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Matt Cutts: You know Googlers tend to be a little tech savvy and a little bit towards the bleeding edge so I remember there were two different people at Google saying, “You need to check out this site called Digg. It’s really cool. I Dugg some articles.” It was a long, long time ago and I was wandering what this Digg thing they were talking about was. So Googlers tend to find social news sites relatively quickly.

I’ve been hanging out a little bit more on hacker news lately, which is kind of a fun site. It has a good signal and noise ratio. The thing that is kind of interesting to me, and certainly there are people who have fun and enjoy Redit as well as all those great sites but if you talk about Google one thing you might not realize is that typically a lot of people will see that article inside of Google.

So we don’t always do as good of a job at communication 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 have to be a little bit careful. You don’t want to say things or give promises that turn out you can’t make.

But there are a lot of engineers who keep an eye out for mentions of their product. So if you are complaining about Google calendar or you dislike some aspect of Google Reader a lot of the times a Google engineer is actually reading that and sometimes they will be able to comment on your blog post or on your web page. And sometimes they’ll just pass that feedback around.

So that’s one thing 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. They’re not paying attention to me.” And it’s a lot of fun when 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 smucks.” And they were a little surprised when I Tweeted him back and say, “Hey here is the part of your site that is hacked.” Then they turned really nice and were like, “sorry I called you a smuck.”

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, Redit, Digg, Tech Crunch, all those sorts of sites. If you are talking about, complaining about or discussing a product at Google there is 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.