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As far as I can tell, Google have the power to essentially end web bloat at one stroke: introduce severe Google ranking penalties for bloated pages. Websites wo

As far as I can tell, Google have the power to essentially end web bloat at one stroke: introduce severe Google ranking penalties for bloated pages. Websites would soon get the message and cut down on bloat. Presumably the reason Google doesn't do this is that they'd have to punish many of the most popular websites, which might be seen as damaging the quality of their search results (at least in the short term).

pwinnski 5y ago
Some of the bloat is very specifically Google's own ad and tracking code, so they are very much working at cross-purposes within Google.
- sellyme 5y ago
  Google's ad/tracking code is generally measured in the tens of kilobytes. Compare that to e.g., the tens of megabytes that news sites routinely waste autoplaying videos on completely different stories to the one you clicked on. Google clearly already knows whether a website is primarily a text-based site or a video-based site, as it displays the two differently in search results. If they immediately blacklisted any text-based site with autoplay video from ever appearing on the first page of search results it would cut about 50% of web bloat overnight. Yeah they have competing interests when it comes to truly minimising unnecessary resource usage, but there's so much good that they could do without going anywhere near cutting into their own analytics.
claudiulodro 5y ago
> introduce severe Google ranking penalties for bloated pages That's literally what they're doing with the AMP requirement change, no? Instead of giving priority to AMP pages, they're giving priority to any pages which have good performance.
- MaxBarraclough 5y ago
  I'm not sure. The article does say: > If you want higher rankings and more traffic from search engines, you need to optimize your site for a better, more performant and faster user experience. But wasn't this how things were meant to work before AMP? Google search never had harsh enough penalties to seriously deter bloat, and I don't know that they're going to change that, they're just going to remove the preferential treatment for AMP.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  AMP pages are incredibly bloated with all the ad assets that slowly load in. Media sites browsed with aggressive JavaScript blocking are significantly faster.
  - whoknowswhat11 5y ago
    I've repeatedly browsed AMP and non-AMP pages (without blocking as a normal user) - this is basically a total lie. The amount of crap on media pages (while they wail about privacy) is absolutely staggering. How many trackers do these folks need? I got to MSBNC - a place looking to take down this tracking panopticon system and they are shoving demdex taboola scorecardresearch tvpixel chartbeat sail-horizon condustrcts imrworldwide hotjar connect.facebook.net womanear.com mparticle.com etc. I mean, seriously - why not just use one (like google) and be done. Can anyone explain why the need so many beacons on a page?
    - wilde 5y ago
      I interpreted this as the downside of competition in the ad network space. Similar to “why do we need 4 cell towers on the top of this building” or “why does Boston have so many hospitals”.
    - s_fischer 5y ago
      The biggest reason is that google doesn't provide the utility that each of these individual libraries brings to the table. Even if they did, there's nothing that says the total "omega tracking bundle" that you'd be downloading from Google would be any smaller than the aggregated total of these libraries. You'd definitely have fewer network requests but I'm not sure that would really move the needle as much as you'd want. While there is probably a bit of overlap, many of the above tools have very different use cases. For example, chartbeat is commonly used more on the editorial side for writers to track article performance but imrworldwide is a subdomain own by Neilson that they use to serve their sdk which offers metrics for preroll video ads. Hotjar provides user heat maps but sail-horizon is part of sailthru and used for email marketing.

pwinnski 5y ago

Some of the bloat is very specifically Google's own ad and tracking code, so they are very much working at cross-purposes within Google.

sellyme 5y ago
Google's ad/tracking code is generally measured in the tens of kilobytes. Compare that to e.g., the tens of megabytes that news sites routinely waste autoplaying videos on completely different stories to the one you clicked on. Google clearly already knows whether a website is primarily a text-based site or a video-based site, as it displays the two differently in search results. If they immediately blacklisted any text-based site with autoplay video from ever appearing on the first page of search results it would cut about 50% of web bloat overnight. Yeah they have competing interests when it comes to truly minimising unnecessary resource usage, but there's so much good that they could do without going anywhere near cutting into their own analytics.

claudiulodro 5y ago

> introduce severe Google ranking penalties for bloated pages That's literally what they're doing with the AMP requirement change, no? Instead of giving priority to AMP pages, they're giving priority to any pages which have good performance.

MaxBarraclough 5y ago
I'm not sure. The article does say: > If you want higher rankings and more traffic from search engines, you need to optimize your site for a better, more performant and faster user experience. But wasn't this how things were meant to work before AMP? Google search never had harsh enough penalties to seriously deter bloat, and I don't know that they're going to change that, they're just going to remove the preferential treatment for AMP.
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
AMP pages are incredibly bloated with all the ad assets that slowly load in. Media sites browsed with aggressive JavaScript blocking are significantly faster.
- whoknowswhat11 5y ago
  I've repeatedly browsed AMP and non-AMP pages (without blocking as a normal user) - this is basically a total lie. The amount of crap on media pages (while they wail about privacy) is absolutely staggering. How many trackers do these folks need? I got to MSBNC - a place looking to take down this tracking panopticon system and they are shoving demdex taboola scorecardresearch tvpixel chartbeat sail-horizon condustrcts imrworldwide hotjar connect.facebook.net womanear.com mparticle.com etc. I mean, seriously - why not just use one (like google) and be done. Can anyone explain why the need so many beacons on a page?
  - wilde 5y ago
    I interpreted this as the downside of competition in the ad network space. Similar to “why do we need 4 cell towers on the top of this building” or “why does Boston have so many hospitals”.
  - s_fischer 5y ago
    The biggest reason is that google doesn't provide the utility that each of these individual libraries brings to the table. Even if they did, there's nothing that says the total "omega tracking bundle" that you'd be downloading from Google would be any smaller than the aggregated total of these libraries. You'd definitely have fewer network requests but I'm not sure that would really move the needle as much as you'd want. While there is probably a bit of overlap, many of the above tools have very different use cases. For example, chartbeat is commonly used more on the editorial side for writers to track article performance but imrworldwide is a subdomain own by Neilson that they use to serve their sdk which offers metrics for preroll video ads. Hotjar provides user heat maps but sail-horizon is part of sailthru and used for email marketing.