49 ms·

Google Is Not God of the Web

403 points by davidblue 6y ago

neya 6y ago
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.
throwaway810 6y ago
I find this tweet about how Google approaches web standards illuminating. To quote: > 1. design a flawed API (it's fine! APIs are hard) > 2. ship it in the most-used browser, despite objections > 3. get cross-browser working group to fix the API > 4. oops, too late, that would break the web https://twitter.com/Rich_Harris/status/1220412711768666114 https://twitter.com/Rich_Harris/status/1220412711768666114
- ksec 6y ago
  >5. Rally a group of developers and PR to bash Webkit as the only one not implementing those flawed API and name it as the new IE.
  - throwaway810 6y ago
    Too true. Not to mention that many of the APIs Google introduce are prone to tracking and spam.
rawoke083600 6y ago
I see a lot of hate for SEO - Sure it can be use for crappy things but so can a lot of business functions. I see a lot of complaints about ppl saying "oh but this stupid page outrank company abc or the page they would expect." I am just thinking out loud... if we are willing to employ "specialist" lawyers, accountants, programmers etc in our business, why do we balk at employing a SEO specialist as a specialist business function? There are many good seo companies(true, you have todo your home-work, but that is true for other service providers as well). The dream is of course to not have to use them and just reply on Google and it's good nature and or algorithms... But is that not saying.. Oh we will just relay on never getting sued and therefor never need a lawyer cause, crimes are bad ?
arexxbifs 6y ago
> 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.
yingbo 6y ago
Of cause Google is not God: Money is.
kickscondor 6y ago
> 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 crush their pngs and such. > https://bilge.world/open https://bilge.world/open Cool - thanks for this! (As an aside, it's great to see a continuation of topics like this - which is commenting on last week's article from Parimal Satyal. It makes this place seem more like a forum.)
- downerending 6y ago
  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.
  - sergeykish 6y ago
    It exists right here and now. Disable javascript - almost everything works. You can disable CSS and images as well - just a few clicks in uBlock Origin on uMatrix [0]. People with Vision Lost browse the web. No need for separate web. [0] uBlock Origin (advanced user) * * 1p-script block * * 3p block * * 3p-frame block * * 3p-script block * * image block * * inline-script block uMatrix * * * block * * frame block
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - j-james 6y ago
    You could mess around with Gemini. It's sort of like the Gopher protocol, but with links allowed in arbitrary locations. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424
  - ardy42 6y ago
verdverm 6y ago
Google has largely made the internet a safer and more efficient system by pushing standards through their market dominance. Is this a bad thing?
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  There is always the trade-off between higher quality through what is essentially regulation and standards and squeezing out those who don't comply (which disadvantages new entrants). With drugs, we weight that trade-off heavily towards higher quality over new entrants. The question is, is that an acceptable trade off on the web? Reading this, I now think I should go put AMP on my personal blog. Before that, I needed an HTTPS cert. Before that, I needed to confirm I owned the site to Google. All things which may make the web better, but it certainly increases the operational burden and may discourage others from bothering in the first place.
  - verdverm 6y ago
    Push a static site to netlify for free and all of this is taken care of you for free. The burden is necessary given the proliferation of bad actors I would not recommend AMP, but there are dozens of standards that are not part of what the public sees, low level enough they don't care to see. These are the important things Google has caused the world to adopt as best practices. You don't have to have http, but you are telling users you don't care about their security. This was largely pushed by green/red indicators in the URL bar.
    - freedomben 6y ago
      > Push a static site to netlify for free and all of this is taken care of you for free. The burden is necessary given the proliferation of bad actors This heavily pushes the web toward centralization, which I see as a really bad thing, in many ways the cure is worse than the disease. It's happening in so many ways (have you tried standing up your own email server?) and this sort of thing drives it the hardest. I don't think Google is all bad, in fact I appreciate a lot of what they have done for the world (you mention some of these things). But as with nearly everything in life, it's complicated. I worry a lot that we're headed towards an internet where the individual is at the mercy of organizations to allow them to have a voice.
verdverm 6y ago
This is the best place I know of to have thoughtful discussions and talk about what most consider taboo. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html There are times where it gets heated, but those are quickly shut down by the very excellent community moderation.
- dang 6y ago
  We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23383662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23383662.
tschellenbach 6y ago
It's funny that Google is so large, that one way to grow their business is to improve the user experience of the internet as a whole.
- monadic2 6y ago
  If this were true chrome would ship with ad block and they would accept cold hard cash for their services.
  - verdverm 6y ago
    I tried this, I used it, no big adoption, product got killed. Largely people prefer the free perception of the internet and wouldn't pay the prices it would cost if direct payments were made. I believe its in the $x00s per year
    - monadic2 6y ago
      > Largely people prefer the free perception of the internet You have any reasoning behind this or are you taking the people who killed the product at face value? If I were to guess that product (i have no idea to what you’re referring) was designed to fail, like youtube premium.
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      They tried this, I used it, no big adoption, product got killed. To which service do you refer?
      - gundmc 6y ago
        I believe it was Google Contributor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
        verdverm 6y ago
        Yes, that is the one, thank you
skilled 6y ago
Google Search is in a horrendous state right now. Search results have been getting worse each year, with interesting information being buried 20 pages down. I really hope they have plans to improve this or find an approach that works as a middle ground for generic SEO content.
- verdverm 6y ago
  I would agree search seems to have gotten worse. I wonder how much of the search abuse / manipulation they are dealing with given the current situations and upcoming elections?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- blueboo 6y ago
  This seems like a common claim here on HN. I would expect the creativity of the world's SEO hackers to outstrip any single team, so I expect you'rer right. But I struggle to find queries where interesting information isn't in the top handful of links. [badgers in montana], [while loop python], [how to fix noisy refigerator], [nude stallman] all do just fine. Are there veins of queries that are particularly polluted? Even [homeopathy covid] is pretty good.
  - birdyrooster 6y ago
    Did you actually search “nude stallman”? I can’t bring myself to do it for obvious reasons but I am curious what you saw.
    - krebs_liebhaber 6y ago
      The worst recesses of hell, lurking in the back of your mind, suddenly brought to the forefront. The sort of thing you sleep to get away from.
  - slantyyz 6y ago
walshemj 6y ago
I thought this was going to be a reasonable article but its just another whine from a designer who wants to add another 6mb of pretty animation to a web page. 1 and 2 are totally wrong and 3 googles moving away from amp ant letting normal pages rank. I have wasted to many hours of my time on conference calls with people like this.
NickHirras 6y ago
If you direct their web vitals tool to test itself (https://web.dev/vitals/ https://web.dev/vitals/), the report isn't great: https://lighthouse-dot-webdotdevsite.appspot.com//lh/html?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.dev%2Fvitals%2F https://lighthouse-dot-webdotdevsite.appspot.com//lh/html?ur...
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Someone at Google forgot to eat their own dog food :P
- bitpush 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_the_messenger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_the_messenger
youeseh 6y ago
God, how? Like, in the monotheistic sense or the polytheistic sense? If we're going poly, then Google is definitely one of the Gods of the web. Maybe even the top God, but there may be some competition there.
- verdverm 6y ago
  Please read first, the title is misleading.
- throwaway90179 6y ago
  Google is the God of Control of the web. It thinks it knows what the people want, but it's just using its influence to make it look that way. The only difference is that Google isn't even aware that's what it's doing.
magicalist 6y ago
Not sure what this article is arguing. Sometimes you want to make a slow website that doesn't fit well on a phone screen? Leaving aside the fact that you can of course do that, and that if I'm using a search engine on my phone I probably (usually?) don't want to look at your slow site that I have to horizontally scroll... > Modern web design principles are very rarely directed at regular people looking to make a website on something they are interested in. Instead, the focus is on creating websites that perform well: > Don't use too many colours. Write short, catchy headlines. Don't let content be too long. Optimise for SEO. Produce video content, attention span is decreasing. Have a an obvious call to action. Push your newsletter. Keep important information above the fold. Don't make users think. Follow conventions. All that's true to some extent if you're making a product on the web and you have a few seconds to hook a customer before they move on. If you're making a website for enthusiasts in some niche, though, content is your draw and you can worry less about some of these things.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Sometimes you want to make a slow website that doesn't fit well on a phone screen? Sometimes you should have the choice of making a slow web site that doesn't fit on the phone screen. A large corporation shouldn't dictate how you present your information. Sometimes you want to put a document on the web without having to pay someone to run on Google's treadmill of changing standards and policies for the rest of your life. I'll take a crappy-looking web site with good content over an SEO-pumped disaster that provided no information. Craigslist, eBay, and dozens of others didn't get to be huge because of their good looks.
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    I think we’re at the point with the internet where modern design is inversely proportional to good content. I find more stuff on half-forgotten .edu sites, old.reddit threads, and weird forums than anything “responsive” nowadays. Most of the nice looking sites are just regurgitating stuff from the older, rougher ones anyway.
  - modeless 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
habanany 6y ago
Actually is de demon, unfortunately not good alternative
habanany 6y ago
Google the demon, unfortunately no better alernative
Animats 6y ago
Now go look at the page source for the home page of Google.
mrkramer 6y ago
Casual users don't care about details in user experience, when you innovate casual experience they will consider using new search engine.
skywhopper 6y ago
I agree with the general thrust of the article, but not a lot of the details. And then there's this: > Our phones have as much RAM as my “studio” work desktop This is unlikely to be true. From what I can find, the latest iPhone has 4GB of RAM, and Samsung is up to 8GB (and they are growing this stat fast to be sure), but no "studio" desktop made in the last five years is going to have that little. > 22.82 Mbps will reliably download very complex web > pages nearly instantaneously. This is definitely not true. It is true that the download time is not large, but between DNS and TLS latency and the fact that most "complex" web pages are built of assets from dozens of different servers, your actual wait time for the assets can be quite long. But even if you discount that, the render time is probably longer than the download time. If your page is that complex, I hope it's very beautiful to look at.
gok 6y ago
> 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 page has about 500 words of content. It also covered 100% of the content with ads, twice. This is unsustainable. Web developers have utterly squandered all efficiency gains of the last 30 years, and then covered their grossly inefficient work with impossibly annoying, privacy-invading advertising. Google should be applauded if they make these wasteful developers suffer monetarily until they shape up. They've already stolen untold amounts of time and energy from us all.
- johnspiral666 6y ago
  Downloads of this size will also have a extremely large power footprint if you add up all the hops across the Internet.
- icemelt8 6y ago
  please don't curse Web Developers, its a business decision.
- boraoztunc 6y ago
  Ironic read from Wired. Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising? https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-advertising/ https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-ad...
- prayDeeGayAwe 6y ago
  I stopped visiting wired.com years ago, when, instinctively, I could just sense the bloat by the spike in CPU, and lag in pageload, for what was ostensibly plain text, plus a serif font and one header image. As if I wouldn't notice that casual reading material was causing my cooling fans to spin up. As if I were multi-tasking so hard, that it couldn't be discernible which dog in the room could take the blame for who just farted. The wired.com website first showed hints of becoming unusable when their audience participation widget provided by Disqus, for reader/user comments, became this opaque blob of compressed/minified JavaScript. Then they started piling on video. This was back around 2009 or 2010. By 2013, I had mostly washed my hands Conde Nast publications. Whoops.
bosswipe 6y ago
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?
- wmeredith 6y ago
  So glad you were able to articulate what I've been feeling for years. Google promotes good websites which has little to do with good content. It's a (debatable) signal of website quality, which is only tangentially related to content quality.
- onemoresoop 6y ago
  That's why we should ditch google search for alternatives. So far I've been using DDG and am quite happy though it needs improvements in search results they may be the ones to listen to our needs unlike google who is too big to care.
  - not2b 6y ago
    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.
    - onemoresoop 6y ago
      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
      - freediver 6y ago
        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.
cj 6y ago
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 file, and then swap in the gif 2 seconds after the page is fully loaded. Except now the new “largest contentful paint” metric is failing on those pages because it includes the 2 second delay when the animated gif is swapped in. I guess technically they’re not wrong in how they’re calculating it. In fewer words, Google doesn’t like anything being lazy loaded if it’s above the fold. The metrics and how they’re calculated are questionable. We ended up optimizing for Google and removed the lazy load (ignoring that we think it’s a better UX to lazy load that specific gif).
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  > 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.
  - rawoke083600 6y ago
    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 ?
- Kye 6y ago
  I will not stay on a site with auto-playing video or GIFs. I can't focus on anything with it there.
  - 6y ago
pretendscholar 6y ago
Is there a formal study available that examines the tradeoffs of google vs a search engine like ddg?
gumby 6y ago
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.
- mc32 6y ago
  HotBot and Copernic.us I think is what people used. Lycos too. But what started search engines down this wayward path was Overture that combined with doubleclick proved to be too attractive a revenue model and we’ve gone down hill since.
- partdavid 6y ago
  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.
  - enonevets 6y ago
    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.
    - gumby 6y ago
      Can you expand? Chrome seems to be popular but I don’t know the motivation for it.
impalallama 6y ago
It thought I be in favor of whatever this article was arguing but then it went in a weird direction by arguing against certain things that are just considered good practice but its bad now because google is saying it. Like yes, I would consider it a good thing to have lighter websites. Unless your site is catering to some niche that needs to offer 1 to 1 perfect image quality there no reason to not compress your assets.
karakanb 6y ago
The article is an unexpected take on what I would have assumed "the basics of web development" that would not be argued against. I would like to touch to some of the points here, as the arguments of the article were not very clear to me: > The simple assumption that it is always better to have the smallest page possible – that images should be resized and compressed to hell and typography/other elements should be few in number. I strongly agree with this statement overall, and the article doesn't seem to provide any counter-arguments against it. We need to serve the smallest page possible because the larger the page, the more resources it consumes, it is that simple. Every _unnecessary_ byte added to a page literally translates to more storage for the page, more processing power to prepare the page, more data being sent on the wire, more data on the client-side to interpret the given data, and all these add up to more energy being used to consume that page and more resources being wasted. If I can remove one byte from a page, this is for sure a win for everyone, one byte is one byte, whether that saving is relevant considering the scale and the effort is a whole another discussion, and the claim was never "send the smallest page at all costs". Considering the time and effort, if there is a way to send a smaller page, then do it, it is no different than turning the lamp off of an empty room, just on a different scale. > Instantaneous page loads should be priority over any other standards of measure for a web page – like interesting design, for instance. I have never seen such a claim anywhere before, needs citation. As a developer, I think the look and the feel of the pages are as important as performance or efficiency, and web on its own can be used as an art platform, which would make this whole point irrelevant. Again, the overall point is this: if you can offer the same thing with smaller pages witha reasonable amount of effort, do it. > Minimalistic design is necessary. I have never seen such a claim, needs citation. As a user, I prefer cleaner design over fancier things, but this is neither a "rule" nor the industry standard. There are various research being done on this topic and I am no expert on it, but a joint research [1] done by University of Basel and Google/YouTube User Experience Research shows that the users perceive the cleaner designs as more beautiful, making the point that if the user perception is a goal for the given webpage, then keeping things simple might actually make a difference there. Again, depends on the use-case. > 22.82 Mbps will reliably download very complex web pages nearly instantaneously This is a pain I am living with every day. I have a 4 year old mobile phone with 6GB of RAM, and it takes at least 8-10 seconds for Medium to be usable over a ~100Mbps connection, combined with fetching the page and rendering / interpreting it. This is exactly the point I was making above, if the page was smaller, it would have actually made a difference of seconds. The same device over the same connection at the same time opens the bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com in under a second, so, there is something to be seen there. In addition to that, even if I had 1Ghz connection, a 1-byte waste is a waste, irrelevant of my connection speed. I am not talking of the effort of saving that byte, but it is important to acknowledge the waste. > Google has the right to dictate “Best Practices.” This is a point that I agree with more than the other ones, but this seems to be a separate topic to me. The previous arguments were against the practices themselves, and this one is against the entity that is supplying those practices. Even though I agree with the majority of the points there, it would have been a more informative read if the claims and frustrations there were stated with better point-by-point explanations and data to back those claims up. Google having a huge power and monopoly to push people to certain standards is a big problem, but it is not clear in the article whether the author is arguing against the practices or Google itself. Overall, I believe it would have been a more resourceful article if the points and claims against the given practices were backed by better alternatives and data. We all accept that more data is more processing power + more energy, therefore trying to minimize it is an important goal, if the author thinks it should not be, then would be more interested in the answer of "why?" rather than a rant against long-standing practices.
seanwilson 6y ago
> web.dev is operating on some irritating assumptions: > 1. Smaller assets are ideal. > 2. Minimalistic design is necessary. This doesn't sound right to me. Aren't the three new page metrics mostly targeting what happens when the page initially loads? https://web.dev/vitals/ https://web.dev/vitals/ > Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading. > First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have a FID of less than 100 milliseconds. > Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1. The first two are about initial loading. For the last one, you can avoid layout shift by e.g. reserving space for images that are yet to load fully. For example, it sounds like your page could load 100MB of images with the most complex design ever, and it would get a good score as long as the initial viewport of the page displays quickly, is interactive quickly, and doesn't jump around as it's loading. They sound reasonable metrics to me in terms of fighting bloat but with flexibility for web developers (as opposed to AMP). Who gets to decide the metrics is another issue though.
romaaeterna 6y ago
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.
- nicbou 6y ago
  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.
  - romaaeterna 6y ago
    Other people are reporting the same thing: https://www.hypernode.com/blog/performance/huawei-aspiegelbot-is-increasingly-impacting-european-online-stores https://www.hypernode.com/blog/performance/huawei-aspiegelbo...
entropyneur 6y ago
As a web developer who has recently spent an ungodly amount of time trying to make my pages meet Google's impossible standards for qualifying as "fast" on mobile, I sympathize with the author's point. But I think he's missing the even bigger picture. Personal computing is mobile now. And even though the phones have as many megabytes, kilotonnes, little clowns or whatever the device greatness is measured in these days, browsing the web on them is still slow as hell. And I would seriously entertain the suggestion that it's all Apple's evil plot if every Android phone I ever used didn't suck donkey balls for browsing the web. Whatever the reasons for this are, what's at stake now is not web's diversity but it's relevance altogether. I'd rather live in the world where web is needlessly optimized for performance than in the world of apps.
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  It doesn't help that ~every mobile device is 6+ cores while the web still largely pretends that there's only a single CPU core & that that core is getting faster. The web should have started adapting back in 2006 when this trend really become common reality, but it didn't. So you're stuck with 1 shitty CPU core, and you're stuck sharing it with the browser & JS runtime (yes there's of course multithreaded aspects to the browser itself, but you're still sharing an awful lot of CPU time on your single thread with the browser). 1/6th to 1/8th the performance of the phone is the most you can achieve if you're lucky. That's a fucking terrible starting point, and nobody should be surprised the mobile web sucks ass as a result.
pornel 6y ago
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 some dumb edge cases. You could endlessly bikeshed which metrics could be better, but this particular set is not unreasonable. It makes sense for search engine to pick websites that not only have the relevant content, but also are able to actually get that content on screen without frustrating users with slow-loading crap that makes browser freeze and stutter. Keep in mind that your high-end desktop web experience is in minority. The web is now mostly mobile, and mobile is mostly low-end Android. That's a shit sandwitch, and it desperately needs an intervention.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  > 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.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > 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.
    - dreamer7 6y ago
      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
addicted 6y ago
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 return one thing, which tells you exactly what you want. One example of this change is the fact that it’s no longer useful to go beyond the first page or so of Your results. Because anything down that low is irrelevant as an answer and is probably discarded by google anyways, which wasn’t the case when it was a search engine. 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. But I think this is what leads to google search changing in a way that does not meet many people’s expectations here. It means google emphasizes stuff that gets people answers quickly. They parse text and reveal the answers on their page itself. And they are not very useful for exploring anymore.
- rawoke083600 6y ago
  >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"
- dhimes 6y ago
  s/an answering engine/an advertising engine/ FTFY
  - not2b 6y ago
    Both, actually. They figure that if you can get all your answers from Google itself, they get all of the ad dollars and don't have to share. That's why they try to get the implied question answered with pages served from them if possible.
  - bitpush 6y ago
robbrown451 6y ago
It would be nice if you could specify preferences. For instance, if you hate tracking and ads, you could tell google that and it would down-weight those results.
replyifuagree 6y ago
My favorite Google war story is implementing a web application using Google's polymer, only to watch their Google bot choke on crawling the site. It took about a year for them to get their bot working.
skynetv2 6y ago
Anyone who can force the web developers to make more responsive, small, junk free, sites that focus on user than ads will have my support. I don't see anyone else making the attempt to force a change. The author is mistaken in their views.
DevKoala 6y ago
I wish there was a way to index the web which was not so susceptible to marketers gaming the ranking system; it is clear Google has lost the battle there. Moreover, I don’t believe it is in Google’s best interest to surface the best results for me, but those that will generate them the most revenue.
NetBeck 6y ago
The web is optimized for Google Chrome, not the inverse. It's not surprising. Google is an advertising company with >90% search market share. There is little competition in the economy, only product differentiation.
z3t4 6y ago
Many inlinks are good for search ranking - people create fake sites and spam. domain is important for search ranking - people pick domain after search keyword. Faster pages rank higher - people make fast websites. Quality content rank higher - like if that ever going to happen.
urda 6y ago
And we are allowing it. From the dangerous tactic of allowing them to MITM all users via the AMP platform, to pushing their features only in their browser. A browser, which I may remind, was pushed to success by abusing their market position. Had Google pulled this in the 90's they would have been attacked like Microsoft.
gdsdfe 6y ago
I keep telling people that search shouldn't be a monopoly but they just keep looking at me like I'm a crazy person
aabbcc1241 6y ago
Google Search is an index, it can do whatever decision it like. If we don't like it, we can use other indices, even better, we can build more alternatives. The web is a open network. Anyone can share content as well as indices. I know it's mostly impossible to beat google, but niche indices has their place to shine. For example, here, HN is an index of hand picked (mostly great) content, and there are multiple "unofficial" HN variances. See? the web is very diverse and free.
yongjik 6y ago
(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 hits back button in three seconds, it's a strong signal that the user was not satisfied. And Google tries very hard to increase this "user satisfaction" (and other similar metrics), because not only does it help Google's business, but it also improves the service itself. And, guess what? When a page takes fifteen seconds to load, lots of people hits the back (or close) button. Showing such a page is giving the user a bad experience. Unless there's literally no alternatives, it makes sense for Google to "penalize" such a page. Of course no metric is perfect, so it will occasionally backfire and penalize a great page that takes thirty seconds to load. But that's life.
- freediver 6y ago
  How is this helping Google not lose to Bing, when the change would equally improve Bing experience (rising tide rises all boats?).
  - dageshi 6y ago
    Google already has market dominance, they lose nothing if things rise equally for both themselves and bing.
    - freediver 6y ago
      They also do not gain anything. Then why bother?
  - cageface 6y ago
    They're also competing with native apps. Apple News, as an example.
  - Flimm 6y ago
    Not all websites are going to improve their performance, even with Google's incentive. If Google ranks fast websites better than slow ones, that gives Google an advantage over any competitor that doesn't, as long as slow websites still exist.
entha_saava 6y ago
Didn't expect something as silly as this, especially the assertion that page sizes don't matter and since internet speeds are going up, web people are free to use it. I don't see internet costs going down per MiB. Not everyone is on an unmetered connection. And users expect the large amount of bandwidth to be utilized for Netflix or something like that. And how do you say Google is being evil for doing this? Even if there was no search monopoly and imagine there were two competing search engines. I think both of them would factor page load times in search results for better user experience.

403 points by davidblue 6y ago

neya 6y ago

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.

throwaway810 6y ago

I find this tweet about how Google approaches web standards illuminating. To quote: > 1. design a flawed API (it's fine! APIs are hard) > 2. ship it in the most-used browser, despite objections > 3. get cross-browser working group to fix the API > 4. oops, too late, that would break the web https://twitter.com/Rich_Harris/status/1220412711768666114 https://twitter.com/Rich_Harris/status/1220412711768666114

ksec 6y ago
>5. Rally a group of developers and PR to bash Webkit as the only one not implementing those flawed API and name it as the new IE.
- throwaway810 6y ago
  Too true. Not to mention that many of the APIs Google introduce are prone to tracking and spam.

rawoke083600 6y ago

I see a lot of hate for SEO - Sure it can be use for crappy things but so can a lot of business functions. I see a lot of complaints about ppl saying "oh but this stupid page outrank company abc or the page they would expect." I am just thinking out loud... if we are willing to employ "specialist" lawyers, accountants, programmers etc in our business, why do we balk at employing a SEO specialist as a specialist business function? There are many good seo companies(true, you have todo your home-work, but that is true for other service providers as well). The dream is of course to not have to use them and just reply on Google and it's good nature and or algorithms... But is that not saying.. Oh we will just relay on never getting sued and therefor never need a lawyer cause, crimes are bad ?

arexxbifs 6y ago

> 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.

yingbo 6y ago

Of cause Google is not God: Money is.

kickscondor 6y ago

> 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 crush their pngs and such. > https://bilge.world/open https://bilge.world/open Cool - thanks for this! (As an aside, it's great to see a continuation of topics like this - which is commenting on last week's article from Parimal Satyal. It makes this place seem more like a forum.)

downerending 6y ago
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.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  It exists right here and now. Disable javascript - almost everything works. You can disable CSS and images as well - just a few clicks in uBlock Origin on uMatrix [0]. People with Vision Lost browse the web. No need for separate web. [0] uBlock Origin (advanced user) * * 1p-script block * * 3p block * * 3p-frame block * * 3p-script block * * image block * * inline-script block uMatrix * * * block * * frame block
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- j-james 6y ago
  You could mess around with Gemini. It's sort of like the Gopher protocol, but with links allowed in arbitrary locations. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424
- ardy42 6y ago

verdverm 6y ago

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

MattGaiser 6y ago
There is always the trade-off between higher quality through what is essentially regulation and standards and squeezing out those who don't comply (which disadvantages new entrants). With drugs, we weight that trade-off heavily towards higher quality over new entrants. The question is, is that an acceptable trade off on the web? Reading this, I now think I should go put AMP on my personal blog. Before that, I needed an HTTPS cert. Before that, I needed to confirm I owned the site to Google. All things which may make the web better, but it certainly increases the operational burden and may discourage others from bothering in the first place.
- verdverm 6y ago
  Push a static site to netlify for free and all of this is taken care of you for free. The burden is necessary given the proliferation of bad actors I would not recommend AMP, but there are dozens of standards that are not part of what the public sees, low level enough they don't care to see. These are the important things Google has caused the world to adopt as best practices. You don't have to have http, but you are telling users you don't care about their security. This was largely pushed by green/red indicators in the URL bar.
  - freedomben 6y ago
    > Push a static site to netlify for free and all of this is taken care of you for free. The burden is necessary given the proliferation of bad actors This heavily pushes the web toward centralization, which I see as a really bad thing, in many ways the cure is worse than the disease. It's happening in so many ways (have you tried standing up your own email server?) and this sort of thing drives it the hardest. I don't think Google is all bad, in fact I appreciate a lot of what they have done for the world (you mention some of these things). But as with nearly everything in life, it's complicated. I worry a lot that we're headed towards an internet where the individual is at the mercy of organizations to allow them to have a voice.

verdverm 6y ago

This is the best place I know of to have thoughtful discussions and talk about what most consider taboo. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html There are times where it gets heated, but those are quickly shut down by the very excellent community moderation.

dang 6y ago
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23383662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23383662.

tschellenbach 6y ago

It's funny that Google is so large, that one way to grow their business is to improve the user experience of the internet as a whole.

monadic2 6y ago
If this were true chrome would ship with ad block and they would accept cold hard cash for their services.
- verdverm 6y ago
  I tried this, I used it, no big adoption, product got killed. Largely people prefer the free perception of the internet and wouldn't pay the prices it would cost if direct payments were made. I believe its in the $x00s per year
  - monadic2 6y ago
    > Largely people prefer the free perception of the internet You have any reasoning behind this or are you taking the people who killed the product at face value? If I were to guess that product (i have no idea to what you’re referring) was designed to fail, like youtube premium.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    They tried this, I used it, no big adoption, product got killed. To which service do you refer?
    - gundmc 6y ago
      I believe it was Google Contributor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
      - verdverm 6y ago
        Yes, that is the one, thank you

skilled 6y ago

Google Search is in a horrendous state right now. Search results have been getting worse each year, with interesting information being buried 20 pages down. I really hope they have plans to improve this or find an approach that works as a middle ground for generic SEO content.

verdverm 6y ago
I would agree search seems to have gotten worse. I wonder how much of the search abuse / manipulation they are dealing with given the current situations and upcoming elections?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
blueboo 6y ago
This seems like a common claim here on HN. I would expect the creativity of the world's SEO hackers to outstrip any single team, so I expect you'rer right. But I struggle to find queries where interesting information isn't in the top handful of links. [badgers in montana], [while loop python], [how to fix noisy refigerator], [nude stallman] all do just fine. Are there veins of queries that are particularly polluted? Even [homeopathy covid] is pretty good.
- birdyrooster 6y ago
  Did you actually search “nude stallman”? I can’t bring myself to do it for obvious reasons but I am curious what you saw.
  - krebs_liebhaber 6y ago
    The worst recesses of hell, lurking in the back of your mind, suddenly brought to the forefront. The sort of thing you sleep to get away from.
- slantyyz 6y ago

walshemj 6y ago

I thought this was going to be a reasonable article but its just another whine from a designer who wants to add another 6mb of pretty animation to a web page. 1 and 2 are totally wrong and 3 googles moving away from amp ant letting normal pages rank. I have wasted to many hours of my time on conference calls with people like this.

NickHirras 6y ago

If you direct their web vitals tool to test itself (https://web.dev/vitals/ https://web.dev/vitals/), the report isn't great: https://lighthouse-dot-webdotdevsite.appspot.com//lh/html?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.dev%2Fvitals%2F https://lighthouse-dot-webdotdevsite.appspot.com//lh/html?ur...

runawaybottle 6y ago
Someone at Google forgot to eat their own dog food :P
bitpush 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_the_messenger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_the_messenger

youeseh 6y ago

God, how? Like, in the monotheistic sense or the polytheistic sense? If we're going poly, then Google is definitely one of the Gods of the web. Maybe even the top God, but there may be some competition there.

verdverm 6y ago
Please read first, the title is misleading.
throwaway90179 6y ago
Google is the God of Control of the web. It thinks it knows what the people want, but it's just using its influence to make it look that way. The only difference is that Google isn't even aware that's what it's doing.

magicalist 6y ago

Not sure what this article is arguing. Sometimes you want to make a slow website that doesn't fit well on a phone screen? Leaving aside the fact that you can of course do that, and that if I'm using a search engine on my phone I probably (usually?) don't want to look at your slow site that I have to horizontally scroll... > Modern web design principles are very rarely directed at regular people looking to make a website on something they are interested in. Instead, the focus is on creating websites that perform well: > Don't use too many colours. Write short, catchy headlines. Don't let content be too long. Optimise for SEO. Produce video content, attention span is decreasing. Have a an obvious call to action. Push your newsletter. Keep important information above the fold. Don't make users think. Follow conventions. All that's true to some extent if you're making a product on the web and you have a few seconds to hook a customer before they move on. If you're making a website for enthusiasts in some niche, though, content is your draw and you can worry less about some of these things.

reaperducer 6y ago
Sometimes you want to make a slow website that doesn't fit well on a phone screen? Sometimes you should have the choice of making a slow web site that doesn't fit on the phone screen. A large corporation shouldn't dictate how you present your information. Sometimes you want to put a document on the web without having to pay someone to run on Google's treadmill of changing standards and policies for the rest of your life. I'll take a crappy-looking web site with good content over an SEO-pumped disaster that provided no information. Craigslist, eBay, and dozens of others didn't get to be huge because of their good looks.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  I think we’re at the point with the internet where modern design is inversely proportional to good content. I find more stuff on half-forgotten .edu sites, old.reddit threads, and weird forums than anything “responsive” nowadays. Most of the nice looking sites are just regurgitating stuff from the older, rougher ones anyway.
- modeless 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

habanany 6y ago

Actually is de demon, unfortunately not good alternative

habanany 6y ago

Google the demon, unfortunately no better alernative

Animats 6y ago

Now go look at the page source for the home page of Google.

mrkramer 6y ago

Casual users don't care about details in user experience, when you innovate casual experience they will consider using new search engine.

skywhopper 6y ago

I agree with the general thrust of the article, but not a lot of the details. And then there's this: > Our phones have as much RAM as my “studio” work desktop This is unlikely to be true. From what I can find, the latest iPhone has 4GB of RAM, and Samsung is up to 8GB (and they are growing this stat fast to be sure), but no "studio" desktop made in the last five years is going to have that little. > 22.82 Mbps will reliably download very complex web > pages nearly instantaneously. This is definitely not true. It is true that the download time is not large, but between DNS and TLS latency and the fact that most "complex" web pages are built of assets from dozens of different servers, your actual wait time for the assets can be quite long. But even if you discount that, the render time is probably longer than the download time. If your page is that complex, I hope it's very beautiful to look at.

gok 6y ago

> 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 page has about 500 words of content. It also covered 100% of the content with ads, twice. This is unsustainable. Web developers have utterly squandered all efficiency gains of the last 30 years, and then covered their grossly inefficient work with impossibly annoying, privacy-invading advertising. Google should be applauded if they make these wasteful developers suffer monetarily until they shape up. They've already stolen untold amounts of time and energy from us all.

johnspiral666 6y ago
Downloads of this size will also have a extremely large power footprint if you add up all the hops across the Internet.
icemelt8 6y ago
please don't curse Web Developers, its a business decision.
boraoztunc 6y ago
Ironic read from Wired. Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising? https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-advertising/ https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-ad...
prayDeeGayAwe 6y ago
I stopped visiting wired.com years ago, when, instinctively, I could just sense the bloat by the spike in CPU, and lag in pageload, for what was ostensibly plain text, plus a serif font and one header image. As if I wouldn't notice that casual reading material was causing my cooling fans to spin up. As if I were multi-tasking so hard, that it couldn't be discernible which dog in the room could take the blame for who just farted. The wired.com website first showed hints of becoming unusable when their audience participation widget provided by Disqus, for reader/user comments, became this opaque blob of compressed/minified JavaScript. Then they started piling on video. This was back around 2009 or 2010. By 2013, I had mostly washed my hands Conde Nast publications. Whoops.

bosswipe 6y ago

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?

wmeredith 6y ago
So glad you were able to articulate what I've been feeling for years. Google promotes good websites which has little to do with good content. It's a (debatable) signal of website quality, which is only tangentially related to content quality.
onemoresoop 6y ago
That's why we should ditch google search for alternatives. So far I've been using DDG and am quite happy though it needs improvements in search results they may be the ones to listen to our needs unlike google who is too big to care.
- not2b 6y ago
  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.
  - onemoresoop 6y ago
    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
    - freediver 6y ago
      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.

cj 6y ago

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 file, and then swap in the gif 2 seconds after the page is fully loaded. Except now the new “largest contentful paint” metric is failing on those pages because it includes the 2 second delay when the animated gif is swapped in. I guess technically they’re not wrong in how they’re calculating it. In fewer words, Google doesn’t like anything being lazy loaded if it’s above the fold. The metrics and how they’re calculated are questionable. We ended up optimizing for Google and removed the lazy load (ignoring that we think it’s a better UX to lazy load that specific gif).

JoshTriplett 6y ago
> 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.
- rawoke083600 6y ago
  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 ?
Kye 6y ago
I will not stay on a site with auto-playing video or GIFs. I can't focus on anything with it there.
- 6y ago

pretendscholar 6y ago

Is there a formal study available that examines the tradeoffs of google vs a search engine like ddg?

gumby 6y ago

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.

mc32 6y ago
HotBot and Copernic.us I think is what people used. Lycos too. But what started search engines down this wayward path was Overture that combined with doubleclick proved to be too attractive a revenue model and we’ve gone down hill since.
partdavid 6y ago
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.
- enonevets 6y ago
  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.
  - gumby 6y ago
    Can you expand? Chrome seems to be popular but I don’t know the motivation for it.

impalallama 6y ago

It thought I be in favor of whatever this article was arguing but then it went in a weird direction by arguing against certain things that are just considered good practice but its bad now because google is saying it. Like yes, I would consider it a good thing to have lighter websites. Unless your site is catering to some niche that needs to offer 1 to 1 perfect image quality there no reason to not compress your assets.

karakanb 6y ago

The article is an unexpected take on what I would have assumed "the basics of web development" that would not be argued against. I would like to touch to some of the points here, as the arguments of the article were not very clear to me: > The simple assumption that it is always better to have the smallest page possible – that images should be resized and compressed to hell and typography/other elements should be few in number. I strongly agree with this statement overall, and the article doesn't seem to provide any counter-arguments against it. We need to serve the smallest page possible because the larger the page, the more resources it consumes, it is that simple. Every _unnecessary_ byte added to a page literally translates to more storage for the page, more processing power to prepare the page, more data being sent on the wire, more data on the client-side to interpret the given data, and all these add up to more energy being used to consume that page and more resources being wasted. If I can remove one byte from a page, this is for sure a win for everyone, one byte is one byte, whether that saving is relevant considering the scale and the effort is a whole another discussion, and the claim was never "send the smallest page at all costs". Considering the time and effort, if there is a way to send a smaller page, then do it, it is no different than turning the lamp off of an empty room, just on a different scale. > Instantaneous page loads should be priority over any other standards of measure for a web page – like interesting design, for instance. I have never seen such a claim anywhere before, needs citation. As a developer, I think the look and the feel of the pages are as important as performance or efficiency, and web on its own can be used as an art platform, which would make this whole point irrelevant. Again, the overall point is this: if you can offer the same thing with smaller pages witha reasonable amount of effort, do it. > Minimalistic design is necessary. I have never seen such a claim, needs citation. As a user, I prefer cleaner design over fancier things, but this is neither a "rule" nor the industry standard. There are various research being done on this topic and I am no expert on it, but a joint research [1] done by University of Basel and Google/YouTube User Experience Research shows that the users perceive the cleaner designs as more beautiful, making the point that if the user perception is a goal for the given webpage, then keeping things simple might actually make a difference there. Again, depends on the use-case. > 22.82 Mbps will reliably download very complex web pages nearly instantaneously This is a pain I am living with every day. I have a 4 year old mobile phone with 6GB of RAM, and it takes at least 8-10 seconds for Medium to be usable over a ~100Mbps connection, combined with fetching the page and rendering / interpreting it. This is exactly the point I was making above, if the page was smaller, it would have actually made a difference of seconds. The same device over the same connection at the same time opens the bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com in under a second, so, there is something to be seen there. In addition to that, even if I had 1Ghz connection, a 1-byte waste is a waste, irrelevant of my connection speed. I am not talking of the effort of saving that byte, but it is important to acknowledge the waste. > Google has the right to dictate “Best Practices.” This is a point that I agree with more than the other ones, but this seems to be a separate topic to me. The previous arguments were against the practices themselves, and this one is against the entity that is supplying those practices. Even though I agree with the majority of the points there, it would have been a more informative read if the claims and frustrations there were stated with better point-by-point explanations and data to back those claims up. Google having a huge power and monopoly to push people to certain standards is a big problem, but it is not clear in the article whether the author is arguing against the practices or Google itself. Overall, I believe it would have been a more resourceful article if the points and claims against the given practices were backed by better alternatives and data. We all accept that more data is more processing power + more energy, therefore trying to minimize it is an important goal, if the author thinks it should not be, then would be more interested in the answer of "why?" rather than a rant against long-standing practices.

seanwilson 6y ago

> web.dev is operating on some irritating assumptions: > 1. Smaller assets are ideal. > 2. Minimalistic design is necessary. This doesn't sound right to me. Aren't the three new page metrics mostly targeting what happens when the page initially loads? https://web.dev/vitals/ https://web.dev/vitals/ > Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading. > First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have a FID of less than 100 milliseconds. > Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1. The first two are about initial loading. For the last one, you can avoid layout shift by e.g. reserving space for images that are yet to load fully. For example, it sounds like your page could load 100MB of images with the most complex design ever, and it would get a good score as long as the initial viewport of the page displays quickly, is interactive quickly, and doesn't jump around as it's loading. They sound reasonable metrics to me in terms of fighting bloat but with flexibility for web developers (as opposed to AMP). Who gets to decide the metrics is another issue though.

romaaeterna 6y ago

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.

nicbou 6y ago
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.
- romaaeterna 6y ago
  Other people are reporting the same thing: https://www.hypernode.com/blog/performance/huawei-aspiegelbot-is-increasingly-impacting-european-online-stores https://www.hypernode.com/blog/performance/huawei-aspiegelbo...

entropyneur 6y ago

As a web developer who has recently spent an ungodly amount of time trying to make my pages meet Google's impossible standards for qualifying as "fast" on mobile, I sympathize with the author's point. But I think he's missing the even bigger picture. Personal computing is mobile now. And even though the phones have as many megabytes, kilotonnes, little clowns or whatever the device greatness is measured in these days, browsing the web on them is still slow as hell. And I would seriously entertain the suggestion that it's all Apple's evil plot if every Android phone I ever used didn't suck donkey balls for browsing the web. Whatever the reasons for this are, what's at stake now is not web's diversity but it's relevance altogether. I'd rather live in the world where web is needlessly optimized for performance than in the world of apps.

kllrnohj 6y ago
It doesn't help that ~every mobile device is 6+ cores while the web still largely pretends that there's only a single CPU core & that that core is getting faster. The web should have started adapting back in 2006 when this trend really become common reality, but it didn't. So you're stuck with 1 shitty CPU core, and you're stuck sharing it with the browser & JS runtime (yes there's of course multithreaded aspects to the browser itself, but you're still sharing an awful lot of CPU time on your single thread with the browser). 1/6th to 1/8th the performance of the phone is the most you can achieve if you're lucky. That's a fucking terrible starting point, and nobody should be surprised the mobile web sucks ass as a result.

pornel 6y ago

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 some dumb edge cases. You could endlessly bikeshed which metrics could be better, but this particular set is not unreasonable. It makes sense for search engine to pick websites that not only have the relevant content, but also are able to actually get that content on screen without frustrating users with slow-loading crap that makes browser freeze and stutter. Keep in mind that your high-end desktop web experience is in minority. The web is now mostly mobile, and mobile is mostly low-end Android. That's a shit sandwitch, and it desperately needs an intervention.

ehsankia 6y ago
> 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.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > 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.
  - dreamer7 6y ago
    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

addicted 6y ago

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 return one thing, which tells you exactly what you want. One example of this change is the fact that it’s no longer useful to go beyond the first page or so of Your results. Because anything down that low is irrelevant as an answer and is probably discarded by google anyways, which wasn’t the case when it was a search engine. 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. But I think this is what leads to google search changing in a way that does not meet many people’s expectations here. It means google emphasizes stuff that gets people answers quickly. They parse text and reveal the answers on their page itself. And they are not very useful for exploring anymore.

rawoke083600 6y ago
>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"
dhimes 6y ago
s/an answering engine/an advertising engine/ FTFY
- not2b 6y ago
  Both, actually. They figure that if you can get all your answers from Google itself, they get all of the ad dollars and don't have to share. That's why they try to get the implied question answered with pages served from them if possible.
- bitpush 6y ago

robbrown451 6y ago

It would be nice if you could specify preferences. For instance, if you hate tracking and ads, you could tell google that and it would down-weight those results.

replyifuagree 6y ago

My favorite Google war story is implementing a web application using Google's polymer, only to watch their Google bot choke on crawling the site. It took about a year for them to get their bot working.

skynetv2 6y ago

Anyone who can force the web developers to make more responsive, small, junk free, sites that focus on user than ads will have my support. I don't see anyone else making the attempt to force a change. The author is mistaken in their views.

DevKoala 6y ago

I wish there was a way to index the web which was not so susceptible to marketers gaming the ranking system; it is clear Google has lost the battle there. Moreover, I don’t believe it is in Google’s best interest to surface the best results for me, but those that will generate them the most revenue.

NetBeck 6y ago

The web is optimized for Google Chrome, not the inverse. It's not surprising. Google is an advertising company with >90% search market share. There is little competition in the economy, only product differentiation.

z3t4 6y ago

Many inlinks are good for search ranking - people create fake sites and spam. domain is important for search ranking - people pick domain after search keyword. Faster pages rank higher - people make fast websites. Quality content rank higher - like if that ever going to happen.

urda 6y ago

And we are allowing it. From the dangerous tactic of allowing them to MITM all users via the AMP platform, to pushing their features only in their browser. A browser, which I may remind, was pushed to success by abusing their market position. Had Google pulled this in the 90's they would have been attacked like Microsoft.

gdsdfe 6y ago

I keep telling people that search shouldn't be a monopoly but they just keep looking at me like I'm a crazy person

aabbcc1241 6y ago

Google Search is an index, it can do whatever decision it like. If we don't like it, we can use other indices, even better, we can build more alternatives. The web is a open network. Anyone can share content as well as indices. I know it's mostly impossible to beat google, but niche indices has their place to shine. For example, here, HN is an index of hand picked (mostly great) content, and there are multiple "unofficial" HN variances. See? the web is very diverse and free.

yongjik 6y ago

(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 hits back button in three seconds, it's a strong signal that the user was not satisfied. And Google tries very hard to increase this "user satisfaction" (and other similar metrics), because not only does it help Google's business, but it also improves the service itself. And, guess what? When a page takes fifteen seconds to load, lots of people hits the back (or close) button. Showing such a page is giving the user a bad experience. Unless there's literally no alternatives, it makes sense for Google to "penalize" such a page. Of course no metric is perfect, so it will occasionally backfire and penalize a great page that takes thirty seconds to load. But that's life.

freediver 6y ago
How is this helping Google not lose to Bing, when the change would equally improve Bing experience (rising tide rises all boats?).
- dageshi 6y ago
  Google already has market dominance, they lose nothing if things rise equally for both themselves and bing.
  - freediver 6y ago
    They also do not gain anything. Then why bother?
- cageface 6y ago
  They're also competing with native apps. Apple News, as an example.
- Flimm 6y ago
  Not all websites are going to improve their performance, even with Google's incentive. If Google ranks fast websites better than slow ones, that gives Google an advantage over any competitor that doesn't, as long as slow websites still exist.

entha_saava 6y ago

Didn't expect something as silly as this, especially the assertion that page sizes don't matter and since internet speeds are going up, web people are free to use it. I don't see internet costs going down per MiB. Not everyone is on an unmetered connection. And users expect the large amount of bandwidth to be utilized for Netflix or something like that. And how do you say Google is being evil for doing this? Even if there was no search monopoly and imagine there were two competing search engines. I think both of them would factor page load times in search results for better user experience.