Google Is Not God of the Web • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#231

Post by C1sc0cat » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 8:32 AM UTC

glaberficken wrote: post #156

jariel wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Web developers have utterly squandered all efficiency gains" It depends on how you measure efficiency. Edit: I should add what I would thought would be obvious, and that it is that bloat is related to advertising which drives their bottom line, and I'm doubtful of any existing material alternatives to 'wired.com's already problematic ability to exist. Ergo, the bandwidth is set to optimise for things developers per…

Web-designers and web-developers design and build the things that the people with the money ask them to. It's that simple.

You should build what they need - though a lot of the problem is that those specifying websites have very little idea about how the web works and what is needed.

Unfortunately this isn't the 60's at Sterling Cooper where you can brain storm an idea like go to "work on an egg" or a "a mars a day helps you work rest and play"

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#232

Post by rawoke083600 » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 8:43 AM UTC

pdimitar wrote: post #225

zonotope wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, but i think the hosting cost is negligible against the time-invested-cost

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#233

Post by C1sc0cat » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 8:44 AM UTC

bberenberg wrote: post #144

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?

FYI for a huge consumer brand we see over 60% on mobile

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#234

Post by rawoke083600 » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 8:48 AM UTC

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…

Good answer... Out of interest (I understand if you can't answer NDA etc). Taking your example of the back-button (I assume it relates to "dwell time" we keep reading about...) My question is, does this feedback mechanism also include "closing the website" ? I seldom back-button(on desktop) i just use new/close tab.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#235

Post by pdimitar » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 8:51 AM UTC

rawoke083600 wrote: post #232

pdimitar wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, but i think the hosting cost is negligible against the time-invested-cost

Is it though? Nowadays you have plenty of good free CMS-es which integrate directly with Netlify. Sure, it might be half a centimeter more complex than WordPress admin but it's still really easy to grasp for many non-tech people (checked).

But even if it was very complex -- which it isn't -- I still fail to see how that supports a model of an ad-supported web hosting.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#236

Post by rawoke083600 » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 8:56 AM UTC

ehsankia wrote: post #197

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?

> today's best practices Speed has always been a good practice for as long as the web has existed. The specific metric changes, but the goal is the same. It's just that "simple" metrics are very easy to game. An example of this is how they went from "First Paint" to "First Contentful Paint" to "Largest Contentful Paint". They're all trying to get at the same concept , which is when the page loads, but each iteration…

>Realistically, as a webdev, if your site loads fast, it shouldn't matter which metric is used.

I like this ! Very true !

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#237

Post by CM30 » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 9:03 AM UTC

thawaway1837 wrote: post #198

userbinator wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and the answers it gives are often not even right (or wrong). In an ideal world, it would only return one thing, which tells you exactly what you want. In Google's ideal world, it would also only return one thing, which tells you exactly what they want to tell you .

I think this is true of any “answering engine” in an ideal world. In an ideal world, it would act as a function and return a single output for any input, because any particular question should ideally only have a single correct answer.

How would it decide which source to get this answer from?

Because let's face it, one of the biggest challenges with that idea isn't that there are tons of different valid answers to a question (though that could be the case for many political queries or ones related to art/media quality), but that hundreds or thousands of pages and sites contain the requested info, and search engines have to rank them in some sort of order.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#238

Post by dreamer7 » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 9:06 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #221

ehsankia wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Page-load speed would be one metric among hundreds. But we can't assume that Google has lost sight of the ultimate metric - did the searcher find what he was looking for ?

For any competitive search engine, its internal preferences are expected to be a reflection of its users' preferences and not a whim as you seem to be implying

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#239

Post by freediver » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 9:10 AM UTC

dageshi wrote: post #230

freediver wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They also do not gain anything. Then why bother?

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#240

Post by rawoke083600 » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 9:11 AM UTC

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…

>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.

True ! To give a concrete example... LONG FORM RECIPE PAGES - Should be on SERP 100+. It's gotten a little bit better, but still see sometimes a 2000 word article when I google something like "apple pie recipe" or "apple pie oven temperature"