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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

#241

Post by freediver »

onemoresoop wrote: post #154
not2b wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG just gives you Bing's results, while avoiding giving Microsoft information on you. This will necessarily produce worse results, but you might decide that this is worth the tradeoff.

DDG also gives google results. If it grows in adoption it might get better than the two is what I think. If not, some other search engine is welcome, something better than google and bing

Source? Take any query and it will mostly be carbon copy of Bing results. Haven't seen any Google results on DDG yet. An engine that did both would certainly be desirable.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#242

Post by esperent »

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?

There isn't much difference with adblock on or off for this page for me (using Chrome on Windows). With adblock off, there are three obvious ads on the top right of the page, search results on the left. With adblock on, these are gone.

In both cases, the top of the search results is a map with a few shops listed, and under this are normal search results.

Repeating this on mobile, the ads are moved inline above the map. They take up about 50% of the screen. That is a bit intrusive. However, I have muscle memory that automatically scrolls down a bit after searching and to be honest, I would not have even noticed them if I wasn't looking.

I don't know where the the 100% of content being ads claim is coming from. Perhaps it's different in different regions?

I'm not trying to be an apologist for Google here, by the way. However, when it comes to intrusive ads there are far worse offenders (although perhaps not when it comes to behind the scenes data collection, which is a bigger issue).

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#243

Post by cageface »

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?).

They're also competing with native apps. Apple News, as an example.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#244

Post by johnspiral666 »

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…

Downloads of this size will also have a extremely large power footprint if you add up all the hops across the Internet.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#245

Post by rndgermandude »

ricree wrote: post #204
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, and Loading Wired.com with uBlock and no javascript the page comes in below 1.5MB for me, with most functionality seemingly intact (in that the front page looks mostly normal and I can load articles that appear to have their text completely intact). The bulk of that seems to be fonts and images, which are probably unavoidable for a med…

With uBlockO it was 1.5MB for me, without it was 3.8MB, on Firefox, coming from Germany. Which is still pretty ridiculous on both numbers for what's actually visible on the page.

Once you scroll, however, things get messy no matter what, because of their "Scott Adkins Answers Martial Arts Training Questions From Twitter" auto-play video they have right now. That ate way another 30MB quickly and the video wasn't even visible (I had scrolled past it).

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#246

Post by icemelt8 »

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…

please don't curse Web Developers, its a business decision.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#247

Post by rawoke083600 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #118
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…

> 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. You might be able to turn a 300kB GIF into a much smaller encoded video; as long as it doesn't have audio, you can autoplay it.

Interesting case scenarios: 1) a Site has a stupid big gif that shows logo and staff parties, basically adding nothing but sucking up bandwidth(Not your case)

2) Your case, where you actually add value-content with the gif.

Now the speed metrics are just that, speed metrics they "report" in isolation from "content".

So now my question is: Is Google's OTHER-content-signals good enough to overcome any penalty that might have been applied because of the speed ?

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#248

Post by tjpnz »

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…

I once worked for a place where the business unit got us to deploy one of those crappy client side A/B testing scripts which blocks rendering. Conversion rates started to dip and the same people came back to us complaining about it. I was able to pull together plenty of evidence to show them what the issue was. All they cared about was if we could A/B test it using the aforementioned client side script. Some people just can't be reasoned with, so glad I got out of that place.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#249

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#250

Post by Veen »

Rerarom wrote: post #134
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…

https://millionshort.com/

You're being downvoted but this is actually a useful suggestion. I use millionshort.com all the time when I want to strip out the low-value SEO crap that dominates search results.
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