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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

#141

Post by 6510 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #113
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?

Google's ability to surface useful results has been thoroughly defeated by SEO spammers. To a lesser extent, the same is true of other search engines (Bing, etc.) though Google is the foremost SEO spam target for obvious reasons. Given that state of things, there is some sense in promoting more user-friendly pages that are thus a bit less likely to be SEO spam.

Nah, this is just unimaginative. The issue is that it is really hard to admit one was wrong and start from scratch. Rules should be simple enough for mortals to read. If they keep adding to the existing formula there will be web-lawyers required.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#142

Post by DevKoala »

I wish there was a way to index the web which was not so susceptible to marketers gaming the ranking system; it is clear Google has lost the battle there. Moreover, I don’t believe it is in Google’s best interest to surface the best results for me, but those that will generate them the most revenue.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#143

Post by NetBeck »

The web is optimized for Google Chrome, not the inverse. It's not surprising. Google is an advertising company with >90% search market share. There is little competition in the economy, only product differentiation.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#144

Post by bberenberg »

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…

What if my audience is people in the US on desktop devices? Does it make sense for me to build for data capped networks which aren't a thing for 99% of US desktop devices? Does it make sense that I now have to spend time and money optimizing my company site for an audience that I don't care about so we don't get down-ranked?

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#145

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

Isn't there a standard way to show a thumbnail before loading an image? I remember doing that at the 90's.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#146

Post by joe_the_user »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #140
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…

Indeed. Ads are just noise that should be filtered out. To visit a website and be served 100 megabyes of noise along with less than 1 megabyte of actual information... It's an absurdly low signal-to-noise ratio, such an incredible waste. We need to fix the web by blocking these things. No compromises. If a website can't exist without advertising, it should disappear. Eventually, only good websites will remain. Websit…

I hate capitalism. I'm fully an anti-capitalist.

But I'm also a realist. We live in a capitalist society and free content has come out of advertising since before the web. It's an annoying part of the present world but not the most annoying part imo. I don't know how people denouncing just advertising expect the publication of free information to work.

This society has created a vast plenty. I don't see why advertisers, the public and publishers couldn't reach a truce where a moderate amount of semi-relevant text ads get shown the reader in excahnge. But everyone wants to total control, wants to club to death all competitors and that seems to be the way this world of plenty is ending.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#147

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

How does one do that when browsers have the search and address bars merged?

You content yourself with the users that type https:// before your site name and never make a typo?

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#148

Post by z3t4 »

Many inlinks are good for search ranking - people create fake sites and spam. domain is important for search ranking - people pick domain after search keyword. Faster pages rank higher - people make fast websites. Quality content rank higher - like if that ever going to happen.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#149

Post by dhimes »

addicted wrote: post #127

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 r…

s/an answering engine/an advertising engine/

FTFY

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#150

Post by Mandatum »

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…

That sounds like a nightmare. Is there any other way to delay the loading of the gif that doesn't negatively affect your score? Like a JS callback or similar.

As an aside, the other replies to your comment is very telling of the HN audience. Many of which aren't knowledgeable in the webdev field, but "they did it in the 90's", "use bleeding-edge tech" and "everything you're doing is wrong". Also IFRAMEs, hahaha.

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