The Google we lost.

Paul Anthony
Jul 20, 2017 · 4 min read

Way back when Google was cool, Altavista Yahoo and Ask Jeeves were sluggish as hell in comparison. Those heady days of 56k dialup when every second you spent hogging your parents phone line mattered.

With the explosion of mobile web access in LEDCs, connectivity and bandwidth still matters. Even in the UK broadband access is still no where near 100%. The new 56K dialup is 3G and 4G connections on the move and speed is still an issue for many people trying to access services on the web. 70% of cellular network connections globally will occur at 3G or slower within two years.

Which is why the following announcement from Google is so surprising.

When you start with a product designed as stark perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise; the natural evolution of the Google homepage has been to add more and more. I am reminded of Brad Frosts talk on Death to Bullshit. Increasingly I find myself frustrated at the elements on Google which are completely unneccessary to my user journey. Whilst most changes have been incremental, this one is about to take a leap.

The Google Doodle started life as a single static image doodle of a stick figure man to represent the Burning Man Festival. It was a simple out of office message. That evolved into a regular feature which was swapped out to highlight the birthday of an important person or an interesting event. It is now often a complete interactive javascript application in its own right. Case in point Pacman, Cricket or DoodleFruit. Oh and you’ve read about the bugs this sort of thing can introduce?

Maybe I’m just a fun sponge but what price in terms of bandwidth and time did the web pay for such experiences?

How many people trying to find what they wanted were either distracted or slowed down? Slowly over time more and more things got added to the homepage rather than ruthlessly rejecting additions. With great power comes great responsibility and I wish that responsibility said ‘No’ more often. As companies grow this is often the case. More bloat chasing more markets leaving gaps for others to exploit.

It’s easy to forget the fundamental principles of simplicity when everyone is looking at you to appear innovative or fun. Marketing teams often collides with developers trying to squeeze extra cool into products to get traction and the balance between great user experience and finding new audiences is often a difficult line to walk.

Still, speed is one of those features that is easy to get complacent about and unfortunately it is often the silent victim of business demands.

When your brand is as strong as Google and you are in a market leading position, its easy to ignore the principles and lessons that helped to get you there. If anything this underlines Google’s increasingly obvious pendulum swing towards business needs vs user needs. Do they really care that this change wont be as fast as previous? Probably not.

Google obviously doesn’t feel that this move to make their homepage contextually richer is a risk to them. Meanwhile whilst they are busy chasing Facebook to become a personalised destination, Duckduckgo are biting at their heels in terms of page speed — and this is before they have introduced the new feed.

Behind the scenes the metrics and tracking for this particular feature are going to be explored at length but metrics only get you so far. Are more searches still more important than engagement for Google? Are they willing to take a slight revenue / search volume hit in pursuit of fighting a bigger threat? We have long since lost the Google we used to know. Make no mistake; the introduction of something so fundamentally at odds with the original guiding principles of simplicity and speed suggests a shift in goals. The more accurate the personalised experience the better chance of turning Google into the first place users go vs Facebook.

With the amount of data they have at their fingertips, my guess is this is the thin edge of the wedge into hyper personalisation of the content we see; despite Techcrunch’s insistance that it has nothing to do with social. It may also go some way to restoring some of the referral traffic that publishers have seen coming from Facebook. With the introduction of a news feed Google have taken another roll of the social dice and added another layer of bullshit to wade past in providing results. For me and others I respect it is the epitome of the Google we lost.

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