You have reached the website of Pierre Far.
About me in 10 seconds: I have a PhD in bacterial genetics from Cambridge University, England, and I'm a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google.
Me around the web:
Public speaking as a Googler
An incomplete and irregularly updated list of events you might have heard me, or am scheduled to, speak at:
- SMX London, May 2012: Will be speaking about rich snippets and authorship markup.
- International Search Summit London, May 2012: My talk will be about the recent developments in rel-alternate-hreflang annotation for multilingual and multinational sites.
- BrightonSEO, April 2012: Was on the "Ask the Engines" panel with Dave Coplin (Bing UK), Martin McDonald (Expedia EAN), Rishi Lakhani (freelance SEO), and chaired by Tony Goldstone (Fresh Egg).
- Think Visibility, March 2012: Talked about Google's discovery, crawling, indexing and serving pipeline.
- g|jordan 2.0, October 2011: Google event held in Amman, Jordan. I answered webmaster questions, gave demos of Google Webmaster Tools, and also helped answer questions in the Ask a Googler session.
- a4uexpo London, October 2011: I ran an Open Q&A for webmasters with my colleague at Google Kaspar Szymanksi.
- Media Trust Think Mobile event, March 2011: Talked about how to build mobile-friendly websites.
Blog posts I've written as a Googler
Easier done with a search: [site:googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com "pierre far"] :)
Public speaking before joining Google
- Locate, Collate and Aggregate session, JISC CETIS Conference 2010: Talked about my experience in building an open educational resources (OER) repository with content from multiple sources.
- Mozilla Drumbeat Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival November 2010, Barcelona: I helped run the Open Content Studio at the Drumbeat Festival in November 2010. Topics discussed included the future of open educational resources (OER), how to improve the discoverability of OER, particularly OCW, and helping write a Creative Commons-licensed textbook on web development. The Open Content Studio was a collaboration between Flat World Knowledge, the OpenCourseWare Consortium, Connexions, and me as OCW Search.
- MongoUK, June 2010: I spoke at the MongoUK conference on 18 June 2010 in London about my experience building a full text search engine for MongoDB using Sphinx. My slides are on Scribd: MongoDB Full Text Search With Sphinx.
- SES London 2010: I spoke at the Automating Twitter session at Search Engine Strategies 2010 in London. My talk was about analytics for social media marketing. Whenever you launch a marketing campaign, you need to measure it in detail to understand its performance. The presentation covered some of the important actionable metrics you need to track, with code examples of how to track them. Other key topics covered were filtering, automation, and reporting, all of which feed into experimentation to find the most effective marketing messages.
Websites I built
My current sites:
- eKstreme.com: SEO tools and general web development and marketing blog from my pre-Google days.
- This site :)
Previous sites:
- My science news blog: a hold-over from my PhD days. Sadly had to shut it down.
- OCW Search: a search engine of the full course contents of OpenCourseWare materials from the top universities around the world.
- Cligs: I built and marketed from scratch a URL shortener aimed at professional internet marketers. It did real time analytics, geotargeting, and social media monitoring. I sold it in late 2009 to Mister Wong.
- Font Fox: I used to be a typography junkie, and Font Fox was a place I collected my favorite free fonts. It was the first site I ever sold.