Which websites are popular among Googlers?

Matt's answer:

Today’s question comes from Mike Rogers, writing from the United Kingdom. Mike asks, “Hi, Matt. Which websites are popular among Googlers? For example, how many Googlers use Reddit versus other social news sites? Thanks.” You know, Googlers tend to be pretty tech savvy, and a little bit toward the bleeding edge. So I remember, it was two different people at Google who were saying, “You need to check out this site called Digg! It’s really cool! I dugg some articles a long, long time ago.” And I was like, what is this Digg you’re talking about? And so Googlers tend to find new social news sites and various new sites relatively quickly. I’ve been hanging out a little bit more on Hacker News lately, which is kind of a fun site. It’s got a good signal to noise ratio. The thing that is kind of interesting to me, and certainly there are people who have fun and enjoy Reddit as well, all those great sites. But if you talk about Google, one thing you might not realize is, typically, a lot of people will see that article inside of Google. So we don’t always do as good of a job of communicating with the outside world as I would maybe like us to, or as the rest of the company would like to. And that’s because, you know, you have to be a little bit careful. You don’t want to say things, or give promises that you turn out, you know, you can’t make. But there are a lot of engineers who keep an eye out for mentions of their product. So if you’re complaining about Google Calendar, or you dislike some aspect of Google Reader, a lot of times, a Google engineer is actually reading that, and sometimes they’ll be able to comment on your blog post or on your webpage, and sometimes they’ll just pass that feedback around. So that’s one thing that I wanted to assure people about. Is sometimes they think, oh, well, I’m complaining about Google, and they’ve never ever heard of me, and they’re not paying attention to me. And it’s a lot of fun when someone will– we’ve launched a new feature, like “This site may be compromised,” to show when we think a site might be hacked. And somebody tweeted to @google on Twitter, and said, “Prove it, you schmucks!” And they were a little surprised when I tweeted him back and said, hey, here’s the part of your site that’s hacked. And then they turned really nice, and they were like, “Sorry I called you a schmuck.” So there actually are a lot of people at Google who do read a lot of stuff out on the blogosphere. Everything from Techmeme to Google News to Reddit to Digg, Tech Crunch, all those sorts of sites. So if you are talking about, discussing, or complaining about a product at Google, there’s often the people who are responsible for it who are reading that, and who are wondering how they can make it better in the future.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: