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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

#121

Post by jefftk »

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?

If only one website has what I'm looking for, then definitely give me that site. If multiple sites have what I want, then prioritizing by which sites will give it to me fastest sounds like it both helps me with this search and helps with future searches (since it puts incentives towards making sites less slow).

In general, prioritizing speed highly helps small independent sites and over large bloated sites: they typically have less JS, fewer round trips on the critical path, etc. Make your site simple enough (ex: https://danluu.com/) and it will automatically be fast.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#122

Post by kickscondor »

downerending wrote: post #16
kickscondor wrote: post #2

> There is a very reasonable argument for essential services like search engines and news websites to conform to/adopt standards like AMP, but for the rest of The Open Web, ingenuity and risktaking should be encouraged, not discouraged, for the true good of all Peoplekind. Hadn't really considered this - because minimalist page size is often such a given - but, for instance, many amateurs often don't know yet how to…

Actually, I'd be interested in an alternative web where ingenuity and risk-taking would be utterly forbidden. Just HTML, and a very basic subset at that. No Javascript at all, no CSS. So much of the web would be better and more universally usable without "modern" cruft.

Totally appreciate what you're saying - some of the time I'm just in a basic text mood as well. (And am a fan of, for instance, legiblenews.com.)

Most of the time I'm a JavaScript maximalist, though. Crufty, dank and deplorable.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#123

Post by gundmc »

reaperducer wrote: post #97
verdverm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried this, I used it, no big adoption, product got killed. Largely people prefer the free perception of the internet and wouldn't pay the prices it would cost if direct payments were made. I believe its in the $x00s per year

They tried this, I used it, no big adoption, product got killed. To which service do you refer?

I believe it was Google Contributor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#124

Post by throwaway90179 »

youeseh wrote: post #27

God, how? Like, in the monotheistic sense or the polytheistic sense? If we're going poly, then Google is definitely one of the Gods of the web. Maybe even the top God, but there may be some competition there.

Google is the God of Control of the web. It thinks it knows what the people want, but it's just using its influence to make it look that way.

The only difference is that Google isn't even aware that's what it's doing.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#125

Post by Kye »

cj wrote: post #105

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 fil…

I will not stay on a site with auto-playing video or GIFs. I can't focus on anything with it there.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#126

Post by pornel »

There are lots of questionable ways in which Google owns the web (AMP, reCaptcha harassing users without Google cookies, Chrome's "Fire And Motion" web standards strategy), but this one isn't one of them.

In the webdev community it's well known that good performance is very important for user satisfaction, and that's backed up by research. There are no ideal metrics, and unfortunately every single one of them has some dumb edge cases. You could endlessly bikeshed which metrics could be better, but this particular set is not unreasonable.

It makes sense for search engine to pick websites that not only have the relevant content, but also are able to actually get that content on screen without frustrating users with slow-loading crap that makes browser freeze and stutter.

Keep in mind that your high-end desktop web experience is in minority. The web is now mostly mobile, and mobile is mostly low-end Android. That's a shit sandwitch, and it desperately needs an intervention.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#127

Post by addicted »

I think most people haven’t internalized that Google is no longer a search engine but an answering engine.

A search engine tries to find all sorts of relevant information related to your query. The more the merrier (it’s searching after all) and then sorted in a way that puts the relevant results first. An answering engine, in the other hand, tries to minimize the number of results. In an ideal world, it would only return one thing, which tells you exactly what you want.

One example of this change is the fact that it’s no longer useful to go beyond the first page or so of Your results. Because anything down that low is irrelevant as an answer and is probably discarded by google anyways, which wasn’t the case when it was a search engine.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing. In fact, I suspect the majority of time the majority of people want an answer, and not a multitude of results. But I think this is what leads to google search changing in a way that does not meet many people’s expectations here.

It means google emphasizes stuff that gets people answers quickly. They parse text and reveal the answers on their page itself. And they are not very useful for exploring anymore.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#129

Post by 101008 »

gok wrote: post #93

> 22.82 Mbps will reliably download very complex web pages nearly instantaneously. The author may be unaware of how ridiculously huge web pages have gotten. I just loaded Wired.com, scrolled down and let it sit for a few seconds. It downloaded 96.2 MB, requiring over 33 seconds on one of those average connections. On a pay-as-you-go data plan, it would have cost about a dollar just to load that one page. The front pa…

I agree, but somehow when I google for something, Wired and all these websites are the ones that appear on the first result, so what's the deal? Google don't care if your website is heavy as long as that domain provides a lot of ads income?

I've made a website pure HTML with just a small CSS and no JS; with real great content. Google doesn't take it into account. So I don't know if they are really pushing for a light network, or maybe, I don't know, because it is easier to convert these website into AMP?

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#130

Post by lazyjones »

cj wrote: post #105

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 fil…

Have you tried putting it in an IFRAME?
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