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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

#211

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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…

>Web developers have utterly squandered all efficiency gains of the last 30 years

It's true, whenever a company has pleaded with me to bring a site in with better performance, I have adamantly refused to do so.

When companies say guess what, Bryan, we are going to focus a sprint on just making sure everything download as fast as possible and we get rid of anything getting in the way of the best possible user experience, I have spent that sprint watching quirky animation, and sometimes turned that animation into a base64 encoded gif and put it in a div that was set with a z-index low enough that it would be not seen by people but would still have to be downloaded by the browser!

I do all these things of course, because it was decided by the Secret League of Obnoxious Web Developers (SLOWD) that we should do the utmost in our power to make the web slower for everyone.

OR - it could be that I have in fact asked project management at sites repeatedly to focus on performance (and accessibility, another thing that always gets ignored) and been told that nobody care about that stuff.

I guess it's up to you to determine where the fault lies.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#212

Post by stonogo »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #211
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…

>Web developers have utterly squandered all efficiency gains of the last 30 years It's true, whenever a company has pleaded with me to bring a site in with better performance, I have adamantly refused to do so. When companies say guess what, Bryan, we are going to focus a sprint on just making sure everything download as fast as possible and we get rid of anything getting in the way of the best possible user experien…

I don't think anyone is under the impression that web developers can't make excuses; we have plenty of evidence of that.

I think discussions like this are capable of serving as valuable reference material when we are engaged with project managers on this topic.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#213

Post by kllrnohj »

entropyneur wrote: post #119

As a web developer who has recently spent an ungodly amount of time trying to make my pages meet Google's impossible standards for qualifying as "fast" on mobile, I sympathize with the author's point. But I think he's missing the even bigger picture. Personal computing is mobile now. And even though the phones have as many megabytes, kilotonnes, little clowns or whatever the device greatness is measured in these days…

It doesn't help that ~every mobile device is 6+ cores while the web still largely pretends that there's only a single CPU core & that that core is getting faster. The web should have started adapting back in 2006 when this trend really become common reality, but it didn't.

So you're stuck with 1 shitty CPU core, and you're stuck sharing it with the browser & JS runtime (yes there's of course multithreaded aspects to the browser itself, but you're still sharing an awful lot of CPU time on your single thread with the browser). 1/6th to 1/8th the performance of the phone is the most you can achieve if you're lucky. That's a fucking terrible starting point, and nobody should be surprised the mobile web sucks ass as a result.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#214

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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…

There are two types of noise being served here

The advertising The tracking

The tracking is being used to: tell advertisers how well their advertising is working tell the site how well articles are working give unscrupulous sites the possibility of selling that data to others, which are probably advertisers but maybe other companies.

As far as the ratio of advertisement to content this https://www.editorandpublisher.com/news/higher-ad-to-edit-ra... regarding that ratio in newspapers assumes 60 / 40 where I believe the 40 is supposed to be content (although I find the wording not 100% clear)

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#215

Post by CogitoCogito »

Sephr wrote: post #166
101008 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

High network utilization doesn't have to mean an unresponsive website. Google cares more about responsiveness. A site is responsive if you can start reading it quickly, regardless of how much network traffic is being used by ads, as long as the ads are loaded asynchronously after the primary content. Penalizing for high total network traffic is short-sighted and would prevent most video hosts from ranking well in Goo…

Do you know how they decide if someone is able to start reading quickly? Personally I find asynchronously loading ads around the text so distracting that I basically can't focus on reading until it's done loading so for me I basically need to wait for the whole site needs to load anyway. In the same vein, I would prefer Google down score all sites with anything but entirely static ads.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#216

Post by kllrnohj »

user_0x wrote: post #107
modeless wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> but that isn't really true. google gets ~80% of the searches on the web.

Not every destination started as a web search.

Case in point, the list of links on this very site that we're all commenting on. This discussion didn't start with a google search. Google was never involed at all. Not everything on the web goes through google search. Nearly all searches go through Google, but there's a hell of a lot more to the web than searches.

As also evidenced by some of the largest & most visited sites driving a ton of non-search traffic - like reddit. And facebook. And twitter. And etc...

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#217

Post by thih9 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #211
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…

>Web developers have utterly squandered all efficiency gains of the last 30 years It's true, whenever a company has pleaded with me to bring a site in with better performance, I have adamantly refused to do so. When companies say guess what, Bryan, we are going to focus a sprint on just making sure everything download as fast as possible and we get rid of anything getting in the way of the best possible user experien…

Looks like you’re saying that developers can’t discuss priorities with management.

In some companies this might be true.

But in many, when a CTO or a senior dev demonstrates business value of a speedy website, it would get attention.

I’m sure project management doesn’t care about keeping packages up to date either. But most devs can successfully communicate that this is necessary and that the alternative is way worse.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#218

Post by bryanrasmussen »

stonogo wrote: post #212
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Web developers have utterly squandered all efficiency gains of the last 30 years It's true, whenever a company has pleaded with me to bring a site in with better performance, I have adamantly refused to do so. When companies say guess what, Bryan, we are going to focus a sprint on just making sure everything download as fast as possible and we get rid of anything getting in the way of the best possible user experien…

I don't think anyone is under the impression that web developers can't make excuses; we have plenty of evidence of that. I think discussions like this are capable of serving as valuable reference material when we are engaged with project managers on this topic.

I don't think there is a paucity of research that shows that higher performing sites get more users and are generally more valuable for the site owners. The problem is not lack of reference material, the problem is that nobody considers the problem that important (generally) when presented with that reference material.

Now the thread is quite big so I have not read everything but I have skimmed through it all, and have not seen anything that would be a really useful argument for getting someone to consider maybe we should try to improve site performance. A bunch of people complaining about Google, Wired, and a few other things that they complain about is not as impressive as just the hits you get if you search "effects of site performance on user retention" (replace user retention with other useful metrics to get sources for the argument being written up)

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#219

Post by freediver »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #159
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…

25 years ago I used to read Texas Monthly magazine (on paper) because it was some of the best journalism around. I finally unsubscribed when I had to flip through 16 pages of ads to get to the table of contents, and several ads per issue contained scratch-n-sniff perfume samples which meant that reading an article required you to smell like a bordello afterwards. Wired is the digital equivalent of that now. There's s…

Similar to https://www.google.com/search?q=mattress where 100% of all the content you see there is an ad (turn off your ad-blocker just to witness the monstrosity).

Isn't this a direct insult to intelligence? And where and when do you draw the line?

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#220

Post by freediver »

yongjik wrote: post #203

(Disclaimer: previously worked at Google search) I think some commenters are attributing to Google an ulterior motive, whether ill- or good-intentioned, separate from its core business. But in this case no such motivation is necessary. Basically, Google wants its users to be satisfied - otherwise it will lose to, say, Bing. So it measures user satisfaction - e.g., if a user clicks on a Google result, and immediately…

How is this helping Google not lose to Bing, when the change would equally improve Bing experience (rising tide rises all boats?).
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