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Opinion: Google Killed the Internet

Googles Page Speed “Optimizations” Make Learning Difficult

If you, as I, grew up during the web bubble we call the 90’s and were interested at all in web development my guess is that you probably didn’t learn most of your skills from a book or a class.  You probably would run across a site that had something cool on it and ponder  “Oh my, how does that work?” right click, view source, and after some digging were enlightened.  I’m certain this is how most of my generation learned their HTML/CSS/JavaScript skills, it is certainly how I did, and often how I continue though now I have tools to help me even further pick apart a page such as Firebug.

Where I take issue is CSS and more so JavaScript minifying. Google wants essentially all your CSS and JavaScript minified. This lessens the bandwidth Google has to use, but in the process makes the source complete illegible to a human being.

I personally, on this site, lose a fair deal of my Page Speed Score because “Minifying http://donatstudios.com/js/general.js could save 311B (23% reduction)”.   My general.js file is at the moment 1.3 kilobytes; I am losing points off my Page Speed score over 311 bytes simply because I want my source code to remain legible.  Can we please get a sanity check on this, Google.  311 bytes is not going to kill you.

SEO is Destroying the Spirit of the Internet

Back in the hay day of Geocities if you did a search you were likely to get a few if not mostly amateur pages in your results.  They weren’t usually well designed perse, but they were often very useful. I can recall of the top of my head a few instances where they saved the day.

In steps “Search Engine Optimization”. Corporations are gaga over paying people to dig through content, study their keywords, rewording things and saturating content with keywords (often at the cost of readability I might add).

Now let’s compare that to an amateur, who’s content is designed for human consumption rather than googles and now has no way to keep up in this arms race. There usually isn’t the money nor the desire to pump into SEO and content development.  They just want to provide some useful information to the public.  These kinds of sites are becoming increasingly hard to find, with corporate sites taking the lion’s share of the hits.

Frankly I believe a lot of great content is getting missed thanks to SEO.  The spirit of the internet years ago was driven around the fact that anyone could write something, and have it read by millions of people.  While this is still the case, I find it far less likely now than it has been in previous years.  I don’t think there is a solution; I just find the corporatization of the web a little disheartening.


Comment by: Elizabeth on

Elizabeth GravatarPerhaps Google just doesn't want people to "steal" or even use their code for a framework. Although I do not see the point in making the code illegible as people (including you) want to learn how to program (and two, you get very, very angry).

Take this from somebody who can find just about anything in the very basic, basic, basic of HTML code if I know where to look. (I love when colors change and I love knowing why.)

Comment by: Matt / A Concerned Web Developer on

Matt / A Concerned Web Developer GravatarAlthough for your site it may not be worth it to get those extra bytes shaved off, for major websites, minifying is a big deal. I work at a university, doing web development for a living. For one small site, the raw javascript is 243.01 KB. Compressed, this turns into 125.31 KB. That's 118 KB that is saved, EACH request. The website gets over 1000 hits every day. Which means that in one day, we save 115 MB of bandwidth, and 41 GB of bandwidth every year.

It also isn't always about the host either. Yes, saving bandwidth costs is great, but it is also about the client. The page will load faster for a client when they have to download smaller sized files as opposed to larger ones. And the main kicker here is that most people visiting a site don't care about the source they are downloading. They want to see the website as it is presented.

Also, kicking google about it is dumb. Google doesn't benefit from you minifying at all, unless you host your site with them. And PageSpeed rankings are just recommendations. You can ignore them if you want to.

Your argument against minifying CSS is just dumb. If you want to see how they did something, launch firebug and you can see the unminified styles applied to each element as they are processed by the browser. Minified or unminified shows the exact same thing.

Yes, javascript is more difficult, since you can't do the same thing. However, there are applications that will "unminify" it for you. You will lose comments and meaningful variables, however you should still be able to understand the gist of how it works.

As far as SEO goes, is it so hard to put in a few extra lines into your header to make life easier on the robots? If you have a robots.txt file, and valid meta data for keywords and content on your homepage, that's most of what search engines care about. Will you lose a few rankings because Company X did a few more things? Yes. However page rankings are also based on hits. So they will climb the rankings simply because they get more hits.

Comment by: Jesse Donat on

Jesse Donat Gravatar@Matt

I ran a test right now - a minified version of jQuery 1.4.4 is 82 kilobytes, the non-minified version is 184 kilobytes which appears substantial BUT when gziped for example by Apaches mod_deflate, the compressed minified version is 27 kilobytes whereas the gziped readable version is 52 kilobytes. A much smaller savings. I can almost guarantee you there would be a similar reduction on your server if you measured properly. The same thing goes for CSS.

My argument was not that it made learning impossible - it is that it made learning difficult. You and I know how to use Firebug, but someone just getting into web development is not going to know the tools of the trade. My beef was essentially that it raises the bar of entry. That is to say when I was learning, I saw a JS file and sat and pondered it. I can't imagine a kid on the other hand, knowing nothing about programming thinking "hmm, this JS file is compressed, I should decompress it" they're not going to know what compression is, and instead are going to presume that programming is Voodoo.
"Also, kicking google about it is dumb. Google doesn't benefit from you minifying at all, unless you host your site with them. And PageSpeed rankings are just recommendations. You can ignore them if you want to."
  1. Google essentially downloads the entire internet. Google pays for bandwidth just like you or I. Google benefits from telling people to make their pages smaller, the same way you benefit from serving less bandwidth
  2. This site and my "portfolio" are my personal work. I have a full time job as a web developer managing many many e-commerce sites many of which get hundreds of thousands of hits a day. I cannot ignore page rank, it has a serious effect on my day to day.
Lastly, my other argument is not against SEO from a developer standpoint - it is against paid SEO is killing the spirit of the internet, in that essentially the more money you are willing to put down on things like saturation and content generation, the better you will rank on google, but the less useful your content will actually be on users. robots.txt files hardly qualify as "SEO"

Comment by: Matt on

Matt GravatarIf someone is just getting into programming, they don't need to be looking for how the big sites do fancy thing. They need to be learning the basics of the language, and there are a lot more efficient ways than trying to decipher someone else's code.

Yes, gzipping drastically decreases the amount of data passed to the client, but in your example, that is still 30 KB for ONE file that was lost. Multiply that across hundreds of users and it still starts to add up. And I again reiterate that there is no reason not to minify CSS. Ever.

While it is true that Google downloads the entire internet, their expense is the same as a normal user. IE: they have to download your content the same as an end user would. So any benefits you are giving google, you are giving your clients.

Page Rank and Pagespeed are entirely different. Pagespeed are suggestions that Google has mapped out as recommendations to make your site faster. Yahoo offers a similar tool called YSlow. It itself has no effect on Page Ranking. The consequences of NOT following the advise may however. There are many top ranking sites that don't have a perfect score on PageSpeed or YSlow.

I agree with you on random keyword saturation. However, if done correctly, it just meshes seamlessly with the content, and has the added benefit of increasing search engine hits for keywords. And robots.txt qualifies as much in SEO as keywording. If you open your entire site to google, you will get marked down if any of your pages have duplicate content. Therefore it is better to restrict bots to only a few pages, and have those pages bring interested users to the other pages.

As far as paid vs unpaid SEO, that argument is irrelevant. What you are arguing against is incompetent SEO by companies trying to get on the Web2.0 bandwagon and make a quick buck. If done correctly, none of your points stand valid.

And what is this "spirit of the internet" you keep referring to. The internet is an evolving entity that changes as its audience and authors do. Since corporations are starting to invest a lot of time and money into their web presence, parts of the internet are becoming commercialized and industrialized. If you don't like that part, move to a different part. There was a time when most of the internet consisted of bright colors and moving graphics (Browser Wars Era). That passed, and this may too.

Comment by: Fred on

Fred GravatarHow does Google download the entire internet?