The Search Marketing Expo (SMX) West conference was a blast, and now I’m trying to recover and catch up on the things I missed at work. It was great seeing a bunch of familiar faces, and I met quite a few new folks as well. One of my favorite activities was the “Lunch with a Google Engineer” tables at lunch. For all three days of the conference, we had two tables at lunch, and each table had 1-2 Googlers to chat with conference attendees about anything webmaster-related. It was a great way to connect with new people.

Another favorite event was the SMX Search Bowl, where search engines and SEOs matched wits on search trivia. Google got to take home the trophy this time around, and the trophy looks like this:

(My cat Ozzie volunteered to be in the photo to provide a sense of scale.) Check out the quiz questions to see how you do.

I’ll try to write up some more of my thoughts, but if you’re craving other search-y information, several Googlers have done interviews recently:

• At SMX, I did a Whiteboard Friday interview with Rand. It’s an unusual interview because we talk about more personal stuff, although we get into a few webspam specifics toward the end.
• If you want pure information, check out this video interview that Adam Lasnik did at SES London a couple weeks ago.
• I also really enjoyed this interview that Kevin Marks did with Caroline McCarthy about OpenSocial, OpenID, etc.
• This is one of my favorites: Pedro Dias gives a great interview in Portuguese about various webspam topics. Go Pedro!

I’m really happy that Google reaches out to webmasters in many languages, from our German webmaster blog or our Chinese webmaster blog to our webmaster discussion groups in Hebrew, Russian, and many, many languages in between. I’m proud to work with such a great group of colleagues in webspam and search quality. Google can still continue to ramp up our international communication with webmasters, but when you compare to even a couple years ago, we’ve really come a long way.

Original post by Matt Cutts