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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

#161

Post by zonotope »

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…

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

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#162

Post by interestica »

Kye wrote: post #125
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…

I will not stay on a site with auto-playing video or GIFs. I can't focus on anything with it there.

Or you can scroll down. It's presumably a hero imagespace that serves to explain their product in the fastest way. 300kb for a gif isn't that big for such an inefficient type.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#163

Post by msla »

downerending wrote: post #16
kickscondor wrote: post #2

> There is a very reasonable argument for essential services like search engines and news websites to conform to/adopt standards like AMP, but for the rest of The Open Web, ingenuity and risktaking should be encouraged, not discouraged, for the true good of all Peoplekind. Hadn't really considered this - because minimalist page size is often such a given - but, for instance, many amateurs often don't know yet how to…

Actually, I'd be interested in an alternative web where ingenuity and risk-taking would be utterly forbidden. Just HTML, and a very basic subset at that. No Javascript at all, no CSS. So much of the web would be better and more universally usable without "modern" cruft.

Alternative Web? The big "selling" point of Mosaic and other early Web browsers was bringing diverse information sources together into one application! Gopher, WWW, WAIS, FTP, and probably others, all available in one program, and a GUI program at that, unless you were stuck using Lynx over SLIP or some other bizarre excrescence of the dial-up age.

The fact Web browsers won rather disproves your whole notion.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#164

Post by no_wizard »

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…

I don’t follow the “Fire and Motion” bit on web standards. Mind an elaboration?

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#165

Post by jariel »

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.

The people that 'ask them to' are bound by an inexorable set of rules appear in the system, for the most part. That system is observable and a little bit predictable, it's just more economic than it is technical, so it's worthwhile for devs to take one step out of their zone sometimes to see how that math works. I don't really think anyone at wired actually wants a slow site or tons of crap ads.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#166

Post by Sephr »

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…

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 Google Search.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#167

Post by nitrogen »

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?

Sometimes the best things aren't commercially self-sustaining. Blogs, paid for by the writers' day jobs. Professors' sites on .edu domains, paid for by research budgets.

As for professional journalism, the lack of conflicting interests caused by ads is essential for it to be considered "good", so no good journalism website should be clouded by advertising. Yes, that probably means subscriptions.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#168

Post by partdavid »

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 user base to engineer, and much harder for existing search engines trying to protect a revenue stream. People often don't really remember how late Google was to this business and how much of a difference that page speed indicator was.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#170

Post by bitpush »

dhimes wrote: post #149
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…

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"

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