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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

#261

Post by enonevets »

partdavid wrote: post #168
gumby wrote: post #108

Back in 1998 or so people weren't just enthusiastic about the Google search engine because its results were good but because the search page was simple and fast. Compare that to Altavista or Yahoo whose pages were belarded with all sorts of irrelevant links and ads around the search results. Slow to load and hard to visually navigate. I still think the sparse pages are the best.

I worked at one of these companies during this era and yours is an often forgotten fact. It was a very long time before Google search result quality was any good. Their initial popularity was due almost entirely to page load speed, which they included on every page to highlight it. The second was being able to serve a large index with parallelized querying, which was relatively easy for a newcomer company with no use…

The same exact argument could be made for Chrome. Google was extremely late to the browser game and most of the initial switch was on how quick it was in comparison to other browsers at the time.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#262

Post by arexxbifs »

> The entire point of the web was to democratize and simplify publishing [...] But the iPhone's [...] shitbox performance means we're all sort of ready to throw that progress away.

A hilariously ignorant statement. Simplified and democratized publishing doesn't require one smidge of javascript, not one pointless tracker cookie, not a single facebook pixel, no hideous autoplaying videos, not even a jot of CSS. It needs nothing but HTML and text, rendered plenty fast by any computer made this side of 1995.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#263

Post by nicbou »

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…

That's still a lot. The longest pages on my website download around 200kb of data. 1.5MB is a lot of data for text-based information.

Of course, some space should be left for enhancing the text with images, but the Wired front page doesn't have that many of those.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#264

Post by nicbou »

101008 wrote: post #129
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…

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…

Google also considers page and domain authority, which your website likely doesn't have.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#265

Post by Rerarom »

Veen wrote: post #250
Rerarom wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the appreciation

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#266

Post by nicbou »

romaaeterna wrote: post #114

I recently began having a lot of problems with Chinese "searchbot" traffic for a website. Filtering it out, my load went down by two orders of magnitude. It made me wonder how much of the purpose of this sort of thing is SEO. And how much slower Google is making the web for everyone by ranking on it, and therefore encouraging the shenanigans.

Every website is different, but if a single bot is bringing your website to a crawl, you should probably start caching a few things and working on performance.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#267

Post by dhimes »

scollet wrote: post #179
bitpush wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This meme is tired. We get it, Google makes money from advertising. Your comment is same as "NYTimes is a advertising company hurr durr because they make money from advertising"

Well that's a very rude comment. You are also using false equivalence to halt any discourse on the matter. Doesn't seem very safe.

Yeah I think the Google trolls came through last night.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#268

Post by dhimes »

bitpush wrote: post #170
dhimes wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/an answering engine/an advertising engine/ FTFY

This meme is tired. We get it, Google makes money from advertising. Your comment is same as "NYTimes is a advertising company hurr durr because they make money from advertising"

No, I don't think you do get it. Originally, Google's experiment, the reason they came into existence, was to organize the world's knowledge and sell advertising to people who were seeking it, on the idea that you must be interested in something if you're searching for it. That's like the New York Times.

Now, Google seems to be trying to learn the details of all the people, and they're selling access to that. Their mission seems to have flipped.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#269

Post by slantyyz »

rawoke083600 wrote: post #253
chongli wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that Google search is horrendous but Youtube is actually manageable. If you want decent recommendations you need to curate your viewing history. If you watch some random video and find a lot of annoying related videos showing up in your recommendations then go into your history and delete that one video from the history. Now Youtube will "forget" you watched that video and stop recommending things related to…

I agree and will go further. I love YouTube, the content and the concept. I watch more YouTube than any other streaming service (except for Space-Force on NetFlix - damn it's good !). Sure not every video that is recommended will be what you like.. but it's quite a hard problem I think to recommend something in EVERY GRID POSITION that you will like.. Usually I'm willing to watch at least 2/5 to 4/5 videos being reco…

About a year ago, my Youtube front page feed was pretty good. Then it has slowly degraded since then. I went from Youtube being the service I used the most to watch stuff to becoming much less interested. Most of my recommendations don't even come from my subscriptions.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#270

Post by worble »

freediver wrote: post #241
onemoresoop wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

DDG has a number of sources, including it's own bot, although it specifically says Google is not one of them, contrary to the GP.

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