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Google Is Not God of the Web

bilge.world

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Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#101

Post by onemoresoop »

bosswipe wrote: post #95

What's infuriating to me about these types of "signals" to the search rankings is that they have little to do with the content that I'm searching for. Google will hide results that I might find useful because the web master hasn't kept up with whatever Google decided was today's best practices. How about ranking based on the best source for what I'm looking for?

That's why we should ditch google search for alternatives. So far I've been using DDG and am quite happy though it needs improvements in search results they may be the ones to listen to our needs unlike google who is too big to care.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#102

Post by dang »

verdverm wrote: post #4

This is the best place I know of to have thoughtful discussions and talk about what most consider taboo. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html There are times where it gets heated, but those are quickly shut down by the very excellent community moderation.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23383662.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#103

Post by darkmx0z »

reaperducer wrote: post #99
darkmx0z wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are getting that because other people do not care about what you are searching for :( their AI is maximizing the chances of quickly finding what most people want, not what you want.

Most people want offers to sell fictional criminal records and address records that don't match what I searched for? I don't think the AI understands what the word "most" means.

unfortunately, those websites are probably more popular than the church's website in question (or at least, receive more clicks from google search)

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#105

Post by cj »

One anecdote where their “Largest Contentful Paint” metric fails, and fixing degrades performance:

We have a large 300kb animated gif that takes up maybe 20% of the viewport above the fold. The gif demonstrates visually what our service does.

A couple months ago Webmaster Tools reported that page as being “slow” pointing to the large image download. So we decided to show the first frame of the gif as a (30kb) png file, and then swap in the gif 2 seconds after the page is fully loaded.

Except now the new “largest contentful paint” metric is failing on those pages because it includes the 2 second delay when the animated gif is swapped in. I guess technically they’re not wrong in how they’re calculating it.

In fewer words, Google doesn’t like anything being lazy loaded if it’s above the fold.

The metrics and how they’re calculated are questionable. We ended up optimizing for Google and removed the lazy load (ignoring that we think it’s a better UX to lazy load that specific gif).

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#107

Post by user_0x »

modeless wrote: post #90
reaperducer wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes you want to make a slow website that doesn't fit well on a phone screen? Sometimes you should have the choice of making a slow web site that doesn't fit on the phone screen. A large corporation shouldn't dictate how you present your information. Sometimes you want to put a document on the web without having to pay someone to run on Google's treadmill of changing standards and policies for the rest of your l…

Sometimes you can choose to make a website whose sole purpose isn't to attract Google Search traffic, and that's OK! Not every website has to rank in Google Search to be useful.

but that isn't really true. google gets ~80% of the searches on the web. that means that if someone who isn't conforming to google's frankly arbitrary ranking system is being censored, to use strong language.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#108

Post by gumby »

Back in 1998 or so people weren't just enthusiastic about the Google search engine because its results were good but because the search page was simple and fast.

Compare that to Altavista or Yahoo whose pages were belarded with all sorts of irrelevant links and ads around the search results. Slow to load and hard to visually navigate.

I still think the sparse pages are the best.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#109

Post by impalallama »

It thought I be in favor of whatever this article was arguing but then it went in a weird direction by arguing against certain things that are just considered good practice but its bad now because google is saying it. Like yes, I would consider it a good thing to have lighter websites. Unless your site is catering to some niche that needs to offer 1 to 1 perfect image quality there no reason to not compress your assets.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#110

Post by hrktb »

verdverm wrote: post #41
Covzire wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, unless illegal.

It is a private platform, correct? Would you prefer no search or what we had before Google? What would search look like of they did nothing? What would the world look like over the last 20 years?

Arguably other companies would have taken the burden, and it could have been for the better, who knows.

We might not see any obvious candidates for that, as Google was dominant and they had no market access.

Imagine a timeline where Palm ruled the phone market, and we’d be here asking rhetoric questions about what it would have been if Palm didn’t do it.

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