Simon Willison’s Weblog

SQL Has Problems. We Can Fix Them: Pipe Syntax In SQL (via) A new paper from Google Research describing custom syntax for analytical SQL queries that has been rolling out inside Google since February, reaching 1,600 "seven-day-active users" by August 2024.

A key idea is here is to fix one of the biggest usability problems with standard SQL: the order of the clauses in a query. Starting with SELECT instead of FROM has always been confusing, see SQL queries don't start with SELECT by Julia Evans.

Here's an example of the new alternative syntax, taken from the Pipe query syntax documentation that was added to Google's open source ZetaSQL project last week.

For this SQL query:

SELECT component_id, COUNT(*)
FROM ticketing_system_table
WHERE
  assignee_user.email = 'username@email.com'
  AND status IN ('NEW', 'ASSIGNED', 'ACCEPTED')
GROUP BY component_id
ORDER BY component_id DESC;

The Pipe query alternative would look like this:

FROM ticketing_system_table
|> WHERE
    assignee_user.email = 'username@email.com'
    AND status IN ('NEW', 'ASSIGNED', 'ACCEPTED')
|> AGGREGATE COUNT(*)
   GROUP AND ORDER BY component_id DESC;

The Google Research paper is released as a two-column PDF. I snarked about this on Hacker News:

Google: you are a web company. Please learn to publish your research papers as web pages.

This remains a long-standing pet peeve of mine. PDFs like this are horrible to read on mobile phones, hard to copy-and-paste from, have poor accessibility (see this Mastodon conversation) and are generally just bad citizens of the web.

Having complained about this I felt compelled to see if I could address it myself. Google's own Gemini Pro 1.5 model can process PDFs, so I uploaded the PDF to Google AI Studio and prompted the gemini-1.5-pro-exp-0801 model like this:

Convert this document to neatly styled semantic HTML

This worked surprisingly well. It output HTML for about half the document and then stopped, presumably hitting the output length limit, but a follow-up prompt of "and the rest" caused it to continue from where it stopped and run until the end.

Here's the result (with a banner I added at the top explaining that it's a conversion): Pipe-Syntax-In-SQL.html

I haven't compared the two completely, so I can't guarantee there are no omissions or mistakes.

The figures from the PDF aren't present - Gemini Pro output tags like <img src="figure1.png" alt="Figure 1: SQL syntactic clause order doesn't match semantic evaluation order. (From [25].)"> but did nothing to help me create those images.

Amusingly the document ends with <p>(A long list of references, which I won't reproduce here to save space.)</p> rather than actually including the references from the paper!

So this isn't a perfect solution, but considering it took just the first prompt I could think of it's a very promising start. I expect someone willing to spend more than the couple of minutes I invested in this could produce a very useful HTML alternative version of the paper with the assistance of Gemini Pro.

One last amusing note: I posted a link to this to Hacker News a few hours ago. Just now when I searched Google for the exact title of the paper my HTML version was already the third result!

I've now added a <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"> tag to the top of the HTML to keep this unverified AI slop out of their search index. This is a good reminder of how much better HTML is than PDF for sharing information on the web!

# 24th August 2024, 11 pm / google, pdf, seo, sql, ai, julia-evans, generative-ai, llms, gemini, slop

Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now thanks to AI deal (via) This is depressing. As of around June 25th reddit.com/robots.txt contains this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Along with a link to Reddit's Public Content Policy.

Is this a direct result of Google's deal to license Reddit content for AI training, rumored at $60 million? That's not been confirmed but it looks likely, especially since accessing that robots.txt using the Google Rich Results testing tool (hence proxied via their IP) appears to return a different file, via this comment, my copy here.

# 24th July 2024, 6:29 pm / google, reddit, search-engines, seo, ai, llms

datasette-block-robots. Another little Datasette plugin: this one adds a /robots.txt page with Disallow: / to block all indexing of a Datasette instance from respectable search engine crawlers. I built this in less than ten minutes from idea to deploy to PyPI thanks to the datasette-plugin cookiecutter template.

# 23rd June 2020, 3:28 am / plugins, projects, robots-txt, seo, datasette

Evolving “nofollow” – new ways to identify the nature of links (via) Slightly confusing announcement from Google: they’re introducing rel=ugc and rel=sponsored in addition to rel=nofollow, and will be treating all three values as “hints” for their indexing system. They’re very unclear as to what the concrete effects of these hints will be, presumably because they will become part of the secret sauce of their ranking algorithm.

# 10th September 2019, 9:16 pm / google, nofollow, seo

Googlebot’s Javascript random() function is deterministic. random() as executed by Googlebot returns the same predicable sequence. More interestingly, Googlebot runs a much faster timer for setTimeout and setInterval—as Tom Anthony points out, “Why actually wait 5 seconds when you are a bot?”

# 7th February 2018, 2:41 am / crawling, google, seo

What is the plural of blitz? Wow, WordHippo is a straight up masterclass in keyword SEO tactics. Everything from the page URL to the keyword-crammed content to the enormous quantity of related links.

# 25th November 2017, 5:42 pm / seo

Great Literature Retitled To Boost Website Traffic (via) “7 Awesome Ways Barnyard Animals Are Like Communism”.

# 17th June 2010, 10:32 am / copy, funny, seo, recovered, awful, headlines

Official Google Webmaster Blog: A proposal for making AJAX crawlable. It's horrible! The Google crawler would map url#!state to url?_escaped_fragment_=state, then expect your site to provide rendered HTML that reflects that state (they even go as far as to suggest running a headless browser within your web server to do this). Just stick to progressive enhancement instead, it's far less hideous. It looks like the proposal may have originated with the GWT team.

# 8th October 2009, 5:52 pm / ajax, crawling, google, gwt, javascript, progressive-enhancement, search-engines, seo

Specify your canonical. You can now use a link rel=“canonical” to tell Google that a page has a canonical URL elsewhere. I’ve run in to this problem a bunch of times—in some sites it really does make sense to have the same content shown in two different places—and this seems like a neat solution that could apply to much more than just metadata for external search engines.

# 14th February 2009, 11:28 am / canonical, google, metadata, relcanonical, search-engines, seo, urls

Underscores are now word separators, proclaims Google. I missed this story last year—the change was announced by Matt Cutts at WordCamp 2007.

# 13th August 2008, 1:06 pm / google, hyphens, matt-cutts, seo, underscores, wordcamp, wordpress

Search Engine Optimization Through Hoax News. Devious new black-hat SEO technique: invent a news story that’s pure link-bait. The recent “13 year old steals dad’s credit card to buy hookers” story was a hoax: it was a pure play for PageRank.

# 22nd May 2008, 6:09 pm / blackhat, google, pagerank, seo

Some thoughts on Mahalo. Rich Skrenta with notes on running a large site that lives and dies by SEO traffic.

# 20th August 2007, 5:23 pm / mahalo, richskrenta, seo

Why people hate SEO... (and why SMO is bulls$%t). Jason Calacanis explains SMO, or “Social Media Optimisation”—digg spamming now has its own TLA.

# 8th February 2007, 7:47 am / jason-calacanis, seo, smo, spam, tla