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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

#221

Post by thaumasiotes »

ehsankia wrote: post #160
pornel wrote: post #126

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 som…

> it's well known that good performance is very important for user satisfaction Even putting that aside, I'm not sure how them changing from one rank scoring system to another on their own search engine is them playing "God" for the web. The whole goal of Search is to rank items per some metric of "quality", and speed seems as good and fair as any to me.

> The whole goal of Search is to rank items per some metric of "quality", and speed seems as good and fair as any to me.

No matter what I search for, I'm not going to be pleased to have the results listed in order of page load speed. The goal of search is to rank items according to a metric that matches what the searcher is looking for, not a metric that reflects the search engine's internal preferences.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#222

Post by greggman3 »

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 prefer fast non bloated websites but your example does remind me of a tangential example. Video Game Load times. People complain but they really only complain if the content is not great. If the content is great no complaints. Case in point, any game by Valve has atrocious load times, even and including their latest, Half Life: Alyx. And yet Valve's titles are among the highest rated games. And so, load time is rarely prioritized because it clearly doesn't matter. What appears to matter is content people want. (T_T)

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#223

Post by bryanrasmussen »

thih9 wrote: post #217
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…

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…

Yes, when I was CTO I did a lot to make our website speedy.

When I was consulting I would often do performance analysis of the sites I consulted at, show how performance improvements could be made, put links to relevant studies on performance improvements and the effects on the bottom line with nice quotes, to have the task of cleaning everything up be put in the backlog and forgotten forever.

>I’m sure project management doesn’t care about keeping packages up to date either.

How many days or weeks does it take you to update a package? It generally takes me a minute, sometimes problems happen and I need to spend some hours but those are infrequent. If a package update is going to take too long it becomes something for project management to be aware of and sometimes it is not allowed to update a package.

But generally issues with site performance need handling over a longer period of time than updating a package, I would think that was evident to anyone that has ever updated a package or done a performance analysis of a site. The comparison between something that generally takes a minute and something that takes weeks seems insincere.

But I can make an example where an update was needed that would take a significant amount of time, the reason that the update was accepted was that it would fix certain bugs with the old package and it needed to be done. Either the package was updated or the bugs were allowed to remain or we could fix the bugs with longer time than it took to update the package. I think it is obvious how this is a different argument than the site performance thing, the package update is an argument that this way we will fix the problems that you the business have pointed out, the site performance thing is an argument that this is a problem we want you the business to acknowledge.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#224

Post by bryanrasmussen »

greggman3 wrote: post #222
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 prefer fast non bloated websites but your example does remind me of a tangential example. Video Game Load times. People complain but they really only complain if the content is not great. If the content is great no complaints. Case in point, any game by Valve has atrocious load times, even and including their latest, Half Life: Alyx. And yet Valve's titles are among the highest rated games. And so, load time is rar…

I think the context of what you're serving matters. In this case the game content is good enough that the performance probably doesn't matter.

The worst example of a refused performance improvement I can think of was in relation to improving a help site, it had generally bad reviews from users (it is very difficult to get good reviews from users for a help site because if a user is coming to your help site they are already in a bad mood)

but obviously if you are on a site that you are mad about being on and it then takes a long time to load all the data so you can try to figure out your problem you are going to be steaming.

Project manager wouldn't prioritize the three performance improvement tickets I made with lots of cogent description of why it needed to be done. Somehow though, this is my fault.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#225

Post by pdimitar »

zonotope wrote: post #161
matheusmoreira wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How will these remaining good websites make enough money to sustain themselves?

Why must websites sustain themselves financially?

It can literally cost you $30 a year to host a website.

Many people will spend more on coffee. Per month.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#226

Post by mehdix »

freediver wrote: post #219
dreamcompiler wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You're right, by turning off my ad-blocker, my mobile screen was fully covered with ads.

What constantly worries me however, is what happens when most visitors use ad-blockers? My guess is, a war would be declared against current web standards, where users can still modify DOM and remove unwanted content. Edit: reword for clarity.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#227

Post by Jaruzel »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #215
Sephr wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the performance checks they use is how quickly the body text renders into a readable format as a page loads. If your site has slow loading web fonts, AND you haven't specified a fall-back font (i.e. serif, or sans-serif etc.), Google will penalise it.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#228

Post by buboard »

mhh__ wrote: post #8
verdverm wrote: post #3

Google has largely made the internet a safer and more efficient system by pushing standards through their market dominance. Is this a bad thing?

What did Google ever do for us?

nah buddy, google is a leech in the way the Romans weren't. Not even a comparison, google is not taxing you it's stealing your content and your users

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#229

Post by neya »

If not Google, someone else must step in and set some standards. Either way, I don't see anything wrong, their platform, their rules. Don't like their rules? Don't use them. When less people use their products, they will listen to what customers want.

Having said that, what exactly do customers want? They want the best experience on whatever device they're on. This is 2020, there's so much that has happened since the 1990s. We can't simply keep using standards from the 1990s.

> 22.82 Mbps will reliably download very complex web pages nearly instantaneously.

The author needs to come down from his high horse and use internet in developing countries. I was in India the other day for a client meet and I was on one of the largest networks there. I had a subscription to NYT and I tried to load an article and whoa, it took me 3 full minutes for the browser to fully load the article to the point where it was even barely readable. I'm not saying the network in India is slow, I'm saying, even with the best networks, when you're travelling your speeds will be in KBPS. If we don't have strict standards, the sizes of these pages will only grow and grow.

Later that day, I loaded the same article from my desktop again. The site made a gazillion requests in the network tab to so many advertising vendors and each of them had consistently sizeable assets. More than being offended for selling me out despite a paid subscription, I was offended how ridiculously unoptimized sites like NYT are, despite being a popular online, large scale publisher.

I'm happy such sites like NYT will be penalized if they don't provide their users a good experience.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#230

Post by dageshi »

freediver wrote: post #220
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?).

Google already has market dominance, they lose nothing if things rise equally for both themselves and bing.
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