[HN Gopher] The Google home page is 500K
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The Google home page is 500K
Author : tomcam
Score : 295 points
Date : 2021-12-24 01:52 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pagespeed.web.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (pagespeed.web.dev)
| lbriner wrote:
| I'm sure someone has coined a term for it but isn't it just a
| tendency for rich companies to keep employing more and more
| people who are adding less and less value so they invent roles,
| departments, imaginary needs and requirements so that everything
| gets more expensive, more complicated and slower.
|
| What do you do if your current front page actually works really
| well with some basic PHP or whatever but you employ x thousand of
| the world's best developers? You invent new frameworks that are
| more complicated to solve one problem and create 10 more, you
| change things so they can be automated even though you can easily
| afford for people to press a few buttons.
|
| And the worst of all, the need to "stay relevant", which is a sad
| but real pressure in marketing and can involve really expensive
| design consultants (new font Twitter?) and sometimes something
| that is not only very different than before but sometimes much
| worse.
| iamgopal wrote:
| They hire people so that they don't go to the competitor.
| windows2020 wrote:
| Does anyone have a link to this story? I remember it as:
|
| Way back when, a Google dev started to receive frequent cryptic
| emails. Each email contained a single number. They struggled to
| figure out what it represented, if anything. Somehow, it was
| realized the number represented the word count on their homepage.
|
| This story comes to mind when I see promotions, statements and
| other things there. Perhaps someone should start emailing a byte
| count.
| sadjad wrote:
| https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/what-comes-next-in-t...
| dpritchett wrote:
| > Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User
| Experience
|
| The years really do fly by. Looked her up and she's currently
| a cofounder at a company that sells an iOS contacts app.
| jcims wrote:
| For anyone that isn't aware, she was also a very early
| Google employee (wikipedia says #20) and CEO of Yahoo for
| several years.
| thallium205 wrote:
| And she absolutely ran it into the ground.
| codingdave wrote:
| I was under the impression that running it into the
| ground was her job -- to turn it into a controlled crash
| rather than a completely unmanaged failure.
| seanieb wrote:
| Kinda hard to say it was just her. Yahoo! was already
| pretty much dead when she arrived.
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| For her first year, yahoo was growing in visits. 1 year
| into her tenure, yahoo had more visits than Google. The
| next four years were downhill. To me, that looks like
| Yahoo was on a path to recovery and she sunk it.
| boringg wrote:
| Yup time hasnt stopped yet. Been awhile since shes been in
| the press post yahoo sale. I guess that makes me kind of
| old.
| kingcharles wrote:
| How the mighty have fallen...
| prirun wrote:
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Google should consider converting its website to AMP. It will
| definitely improve their ranking
| chii wrote:
| Also, i wonder who actually go to the google home page to search
| these days, instead of directly typing into the address bar?
| ehsankia wrote:
| Especially on mobile.
|
| Worth noting that the bad score is only on Mobile, I
| consistently get 45-50, but on the Desktop section I get 99.
| CrazyCatDog wrote:
| But does this really matter? When I pull-up google.com on
| mobile the search bar is instantaneous; what isn't
| instantaneous, is all the superfluous junk that nobody visits
| google.com for...
| akyoan wrote:
| People googling Google, which is a lot.
| IncandescentGas wrote:
| I do. Google is not my default search engine. In the rare case
| I want to use it, I must visit the google website to search.
| ehnto wrote:
| A few of the other search engines let you do "!g" in your
| query which automatically takes you to a google search
| instead.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| For example: DuckDuckGo.
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| You can set google as a search engine then when you type
| "google.com <space>/<tab>" and it will switch the search
| engine for this one query. You can edit the exact keyword and
| set whatever search engine you want in settings -> "search
| engines" in google.
| charcircuit wrote:
| You can just click the Google icon in your search box and it
| will then search with Google.
| JansjoFromIkea wrote:
| I got an extension that just adds a "search on google" option
| at the top of any duckduckgo search results page. For most
| things DDG suffices fine but when it isn't I'll just have to
| do one extra click.
|
| This feels like a better flow to me than having to remember
| when I explicitly need to use google in the address bar or
| having to go to google.com and search it there.
| freediver wrote:
| A more intriguing fact is that Google's search result page will
| often run 2-2.5MB in size (!). And sub 500ms results are a thing
| of (distant) past. More often than comfortable, user will wait
| between 1.5s and 2 seconds for results to load. [1]
|
| This has gotten out of the hand for a company with so much
| resources, that literally depends on page speed for revenue. It
| is incomprehensible that the size (which is probably the main
| reason for latency) can not be reduced.
|
| At Kagi Search [2] (I'm founder) our home page (for logged in
| users, not the marketing landing page) is mere 68kb, everything
| works even without javascript, and 90th percentile result pages
| load in <1s with SERP page being on average 100-200kb total.
|
| [1]
| https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.googl...
|
| [2] https://kagi.com
| badrabbit wrote:
| I hope you won't be requiring logins in the future. Big deal
| breaker for me.
| executive wrote:
| > 100% free of ads and tracking.
|
| > forces you to login
| asdffdsa wrote:
| At least Google gets you a search page, rather than a sign-up
| prompt.
| c54 wrote:
| I was enjoying trying out kagi but it served me a page to the
| effect of "you exceeded your number of searches" and that
| immediately turned me off of the product. Will that limitation
| be lifted at some point?
|
| My other feature request is that I still like google maps, and
| OSM is just not a good replacement. The important feature for
| me here is: google a place name, click the map square that
| shows up in the Answer for that place to open it in gmaps. Both
| kagi and brave search use OSM which is not clickable, this
| really breaks my UX and alone is enough to make me want to go
| back to google search. Using !m sometimes seems to work but I
| think ideal would be a "which maps provider would you like"
| feature which just lets a user choose.
| freediver wrote:
| Yep sorry for that. We introduced query limit to prevent
| abuse and control cost during (free) beta but initially set
| it very low for our target userbase (50 queries/day). We
| increased it since to 200/day after receiving similar
| feedback and of course once we launch there will be no limit.
|
| Kagi Maps is still work in progress (beta like everything
| else) and we just didn't get to shipping this feature. We are
| not using OSM only though, and many users have complimented
| the map to be better than Google maps already (for features
| that we have shipped).
| lewantmontreal wrote:
| Looks really nice. If I had any suggestions it would be to use
| a different search for each example, now Magic the gathering is
| used twice. I can imagine potential customers will love to see
| what the final product looks like before purchasing.
|
| Best of luck, looks really ambitious!
| charcircuit wrote:
| Google isn't as bad as you are saying. Doing a search of "test"
| the result page is about 130 KiB. This is an order of magnitude
| smaller than what you claim. It also loads in between 900ms and
| 1 second the majority of the time.
| svnpenn wrote:
| Please don't spam your paid walled garden.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I registered for the beta, I must say I have low expectations,
| but I'm ready to be positively surprised ;)
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I looked at it, and I'm uncomfortable with the fact I have to
| be logged in, so you know all my search results, know my exact
| identity (through the credit card) and can analyze them and
| store forever (you can say you don't do that, but you cannot
| prove it). At least with Google I can delete cookies, disable
| fingerprinting and use a VPN, and hope they don't have my
| search history. Furthermore, you are in US jurisdiction, so the
| government can request access to your data and you can never
| tell anybody about that.
|
| What about a version of that where I pay a few cents for each
| search, using Lightning Network, for example?
| Keyframe wrote:
| _literally depends on page speed for revenue._
|
| Turns out, this might not be true at all.
| mro_name wrote:
| > a company with so much resources
|
| That is the problem: resources show up in abundance, not in
| scarcity. Only small or poor creators usually can do the
| latter.
|
| Conways law at work, I guess.
| kypro wrote:
| That's a lovely landing page and a nice domain you have there.
|
| I really like the idea of a premium search engine too, I'll
| give it a go for sure.
|
| I'm a little uncomfortable with having to be logged in
| though... Ideally if I'm going to pay for a search engine I
| would like to do that as anonymously as possible.
|
| Best of luck with the project, I'd love to see some competition
| in search again. Google has been getting worse for years and
| they have no real incentive to improve given their dominance
| and lack of disruption in the space.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Honestly, if I have to be logged in by default on a search page
| I'm not gonna use it.
|
| Assuming that people don't clear their cookies is wrong
| nowadays. Even when your website is a little snowflake, the
| rest of the web isn't.
|
| I honestly would recommend a Web Extension that adds your
| search as a search provider, or something like an Open Search
| Description.
|
| Also: the landing page of GitHub annoys the shit out of me.
| Every damn time. I don't wanna register with three clicks if I
| already have an account.
|
| Make a landing page easier for regular users to login, and
| prioritize login over signups...otherwise those regular users
| won't be happy. Any company should focus on keeping the regular
| users happy (UX wise) and not focus on one time trial
| registrations that will be a burden on infrastructure.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| > Make a landing page easier for regular users to login, and
| prioritize login over signups...otherwise those regular users
| won't be happy.
|
| This is one of the first "asshole design" moves that I
| recognize, that unfortunately most sites use. If the "Sign
| up" button (which will be used once by each user) is
| highlighted more than the "Sign in" button (which will be
| used hundreds of times), I know that your company doesn't
| really care about its users.
|
| I'm surprised how common it is.
| ralph84 wrote:
| > the landing page of GitHub annoys the shit out of me. Every
| damn time. I don't wanna register with three clicks if I
| already have an account.
|
| ?
|
| If you're not signed in, `Sign in` is available on literally
| every page in the upper right and one click takes you to the
| sign in box. If one click is too many just bookmark
| github.com/login.
|
| If you don't want to sign in the search box is also in the
| upper right on every page to take you wherever you want to
| go.
| injidup wrote:
| It is expected that if you are logged in you stay logged
| in. Only a minority of users clear all their cookies at the
| end of every session. Sorry but that is true. Thus the
| landing page is optimised for the most common visitor, that
| is the one with no account yet, not the loudest complainer
| on a tech geek forum.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| > just bookmark github.com/login
|
| This will make me be detected as a bot and I see captchas
| everywhere afterwards. I was using that for a while.
|
| A better alternative would be content identity through
| URLs.
|
| If your marketing page is at github.com/index.html, then
| make something like github.com/dashboard.html for logged in
| users, and redirect them to /login.html when they are
| required to be logged in.
|
| This way users can easily bookmark the page that they
| actually want to see.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Github already has my public ssh key so I can
| push/pull/clone without typing a password. Why the heck
| don't they support ssl client authentication so the same
| thing works when I use a browser? SSL client certs are an
| actual thing yet no web site I have ever seen uses them.
| Why?
| injidup wrote:
| Whitelist github.com from Auto cookie clearing. Takes less
| time than a rant on SO. I had a guy at work ask me to store
| the entire state of an internal web site in the URL. He went
| so far to go and get his change request approved by
| management, resources and time allocated. When it was passed
| to me to implement and I dug into why he wanted this, turned
| out he was auto clearing his cookies. I told him to whitelist
| our internal website from his cookie clearing Paranoia and
| stop wasting my time and company money.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Wow, this guy must have some pull in the company for this
| to happen
| freediver wrote:
| > Honestly, if I have to be logged in by default on a search
| page I'm not gonna use it.
|
| Curious how would you handle authenticating for a paid
| product on the web today?
| alok-g wrote:
| (I'm not the person being asked.)
|
| As of now, I log in only when needed, and usually to a
| single account at a time, at most two.
|
| I am willing to try new models for web search if the
| provider does not log any information. I'll prefer it to be
| stateless (other than account settings and payments).
| lovich wrote:
| Not the person being asked, but unless it's for work I just
| don't use it. There's more content online than I can ever
| consume and if it's a tool I need for a side project I
| might as well build it myself since I work on side projects
| solely to keep my tech skills up
|
| Edit: I do authenticate on several paid products, but I was
| always introduced to them in some hassle free manner, and
| only got to the point of paying and dealing with adding
| another app to deal with maintaining after I've grown to
| like the service
| stanmancan wrote:
| You're authenticated here? What's the difference?
| garmaine wrote:
| If I had to be logged in to view HN the very first time I
| arrived here, I wouldn't have bothered.
| lovich wrote:
| Did it after years of lurking and finally feeling like
| it's worth it. This was in response to the application in
| question requiring authentication from the get go.
|
| Ultimately it's laziness, but dealing with authentication
| is annoying and I can't be assed to do it for something
| I'm not already valuing
| thelittleone wrote:
| Not just laziness but increased attack surface for
| compromised credentials. Just like physical things weigh
| us down (spring clean or donating old stuff is
| liberating) so too is having another login somewhere. I
| wish I knew all the sites I have logins too but I dont
| and its frustrating, risky and worrying.
| lovich wrote:
| That and data being sold, haveibeenpwned gives me a
| larger list as the years go on from all the "secure"
| services who werent.
|
| I feel bad for people making new services now who have to
| deal with this, but the internet isn't new and they have
| to overcome our experience with all the bad behavior of
| shysters who operated like these apps and ended up lying
| about the service
| reificator wrote:
| I have two periods in my life. Before password manager
| and after password manager.
|
| After I made the password manager a part of my routine
| that I trust absolutely that I never skip, all of that
| anxiety went away. I still have logins from the before
| times that I wish I could round up, but for the last ten
| or so years I can guarantee I know every site that I've
| signed up for.
| spurgu wrote:
| > Make a landing page easier for regular users to login, and
| prioritize login over signups...
|
| This. I suppose it's become so prevalent due to A/B tests
| finding it more efficient to optimize for new users, but at
| some point in a company's growth it would make sense to put
| the focus on user retention. Then again, it wouldn't be that
| hard to make _both_ signing up and logging in easy and
| attractive.
| dangus wrote:
| I don't even mind logging in, but it does seem weird to force
| it before letting potential customers interact with the
| product. Why not just prompt for registration when
| personalization features are used?
|
| What I _do_ mind is the price...if you read the FAQ, they
| want to charge _as low as_ $10 /month, $30/month for families
| once it exits beta. ("As low as" means "possibly higher")
|
| That's very high. The family price equates to 16 Office 365
| Family seats, which includes 16TB of cloud storage.
|
| In my opinion, the price for this kind of product should be
| more in the realm of $50/year. I'm thinking a price closer to
| what password managers charge.
|
| This price also will need to be adjusted for global customers
| if that is the eventual intention. Spotify in India costs
| less than $1.50 a month.
| stanmancan wrote:
| It's unfair to compare pricing between two totally
| different products, especially when one of them is owned by
| one of the biggest companies in the world with millions of
| paying customers and a vast suite of products.
| burrows wrote:
| dangus wrote:
| That's $130,000 in 30 years if invested at a 6% annual
| return, compounded daily.
|
| In other words, shave off a year of your career at least
| and retire instead.
| burrows wrote:
| If I still haven't beaten the game of life or cracked the
| buried treasure chest or rescued the sultry wicked smaht
| blonde princess from the tower of doom thirty years from
| now safe to say it isn't happening and I'll just seppuku.
| But until then I'm going to drink tea in cafes and mumble
| about nihilism.
| waffle_maniac wrote:
| dangus wrote:
| Just an example! Being frugal is a balance, because if
| you go too far on the extreme of that spectrum you end up
| doing really crazy stuff to save money, and then die and
| leave your stash to your next of kin. That's certainly
| not what I'm advocating for!
|
| Still, $5 for a cup of tea is a really terrible example
| because it's an incredible waste - tea is very easy to
| make. Technically, when you buy some tea somewhere else
| you're _wasting_ time rather than saving it, since an
| electric kettle is much faster.
|
| A mildly better example: at least when you pay $5 for a
| Starbucks nitro cold brew, you're getting something that
| isn't realistically available at home (unless you want to
| buy/clean/store/operate a nitrogen coffee kegerator).
|
| $10/month for a search engine...I mean, you can just
| block ads and trackers for free. Microsoft literally pays
| you money to use their search engine. It's not like
| streaming services where paying for ad removal saves you
| time.
| hetspookjee wrote:
| I get that you live in a tent and eat peanuts and lentils
| everyday with water? Imagine if you calculate your
| savings with this lifestyle. You could retire a decade
| before everyone else!
| dangus wrote:
| No, I don't live in a tent, not at all! I have a gym
| membership that costs my family $500 a month. But, when
| we go there, we get unlimited classes, a pool, hot tub,
| sauna, steam sauna - it's good for our physical well-
| being, and it acts as extra rented real estate. They
| offer an hour of child care included per visit, so it's a
| break from parenting while we work out.
|
| $5 tea or coffee is just flavored water that I can make
| at home for 50 cents and minimal effort.
|
| Obviously, to each their own, but $5 tea was a bad
| example.
|
| And a $10/month search engine is a bad deal when ad
| blockers are free.
| eitland wrote:
| > And a $10/month search engine is a bad deal when ad
| blockers are free.
|
| Even if Google was completely free and didn't track me
| and didn't insult me with their ad matching, paying $10 a
| month for results that are in another league is fine with
| me.
| burrows wrote:
| feffe wrote:
| Add blockers would not make the result better though. For
| me google is useless nowadays. If a search engine surfice
| that truly find what I'm looking for I'll pay $10/month
| for it but I think the price may be too much for those
| that don't care as much about the search result quality.
| rolisz wrote:
| I've been using Kagi for a couple of weeks now and I love
| it. It's not just that there are no ads, but at least for
| programming, the first page is not stuffed with weird
| spammy sites that scrape Stackoverflow and Github Issues,
| like it is on Google nowadays.
| slickdork wrote:
| You just described lean fire, which is a thing some
| people do.
| forgotmyoldname wrote:
| Every product in the world sells itself as being as cheap
| as a cup of coffee or a cup of tea "so just pay it,
| cheapo". If that excuse actually worked, nobody would be
| drinking tea or coffee because we'd have spent our money
| on random apps and services.
|
| It's necessary to prove an app brings more joy than a
| good $5 drink does--most products fail to cross that
| threshold.
| burrows wrote:
| Agreed, most apps are useless to most people, just like
| most people don't read most books. And I'm not
| recommending the comparison to a cup of coffee as
| marketing.
|
| For me there is absolutely no difference in paying
| $1/month and $10/month for a daily driver search engine
| and I'm letting everyone know this to establish dominance
| over OP.
| harles wrote:
| I find such pitches more a reminder that we've somehow
| decided $5 is an acceptable price for a cup of flavored
| and slightly chemically enhanced water.
| forgotmyoldname wrote:
| People have been paying money for food and beverages
| forever. The cost of labor is a big factor in it. It's
| the foundation of the economy.
| piaste wrote:
| You're not paying $5 for the cup. You're paying $5 for
| the guy making it for you at a moment's notice, for the
| warm couch to sit in while you drink it, and for the
| other guy who comes after you leave and cleans after you.
| eitland wrote:
| Good point and I've also written elsewhere about
| subscription exhaustion or something like that (I think I
| had a better term for it then).
|
| I think I wrote something like "if a product requires a
| subscription I don't consider it unless it replaces
| another subscription - or is so good that it is obviously
| worth it".
|
| Well, for me this is the second category: For me Kagi is
| a fantastic deal at $10 (although I hesitate to say it
| since it probably means they'll end up charging more ;-)
| freediver wrote:
| The goal of Kagi is not to be a mass market product, but a
| premium search engine, offering best in class search
| product experience with top privacy guarantee (as the
| business model does not require fiddling with your data in
| bad ways). Search is arguably one of the most important
| activities we do every day both in personal and work
| setting. Unique Kagi features should be well worth the
| cost.
|
| It is also an independent company, bootstrapped by the
| founder, without a ton of VC money to subsidize the cost.
| And at $10/mo per user it would be barely breaking even, if
| at all. So there are a lot of factors of play, and I
| completely understand why $10/mo may sound excessive given
| all the free alternatives out there. It is just one of the
| many uphill battles we are fighting ;)
| stayfrosty420 wrote:
| tbh what your saying doesn't make sense to me vis.
| breaking even, unless there is some signifcant manual
| element to your search indexing. If this isn't the case,
| the revenue received from new customers should far
| outpace the marginal cost of supporting new customers
| unless you have signifcant fixed costs for some reason. I
| am interested in your product and will sign up for the
| beta and if it is quality would even be willing to pay
| the price if it was flawless quality, but i'd suggest
| doing some analysis vis. how many users you would need to
| reduce the price closer to somehting like $5 a month,
| which is far more palatable to me.
|
| Right now you're charging nearly as much as something
| like Netflix, so your product has to be nearly a Netflix'
| worth's more value than DuckDuckGo (rather than Google as
| it's closer to your value proposition) for me to
| rationally justify the price.
| tjalfi wrote:
| Have you considered adding business or enterprise
| subscriptions[0]? B2B users are a lot less price
| sensitive[1] than consumers especially when you're
| competing against a free product.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2781133
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13843743
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| The more expensive it is the better it will have to be
| relative to free alternatives though.
|
| Is it that you're doing a large amount of compute per
| search which yields better results but higher cost per
| search?
| feffe wrote:
| If it really starts to take off I think you should
| consider lowering the price. Initially I understand a
| higher price is required to be able to cover expenses. A
| price that is low enough to not matter would lure more
| customers into the fold (if the products deliver on its
| promise).
| dangus wrote:
| I definitely understand where you're coming from. One can
| make the argument that a search engine is used with an
| incredible amount of frequency for most people - dozens
| of times per day. It _should_ be worth a lot.
|
| One thing that's great about search engines in terms of
| entrepreneurship fundamentals is that is is such a
| massive market. You only need a fraction of a percent to
| be a viable business, I'm sure.
|
| I can also understand how underpricing a product can be a
| big mistake. Somebody who wants this kind of product has
| already made the conscious decision to pay. Pricing a
| product too low can be a signal that it's not a good
| product.
|
| Perhaps one might say that this is an example of how
| complexity and cost of production is a bit detached from
| the customer's willingness to pay. The most complex
| software product, the operating system, is essentially
| given away for free. People are mostly not willing to pay
| for it, even businesses don't want to anymore. On the
| other end of the spectrum, there are SaaS products with
| very low levels of complexity pulling in a lot more than
| $0.
|
| If it's truly barely breaking even at $10/month, that
| fascinates me. It must mean that search engines have to
| do a lot of computing.
|
| In any event, I wish you the best, because the features
| _do_ look cool. I like the idea of being able to set site
| preferences (e.g., when I search for a movie I might like
| to see Wikipedia over IMDB).
| freediver wrote:
| > Perhaps one might say that this is an example of how
| complexity and cost of production is a bit detached from
| the customer's willingness to pay. The most complex
| software product, the operating system, is essentially
| given away for free.
|
| Spot on. Not that long ago we used to pay for OS, even
| beta versions of OS. Nowadays, most complex software
| products imaginable, like OS, browser, search engine,
| social networking... - are all free, and over the years
| we as a society have been slowly drawn into an
| expectation of these to be free. Of course someone or
| something is paying for it, as all these also "magically"
| generate hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue. And
| when someone shows up with an idea to actually sell such
| product and tries to create a business where user is also
| the customer, and incentives between the user and the
| business are aligned, they are usually looked at with a
| raised eyebrow.
|
| I am personally of the opinion that you always get what
| you pay for and that one should not shy away from paying
| and supporting products they love. I hope we are building
| one such product, that some people (and admittedly you
| need to be a little different to use and pay for Kagi)
| will fall in love with.
| no_time wrote:
| >That's very high. The family price equates to 16 Office
| 365 Family seats, which includes 16TB of cloud storage.
|
| Offtopic: That must be one of the best deals on online
| storage Excluding Google's enterprise unlimited storage
| option which always felt like they could pull the rug under
| you any day.
| eitland wrote:
| > What I do mind is the price...if you read the FAQ, they
| want to charge as low as $10/month, $30/month for families
| once it exits beta. ("As low as" means "possibly higher")
|
| $10 a month is less than one lost hour of work.
|
| I hope they price it around there somewhere so that many
| will use it but even at $20 it is a no-brainer for me.
|
| The results are in another league compared to what I get
| elsewhere and by now it also feels like an insult every
| time I realize Google has altered my query: do you guys
| really think I don't know what I am doing?
|
| Google probably works better for illiterate people these
| days, but in the process they have alienated me. I have
| lost too many hours searching for things I knew used to be
| there only to be ignored and corrected by their AI. It is
| rather patronizing at this point.
| ralferoo wrote:
| > $10 a month is less than one lost hour of work.
|
| This is a pretty feeble argument for something,
| especially for a product where the user perception is
| that it should be free, and there exist multiple free
| options already.
|
| While "one hour of work" might not seem a lot, a
| different way of looking at that is that for most people
| there are 160 hours of work in a month, and so this thing
| needs to be worth 1/160th of their life.
|
| It's not so hard to make that choice for a couple of
| things that are of obvious value, but when they start
| adding up in your life for basic things, people will
| question the value of it to them, and I'd argue for most
| people, search just isn't worth that much to them when
| there are so many good free options.
| maven29 wrote:
| For people who cannot afford the $10, I can unironically
| suggest bing. It actually responds to long queries much
| better than google.
|
| You should still use the website's search function first.
| Github issues/SO search often turns up results that
| google will ignore.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Using google search without being logged in and clearing
| cookies regularly will constantly harass you with a very
| intrusive "cookie banner". Quotes because it's much more than
| that.
|
| The sole purpose of these is to get you to globally log into
| google and stay logged in.
|
| So I don't think it really makes much of a difference.
| [deleted]
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| That's true in Europe but not in the US, I believe. It is
| indeed one of the more obnoxious cookie consent banners
| I've seen.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| "I don't care about cookies" + "Cookie Autodelete" add-ons
| solve that problem easily for me.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| It's annoying as fuck but tbh I got used to it, it's second
| nature to me now.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| The sole result for me has been a pretty insistent reminder
| that I should not be using this service.
| tjoff wrote:
| Agree. The routine of opting out of that every day is
| very important. It is a constant reminder that I
| absolutely need to further reduce the use of google
| services.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| I get the impression that startups get something like a 10x
| multiplier in kudos, stock options, chances for a next round,
| (pick your reward) etc for signing up a new user than for a
| repeat visitor logging in. The former means growth; the
| latter doesn't. Hence it's always easier to find the signup
| button than the login button.
|
| Fucked up incentive structures like this are why we cannot
| have nice things.
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| Having users that _want_ to return is objectively good. We
| 've just taken this to the wrong conclusions.
|
| I strongly suspect that this has to do with attribution and
| shallow "data driven" choices - there is a heavy bias
| towards things that are easier to measure. Especially in
| startups with limited resources.
|
| Measuring retained users regardless of anonymous/known
| state is very hard and lossy. So the nearest easy to
| measure analog that is often picked is logged-in users and
| we start the fucked up cycle you mention.
|
| Similar things happen around all metrics that have to do
| with retention. We _know_ that a better experience through
| higher performance and better UX is likely to create
| happier users that return... but we cannot prove it
| (easily) so we focus on optimizing other things.
| bregma wrote:
| The minute something becomes a KPI it is no longer a
| useful KPI.
| Jenk wrote:
| I've been in more product meetings that have uttered a
| phrase like "we will work out what to do with all these
| users later" than I care to count. It really is a startup
| goal to sign-up as many users as possible. In most cases
| it is literally a metric for the next funding round
| ("Last quarter we had 100k signups!" Is a very attractive
| soundbite at the round table)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That's how extreme shortsightedness looks like.
|
| The number of users you lose by doing that is smaller than
| the number you gain as long as you don't have enough users
| (and spends enough on publicity). This is also the one
| thing that limits the number of users a company will ever
| have on most cases.
| skinkestek wrote:
| I've tried Kagi the last two or three weeks and the page speed
| is a nice bonus but the real advantage it has over DDG and
| Google is that it does find the pages I look for, rank them
| reasonably well and doesn't mix in pages that doesn't contain
| my search terms.
|
| It is just like being back in 2007 or something when Google
| worked this way and it is _wonderful_.
|
| I've used DDG for the past few years and I still hope they too
| will succeed, but with DDG the quality is the same or
| (slightly) lower than Google and the bang operator comes in
| handy many times a week.
|
| With Kagi I only think I have used the bang operator once (yes,
| they have it). It is that good: when I look at the results I
| know immediately that there is no way Google or DDG can do it
| better except by pure luck and also my results are already
| there on first or second try so why bother shopping around?
|
| Bonuses:
|
| - bangs work like in DDG (I think, I don't use them anymore)
|
| - doublequotes actually work unlike in Google and DDG
|
| - even without doublequotes it doesn't stray very far from my
| query
|
| - I can add lenses (?) or something (I have not bothered yet,
| the defaults are good enough)
|
| Yep, I'm a walking billboard now, but I'm not paid in anyway
| and don't know any of the people behind kagi, it just happens
| to be the biggest improvement I have seen since Google replaced
| everything else sometime around twenty years ago.
|
| Edit: yes, it is a paid product but it is free during beta and
| so good that I would consider Kagi gift cards for friends in
| tech if it was paid, just like I'd consider gifting WhatsApp
| subscriptions before Facebook bought and subverted it (yes, I
| was considering worse words).
|
| Edit 2: I'll do this for your product too if I love it. I did
| for WhatsApp and Google+ and in real life for the insurance
| company I have used the last few years.
| annadane wrote:
| > - doublequotes actually work unlike in Google and DDG
|
| This drives me _nuts_. If you 're going to have a competitor
| to Google (ddg) at least give me proper functionality to
| refine my searches
| skinkestek wrote:
| Yep! How this passes QA is and why everyone else who knew
| old Google isn't crying out loudly is beyond my
| understanding.
| gompertz wrote:
| I'm having great results with Kagi as well. I actually forgot
| I signed up for beta a few weeks back until I saw this post;
| and started testing it out this morning. Thus far, I'm quite
| impressed - similar sentiments to what you have outlined.
| freediver wrote:
| This testimonial is the best Christmas gift the team could
| have hoped for. Thank you very much!
| skinkestek wrote:
| Good to hear!
|
| Lets be clear that this goes both ways, Kagi is a really
| nice Christmas present: so far this is the biggest software
| improvement I've seen in a number of years: on the same
| scale as when generics was introduced to Java (and this was
| a big deal for me) or in fact even on the same scale as
| when I was introduced to Google. I'll have to keep using it
| for a few months to see exactly how big it is but feels
| like a really bif deal so far :-)
|
| Wishing you a merry Christmas whenever you celebrate it (we
| are celebrating tonight).
| no_time wrote:
| Interesting business but I can't help but be a bit worried. You
| promise not to monetize usage data and such but as a paid
| search engine, you are in the perfect position to do so. Even
| more so than Google or DDG since neither of those have my name
| and other PII. You would have my payment information AND
| valuable insight into my interests.
| freediver wrote:
| Yes, and zero incentives to misuse that information, as the
| entire business literally depends on the trust between us and
| the user, and is entirely supported by user subscriptions.
| Incentives are perfectly aligned too - we have to constantly
| keep improving the product or you will jump to a (free)
| alternative.
| no_time wrote:
| I admit I might be more paranoid than the average person.
| This could work if we knew each other IRL or something like
| that but as it stands what you said is a nicely worded
| version of "Source: dude trust me."
|
| Accepting crypto payments could be a solution but I'd
| totally get why'd you want to avoid that.
| freediver wrote:
| There is nothing else we can possibly tangibly offer, and
| you are right to have high standards. Note that also we
| never say a version of "dude trust me", but lay down the
| facts how the business operates, what the vision is and
| why are we doing it.
|
| The best we can do really is have a business model that
| aligns incentives with the users and weirdly enough, this
| is already an innovation in this market. Then, create the
| best possible product that users will love. Gaining trust
| is a process that can not be skipped.
| equivocates wrote:
| Don't really want to login to search.
| rym_ wrote:
| how can you search 'with privacy' / anonymously if it is tied
| to an account.
| freediver wrote:
| Privacy and anonymity are not the same. We do not claim
| anonymity although if you read our privacy policy you will
| see that it is very close to it (as we do not log searches at
| all, so it it not possible to tie them to a user).
| charwalker wrote:
| I don't see how your paid service is any different from Google
| beyond interface and lack of ability to use it for free/no
| signup to compare.
|
| Or I can use duckduckgo without needing to sign up and get your
| promised security with 1-2 second searches for free. Maybe
| you'll have enough takers to get off the ground but I'll rely
| on other tools.
| google234123 wrote:
| Just did a search and it took 550ms. 1.5s and 2 seconds sounds
| like an exaggeration
| stavros wrote:
| Kagi looks interesting, can I have an invite?
| fomine3 wrote:
| I don't care much page speed when I want to search some deep
| information. Sadly Google getting significantly worse for
| indexing.
| danvayn wrote:
| I'd give your project a shot but the signup funnel for your
| beta is a little funny -- you should let people choose to leave
| the textbox-based questions blank and still get an invite.
|
| If you just made those parts drop-downs with the most popular
| answers and had an 'Other' option that makes a text-field
| option, you would probably get much more valuable data and more
| of it. I would not be surprised if you had some amount of
| dropoff in your beta signup funnel due to questions that make
| potential users feel like theyre being 'put on the spot'
| buro9 wrote:
| I can't try kagi before signing up.
|
| I'm not sure that I want to sign up and give you data when your
| premise is to not mine the data. Is that your premise? How long
| do you retain knowledge of what had been searched?
|
| The personalise features put me off. The level of
| personalisation I want is course location... I.e. online shops
| in my country, or if I search for something in Liverpool pick
| the right Liverpool in the world... Both of these are relative
| to where I am and an IP geo lookup is roughly good enough with
| an override in the worst case.
|
| I'm not sure precisely what your differentiation is (again,
| can't find it without signing up)... But I want to be very sure
| before I sign up to anything that you treat user data as a
| radioactive resource. Thankfully given that GDPR exists and
| everything done on search is related to a user profile I'm
| assuming that you're petrified of storing and using data... But
| I don't know as the site didn't reassure on that front and I
| didn't see the privacy policy at the foot of the home page.
|
| I want to like what you're doing so much... But you've designed
| it to have friction to that discovery.
| ralferoo wrote:
| > I'm not sure precisely what your differentiation is (again,
| can't find it without signing up)...
|
| I'd echo this. I actually even went to the site to see what
| was so good about your search, then realised I can't even
| test with a single query without signing up, and lost
| interest.
| freediver wrote:
| > I can't try kagi before signing up.
|
| Perhaps it is not obvious that Kagi has not launched yet. We
| are in closed beta, and email is used to invite people who
| want to be beta testers, nothing else. Once we officially
| launch, everyone will have the ability to try it.
|
| >I'm not sure precisely what your differentiation is (again,
| can't find it without signing up).
|
| The FAQ has a lot of information you may find useful
| https://kagi.com/faq
| [deleted]
| ec109685 wrote:
| Don't you think they have run tests that trade off search speed
| for additional features and determined the features increase
| engagement / revenue?
|
| There is a _lot_ more going on than 10 blue links these days,
| including continual scroll on mobile. Perf versus features is
| always a matter of trade offs.
| influx wrote:
| Gmail has a fucking loading screen now. Have I switched? Not
| yet, but the reason I switched to gmail in the first place
| was for the minimal, fast interface.
| bawolff wrote:
| Gmail was the original heavy webmail interface. All its
| competitors at the time were basic html (and providing only
| 5mb of space). Heavy js to provide a smooth interface was
| what made gmail such a big deal other than high storage
| limits.
| dchest wrote:
| Gmail always had a loading screen.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > determined the features increase engagement / revenue?
|
| This. Nothing else matters.
| fartcannon wrote:
| I think its more that they have a monopoly on search in the
| current zeitgeist. So no, I don't think they've done that,
| and if they did, there's no pressure for them to optimise for
| speed, so they'd optimize for something bloated that helps
| someone get a promotion. This is why, for example, everything
| Microsoft Office does is a bloated trash fire, and how Apple
| gets away with telling a whole generation of phone purchasers
| that they were holding it wrong.
| slap_shot wrote:
| > and how Apple gets away with telling a whole generation
| of phone purchasers that they were holding it wrong.
|
| Okay. I'll bite. What does this mean?
|
| I hold my iPhone 13 the exact same way I held a Nokia brick
| in 2003. What did Apple tell us?
| jodrellblank wrote:
| 11 years ago, if your finger bridged the two antennae
| together on an iPhone 4, you lost signal strength. Half a
| percent of iPhone users complained about it, Apple
| offered a free cover to anyone affected.
|
| They were HIT WITH 18 LAWSUITS about it OMG.
|
| They settled all the lawsuits by ... offering a free
| cover or $15 refund.[1]
|
| Depending on your viewpoint this is either one of many
| blips along the way of manufacturing tens of billions of
| products over a dozen generations, or a way for "mactards
| [to] realize Steve Jobs are out to milk their clueless
| a$$es with his oh so clever marketing gimmicks" (Yahoo
| News comment).
|
| Bonus points if you can find anywhere Apple said "you're
| holding it wrong" or blamed users. Steve Jobs wrote "Just
| avoid holding it (the iPhone] in that way." which is
| somewhat pragmatic, and rather what you'd expect someone
| to say if they weren't filtered by a PR firm. Probably
| what I would say. Apple haters can't face this.
|
| Macworld.co.uk said:
|
| > " _We don 't really think there was anything
| substantial to the problem, and the iPhone 4 sold
| tremendously well. Customers didn't seem to notice, let
| alone mind, and Apple repeatedly pointed out that other
| mobile phones suffered the same effect._"
|
| [1] https://www.cnet.com/news/settlement-reached-in-
| iphone-4-ant...
|
| [2] https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/antennagate-11-big
| gest-ap...
| fartcannon wrote:
| iPhone 4 had a bad antennae design. Jobs blamed the
| users. It was hilarious.
| slap_shot wrote:
| :facepalm: of course!
| ec109685 wrote:
| Even with a monopoly, they make more money the more often
| it's used.
| freediver wrote:
| I suppose you are right. I can only guess that RPU is the
| primary KPI and somehow more scripts allow for more revenue
| extraction even if the performance is lower.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I think you're overthinking this.
|
| You're looking at cold start download sizes, but that's not
| what people actual see after everything is cached follow
| the first load.
|
| Google pages load plenty fast on every device I've used
| recently, including some very old android tablets. Most
| page loads don't transfer much data at all due to caching.
| Combined with the high speeds of both browsers and devices
| today, there wouldn't be much real change in a highly
| stripped down Google page relative to what they're serving
| up today.
| freediver wrote:
| But it is not just a cold start problem. Check your
| network tab on a "warm" search.
|
| Here is what I get:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/Dl2B5Zo
|
| 2 seconds to load and 1.12MB transferred, all on "warm"
| start.
| marricks wrote:
| And the top half of the results is all ads! I don't know
| how people stand Google.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Using Chrome Dev Tools I'm seeing around 150-200KB
| actually transferred on each search page result (2MB
| resources, though most are cached).
|
| I'm also seeing content loaded happen in under 1 second.
| pfooti wrote:
| Can't tell from your UI screenshot, but quite often
| loading a page with devtools open will disable the cache.
| I forget if this is the default behavior or not.
| thedudeabides5 wrote:
| Or maybe just give it away to ppl and see if they like
| using it to find stuff?
|
| Where did the love go....
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I am sure that is the case, but I am not sure it is good for
| the user: Google ads a lot of ads and behavior tracking that
| probably is for their benefit, not yours.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| > that literally depends on page speed for revenue.
|
| I don't think that's an accurate view of the business model of
| Google. For them consumers are mostly locked in and their
| business model is in tracking users and mining as much
| information as possible from every facet of the experience.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| Unless you are using an ad blocker or have disabled it in the
| settings chrome precaches so for the majority of the people
| there probably is no 1.5-2 second load time. But I expect
| majority of the people browsing hacker news would have it
| disabled so would have the slower loadtime
| impetus1 wrote:
| When i code in python or react, I get proud of my 900kb spa web
| pages. I respect your site so much in fact, I would like to
| apply to work at your company. Where do I apply?
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| > Google's search result page will often run 2-2.5MB in size
|
| While it is true, for almost all of the users most of it is
| cached. For me it is using 2.5 MB resources with 77kB
| transferred.
| onion2k wrote:
| That's important of course, but the cached code will have to
| be refreshed when there's a change (could be done partially
| with code splitting), so how long the cached data lasts
| depends on how often the Search page is updated. For Google
| that probably isn't happening _daily_ , but it could be very
| often. Hopefully Google have split out the hot code that
| changes a lot in to a small bundle so the rest can sit in the
| cache for a while.
| jamil7 wrote:
| That cached code (presumably) needs to be executed by your
| computer so it's still wasteful, slower and somewhat mind
| boggling as to why that pages needs 2.5mb worth of
| html/css/js.
| authed wrote:
| gmail is a lot worst
| cletus wrote:
| This is kind of sad.
|
| Going back more than a decade ago, google.com used to be brutally
| optimized. Anything unnecessary was stripped to reduce load times
| and decrease network traffic. For example, attribute values were
| never quoted if they didn't have to be and closing tags like
| </html> were omitted. It was kind of fascinating to read how many
| terabytes of network traffic omitting </html> saved.
|
| But then came the ill-fated boondoggle that was Google+ and with
| Google+ came the OneBar. This was the black bar across the top of
| the screen with key properties but, more importantly, the G+
| login. The cost of this was really high.
|
| We don't have the black bar anymore but a subset of links remain
| as does the login box, even if it isn't for G+ anymore. The
| Google home page just isn't the lean page it once was.
|
| That doesn't make me mad, unlike say AMP, which makes me
| incredibly angry. But still I can't help but take it as a sign of
| lost values.
| [deleted]
| tomcam wrote:
| Yep. Surprised the hell out of me too.
| darknavi wrote:
| Even more sad is that 500k is incredibly tiny compared to most
| websites that shit every JS-based telemetry package under the
| sun at you.
| mullingitover wrote:
| Pinboard has been trying to warn us about page bloat for years.
| Props to Maciej for still running one of the fastest, most
| useful, least creepy social anti-social media sites on the web.
| tomcam wrote:
| Pinboard has got very slow for me, esp. at night.
| TheRealNGenius wrote:
| 500k what? Link says nothing about 500k...
| gapan wrote:
| The title was confusing for me as well. Apparently its size is
| about 500KiB.
| [deleted]
| tomrod wrote:
| This is a neat tool.
|
| Hacker News hits 100%
|
| Reddit fails w/ a score of 23
|
| Looking forward to using it to test against my sites.
| masklinn wrote:
| I have old.reddit.com at ~40 (varies between 35 and 45) on
| mobile, and 80 on the desktop.
|
| Apparently the reddit home page is getting hit hard by all the
| award icons, which google _really_ doesn 't like:
|
| * they're really large, some are animations and they're 48x48
| full-color (rendered at 12x12), meaning some of them are close
| to 100k
|
| * they're (a)png which google dislikes
|
| * they're unsized on the page (they're sized in CSS) which is
| dinged on grounds of layout shift
|
| * they're not deferred so the awards below the fold are still
| fetched upfront
|
| Google's estimates also seem over-optimistic e.g. they
| advertise potential savings of 94K (out of 95.2) by using next-
| gen formats for https://www.redditstatic.com/gold/awards/icon/I
| lluminati_48...., but plugging that in an AVIF converter yields
| a 27K file with neither the animation nor the transparency
| worker (no idea if it's an issue with ezgif's converter or
| firefox's support).
| josephg wrote:
| A blog post I wrote a few months ago is apparently fast in
| general, but I get a bad score on pagespeed insights because
| I'm pulling in 3rd party scripts. The scripts I'm using? An
| embedded youtube video and some fonts from google fonts. I'm
| not sure why pagespeed insights says first paint is delayed
| behind youtube's javascript loading. Sounds like something I
| should fix.
|
| Shame on me for using google's other services in the
| recommended way I suppose.
|
| [1]
| https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fjosephg.c...
| GordonS wrote:
| PageSpeed even moans about Google Analytics scripts!
| raihansaputra wrote:
| Hah. Kindof same. Ran Lighthouse tests on my project and on
| the evaluation it complains about gtag and Google Sign In
| being slow to load.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'm shocked they are allowed to report this. Interesting
| that they are allowed to be independent and not obfuscate
| the fact that the other Goog services are so slow.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| That's always been the case. Having too many Google Ads
| can even downrank you in search results for being a bad
| user experience.
|
| For Youtube embeds, I prefer Lite Youtube Embed[1] by the
| magnificent Paul Irish.
|
| [1] https://github.com/paulirish/lite-youtube-embed
| rapind wrote:
| Reddit is intentional though. They really, really, really want
| you to use their app instead.
|
| [Daily Standup]
|
| "Hey guys, you know how we need more user data to monetize but
| no one wants to use our crappy app? Why not just make the
| website horrible and constantly nag them via dark patterns to
| install our app?"
|
| PROMOTED!
| schleck8 wrote:
| There is two alternative reddit frontends, both of which
| should be smaller/faster
|
| https://github.com/digitalblossom/alternative-
| frontends#redd...
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| I always use old.reddit.com - I find the default site
| virtually unusable
| charwalker wrote:
| The classic forum style is part of the appeal to me. It
| walls off typical social media users in favor of people
| willing to embrace the platform for what it is, not what
| they are trying to make it via IPO.
|
| If the communities I am part of (or built) weren't so
| entrenched and interesting I'd be happy to move from the
| front page of social media back to the front page of the
| internet.
| darknavi wrote:
| On mobile (iOS) I use an app. Just not their app.
|
| Apollo is the best thing since reddit bought Alien Blue and
| shut it down.
| thizzbuzz wrote:
| Reddit can't even handle copy-pasting into the comment box
| unless the cursor is at the end of what's typed already. It
| starts to run up my i7 if I have just a few of those comment
| boxes open at once.
|
| Navigating back to the list of submissions, which are already
| in the DOM and are literally visible through a transparency,
| takes like nearly a second.
|
| Of course the back button doesn't work in most cases. It's
| pretty embarrassing if it's not intentional.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Ah, the familiar Facebook approach.
|
| For years reddit was unusual in not offering an official app.
| tomcam wrote:
| Thanks for adding the right URL, kevingadd. Have no idea how I
| screwed that up. As they said, it's supposed to be
| https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.co...
| einpoklum wrote:
| Just use duckduckgo: https://duckduckgo.com/
|
| Their homepage is 5722 bytes not including images.
| ekzhu wrote:
| Most of it should be cached. I think it's a trade off between
| server load and client experience. Millions of 10KB requests <<
| thousands of 500KB requests (also potentially with lots of
| compressed stuff).
| gniv wrote:
| It's really only about 43k and it loads instantaneously for me.
| The rest is scripts and other stuff that's cached. I think this
| is the right tradeoff for an ultra-popular site.
| lkbm wrote:
| Yeah, I show just under 60KB transferred because it's cached
| and compressed.
|
| Size is a useful metrics, but actual UX is what matters.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| It says 5.5s to first interactive. Yikes. Though on my iPad Air 2
| it's significantly faster than that.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Yeah - bear in mind this is testing on a Moto G4 with a
| simulated horrible cellular connection.
|
| It's supposed to be a "worst case scenario" sort of test.
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| I have a Moto G4 and a sometimes patchy internet connection.
| This might be the prompt I need to upgrade!
| google234123 wrote:
| I think it has more to do with simulating 3g network (which
| is being decommissioned now)
| lelandfe wrote:
| The performance of the device is actually a huge factor
| for TTI specifically
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Let me ask every single web developer a straight-forward
| question.
|
| If huge tech companies like google, facebook, airbnb etc are
| unable to make fast websites... then why should we use their
| frameworks and tools?
|
| I really feel like the emperor has no clothes here and it's
| insane for smaller companies to try and ape them.
| forgotmyoldname wrote:
| > then why should we use their frameworks and tools?
|
| Because job postings demand X years experience in Y framework
| instead of looking for actual skills, and many investors look
| for hot things that are jumping on Z hip new tech buzzword and
| not all look at what they actually solve.
|
| Plus to a certain extent they can be used to get a project off
| the ground faster. Although at a certain point a good number of
| projects that are successfully taking off would benefit from a
| nice rewrite--but that's not as sexy and marketable as adding
| another new feature in that same time span.
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| Very naive to think these companies don't care about speed/perf
| if it truly affected their revenue
| rapind wrote:
| While I'm sure there's some portion of developers who are ready
| to jump to google and Facebook tools right away, I doubt it's a
| majority.
|
| There have been a lot of misses from these companies. Some big
| wins for sure, but it's definitely not a perfect record.
|
| I do think there are a lot of smart people working on hard
| problems (user engagement... not cancer) with large teams at
| these companies though. Which means they are bound to come up
| with some percentage of good solutions. I'm glad they share
| them even when they flop.
| wepple wrote:
| > If huge tech companies like google, facebook, airbnb etc are
| unable to make fast websites... then why should we use their
| frameworks and tools?
|
| You don't have to at all. Lots of folks do because "fast
| websites" is one requirement out of many to consider.
|
| What about secure? Stable? Reliable? Maintainable? Reusable?
|
| I personally build excessively lightweight and simple web UIs
| for my personal projects, but I'm not managing infra that >1bn
| people use daily and is literally used to answer "does my
| internet work?" because of its expected reliability.
| iKevinShah wrote:
| > It's insane for smaller companies to try and ape them
|
| In my cynical view, When you think about engineers as people
| who want to stay up to date with 'latest and greatest' so that
| they are not left behind in the market, the use of their
| frameworks makes sense. Also, the frameworks do solve very key
| problems in their own ways (and also avoid re-inventing the
| wheel).
|
| So the truth lies somewhere between the 2 sentences there.
| There's nothing which we can not achieve without frameworks
| however managing that solution is a pain. More so if one is
| working on a bigger team.
| gnz11 wrote:
| Their frameworks and tools also generally come with extensive
| documentation...which is quite rare in projects that are
| proprietary balls of mud written by a single programmer who
| left the company several years ago.
| DnDGrognard wrote:
| 500k *Sobs* and goes off to drown my sorrows with an early
| Christmas Negroni
| kevingadd wrote:
| I think the link is meant to be
| https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.co... -
| a perf report on the Google homepage. When I click the link from
| HN it pulls up a performance report on the performance report
| service (which is also bad.)
|
| It's fascinating that according to the report, someone on a Moto
| G4 would have to wait over 6 seconds for the google search page
| to be responsive so they could type in a query.
| Laforet wrote:
| I wonder how accurate are the results really, or maybe I wasn't
| interpreting the numbers correctly. Accessing Google.com from
| my Moto G7 Power (a phone about 30% faster than G4 in terms of
| CPU performance) shows no seconds long delay. In face it feels
| almost instant.
|
| On the other hand it seems to give a fair critique to other
| sites that are known to be bloated such as the one below.
|
| https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnzherald....
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Wonder if it's due to a warm cache. I never use Google (hence
| it won't have google.com cached) and accessing it from
| Firefox on my high-end Android S21 takes a few seconds to
| load via my NZ fibre connection. Certainty not instant.
| DuckDuckGo on the other hand loads nearly instantly (although
| it's probably a warm cache on my part). To be more fair I
| tried Bing (which I also never use) which seems to be on par
| with Google, I suspect due to Bing loading a photogenic but
| ultimately useless background image.
| kevingadd wrote:
| They simulate slow wireless data, which I suspect is the
| cause of the gap. It's certainly the case that a big % of the
| world's population has bad mobile data even if they do have a
| relatively fast smartphone.
| tomcam wrote:
| Appreciate that. Not sure how I managed to screw that up so
| royally.
| tomcam wrote:
| Update: it wasn't me!
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29670584
| tomcam wrote:
| dang informed me that HN stripped off the second half of the
| URL. It routinely distills them down to the canonical version.
| I feel slightly better about myself and dang restored it.
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if google serves different html based on
| location+ISP and browser agent etc. I.e if you're on a modern
| browser with a high-speed isp you might get a heavier page than
| if you're on dialup or mobile in 3rd world countries.
| rabbidruster wrote:
| Doing anything too complex there would be pretty surprising to
| me. if they are it seems they didn't do too good a job since
| the test is emulating a old phone that should probably get a
| simple/smaller page
| Gigachad wrote:
| They absolutely do serve legacy versions to old browses. I'm
| pretty sure you can still get a version with the black bar on
| the top.
| lelandfe wrote:
| There's a CSS media detection feature called `prefers-reduced-
| data` that may be graduating from a Chrome feature flag
| Soon(tm), although I'm not sure if Google is using that
| anywhere on their sites today.
|
| https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=105118...
| divbzero wrote:
| Comparing the Google home page against a few competitors --
| 1,326 KiB Bing https://www.bing.com/ 829 KiB
| Yahoo! https://www.yahoo.com/ 506 KiB Google
| https://www.google.com/ 358 KiB DuckDuckGo
| https://duckduckgo.com/ 8 KiB DuckDuckGo Lite
| https://lite.duckduckgo.com/
| merlinscholz wrote:
| 174 KiB (419 KiB without gzip/deflate)
| https://search.brave.com/
| usr1106 wrote:
| Oh, lite.duckduckgo.com is great on my somewhat underperforming
| old mobile. Wasn't aware of that. The URL could be more
| touchscreen friendy.
| authed wrote:
| Since they own duck.com, you wonder why l.duck.com doesn't
| redirect to the correct URL (or lite.duck.com).
| cblconfederate wrote:
| 377 kb Yandex
| Grakel wrote:
| I have started using Yandex for image search, it has all the
| features Google removed to keep from getting getting sued.
| Excellent results and great tools.
| rwky wrote:
| I didn't know lite.duckduckgo.com existed! It's amazing I've
| now set it to my default search engine on my phone.
| dpark wrote:
| Out of curiosity, how much of that Bing load is the lazy-loaded
| background image? I would guess that the rest of the page is
| very light but maybe I'm wrong.
|
| On my mobile device, Google _feels_ slow because they have to
| throw up a spinner for 2 seconds while they figure out what
| local news to share with me. Bing manages that seemingly
| instantly on on my device.
|
| For full disclosure, I'm a Microsoft employee. Not trying too
| shill for Bing. I've just been surprised how slow Google feels
| lately due to their (slowly) lazy-loaded content.
| divbzero wrote:
| I was looking at the mobile results that PageSpeed Insights
| reports by default. Bing on mobile uses ~170 KiB for the
| background image while Bing on desktop uses ~1,000 KiB for a
| higher resolution version of the same image.
| lazyjones wrote:
| So what is this 244KB JS taking 1300ms to execute on the
| simulated G4 actually doing? It contains mostly parts of the
| Closure Library (https://developers.google.com/closure/library/).
| prirun wrote:
| I had HashBackup's web site hosted at Google Sites for 10 years.
| The recent migration to Sites V2 looked really bad, so I redid it
| all in Asciidoc.
|
| I downloaded a static HTML-only version of the old site from
| Google and a cat of all the HTML files was 25.3MB. The new static
| site is only 1.7MB of HTML, with more than a third of that being
| the release log. The average HTML page size is 19K, whereas with
| Google V1, the average was 450K. And it's way easier to maintain
| now with a text editor and rsync vs pointing and clicking in a
| browser text window.
|
| The other major problem with the V2 Sites is that the HashBackup
| release log took 15 seconds to load. It didn't do that with V1
| Sites, so this was a new "enhancement". With the Asciidoc site it
| takes a little over a second. Google has a Report Migration
| Issues button, but of course they never responded to anything I
| sent.
| trasz wrote:
| Google services are crap, what a surprise.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I think page load times like this are like 30fps vs 60fps in
| console gaming.
|
| 60fps is perceptibly better and for many of us, me included, is
| usually required or it is palpably uncomfortable.
|
| But for the overwhelming majority of people: they don't notice or
| don't care.
| worik wrote:
| How the mighty have fallen, how far, how sad.
|
| Once the Google home page was a master class in good design.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Has it ever been? The page used center tags last I checked and
| a mountain of spec violating stuff but technically works on all
| browsers.
|
| Using the google page as a reference would be like ripping a
| few note pages from a physicists workbook as an example to
| learn math.
| kerneloftruth wrote:
| Sergey used to demand that the payload of the home page be
| tiny (I think it had to be < 100K, if I recall -- or maybe
| even smaller). That was part of the appeal of the simple
| search page, nothing but a logo and a search field. Now it
| looks minimal-ish, but contains a bunch of crap that serves
| only Google, not the end-user.
| onion-soup wrote:
| 500K what?
| random314 wrote:
| Pretty certain that Google will lower the payload on expensive
| connections. These things get A/B tested to death.
| jraph wrote:
| Which is huge for a page that displays an input box and a button
| to send the query, which requires a few _bytes_. Add a few KBs
| for the suggestions.
|
| These few bytes is actually mostly what you get when browsing
| Google with w3m. By the way I just noticed they now have a cookie
| banner _that works in w3m without JS_? Now this is some zeal!
| Gigachad wrote:
| None of us know what the google home page is actually doing. It
| reminds me of the gnu coreutils where the program "true" which
| simply returns a successful status code on run, is hundreds of
| lines in C. I could do that in 3 lines! Except I'd be ignoring
| all of the weird use cases and architectures that the coreutils
| have to support.
|
| The google homepage works on a _remarkable_ number of devices.
| You could install a fresh copy of windows XP and the built in
| IE works flawlessly with google while almost any other page is
| broken.
|
| And also forgetting all the analytics they need. I know its a
| dirty word on HN but this kind of stuff is essential for a
| product of this scale. Throw in some extras for accessibility,
| etc.
| josefx wrote:
| If I remember correctly GNU true violates various specs
| because it does too much (help and version) when it should
| ignore all parameters. As you say a valid implementation can
| be done in three lines.
| Gigachad wrote:
| The code is made way more complex by combining both true
| and false in to the same binary and then using the output
| binary name to decide which return code it outputs.
|
| It seems overly complex to me but I have no idea what kind
| of requirements they have.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > gnu coreutils where the program "true" which simply returns
| a successful status code on run, is hundreds of lines in C
|
| Looking at [0] it seems to be 80 lines, as it's doing
| argument-parsing (for _--help_ and _--version_ ) and stream-
| management.
|
| [0] https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/tr
| ue....
| ciphol wrote:
| As soon as you start typing your search, it starts making
| search suggestions. That's a complex feature which must involve
| lots of code.
|
| Also, the search page is not just the search page, it's the
| portal for all Google services and has corresponding links and
| menus at the top.
|
| So we should expect the page to be much bigger than "a few
| bytes", and it is.
| avodonosov wrote:
| The page suggests to remove unused javascript.
|
| In the past I measured google search (and some other web apps),
| only around a 1/3 of the javascript loaded was actually used,
| despite, I suppose, google's javascript is optimized by closure
| compiler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoFleV1ybxE
|
| Javascript could probably benefit from an optimisation like this:
| https://github.com/avodonosov/pocl
| mro_name wrote:
| Website obesity crisis progressing.
| http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
|
| A webform requiring truckloads of stuff and gear.
| rkagerer wrote:
| From a company like Google, this is shameful. I don't think it
| ever would have happened under Marissa Mayer's watch.
| siva7 wrote:
| Am i missing some irony?
| mkl wrote:
| No, just history:
| https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/what-comes-next-
| in-t...
|
| (linked by sadjad upthread)
| CrazyCatDog wrote:
| Agreed, and SO thrilled that Yahoo hasn't changed one iota
| since her departure--imagine what's the world would be like
| today has she been at lycos or alta vista!
| [deleted]
| iamleppert wrote:
| Performance only matters if you are in competition with others.
| You can win a marathon by crawling if you're the only
| participant.
|
| Who are Google's serious competitors? Sure there are other search
| engines but I'd argue that none are serious or even marginal
| threats.
|
| People will tolerate sub-optimal experiences if they perceive
| they don't have any option; just ask anyone who has stood in line
| at the DMV.
|
| The first sign of a monopoly is a rapid performance degradation
| which can't be explained by economics of scale and which did not
| exist in prior versions of a product. Free market forces and
| incentive structures no longer apply to monopolies, which is why
| many large corporations can get away with sloppy work and
| treating their customers poorly, but do not see much if any
| consequences. Behavior that would have been disastrous in a
| startup is tolerable in a large corporation operating as a
| monopoly.
|
| A product owner or dev at Google would be committing career
| suicide if they started to care about performance at this point,
| because that would not result in any appreciable changes or
| outcomes consistent with the incentive structures at Google.
| nfm wrote:
| > Performance only matters if you are in competition with
| others.
|
| I'm not sure that's right. There's a strong link between
| performance and repeat usage. Even in the complete absence of
| competition, Google search being fast could result in more
| searches per user being conducted and more revenue as a result.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| > Who are Google's serious competitors? Sure there are other
| search engines but I'd argue that none are serious or even
| marginal threats.
|
| Google seems to disagree given how much they shell out to be
| default search engine on different devices and browsers
| howdydoo wrote:
| Google does this for the same reason coca cola advertises
| during the super bowl. It's not because they're afraid of
| competitors. It's to reinforce their position in your mind as
| a household name.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I have never felt like google search was slow. So I would say
| they are within the range of acceptable times.
| charwalker wrote:
| The DMV is motivated to be efficient because it's the only shop
| in town and people who have to use it will make noise when it
| sucks. But they may not pursue efficiency because they are the
| only shop in town unless pressured.
|
| In Oregon they seem to care. I've never spent more than 25
| minutes in line and often been out the door in under 20 minutes
| even with complex forms to complete. They often have someone
| near the door to check your needs and get you the right form as
| you take a number so when you get to the window you're set to
| submit your form, pay any fees, then leave vs sitting down
| again to start the form or something. Oregon has it figured
| out.
|
| Washington though, they have private offices running all
| aspects in separate locations ex emissions test up the highway,
| licensing across town, and vehicle registration down south. It
| took me over 3 hours to register my car when I moved and the
| DMVs there only proceeded to be worse.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >Performance only matters if you are in competition with
| others. //
|
| Or if 'resources' are limited, like carbon emissions.
| moonchrome wrote:
| I would say performance only matters if it's debilitating,
| outside of that it's something that few notice even fewer care
| about. Also I guess it can impact first impressions.
|
| But once I'm using a tool for something unless the performance
| is actually preventing me from using it - I'm not going to
| bother switching. So no need for a monopoly - if your
| competitive edge is that you are faster than competition,
| unless the competition is dog slow it's not a selling point to
| me.
|
| Eg. I won't look for VS code alternatives just because it's
| electron based and the competition has higher performance,
| vscode is fast enough for me. I will switch to a different
| compiler or even language if it shaves % off buid time that
| makes the iteration meaningfuly faster, or the tooling
| addresses pain points.
| alpb wrote:
| > People will tolerate sub-optimal experiences
|
| Implying the Google Search homepage loading experience is sub-
| optimal? Chrome starts loading it before you finish typing
| google.com on your keyboard.
| hetspookjee wrote:
| I think most products from Microsoft are relevant in this
| context. Teams is horrible and every week another thing
| breaks. Almost every page by Microsoft takes more than 10
| seconds to load on my side. Yet everyone including me uses
| it.
| pas wrote:
| captive audience!
| iamleppert wrote:
| I don't think the actual experience is sub optimal. It's not
| quite there yet, but give it another 10 years and it might
| be.
|
| However, from a pure engineering perspective, I think most
| people agree that the page weight has increased at a rate
| that is unjustified considering the core features and
| functionality have been relatively static. So why the bloat?
| Engineers can tell of course. The margins of acceptance have
| gone way up thanks to faster devices and connections, but
| that still doesn't explain why they don't seem to care to
| optimize anymore. In optimize, I'm talking about it from a
| pure engineering perspective: what is the minimum amount of
| data needed to do the job of displaying a list of search
| results? Some people have forgotten that a list and some
| simple formatting is all there is to it. It's not a web app,
| it has minimal interactivity, and relatively basic features.
| The fact that it has ballooned to 500k just proves that even
| Google is not immune. Maybe more resistant than other giant
| tech companies who's software just keeps getting larger but
| not immune.
|
| Remember that code is data too. 500k isn't a lot in today's
| world but multiply that by how much traffic they receive and
| it is. I'm not saying Google search isn't a well designed
| product that doesn't work well, but from a pure first
| principles perspective it does seem quite bloated based upon
| what it used to be.
| majani wrote:
| I'm convinced that Google's massive push into NLP has a lot
| to do with this shift. Their next chapter is turning the
| search engine into a smart assistant and they seem to be
| willing to sacrifice quality in the short term for this
| broader goal
| digdigdag wrote:
| Does it matter anymore? I haven't used the Google homepage to use
| Google in years. It's integrated into the search bar now...
|
| Also, the Google home page loads dependent services (single sign
| on, lots of JS for XHR searches, etc.)
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