Steve – Thumbtack Engineering

Author Archives: Steve

Gambling with the devil: A/B tests done right

March 21, 2012 – 3:04 pm

“Designing an experiment is like gambling with the devil: Only a random strategy can defeat all his betting systems.” (R. A. Fisher) These days just about everyone does some form of A/B testing to optimize pages. But as Ronald Fisher knew, A/B testing is loaded with traps, and the only way to avoid them is [...]

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Googlebot makes POST requests via AJAX

October 11, 2011 – 12:54 pm

Googlebot is constantly evolving to better capture the web’s content. Over the past few years we’ve seen Googlebot submit GET forms and execute JavaScript. But we’ve always taken it for granted that Googlebot would never execute a POST request, nor would any other well-behaved web crawler. We were wrong about that. Recently, we started observing Googlebot [...]

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