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Id argue its their job to index the internet, not dictate how people build their webpages to determine the order they are displayed. They want their crawler to
by ProAm 6y ago
Id argue its their job to index the internet, not dictate how people build their webpages to determine the order they are displayed. They want their crawler to be faster and to capture market share/screen time.
- shadowgovt 6y agoWhen Microsoft was the dominant OS, they enabled ever-harder-to-ignore auto updates because without them, deployments of their OS could be used to harm other people's systems through remote attack exploits. Google is also at a scale where they can improve the quality of everyone's web experience with their scale. It' not so much "their job" as "their obligation."
- ProAm 6y agoI completely disagree. Its my website, my servers, my bandwidth I pay for. Google has zero obligation to dictate how others go about creating their own product. They can enforce web standards sure, but AMP is horrific, and Im sure they next-gen AMP will also be counter productive to third parties.
- shadowgovt 6y agoBy that reasoning: it's their search engine, their crawlers, their business to route people to the websites likeliest to be useful to those users. In that sense, their approach is in some way more equitable than Microsoft's: they're not forcing change upon your system by way of mandatory updates, they're simply saying that if you don't play the same game they play, they're unwilling to do business with you. If you're free to maintain your server to your standards, why should they not be free to maintain their search service to their standards?
- ProAm 6y agoIs google search there to provide the most accurate information or the fastest load information regardless of content? "The primary goal of Google is to provide users with the most relevant, highest quality results based on user search queries, i.e. their wants and needs when performing a search online."
- shadowgovt 6y agoThese are not mutually exclusive. And no, "most accurate" isn't really guaranteed; their goal is basically a closed feedback loop: they have signal on whether people liked the result they yield and that up-signals that result for searches in similar context in the future. Speed is valuable because it allows users to more quickly digest whether the result is relevant to them.
- ProAm 6y agoThat is where I also disagree. Giving a higher rank to a AMP page that people like vs an page the is more accurate information seems like an issue to me. People are larger not smart enough to discern an accurate answer (look at how bad society wants to regulate FB, Twitter, etc for posting information that does not pass 'fact checks'). At the end of the day it doesnt matter, these decisions are made by what drives advertising dollars not relevancy or accuracy. Today faster browsing and crawling equates to faster advertisement display.
- shadowgovt 6y agoI don't think a search engine is the tool you seek; you're looking for an expert-opinionated resource for sifting data, not an automated system to retrieve some data on arbitrary topics.
- overboard2 6y agoMicrosoft enabled harder to ignore auto updates because users didn't want to update. If a user doesn't want to update, they shouldn't have to, as it's their computer. It's not their OS being used to harm users, it's users making their own decisions and accepting the associated consequences. Google should not be trying to force people to obey web standards, they should try to let users make their own decisions.
- shadowgovt 6y ago> If a user doesn't want to update, they shouldn't have to, as it's their computer. And then they plug that computer into a global multi-user network and their machine is botnetted and used to harm other users. In that context, people are no longer making simple decisions and accepting the consequences; a tragedy of the commons is instead created. Your thinking works when computers are isolated from each other. When they're not, it's in the same category as "states require annual vehicle inspections." Because when you're sharing the road with other drivers, you owe it to them that your vehicle is unlikely to undergo catastrophic rapid disassembly.
- ehsankia 6y agoRight, but when I search "cookie recipe", there are millions of pages that match in the index. Yes, popularity is a good starting point, but even that has its limits. All things equal, I'd much rather have a page that loads in 1s than one that loads in 10.
- heavyset_go 6y agoI'd also much rather have a page that brings me to a cookie recipe when I search "cookie recipe", but Google ranks pages with tons extraneous text, images and ads above your bare bones recipe site. This has given rise to an immense amount of blog spam on Google, where you have to scroll through paragraphs and paragraphs of inane content created by an army of underpaid writers just to get to the relevant information you searched for.
- ehsankia 6y agoI'd honestly be curious to see a screenshot of your search result for "cookie recipe" because that's definitely not my experience.
- caw 6y agoMy top result is a blog format recipe — recipe at end of page, though this one has a “jump to” button. https://joyfoodsunshine.com/the-most-amazing-chocolate-chip-cookies/ https://joyfoodsunshine.com/the-most-amazing-chocolate-chip-... The second recipe result is Betty Crocker and as you’d expect — recipe at top, steps with photos after. I personally find more of the former than the latter when looking for specific recipes (Red wine chocolate cake was my most recent search)
- Nasrudith 6y agoThey don't dictate anything - I am perfectly free to try to set up "the last page on the internet" which will be penalized in rank compared to anything else. They would indeed prefer to be utterly ignored by designers over being gamed to but SEO remains something optimized for like clickbait titles and headlines.