All right. Welcome, everyone, to today's Google SEO Office Hours. My name is John Mueller. I'm a search advocate at Google here in Switzerland. And part of what we do are these Office Hour Hangouts, where people can jump in and ask their questions around their website and web search. And we can try to find some answers.  So we can go through some of that. But if any of you want to get started with the first question, you're welcome to jump in. Hi, John. I have a question. So this question is regarding to e-commerce. So there is a lot of e-commerce pages. They have like a refined pages, right? So they will be a pages that they will put a certain amount of product in the page based on a predefined logic to show up those products in those pages. And those pages that, in my case, I have a client. It's a very good pages to capture long-term keywords because they are like refined, saying that, for example, computer and at the same time have AMD chips, things like that. And when people are searching for a long-term keyword, like computer, AMD processor, those pages are a very good place to capture them. However, so here comes my question is for those pages, they are some kind of decide that people will, they are some kind of decide that because they're automatically a side product, right? And you can't put all the product in the first rendering of those kind of pages. So every time when there's new product adding into the inventory or some product is removed from the inventory, the page content of first rendering product will change. And I will send a sample here in the comment section. For example, this is not my client, because I'm not allowed to show my client's website but it's a similar situation. So when you click into that link, you can see that they are a lot of product in the page but when you scroll down to the bottom, they will have load more. So people only see the product before a load more, right? And whenever we add inventory into the product or remove something, the first rendering product will change. So Google will constantly seeing different content of that page. So they confuse Google, how do we solve this problem? That's essentially fine. That's totally normal. I think with e-commerce, with a very busy site, you have those kind of shifts all the time. With news websites, you have it similar, that you have news articles all the time. And when you look at the home page of a news site, like there are always different articles that are linked there. And from our point of view, that's fine. The important part, I think, especially with e-commerce, is that we're able to find the individual product pages themselves. So somewhere along the line, we need to have kind of persistent links to those products. So that could be on that page. It could be on page two or page three or page four of that listing, something like that. So that's kind of the important part there. I wouldn't worry that the pages change from load to load because what will happen from a search point of view is we will recognize there's specific content for this topic on this page. And we'll try to bring queries to the page that kind of match the general topic. And if a computer model one or a computer model two is shown there, and they're essentially equivalent because they're in the same category of product, then that doesn't really change much for us. So what I heard is that as long as the logic of the signing product is consistent, and the product is showing up in the first rendering, match, for example, title tag on the page, then that is fine. But the logic is like not consistent, and they suddenly have other product, and there will be a problem. Yeah, so for example, if you have a clothing store and you have a category that's just blue, and the category blue has everything from socks to jackets and everything in between, then it's really hard for us to say, this is a landing page for this type of product. So we will constantly be confused by a page like that. Whereas if it's a landing page about, I don't know, blue jackets, for example, like category jackets and color blue, then it doesn't really matter which jackets you show there. They all match that intent, and it's pretty clear to the user, they fit into that category. So as long as this product, new adding product, are still blue jacket, even if different blue jacket in the first rendering and the content exchange is OK. Yeah, yeah. But if there is like one time there's a red jacket adding to that product, there will be a problem. I think individual cases is absolutely no problem. If it's always something random in there, then it gets hard for us to understand the pattern. OK, thank you so much. Sorry for taking so long. Hey, John. Thank you. My question is regarding image search and why one image might be shown preference over another. Specifically, it's on a product page that uses an image slider to display pictures of the product. And considering that pretty much everything is nearly identical, like alt text, file name, nearby text dimensions, weight, things of that nature, why might a seemingly random image from within the slider sequence, maybe 3rd or 4th thumbnail, be shown preference over a featured image, usually the first image that you would see on a product page? I don't know. It's hard to say. I don't think so. So we have various things that kind of go into image search. And on the one hand, it is kind of the aspects that you mentioned, like the titles of the page, the image file name, the captions, alt text, things like that. But we do also have some logic that tries to understand is this a high quality image or not. And it's possible. I don't know those images that our systems are either getting confused by the contents of the image or that they clearly see one image is significantly higher quality than the other. And for us, then maybe we would show it a little bit more visibility like that. But it's something where I think there are always a number of different factors that play into that. And even for multiple images on the same page, which are kind of in the same category of things, it's possible that we kind of show them in one order once and show them in a different order another time. OK, so are you able to comment on this? I imagine that Cloud Vision has something to do with that, trying to match similarities with machine learning to the entities. Am I on the right track here? I don't know how far we would use something like that. I do think, at least as far as I understand, we've talked about doing that in the past, specifically for image search. But it's something where just purely based on the contents of the image alone, it's sometimes really hard to determine how the relevance should be for a specific query. So for example, you might have, I don't know, a picture of a beach. And we could recognize, oh, it's a beach. There's water here, things like that. But if someone is searching for a hotel, is a picture of the beach the relevant thing to show? Or is that, I don't know, a couple miles away from the hotel? It's really hard to judge just based on the contents of the image alone. So I imagine if or when we do use machine learning to understand the contents of an image, it's something auxiliary to the other factors that we have. So it's not that it would completely override everything else. Gotcha, thank you. Sure. John, just one follow-up on this. Does Google have any plan of machine learning auto detection of what is happening in what is there in picture? Because I am saying that different devices also have this kind of feature. Does Google also have any plan of implementing this kind of feature? What is happening within the image? I don't know. Kind of like with the previous question, it's something where it's certainly possible to some extent to pull out some additional information from an image, which could be objects in the image or what is happening in the image. But I don't know if that would override any of the other factors that we have there. So my understanding is this is probably something that would be more kind of on the side if we have multiple images that we think are kind of equivalent. And we can clearly tell somehow that this one is more relevant because it has, I don't know, the objects or the actions that someone is searching for. And maybe we would use that. But I honestly don't know what we've announced in that area or what we're actually using for search there. Because the thing to keep in mind is that there are a lot of different elements that are theoretically possible that might be done kind of in consumer devices.  But just because it's possible in some instances doesn't mean that it makes sense for search. And we see that a lot with patents when it comes to search where someone will patent a really cool algorithm or setup that could have an implication for search. But just because it's patented from Google and maybe even from someone who works on search doesn't mean that we actually use it in search. Yeah. OK. Thank you. Sure. OK. Let me run through some of the submitted questions. And if you have questions along the way, feel free to jump in. And we'll almost certainly have time towards the end for more questions from all of you. All right. The first question is about Google Discover. One of the sites I'm running is about anime, fan arts, cosplay, fan fiction, was performing fairly well in Discover. But one day to another, the traffic dropped to zero without any significant change on the site. In Google Search, it's growing before and after that. What kind of problems could bring that situation? I don't know. It's really hard to say without looking at the site. But in general, when it comes to Google Discover, one of the things that I've noticed from feedback from folks like you all is that the traffic tends to be very kind of on or off in that our systems might think, well, it makes sense to show this more in Discover. And then suddenly, you get a lot of traffic from Discover. And then our algorithms might at some point say, well, it doesn't make sense to show it that much in Discover anymore, and the traffic goes away. And especially with Discover, it's something which is not tied to a specific query. So it's really hard to say what you should be expecting because you don't know how many people are interested in this topic or where we would potentially be able to show that. So that's something where if you do see a lot of visibility from Google Discover, I think that's fantastic. I just would be careful and kind of realize that this is something that can change fairly quickly. Additionally, we also, for Discover, we have a Help Center article that goes into pretty much detail what kind of things we watch out for, and in particular what kind of things we don't want to show in Discover. So that's something that you might want to double check. Depending on, I guess, the site that you have, that's something that might be more relevant or less relevant there. But I would definitely check that out. What are the levels of site quality demotions? Is there a first level where everything site-wide looks fine, no demotion, second level that you demote some pages that are not relevant, or third level site-wide is not good at all? So from my understanding is we don't have these different levels of site-wide demotion where we would say we need to demote everything on the website, or we don't need to demote anything on the website. I think, depending on the website, you might see aspects like this or might feel like aspects like this. But for the most part, we do try to look at it as granular as possible. And in some cases, we can't look at it as granular as possible. So we'll look at different chunks of a website. So that's something where, from our side, it's not so much that we have different categories. We just say it's like in this category or in that category, it's just there is almost like a fluid transition across the web. And also, when it comes to things where our algorithms might say, oh, we don't really know how to trust this, for the most part, it's not a matter of trust is there or trust is not there. It's like yes or no. But rather, we have this really kind of fluid transition where we think, well, we're not completely sure about this, but it makes sense for these kind of queries, for example, or it makes sense for these kind of queries. So that's something where there's a lot of room. Let's see, I have a question about omitted results. We published two large.coms, Horoscope and Astrology, each with each own URL and content teams, after ranking on the first page for Astrology queries for multiple years. In February last year, only one of the sites began to show up for normal search results at a time. Whichever site has the highest ranking for a given query that will show up with the other site being classified as an omitted result. There is no duplicate content or cross links between the sites. I'm curious why this is happening. It's really hard to say without looking at the specific sites and looking at the specific situation. So usually with two websites, if they're not completely the same, then we would rank them individually, even if there is kind of like an ownership relationship there. So from that point of view, it might also just be something that is kind of not related to what you're suspecting in that algorithms think that it's like the same site. We should only show one of these at the same time. I have seen situations where if there are a large number of sites that are involved, a large number of domains, that our algorithms might say, well, all of these domains are essentially the same content. And we should just pick one of these to show rather than all of these. But usually if there are two websites and they're kind of unique in their own ways, then that's something where we would try to show them individually. So I think from a practical point of view, what I would do here is go to the Webmaster Help forums and post the details of what you're seeing here, maybe some screenshots, specific URLs and queries where you're seeing this happening. And the folks there can take a look at that and maybe guide you into, I don't know, if there's something specific that you could be doing differently there, maybe they can point you at that, or maybe they can point you in the direction of saying, well, it is how it is. That's nothing kind of unnatural that's happening there. But also the folks active in the help forums have the ability to escalate things to Google teams. So if they think this is really weird and maybe something weird is happening on Google's side, then they can escalate that to someone at Google. Let's see. Does Google Search consider each URL of a website individually? For example, does a low score on a domain homepage have any effect on the other pages which have a high score? So yeah, like I mentioned before, we try to be as granular as possible, as fine-grained as possible, in the sense that we try to focus on individual pages. But especially within a website, you're kind of always linking to the other pages of your website. So there is kind of a connection between all of these pages. And if one page is really bad and we think that's the most important page for your website, then obviously that will have an effect on the other pages within your website, because they're all kind of in context of that one main page, for example. Whereas if one page on your website is something that we would consider not so good and it's some random part of your website, then that's not going to be the central point where everything evolves around. Then from our point of view, that's like, well, this one page is not so great, but that's fine. It doesn't really affect the rest. The mobile section of Core Web Vitals in Search Console shows a bad URL on original link while the AMP version of the same URL is a good URL. Why are these two considered separately? So essentially, what happens there is that we don't focus so much on the theoretical aspect of, this is an AMP page and there's a canonical here, but rather we focus on the data that we see from actual users that go to these pages that navigate to them. So that's something where you might see an effect of lots of users are going to your website directly and they're going to the non-AMP URLs, maybe, depending on how you have your website set up. And in Search, you have your AMP URLs. Then we probably will get signals, or enough signals, that we track them individually for both of those versions. So on the one hand, people going to Search, going to the AMP versions, and people maybe going to your website directly, going to the non-AMP versions. And in a case like that, we might see information separately from those two versions. And then kind of like we have those two versions and the data there. So we'll show that in Search Console like that. Whereas if you set up your website in a way that you're consistently always working with the AMP version, that maybe all mobile users go to the AMP version of your website, then that's something where we can clearly say, well, this is the primary version. We'll focus all of our signals on that version. The next question there is, since AMP is enabled, will Google Mobile Search consider only the AMP version, which passes the Core Web Vitals test when ranking the website, or will the original link also be considered? So I mean, on the one hand, there is the aspect of, is it a valid AMP or not? If it's not a valid AMP, then we wouldn't show it. That's one aspect that goes into play there. But I think in the theoretical situation that we have data for the non-AMP version and data for the AMP version, and we would show the AMP version in the search results, then we would use the data for the version that we show in Search as the basis for the ranking. So in a case like that, we clearly have data for both of these versions, and we would pick one of those versions to show, then we would use the data for that version. That's similar, I think, also with international websites where you have different URLs for individual countries. And if we have data for one version, we show that, or if we have one version that we would show in the search results, and we have data for that version, then we'll use the data for that version, even if we have other data for the other language or other country versions. Now, the only case where I know where we would fold things together is with regards to the AMP cache, because theoretically, the AMP cache is also located in yet another place, another set of URLs. But with the AMP cache, we know how we should fold that back to the AMP version and track that data there. So that's a little bit of an exception. But if you have separate AMP versions and separate mobile versions on your site, then it's very possible that we could track those individually. Does Google Wave the exact match title tag more in comparison to the title tag focus more on users? So let's say the phrase I want to rank for is Audi A3, and one version of the title tag is this exact match. The other version is this car for sale, 152 great models. Would this title be scored less relevant for the Query Audi A3 just because it is longer and not exact match? I don't think we have any exact definition on how that would pan out in practice. So there's certainly an aspect of, does this title match the query? But we also try to understand the relevance of the query. We try to understand things like synonyms or more context around the query, around the titles as well. So I don't think there's a simple exact match to the query is better or not exact match to the query is better there. So my recommendation there would be to test this out and just try it out. And not so much in terms of SEO, which one will rank better, but kind of think about which one of these would work better in the search results. And that's something you could try out on one page. You could try out on multiple pages that are kind of set up in a similar way. And then based on that, you can determine, well, this one kind of attracts more clicks from users. It matches the intent that the user has better somehow. So I'll stick to that model and use that across the rest of my website. So that's kind of my recommendation there. I think with kind of the general information retrieval point of view of which one of these would be the better fit, I imagine you could get into really long arguments with the people that are working on information retrieval on which one is better or not. So I don't think there is like this one clear answer. Comments below the blog post. Are comments still a ranking factor migrating to another CMS and would like to get rid of all comments about one to three not really relevant comments below many blog posts? Can I delete them safely without losing any ranking? I think it's ultimately up to you. From our point of view, we do see comments as a part of the content. We do also, in many cases, recognize that this is actually a comment section, so we need to treat it slightly differently. But ultimately, if people are finding your pages based on the comments there, then if you delete those comments, then obviously we wouldn't be able to find your pages based on it. So that's something where, depending on the type of comments that you have there, the amount of comments that you have, it can be the case that they provide significant value to your pages. And it can be a source of additional kind of information about your pages, but it's not always the case. So that's something where I think you kind of need to look at the contents of your pages overall, the queries that are leading to your pages, and think about which of these queries might go away if my comments were not on those pages anymore. And based on that, you can try to figure out what you need to do there. It's certainly not the case that we completely ignore all of the comments on a site, so just blindly going off and deleting all of your comments in the hope that nothing will change, I don't think that will happen. When using intracitials as product pages, does Google index the content on those intracitials, or does it only index the content on the static pages? So I wasn't quite sure how you use intracitials as product pages. It seems like a kind of unique setup. But anyway, I think it's less a matter of intracitials or not, but more a matter of what content is actually shown when we load those pages. So if we load this HTML page, and by default, it always doesn't show any product information, then we wouldn't have that product information to actually index. Whereas if you kind of load that page, and it takes a second, and then it pops up the full content, the full product information, then essentially by loading the page, we have that information. And we can use that to index and to rank those pages. So it's kind of a simple way to double check. What we would be able to pick up with regards to indexing is to take that URL and use something like the mobile friendly test or the URL inspection tool in Search Console, and copy it in there, and to see if Google is able to bring up the full product information or not. If Google can bring up the product information, then probably that's OK. Whereas if Google only shows you kind of the static page behind that, then probably it's a case that we wouldn't be able to pick up the product information. So that's kind of one thing to watch out for. I think what threw me off with this question initially is also the word interstitials there in the sense that usually interstitials are something that are kind of between the content that you're looking for and maybe kind of like what is actually loaded on a browser. So if you go to a page and instead of the product page it shows a big interstitial showing something else, that's kind of the usual setup for interstitials. And from our point of view, those kind of interstitials, if they're intrusive interstitials in the sense that they get in the way of the user actually interacting with the page, then that would be something that we would consider a negative ranking factor. So if it's really a case that when you go to your pages it just takes a bit and then your product page pops up, then I wouldn't call those interstitials. Maybe use some other word for that because if you ask around like in the help forums or elsewhere and you say, oh, my interstitials and I want to rank for my interstitials, then probably a lot of people will be confused. It seems like Google Images crawls some SVG files in SVG and then some it renders into PNG while serving in the search results. What is the reason for that? Is there a way that we can dictate this behavior for a Google image crawler? I don't know. I wasn't aware of the kind of like how this is happening. So I'm not 100% sure what exactly you're referring to. My understanding is that when it comes to images, especially the vector formats like SVG, which don't always have a well-defined size, what we do internally is we convert that into a normal pixel image so that we can treat it the same way as we can treat other kinds of images. That means for all of the normal processing internally and all of that. And also, specifically with regards to the thumbnail images that we can show so that we can scale it down using the normal pixel scaling functions and get it to the right size and get it into an equal resolution to the other thumbnails that we show. So probably that is something that is happening there and that's not something that you can easily change because we kind of have our system set up to deal with pixel-based images. And that's what we would do there. With regards to kind of the next step from there, the expanding of the image, when you click on it in the image search results, I don't know how that would be handled with regards to SVGs or if we do some kind of in pixel-based bigger preview or SVG-based bigger previews. I don't quite know how we would handle that there. If you have any examples where this is causing problems, I would love to see them. So feel free to send me anything that you run across in that regard, especially when you see that it's causing weird problems that could be avoided by doing it slightly differently. Is there anything that we can do in terms of SEO to improve user journey? I think those are kind of separate topics. So it's not something that you would do SEO to improve user journey, but rather you have your user journeys that you use to kind of analyze your products and try to find the best approaches that you can do there. And then based on that, you would also try to do some SEO to improve things in the search results. So one is kind of improving things for the user and the other is kind of improving things for search engines. Sometimes, if things line well, then there is enough overlap that they work together. But essentially, they're separate topics. What is the best way to treat syndicated content on my site? If the content is already in other sites, too, and I have to know and I can page or do I canonicalize to original source? Do I no follow all the internal links of that page? Yeah, good question. I don't think we have exact guidelines on syndicated content. Generally, we do recommend using something like a rel canonical to the original source. I know that's not always possible in all cases. So sometimes what can happen is we just recognize that there is syndicated content on a website and then we essentially try to rank that appropriate thing. So if you're syndicating your content to other sites, then it's theoretically possible that those other sites also show up in the search results. It's possible that maybe they even show up above you in the search results, depending on a situation. So that's something to kind of keep in mind if you're syndicating content. If you're hosting syndicated content on your website, then that's kind of similar to keep in mind in the sense that most of the time we would try to show the original source. And just because you have a syndicated version of that content on your site as well doesn't mean we will also show your website in the search results. So usually what I recommend there is to make sure that you have significant unique and compelling content of your own on your website. So if you're using syndicated content to kind of fill out additional facets of information for your users, then that's perfectly fine. I wouldn't expect to rank for those additional kind of facets or filler content that you have there. It can happen, but it's not something I would count on. And instead, for the SEO side of things, for the ranking side of things, I would really make sure that you have significant kind of unique content of your own so that when our systems look at your website, they don't just see all of this content that everyone else has, but rather they see a lot of additional value that you provide that is not on the other sites as well. When we want to rank for a specific topic on Google, is it a good practice to also cover related topics? For example, if we sell laptops or you want to rank for that, is it useful to create posts like reviewing laptops, introducing the best new laptops, those kind of things. And if it's useful, then it doesn't have to be done in any special way. So I think this is always useful because what you're essentially doing is, on the one hand, for search engines, you're kind of building out your reputation of knowledge on that specific topic area and for users as well. It provides a little bit more context on kind of like why they should trust you. If they see that you have all of this knowledge on this general topic area and you show that and you kind of present that regularly, then it makes it a lot easier for them to trust you on something very specific that you're also providing on your website. So that's something where I think that always kind of makes sense. And for search engines as well, it's something where if we can recognize that this website is really good for this broader topic area, then if someone is searching for that broader topic area, we can try to show that website as well. We don't have to purely focus on individual pages, but we'll say, oh, it looks like you're looking for a new laptop. This website has a lot of information on various facets around laptops. How long should we wait for Search Console manual action response? It's been months in. I avoided resubmitting because that's not nice, but do these ever get lost? If we don't get new replies, what should we be doing as an extent? Depending on the type of manual action, it can take quite a bit of time. So in particular, I think the link-based manual actions are things that can take quite a bit of time to be reviewed properly. And it can happen in some cases that it takes a few months. So usually what happens is if you resubmit the reconsideration request, then we will drop the second reconsideration request because we think it's a duplicate. The team internally will still be able to look at it. And if you have additional information there, that's perfectly fine. If it's essentially just copy and paste of the same thing, then I don't think that changes anything. It's also not the case that you would have a negative effect from resubmitting a reconsideration request. So in particular, if you're not sure that you actually sent the last one, and you're like, oh, it's like someone on my team sent it, and now I'm not sure if they actually sent it or not, then resubmitting it is perfectly fine. It's not that there will be an additional penalty for resubmitting the reconsideration request. It's just when the team sees that one is still pending, they'll focus on that pending one rather than the additional ones. If you don't see any response with regards to manual actions, specifically around the link manual actions, I would recommend maybe also checking in with the help forums or checking in with other people who have worked on link-based manual actions. Because when it takes so long to be reprocessed like this, it's something where you really want to make sure that you have everything covered really well. So that's something where if you're seeing it taking a long time, you're like, oh, I don't know if I needed to do more or needed to do something different, then going to the help forums is a really good way to get additional feedback from people. And it's very likely that you'll go to the help forums and nobody's like, oh, you should have submitted these 500 other things. And it's not the case that you have to do whatever feedback comes back from the help forum, but rather it's additional input to take in. And you can review that and say, OK, I will take into account maybe a part of this feedback and maybe skip another part of this feedback. Because the folks in the help forum are very experienced with tons of topics, but they don't have the absolute answers. I don't think anyone really has that. So I think it's great to get all of this feedback, but you still have to kind of judge it and weigh it out yourself, as with anything on the internet. Does PageSpeed Insights use the Googlebot? I wonder because when I'm looking at the rendered screenshots in PageSpeed Insights based on our site behavior, it looks like those weren't rendered by Googlebot. You're probably right. So in particular, PageSpeed Insights is something which is based on the Chrome setup. So that's something where, as far as I know, the server-based system that does the PageSpeed Insights screenshots and calculations and metrics, all of that, is just purely based on Chrome. And Googlebot also uses Chrome to render pages, but there are some kind of unique aspects with regards to Googlebot that don't apply to PageSpeed Insights, for example, robots text. So when Google renders a page, it has to comply with the robots text of all of the embedded content there. And if you have maybe a CSS file or a JavaScript file blocked by robots text, we wouldn't be able to process that from Googlebot point of view, but PageSpeed Insights would still be able to review that and show that. So that's probably where you're seeing those differences. I think the difference is more and more blurred because Googlebot does use Chrome as well. So it is very similar. But you can certainly find situations where there are differences. And you can certainly construct situations where there are differences. Like I mentioned, with robots text is a really simple way to kind of see those differences. With regards to the way that we calculate speed for search, though, we kind of, I guess, looking forward at the core web vitals. At the moment, I don't really know often how we do that. But with regards to core web vitals, we use what users actually see. So it's not the case that Googlebot renders a page very quickly, and then it gets a good score. Or Chrome in PageSpeed Insights renders a page very quickly, therefore it gets a good score. But rather, we look at what users actually saw. And I think that's really important because that's kind of a measure of what the real world performance is. And all of these tools that kind of render it in more of a lab environment, like Googlebot when it renders a page, or PageSpeed Insights when it renders a page, is something that is almost more of a prediction than an actual kind of measurement. Because there are lots of assumptions in play there. And whenever you run something like a rendering of a page within a data center, then you have a very different setup than the average user has. With regards to network connectivity, with regards to caches, and all of that, it's just very different. So these tools, when you run them and when you look at the measurements that they show, you need to keep in mind this is more of a prediction rather than an actual value that users will see. And I'm sorry. No, I was going to ask a follow-up, but I'm sorry. You continue. And it's something that these tools also try to build in in the sense that they will say, well, I run in a data center, but I will act like I have a 3G phone and kind of a slow connection. And they'll try to emulate that, but it's still very different than actual user. Go ahead. I'm sorry about that. So in terms of assessing it, I was reading a site, seemed like it had a lot of ads. So I decided, OK, let me see how this is scored on page speed insights. And it rendered a score with the circle of 21, which was in the red, not very good. But below that was a visual and below that numerical and visual representation was a sentence that read that based on field data, the page passed in green, the assessment. And then below that, there were these measurement bars for cumulative layout shift, first input delay, et cetera. And those were all mostly in the green. So where's the disconnect? And what should one be paying attention to that first visual circle, or the fact that it says it passed the Core Web Vitals assessment? I need to keep in mind how the page speed insights looked. I think it has that one overview score on top, right? Yeah, I actually, is there a way to present, because I did a screenshot and I redacted the name of the website, if that makes it easier. So I think what happens in page speed insights is we take the various metrics there, and we try to calculate one single number out of that. And sometimes that's useful to work on or to give you a rough overview of what the overall score would be. But it all depends on how strongly you weigh the individual factors. So it can certainly be the case that, overall, when users see a page, it's pretty fast and sleek. But when our systems test it, they're like, oh, these are some theoretical problems that could be causing issues. And they'll kind of calculate that into the score. So I think the overall score is a really good way to get a rough estimate. And the actual field data is a really good way to see what people actually see. And usually what I recommend is using those as a basis to determine, should I be focusing on improving the speed of a page or not? And then use the lab testing tools out there for determining the individual values and for tweaking them with the work that you're doing. So using the overall score and using the field data as a way to determine, should I be doing something on this or not? And then using the lab data with the individual tools to improve things and check that you're going the right direction. Because the issue is also the field data is delayed, I think, by about 30 days. So any changes that you make, and if you're waiting for the field data to update, it's always 30 days behind. And if you're unsure that you're going in the right direction or that you've improved things enough, then waiting 30 days is kind of annoying. Thank you. Hey, John, can I add a follow up on that as well? Sure. With regards to see Core Web Vitals, a field data is going to be the one to pay attention to correct, in terms of ranking signals? Or is it going to be added? Yes. Yes. It's the field data. OK. While we are in this Core Web Vitals topics, I have a small question in this regard is that when this becomes a ranking signal, CLS, and all the other friends, is it going to be page level or domain level? Good question. So essentially, what happens with the field data is we don't have data points for every page. So for the most part, we need to have kind of groupings of individual pages. And depending on the amount of data that we have, that can be a grouping of the whole website, kind of the domain. Or I think in the Chrome User Experience Report, they use the origin, which would be the subdomain and the protocol there. So that would be kind of the overarching kind of grouping. And if we have more data for individual parts of a website, then we'll try to use that. And I believe that's something you also see in Search Console, where we'll show one URL and say there's so many other pages that are associated with that. And that's kind of the grouping that we would use there. Just why I ask this, we have this set of pages that they are slow. They exist for a different purpose than our other pages on the site. And these, we have a no index on them, but they are very slow. And that's why we don't want it to be accounted for. Yeah, I don't know for sure how we would do things with a no index there. But it's not something you can easily determine ahead of time. Will we see this as one website? Or will we see it as different groupings there? Sometimes with the Chrome User Experience Report data, you can see, does Google have data points for those no index pages? Does Google have data points for the other pages there? And then you can figure out, OK, it can recognize that there are separate kinds of pages and can treat them individually. And if that's the case, then I don't see a problem with that. If it's a smaller website where we just don't have a lot of signals for the website, then those no index pages could be playing a role there as well. So my understanding, I'm not 100% sure, but my understanding is that in the Chrome User Experience Report data, we do include all kinds of pages that users access. So there's no specific kind of, will this page be indexed like this or not check that happens there? Because the indexability is sometimes quite complex with regards to canonicals and all of that. So it's not trivial to determine on the Chrome side if this page will be indexed or not. It might be the case that if a page has a clear no index that even in Chrome, we will be able to recognize that, but I'm not 100% sure if we actually do that. All right, thank you. I'll follow up on the reader. Yeah, I would also check the Chrome User Experience Report data. I think you can download data into BigQuery and you can play with that a little bit and figure out how is that happening for other sites, for similar sites that kind of fall in the same category as the site that you're working on. Cool, more questions from any of you? Yes, John, hi. I suddenly see as well as it started all at the mid of January, I suddenly saw in Search Console that there are a lot of old URLs popping up, especially in the 404 subcategory under excluded and in the URL inspection tool. These old URLs are, for example, old HTTP versions of URLs and it's even old domains because the websites were moved to a new domain like three years ago. So my question is, why is that? Should I be worried? And if yes, how can I fix it? So these are showing up as 404 errors? These are showing up as 404 errors and for some URLs, if I use the URL inspection tool, they also show up as referrers in the URL inspection tool. OK, I think if they're just showing as 404s, I would completely ignore that. What happens in our systems is that pages which are 404 are essentially still tracked on our side and from time to time, we will double check to see that they still have a 404. And that can happen, that a site has changed significantly, doesn't have these pages for years now and still, from time to time, our systems say, well, we will double check those old URLs and see if they still return 404. And that's not a sign that anything is stuck with those pages. It's just kind of our systems trying to make sure that we're not missing anything from your website. And if they show up as referring URLs in the URL inspection tool? So how do you mean as referring URLs? Like they link to another page or? Yes, for example, I used the URL inspection tool on a URL that's still present. And then in the URL inspection tool, you see where Google knows this page from. And there it says, for example, it knows it from the site map. And then there are like four URLs listed below that. And in that list, this list contains, for example, an old HTTP version. It contains the same file name. But from the old URL of the website, which are all URLs that don't exist anymore. So this is also something that makes me worry or shouldn't it? That's completely normal. That's something where I am not 100% sure which data we show there in Search Console. But we have a concept of kind of the first scene location of a link to a specific page. And we might have seen that URL from that page at some point, way in the past. And if that page doesn't exist anymore, it's still like, this is where we first saw it. OK, so it's basically just make sure that if the original page doesn't exist anymore, it returns a proper 404. If it's redirected, then make sure it's a proper redirect. And in other cases, just ignore it if you get the question. Exactly, yeah. So usually, if you have an older website, then over the years, you will collect more and more of these 404 pages. And our system is, even when they rarely check a 404 page, it's just like the amount of URLs that could be returning 404 grows.  But for us, it's just checking it maybe once a year or so. But because we have so many that we check once a year, it overall looks like a lot. But that's this web. Yeah. Yeah, sorry, this website is like 10 years old. And last question for that, because the websites I'm talking about, they were also moved to new domains. We used the address change tool. And so basically, just make sure that the old domain still redirects to the new website. This would be then the perfect, good setup. And we shouldn't worry about anything further. Yeah, that sounds great. One place where people also get confused with that, which is kind of similar, I guess, with old URLs, is that when we recognize that pages have moved, we still have some association of the old location. So we will know that this page on the new website used to be located as a page on the old website in some sense. So if in the search results you do a site query for the old domain, then even after a couple of years, you'll still see a lot of URLs that are shown there. And it's not the case that we have them indexed there, but rather, we know they used to be there. And it looks like a user is explicitly looking for the old location, so we'll show them. So if you look at the cached version of the page in a case like that, then you'll see that actually it shows a new domain. So it's a little bit confusing if you look at it like that, but essentially it should be working properly. OK, thank you. Sure. So I have a related question, for example, if we set the proper 301 redirects. And I was just trying to understand the relation of backlinks over the ones, if Google has the history of the old links, is it possible that it passes some sort of page rank to new URLs that we set 301 redirects for? For example, we have a site with the backlinks, and we decided to change the URL and the proper 301s. And backlinks are always there. We normally change a few of those, but they're still there. So if you say Google has some sort of history there, so would it possible that it passes some sort of rank juice or page rank juice to new URLs? Yes, yes. So essentially what happens there is we will have kind of the old URL on your website that has some signals from the links that go to the old URL. And we have the new URL on your website. And with a redirect, you're basically telling us these are equivalent, and you'd probably prefer the new URL to be shown. So what we will do is we will put both of those URLs from your website into a group and say, this is kind of a group of URLs that have kind of collected signals. And then with the redirect, we will pick usually the destination URL and say, this is the canonical for that group. And the canonical page will then kind of inherit all of the signals that go to that group. So if there are links to the old version of a page, if there are links to a copy of that page, then all of that will be kind of combined together in the canonical version. So that's something that kind of gets passed on there. Specifically, when you're talking about site moves, we still recommend making sure that you, as much as possible, can update the old links anyway. Because what happens there is we will put those URLs in the same group, kind of like I mentioned. But we use various factors that determine which of these URLs is the right one to show, which one is the canonical one. And redirect is one factor, but also links are another factor. So if all of the links, like internal and external links, go to the old version of your URL and you redirect to a new version, we might pick the old version of the URL to show in search. So that's something kind of to keep in mind, that if you want to move everything to a new URL, then make sure that everything is aligned with the new URL. So the redirect, the sitemap files, the internal linking, as much as possible, also the external linking so that everything just fits together with that new kind of URL that you want. Thanks for this question. I have another question. Most of the tools, the SEO checkup tools, they pop up with a warning which says, load text to HTML ratio, which means code is more than the original text. Would it be something we need to worry about, or is it OK for Google to pick the right text? We don't have a notion of text to HTML ratio for search. So that's something where I think a lot of these tools are able to calculate this. And they think, oh, it's worthwhile showing, but it's not an SEO ranking factor kind of thing. There are two places where it could play a role on the one hand with regards to speed. So if you have a lot of HTML and you have very little text, then obviously we have to load a lot of content to display the page. So that's like one small factor. The other one is with regards to extreme situations where you have a lot and a lot of HTML and very little text. We have limits with regards to what the maximum page size is that we would download for an HTML page. And I think that's in the order of, I don't know, hundreds of megabytes, something like that. So if you have an HTML page that has hundreds of megabytes of HTML and very little text in it, then yes, that could be playing a role. But that's something that I suspect is extremely rare. And if you have that problem, then that's like a bigger problem than just like, oh, it's not perfect HTML to text ratio. Perfect, yeah, I got that. Thank you. Sure. Let me just pause the recording here. You're welcome to stick around a little bit longer if you like, but it's always good to kind of keep the recording limited to avoid it becoming super long. Thank you all for joining. Thanks for all of the questions that were submitted and that were asked from you along the way. And I'll set up the next office hours probably later today, which will also be next Friday, but evening, European time, more for the American folks. So Michael doesn't have to get up in the middle of the night. I don't know how he does it, but thank you. Cool, all right, let me just pause here and we can continue after that.


Welcome back to the FeeCast, your weekly dose of economic thinking from your friends at the Foundation for Economic Education. My name, as always, is Richard Lawrence, and I'm here today with our resplendent panel of Anna Jane Perrell, Dan Sanchez, and Sean Malone, who is typically behind the camera, but in this week for Marianne March, who's at a marketing conference and unable to join us. So we're happy to have you today, Sean. That's right. I'm thrilled to be here. How are you guys doing? I'm also a recent fill-in host for Richard as well. We've demoted you. You couldn't handle that, but we'll let you sit over there. That was a shot. Yeah, that's my one chance in its place. So who likes to drive cars? Let me just open up with that. I didn't used to, but I do now, actually. You enjoy driving. I enjoy driving. I hate it. If I never have to get behind the wheel of a car ever again. Seriously. Because to me it's raw with danger. Threat of police, threat of tickets.  Yeah, no. I enjoyed it until I moved to Atlanta. That's funny. Yeah, it's a nightmare here.  Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. No? No. Don't trust them? Yeah, I don't like being that much out of control. Let's see, I don't trust myself. That's the problem. Well, I do trust myself, and I'm typically a very good driver. Just a little anecdote is, I got my very first speeding ticket about two weeks ago, and I was driving down near the Georgia-Alabama border in West Point, Georgia to see my godmother. I'm driving with her friend in the car, our friend in the car, and all of a sudden, of course, I see the flashing lights, and I've gone a little bit too fast, and it was an expensive ticket, something I don't want to repeat. So on my drive down to Florida for the beach, I just use cruise control the entire time. Yeah, you said this recently that you'd never had a ticket which just blows my mind. Yeah, never a speeding ticket. Sorry, that's, oh, I see, I was interpreting, but either way, I've had, I'm, what, 26, 27? I've had like three speeding tickets at this point. Never a speeding ticket. I was pulled over once for having an expired tag on my mom's car, so that mom was an issue. The week before, my court date was my week before I started college, so that was a very interesting time. Well, you said you've never had an accident, right? Never had an accident. And that is the goal of this new law, in fact, in Georgia, to ban texting or any kind of input into the phone while driving. Hands-free Georgia law. And it just came online. It's now in force ever since July 1st of this year, and I think our panel might have some mixed feelings about this. Well, I got yelled at about it, which was, which was bizarre. But not by a cop. But not by a cop. I was, I was, I was stopped at a red light with many, many other cars during rush hour, and a guy, and I just pulled my phone up just to, just to glance at it. Actually had a buddy in the car at the time too, so we were mostly conversing. And a guy made a bunch of motions, like, you're, what are you doing? And he's in the car next to me, and I thought, what's this insane person doing? And so he motioned to roll down the window. So I did, and he- So a hand signaling virtue signal. Hand signaling virtue signaler who, who told me to roll down the window and then said, have you been living under a rock? I, it's hands-free. And it's a hands-free state now. What are you doing? And I was like, well, we're stopped. So I didn't really think it would be that big of a deal. But okay, sir, thank you for your time. And then we continued on our way. But it's one of the most bizarre scoldings from a random human being. Very close to a citizen's arrest. It was, it could have been- Right on the verge. I mean, he was irate enough. I mean- I mean, you say he's not a police officer, but he's sort of like deputizing himself. It's just like, why does he care? Like, there's so many other things. Honestly, this has really just created a situation where, and I'm a little bit of a side, I'm going to go on a little bit of a side right now. But do you guys remember T9 texting? You guys probably were. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And that was very physical, right? You could use your flip phone and you could physically feel the buttons. Remember that? Yeah. And even- You pressed like number seven, like six times. Yeah. And it was like, predictive texting. Yeah.  Going from that texting to touch screens, you lost an ability. I used to be able to text without looking at my phone at all. Yeah. Remember that? Like, and I could do that in the car and very easily just look at- Just windshield. Then the touch screen came and I had no idea what I was typing. You had to look at it because you can't feel the buttons. And now, like this hands-free thing, I'm almost getting more and more, I'm getting like less and less safe with my texting. And so it's like, it's creating this situation where I now have to like bring it down here. And so it's like, not only am I up here and I can't look at it and I can't feel the buttons, I'm like down here trying to- What I've gotten weirdly good at, this actually started, you know, about a year ago, whatever, I was starting to experience a lot of kind of carpal tunnel kind of things. So I started getting really, I tried anyway to get really good with speech to text stuff. And so I started doing that with my phone too. But the problem is it doesn't actually work that well. So there's a lot of things where you have to look at it and the word wasn't exactly right. And you throw around a lot of slang. So a lot of youth culture words that the phone doesn't know about. Yeah. Well, and also I find it- Wakanda. Yeah. Have you taught it that yet? I haven't. But it also randomly capitalizes words that I, that shouldn't be like regular stuff like there or your or whatever. It'll just for some reason be capital. Maybe it thinks you're done with the sentence and we're going on to a new sentence. It doesn't enter a period. I don't know. So there's stuff like that where I'll try to do that to avoid having to do the the drawing with my hand and look at it. But then that doesn't work. So you have to look at it and do that kind of stuff. Well, now we're not supposed to be doing any of this right as of July the 1st. Georgia joined 14 other states to become number 15 plus DC in having this hands free, no texting while driving law. And basically what it means is a driver can't have any phone in their hand. They can't support a phone on their body. You have to have one of these, you know, mounts that's either magnetic or maybe physical. You might may not send or read any text based communications. You may not send any messages. You might may not watch any video unless it's for navigation. Here's the interesting part. We were reviewing this in our pre-production meeting. The hands free law does not apply to the following electronic devices. I'm going to summarize. It doesn't apply to radio, citizens band radio, two way communications device from a commercial source. What in the way world is that sounds like a phone to me? You know, sounds like a phone is a subscription based emergency communications device. I mean, that's the very definition of what a cell phone is. In vehicle security, ham radio, navigation or remote diagnostic system. And so you've got all these exceptions baked into this law. It almost makes you wonder, and of course we can have a larger conversation about who was in favor of this law. I mean, it seems pretty clear if you listen to that list that a lot of that probably came from lobbying and probably that lobbying came from police unions and truckers and like, you know, anybody who uses that kind of stuff but would want to avoid the ban, which we were talking about before too. Like if you see the amount of distractions, let's say in a police cruiser, like it's like a desk. It's a, yeah, it just dwarfs whatever the distractions that I've ever had in a vehicle. You know, when I got pulled over for my very first speeding ticket, they printed it out on a laser printer. It's like, where's that laser printer in the car? In the back of your car. Yeah. Yeah. And so we have an article on this. It's actually been very popular on the websites by Mark Scribner from CEI. Dan, tell us about that article because it's got some interesting data. Yes. It's called Why a Nationwide Ban on Texting While Driving is a Bad Idea. And it talks about how in 2017, there were 37,461 highway fatalities. Of those, 9% were distraction-affected crash fatalities. And of the total, 1.3%. So just a portion of that 9% were involved in cell phone use of all kinds. So about 486 fatalities total. Nationally. This is nationally, 486. For one thing, it's much smaller than you'd think given like the uproar and the prioritization of this issue. And to put that in context, 28% of highway fatalities that year in 2016 were from alcohol-related reasons. So compare 1.5% from distracted driving with an electronic device such as a cell phone to alcohol-related. So clearly, this is not something... I mean, we had talked about this with plastic bands a few weeks ago, but this is not something that represents a major problem statistically. This is not a big thing that is killing lots and lots of people, but it is something that I guess governments feel like they have some control over that they can do something.  So let's just acknowledge that. For the 400, and you said 67 people or so who were killed. 86. 486 people in 2016. It's a huge problem. So let's not diminish that. The question really becomes, is this something that warrants the attention that a ban, again, like we've been talking about recently, actually would call for? And would the ban actually help? Because it's also interesting to see who supports the ban, but it's interesting to see who opposes it. And one interest that imposes it is the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Interesting. And you would think that they have a lot of skin in the game. If anyone would be interested in reducing their own liability to pay out for claims for accidents, it would be the insurance industry. But they point out that when you have a ban, what you do is you motivate people to hide from their texting from police. Absolutely. So whereas if there wasn't a ban, at least they have it up in the eye line of traffic. But if you have the ban, then they're looking down because they're trying to hide the phone. And that's much more likely to cause an accident. And I've realized that I've done this. Oh, absolutely. Right. And I've realized that not that I spend a lot of time texting in the car, but where I am trying to change a podcast or press play or stop on something or to pick up a phone call or whatever else to shuffle on my music. It's like things like that. I actually I actually worry and I pull over to a rest stop. I was driving to Savannah for the Labor Day Weekend and I was had to pull over to the rest area every time I was like, okay, now I'm in the mood for podcasts. So I'm going to like, you know, deal with that. Completely stop. But of course, you know, all this enforcement around the law is still being discovered as we experience it in our daily lives. According to some people, and I don't know exactly if this is legitimate or not, you are allowed one press per use of your phone. As long as it's still on the dashboard or, you know. So it can't be on like on your thigh. It can't be like sitting right here. I mean, that's what I would do hypothetically maybe. The reason for the single press is you're supposed to be answering a call, hanging up a call, you know, pressing go on your navigation device or pressing stop, right? And so you can imagine a situation where someone gets pulled over because, you know, the cop says, I saw you pushing on your phone more than once. You know, you could say, well, you know, I did actually break between presses, right? I did only press it once at a time. I mean, it's it's odd too, because like I was reading that list of exemptions before, you know, you can argue that a cell phone is a personal subscription-based emergency communications device. It's funny too. I think that one's a really interesting one just because when I was a kid, when I was 15, 16 years old, that's all cell phones were, right? That's literally it was there's a huge discussion between my brother and myself and my parents around even being allowed to have a cell phone at 16, 17 years old. And the working case at that point was, well, look, if we have a phone and we shared a phone at first, Nokia 8600 brick or whatever that we had a break to you to remember the model. I sure do. Well, who doesn't remember the no key? I mean, that's get some snake going on that. That was the only game on that brick. But but we shared that early, you know, I was I think 16, maybe 17 years after we we were sharing a car as well at that point. And so we had that explicitly because if you get stranded, if you're stuck somewhere, if you need help, it's the excuse or slash reason that every kid in my high school wanted a cell phone, right? But it's I need it for safety. Weirdly, it's a legitimate reason, though.   So it's realistic to argue that cell phones have made our lives much safer, right? In addition to more convenient, in addition to richer, in addition to more productive. But but let's talk and by the way, not just not just that, but also maps and stuff that you would never have had access to. I think that makes you immensely safer as well, knowing where you're where you are, where you're going, not going through a bad neighborhood, ways divert you around traffic, all the rest. But you know, of course, let's go back to this law and the fact that it seeks to, at least on its surface, address a problem, a problem that has affected many people individually, right? It may not be the most pressing problem, but at least it's looking to accomplish a goal that we can all be behind, which is fewer roadway fatalities, right? We don't want to see any roadway fatalities. And we don't want to see any caused by distracted driving. And that includes, by the way, in that 9% number, Dan, that you quoted, rummaging around on the floor for the fry that you dropped recently, or trying to find, you know, whatever in the back seat to keep your kid placated. Or just being lost in thought. Precisely. That's actually one of the reasons is daydreaming, right? Now, what was the, because there was a number for the last one, which I thought was really high. Yeah. When we were looking into this, it was there is some, I think there may not be a number associated with the fact that we were looking at, but it was along the lines of distracted or lost in thought was the cause of more accidents than cell phone related. Yeah. Distraction. But yeah, we need more specifics. So let's talk a little bit about how the sausage gets made, right? I mean, it's, it's obviously seeking to accomplish a goal that we all find important. But why do you guys suppose this law exists here in Georgia now, in addition to the other states and District of Columbia? I mean, well, I would mention here that I, I was actually pulled over for this, this offense many, many years ago in California. This, this kind of law has existed, you know, in other places for quite some time. When I was living in Los Angeles, this would have been 2007 or eight. It wasn't a hands free thing, but you weren't allowed to talk on the phone at the time. And I, I happened to make a tremendous error of actively making eye contact with a, with a motorcycle cop across the street while I was on the phone. Self incriminating. Self incriminating. But so this has been a law that's been in some of these major metropolitan areas. But why? That's my question. LA is like trendy. So it's like, you know, Pinkberry was there first. So it's also there. That's the thing. I think you see this with a lot of laws that start in New York or LA, where it gets rolled out to the, kind of to the rest of the country. And I think some of it is a little bit of signaling or is a little bit of like, look, we're as cosmopolitan, as Los Angeles, we have the same kinds of institutions and rules and everything else. What do you mean? Yeah. What do you mean by like cosmopolitan and how does hands free? Cause I'm actually like annoyed by the hands free thing. And I, every time I complain about Georgia, uh, that's what I start with. So it's like, I don't understand how this is appealing to citizens of the state at all. I don't know necessarily how it would either, but I do see that you see, so you'll see this with a lot of things like, uh, fast food bands or, you know, restrictions on neighborhoods that, that, uh, for, um, which you call food deserts or whatever they start imposing zoning restrictions and say, you have to have a whole foods within this, this area. And it starts in, you know, the hip trendy cities. It starts in Los Angeles. It starts in New York and it kind of gets rolled out into other places. And it's not clear a lot of the times that this has anything to do with efficacy, right? Cause we've also seen this with, with, uh, traffic cameras where there's no, uh, there's no evidence of any kind that traffic cameras reduce fatalities. In fact, the opposite, in fact, is the case. I went to Chicago for many, many years and data coming out of Chicago where there are traffic cams everywhere show that they actually increase accidents. What was the question? Oh, sorry. Just cause like people are slamming on their brakes and stuff.  I mean, that's strictly a revenue generating device, right? I mean, that's what, I mean, that's why people complain about that. Well, I mean, that's one of the reasons that this law may be in place here in Georgia as well, right? Because for the first incident, it's a hundred or it's a $50 fine, but for every other incident, the fine keeps increasing, right? So if you're caught two, three, four times, you could have a fine up to $150. That was originally $900 capped in, in the original legislation, but they worked it down to 150. So they're definitely kind of gunning for a revenue generating purpose here as well. I mean, we live in a state where you get points on your license, does it affect your license in that way? I don't know the answer to that. It may. Yeah, I have no idea off the top of my head. I don't know whether that works in Georgia either. And so I think what you said, Sean, or maybe Dan, about signaling, right, that this is something that Georgia wants to show the rest of the country, that they are, you know, with it, they are on the cutting edge of legislation, that they are sensitive to every tool in the arsenal that can be used, or every tool in the toolbox that can be used in order to make driving safer. And this, of course, in an era when Georgia is becoming a bigger hub for filmmaking, all the Marvel movies are being made here, various other films are being made here, not to mention the fact that they're being induced by incentives and tax, in taxes and otherwise, but that's another subject entirely. But it could make Georgia appear to be a more attractive pro business location than other places in the Southeast, which is what Georgia is regarded as today. Or at least make it feel a little bit more like some of the larger cities, you know, that people are coming from, especially if you think about the film industry presence and stuff, like people coming from LA. Look, I hear this a lot from people.  Or how backwards are you? I can't believe we allow this when the rest of the world doesn't allow that. And I think the same thing applies state to state or city to city sometimes, like LA has banned this. Look at California is already ahead of the curve on this thing. See, I'm not sold some, I'm just not sold on the idea that this somehow makes Georgia look like a better place to live or do business. I don't see that. But that's because that would not appeal to me.  One more thing I can't do. So for me, I'm not, it's not compelling to me that argument. I think it's genuinely especially compared to, I guess it's an out of proportion response to something that's upsetting, which is fatality, which is death, which is safety. It's an out of portion out of proportion response. I think that the government can actually control. And that's why that that's why it was so easy, not easy to enact, but that's why it's been enacted because like the straws, absolutely, it's just a choice that they can, it's a choice people can make. And of course, it's being forced on them now. So now we've established that this law exists. There are certain exemptions to it, obviously, that are that are worth discussing that perhaps it doesn't signal to everybody that this is a state that's progressive in the non political sense, but very forward looking. I want to go a little bit deeper and I want to kind of go into the more philosophical side of things because, you know, one of the reasons that this sort of law is established is as a deterrent, right? And, you know, people might say, well, now that it's illegal, you're not going to be texting while driving. So therefore, there's going to be fewer fatalities or even accidents on the road. But there's also an interesting conception of justice in this. And I wanted to actually ask you, Dan, what you think about that? Well, it reminds me of the movie Minority Report.  And I think that pre crime is fundamentally against the American conception of justice that that what what what liberty is about is being accountable to the actual crimes that you do, not the crimes that you may do. And I think I think the slogan, no victim, no crime is a good slogan, because basically, it's the idea that you can't really predict who what is going to be risky behavior and and what what is not going to be risky behavior. And of course, in Minority Report, they have this technology that allows them to foresee who is thinking about committing whatever kind of crime. We obviously don't have the benefit of that technology, but it appears to be something that they're looking for by outlawing what they believe is a serious precondition to a problem or a crime. I think one one interesting thing about that, because I agree with that, I think that there's the difficulty or the challenge to that position a little bit is that, you know, then you start, you know, thinking about maybe we should live in a world where there's there's no indicators or precursors or anything like that that we ever make illegal. And so that that leads to yeah, and I've seen some people make this argument, which is, you know, not very popular is that even drunk driving should be okay, as long as people don't actually hurt somebody, which is pretty, pretty tough sell for a lot of people. And also, obviously, there are behaviors that can be more risky than others. Well, there's some alcoholics who are more dangerous when they haven't had a drink. So that's that's part of that. You can go down that road and make some of those kinds of arguments. Of course, I don't know how effective those arguments are going to be with most people, but but the thing that's interesting to me about this is that you should be able to see I would be much more in favor of police actually watching for erratic behavior. So like not not to say, oh, you're on the phone or I saw you texting, but to say, how's your driving? Yeah, are you weaving? I saw you cross the line. Did you cross the line? Are you speeding up and slowing down in a way that's not very predictable? Because that's the hazardous behavior. That is the hazardous behavior, right? And that's also something that you as a cop, I think I'm not a cop. I can't entirely make this claim. But I would say like, it should be easier to see that, right? Then it would be to see whether or not somebody was on the phone, or they were applying lipstick, or they were rummaging around in their console or whatever unless you make direct eye contact with them, Sean, all the phones in the hand. Unless you look at the police officer across the street. No, but but that's what that's what I would think, because then it's not pre crime anymore, then it is a tangible thing that you could say you were driving erratically and recklessly. And that's the problem. I care that you are driving recklessly. So let me spot that. And then if it's because it's you're on a cell phone, or because you were lost in thought, or because you're tired, or what who cares? I don't really care about that part.  Yeah, which by the way happens to me every day in Atlanta is somebody like, and I just think that like the truly the fully non pre crime approach is that if you actually hurt someone, then then you are liable. And that is deterred because of your personal liability, but especially because of your insurance company's personal liability, or liability, and that they then are incentivized to have policies that, you know, reward good behavior and punish bad behavior, especially the different premiums that they charge. Well, so that's a good point, Dan. So who ultimately is responsible for safety? I would submit on the road, right? I would submit it's the individual operating the vehicle, right? But there are also other parties involved. You mentioned the insurance company. Well, I feel like it's interesting because I think that if we think about insurance in a positive way, it is there to it is there obviously to make it easier for us to drive. But I'm thinking that the police charging you for having your cell phone in your hand and them reporting that to your insurance company, that's kind of just this process that has allowed the insurance company to determine your premium in such a way, right? So your premium might go up if they report that you have tickets. But if you think about removing if you think about removing the enforcement component of that, and the authority component of that, like the government authority component of that insurance is then incentivized to create new and innovative ways to make sure you're a safe driver, right? Which is so much more meaningful to me. And I think could be so much better than a policeman just saying I saw a cell phone in your hand. I think that you're right in saying that in some way, the insurance company could create a method by which they keep track of your driving and progressives even done that with the safe driving little insert thing. Yeah, I'm talking about little device that goes in there and measures how many hard breaks you have. Yeah, and my friend's insurance actually went down and I'm not kidding. She literally she refused to take her car out past like 8pm because that affected the price and things like that. And it's like, this is such a cool way to improve driving. What's fascinating to me about those approaches is that they're really dynamic and they're liable to change depending on, you know, we might get self driving cars or we might get, I mean, we're talking during our pre-production meeting about just the incredible advancement in safety technology in cars and like, you know, warning sensors and all these other things that laws don't do a very good job of accommodating, you know, because they're not market participants. Lawmakers are not market participants in the same way that insurance companies might be. And so they're not incentivized to quickly and efficiently make change. And of course legislation is one size fits all. And I think ultimately the responsibility does have to get down to the individual. Because every human action involves judgments about risk and versus reward. And just the very fact that we are driving in the first place, that we're moving around in these like two ton missiles that go at really high speeds with like these tiny little lines dividing us like all the time. It's incredible we don't have more accidents. Exactly. But then you think about all the people who have died, who die all the time, like they said that three, seven thousand highway fatalities, and you know, we could eliminate those if we just stop driving altogether, if we ban driving altogether, but then think of all the rewards that we're missing because of that, all the economic prosperity and all the lives that are saved by that economic prosperity. I mean, economic inefficiency really does cost lives because there are people around the world who are like right on the margin of starving. And the more the global economy is prosperous, then the fewer people actually starve. And so there are just so many trade-offs. And the same thing with texting that like you think about like, especially in Atlanta where this law is in place, that you imagine how many traffic jams we have and how many people are stuck in traffic for one or two hours, maybe even more every day. Right. And just being able to text someone at work that, you know, I'm going to be late. So, you know, change your plans accordingly and how much economic efficiency is. We're using your phone to look up where traffic is.  I mean, especially the, you know, what you just said even about, as it's the point that I made earlier about the maps, I think that this is a thing that probably goes wildly underappreciated, which is it like the fact that you have technology that is adaptive, right, that says, here's your route to work. And oh, wait, there's a ton of traffic here, we're going to reroute you a slightly different direction. For me, and it varies by city, obviously, but for me, a lot of that takes me through side streets in Atlanta, it takes me through neighborhoods and stuff. And I rarely, now I rarely drive above 35, 40 miles an hour, but it's pretty consistent the entire way there. If I didn't have that map, I would never chance that, because it's so complex. The routes that I take through Atlanta are very, very difficult and memorizing that map would be pretty, it's pretty difficult. That's right. Whereas, I would take the highways, which are congested, fast, very dangerous, because there's a lot of people coming in or exiting the highway and all that stuff. I don't think, but that would be my option, right? Like if I didn't have this tool, that would be what I would do. Yeah, it ends up making life far less convenient. So we have about just 30 seconds before we're going to need to wrap up, but I have to ask the question, do you think in any reality that if this law were to be proven ineffective or that other data comes to the fore and they say, well, it's not necessary for us to ban texting, do you think that this sort of thing would ever be rolled back? Or is it just not in our political culture to do that these days? I don't think it's in our culture to ever remove regulation. Yeah, I think especially as much as there were interest groups that were invested in it before, like even now they're more invested in it. And it's going to be really a case of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. That's a good point. People will forget that it was ever any other way, very, very quickly. Right. But hey guys, I mean, prohibition, we got through it. We did. You were right. Maybe one day we can text again. One day. Well, be safe, drive safely, follow your best instincts and respect the road. And everyone throughout our listening land should do the same. Have a safe, productive, economically efficient and fun weekend. Thanks for listening to the FEEcast. We'll see you next week.


SUWT2, the central star, is actually a close binary system where two stars completely circle each other every five days. The interaction of these stars and the more massive star that sheds material to create the nebula formed the ring structure. The burned-out core of the massive companion has yet to be found inside the nebula. This nebula is dubbed the starfish because of its shape, the six lobes of gas and dust, which resemble the legs of a starfish, suggest that the nebula puffed off material at least three times in three different directions. NGC 5315 is a chaotic-looking nebula and reveals an X-shaped structure.


I want to welcome out the CEO of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst. Good morning. Good morning. Thanks for joining us. I know that you've had a busy week. You just wrapped up the Red Hat Summit here in Boston last week. Oh yeah, we had a great week. So I see a lot of familiar faces. Hope you enjoyed the weekend if you stayed here. So I wanted to start off by asking you. I know that as you have come into Red Hat, openness and open organizations has become kind of a passion of yours. And I wanted to hear how did that get started, because that wasn't the background that you had previous to Red Hat. Is that correct? Yeah. So before Red Hat, I was chief operating officer at Delta Airlines, ran it through a very difficult period of time. And one of the first things I noticed about Red Hat is just how different everything operated. And I always just say I'm the frog who got thrown in the boiling water. And what you realize is traditional organizations are really built to drive efficiency and a static environment. And they're really good at that. You prescribe what people do and people execute against it and you hold them accountable. The issue is more and more the world's moving to where the simple rote jobs are being automated and the pace of competition and technology is moving so fast that everyone's worried about being Uberized. So now you don't know what the future's going to be. And so how do you organize for that world? And a more, while they create a context for people to do their best work, a more open organization makes sense in that world. So, you know, there's nothing wrong with traditional bureaucracies for driving efficiency, but those are horrible in innovation and there needs to be a new, much more open model that I think actually optimizes to drive better innovation. And I mentioned earlier in my keynote how we kind of saw that play out in practice where the OpenStack community took the initial concepts of cloud and then kind of went off in a variety of directions to meet different needs. Where do you see that going in the future, you know, in terms of technology development? Well, first off, I mean, one of the things that got us so excited about OpenStack initially was it had just such a great outcome in architecture participation. You had vendors involved, yes, but you had large IT users involved, yet enterprises involved. And so, if you have this nice community and then you have a governance structure and a culture that we call kind of creating a context for great things to happen, you don't have to worry about the roadmap. The roadmap will take care of itself. And so, you know, when I look at where OpenStack is today, I feel the same way. It's certainly different than we thought it was going to be three years ago because it's reacted to, you know, the demands and changes in technology and role in marketplace. And I don't necessarily know if we know where it will be in five years, but that's the beauty of having faith that if you've built the right kind of context in the right community, the right things will happen over the next several years. You recently wrote a book about this called The Open Organization, and in there you relay an anecdote where at Red Hat at one point you had a technology decision and you kind of had to decide if you worked in the broader community context around it or if you kind of tried to approach it internally and how that was a big lesson learned for you. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. Was this the KVM decision? Yeah. Well, there was a couple parts around that decision. One is just having worked in a big traditional company, the idea that an engineer in front of his boss and his boss's boss and his boss's boss's boss would say all of them are wrong to the CEO. That person would have been fired. Most companies that person would have been fired before the end of the day. So we have a very open culture that can actually kind of talk about things like that. This particular discussion I think is a great example that we still think about, which was Red Hat was initially an early contributor to Zen as a hypervisor, but the Zen community fragmented and we were part of that. You had Zen sources in which recognized weren't just different flavors coming off of one tree. They were three different trees. And so one of the reasons, I think architecturally KVM is a better architecture anyway, but putting that aside, one of the reasons it was successful is it was under the Linux Foundation, and so it stayed together. And yeah, there can be our flavor, and Ubuntu's flavor, and other flavors of KVM out there, but they're still coming off of one upstream. And that's one of the real powers that we think of OpenStack as well is the governance structure is kept kind of one upstream, and sure, they're different kind of distributions, and we have distributions and others do as well, but if you can kind of keep the community as one ultimately, and a governance model that makes that happen, it just is so much more powerful. Yeah, I agree, and we've seen people who have attempted to do sort of splinters off of it that haven't been successful, because I think as you say, you know, those open organizations that have context, they can just move together so thanks for joining us. I would love to keep talking, but we're actually out of time, and you know, I read your book, I enjoyed it. I think it's a pretty interesting read to see your take on how to apply the principles that probably a lot of us here are familiar with from the open source world, but apply them not just to communities, but actually, you know, businesses that are out there trying to make a profit, and so thanks for sharing that with all of us and joining us here today. Great to be here. Thank you very much.


about things that I get on the channel and that is fit. I am working on simplicity one two five three little oldie but goodie this is I don't know five or so years old but it is just a basic woven tank you make it out of drapey fabrics you know pretty straightforward there's like a jillion different patterns like this so I thought it would be a good one to talk about fit with you guys. I'm making VC and then the first thing that I do with all the patterns is I use my very own fast fit worksheet and this is just a system that I have developed it's available on my website the worksheet and instructions on how to use it and it basically just sort of analyzes the patterns measurements the finished garment measurements my measurements the ease that the pattern the pattern designer is hoping for you to achieve and kind of analyzes all of that and spits out a size and kind of what alterations you need to make the fast fits system is really great for assessing circumference so bust waist and hip and you can see that on this one here I cut a size 16 graded out to a 20 and then based on the worksheet determined I needed to add an additional four inches to the hip so I just added a one inch little wedge created out one inch on both side seams and that'll give me the four inches that I need so once I have that done and I have my pattern pieces all cut out I will drape them on my ditto form I've talked to you guys about the ditto form a little bit this is basically an exact replica of my body I had my body scanned on a 3D scanner they applied everything that that told them to a dress form design this dress form like exact to my body even like the discrepancy in one of my boobs is bigger than the other one that's in here if you have a lower shoulder on one side than the other side they would find that as well you know my belly protrusion you know my back they really do get it all so I know that whatever I am draping on the ditto form I am pretty much like draping on myself it's awesome so there's obviously always a ton to analyze and I don't want to completely overwhelm you guys by putting all of the information in one video so in this video we're specifically talk about the location of the bust waist and hip line and how that measures up to my body and in the adjustments that you can make accordingly so if you can see now that I've got this on my dress form it's inside out so it is a little bit hard for you guys to see but the bust line is right here and that perfectly lines up with the bust line on my ditto form it is going across the apex of my bust exactly where it should be and that completely matches up with the bust line good to go there right so then we want to move down to the waistline and you can see that the waistline is marked on the pattern and it is right here all the way down here this is my waistline my natural waist so either I am short-waisted or this pattern is very long-waisted however you want to look at it and then we can finally come and look at the hem the hem is hitting right well this has got to be turned up there's a 5 eighth inch hem allowance so we can turn that up and you will see that this is going to hit right above my low hip so when it comes to a top like this where the hip is not marked kind of where you want the hem to hit you is going to serve as your hip marking this is a top that I plan on wearing with you know both untucked and tucked so I do want to make sure that this hits at a place that I like so some things to contend with here one is because my bust is in the right place it's not an issue of the shoulder being too high or too low you can also see that up here on the neckline everything looks really great it's not too high not too low it's hitting at a really comfortable place so I think from the shoulder down we're doing pretty good through the bust it's just when we get to the hip where we have a bit of an issue so we're gonna bring the hip up and this is exactly how I would do it even if I weren't filming myself I would take all of the pins out of the front leaving the back intact I would fold it along the hip line and then I would bring that hip line up to my exact hip line and I will keep everything along the center front that full line the line will still continue to be straight all the way down to the hem and you can see that I'm gonna end up taking out probably close to two inches okay so once I take out what I need to for the waist and I pull that waistline up to my natural waist now I am reassessing the hip right so the hip is gonna come down here and now it's actually going to hit closer to my I don't know it's not totally my high hip this is my hip bone right here like the ditto form really gets every single looking grainy of your body it's kind of crazy so that is my high hip yeah the pattern is now going to end right at my high hip so I need to decide if that's something that I want or if I want to add what I took out of here back to the hem and of course at the top like this it's not that big of a deal but which is why I wanted to use it because I thought it'd be a great illustration if you were working with something that had a waist seam you wouldn't just want to take it off the hem you would want to make sure that your waist line hits exactly where the pattern designer wants it to and that's what this process is going to allow me to do it's going to get the waist seam up high that means it's gonna have a really nice natural curve on the side seam so this will prevent that from happening and then it'll allow me to decide you know it'll pull up the hem obviously and then I can decide if I want to add more length to that or not all right you guys there you have it that would be the first next step that I would take when it comes to fitting this particular pattern fast fit worksheet then I would drape it on my ditto form compare the patterns bust waist and hip lines to my body's bust waist and hip lines which is obviously so easy to do whenever you have a dress form that is a carbon copy of your own body so now I feel confident cutting this out knowing that all of the horizontal placements are in the right place as well as having a really great circumference I'm gonna be back to talk to you guys more about fitting I do want to add a lot more of those videos to the channel we'll talk about armsides we'll talk about shoulders we'll talk about the backs of patterns and how to make sure those are you know properly aligned with your body and if this has inspired you to look into getting a ditto form for yourself I do highly recommend them it makes this process so much easier especially if you're alone like me check the description box I'll have a link to where you can learn more information about upcoming scans and how you can do them remotely possibly and of course you know how to get your ditto form so that is gonna do it for me today me and Ellen that's the name of my ditto form and we are gonna go get to work and cutting out this cute little simplicity top you'll see it here shortly thanks so much for watching you guys bye