who did the all the hard work and heavy lifting to deliver this. One of the main engineers behind the effort was Evan Roseman, a member of the webspam team who you might have met at previous search conferences. In fact, Evan was originally scheduled to be on our site review session at Google I/O this past Thursday, but we decided that launching SSL search took priority. I also wanted to say thanks and congratulations to the other Googlers (for example Andrew Widdowson, Nathan Dabney, and Murali Viswanathan, but also many, many others) who generously gave their time and effort to make the launch happen and happen smoothly. You might think that switching on SSL for websearch is easy, but for a website with the complexity and scale of Google, it’s really not. The launch wouldn’t have happened without a ton of assistance from Googlers from many parts of the company, and I sincerely appreciate it.

I hope you enjoy https://www.google.com and find it useful.

It’s that time! On Monday morning I’ll record some new 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.

Just a reminder: please leave your question on the Google Moderator page, not in the comments here. When you leave a question on the moderator page, people can vote for the questions and I can see which questions people are most interested in.

I recently returned from a vacation to Japan, Hong Kong, and Thailand. It was a ton of fun and I hope to blog about it at some point — each country was of course unique and each offered different, wonderful experiences. From the cherry blossoms and the kindness shown to me by my colleagues at the Google Tokyo office in Japan, to the hustle and bustle and skyscrapers of Hong Kong, to the beautiful landscapes, people (and elephants!) of Thailand, I relished every minute. The trip also redoubled my interest in webspam in world-wide languages.

Google has always cared about search quality in dozens of languages, not just English. We’re trying a new experiment in webspam: we decided to identify five languages where we’d really like to drill down into webspam, solicit spam reports in those languages, and pay even more attention to spam reports in those languages over the next couple months. If you know of spam in these languages, we’d especially like to hear about it.

The five languages where we’re asking for spam reports are Thai, Indonesian, Romanian, Czech, and Farsi. Of course, we always welcome webspam reports — in any language! — at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport but we’d be especially interested to hear about spam in Thai, Indonesian, Romanian, Czech, and Farsi. If you know of webspam in those languages, please let us know, and thanks!