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What if Google Had to Design For Google?

Posted by Zonk on from the horse-of-a-different-color dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Web developers increasingly grow weary of having to put so much effort into designing their sites according to the whims of the Google search engine. When the most important thing is 'getting indexed' it is increasingly difficult for web site designers to offer the simple, uncluttered user experience they'd like to. Reminiscent of the famed what if Microsoft designed the iPod box here is a humorous look at what would happen to that famed, clean, uncluttered look if Google had to design for the Google Search Engine."

50 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. This guy clearly doesn't know HTML by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If Google were really designing for Google, they'd use CSS rather than font tags, and they'd wrap a big H1 around the Google logo (with appropriate alt and title tags). They'd also use lists for the... lists.

    1. Re:This guy clearly doesn't know HTML by VGPowerlord · · Score: 3, Informative

      title is also an attribute and that's probably the sense he meant it in, considering that it was paired with alt.

      --
      GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
    2. Re:This guy clearly doesn't know HTML by Bogtha · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yes, that's definitely the sense he meant it in. I thought my irony was obvious, but I guess not.

      The problem with mislabelling everything remotely related to the web as a "tag" is that it dilutes the meaning of the term to be practically useless. How is somebody who refers to everything as a "tag" supposed to distinguish between the title attribute and the <title> element type? More importantly, how is a newbie supposed to figure out in what sense it is meant when they are told to use "appropriate title tags"? This kind of stupid laziness only makes it more difficult for people to learn how to do things right and keeps people at the "copy code, bash it until it works or ask for help" stage.

      --
      Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
    3. Re:This guy clearly doesn't know HTML by grahamd0 · · Score: 2, Funny

      And that keeps the rest of us working! Do you think I'd make any money building web sites if I went around speaking clearly and telling everyone how easy it is??

      [WARNING: This preceding content may contain sarcasm. Use with caution.]

    4. Re:This guy clearly doesn't know HTML by cayenne8 · · Score: 2, Funny
      "...keeps people at the "copy code, bash it until it works or ask for help" stage."

      Wait...are you insinuating that there is some other method of coding things?????

      --
      Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
  2. Brilliant, but... by gbulmash · · Score: 3, Informative

    He only did the surface optimization. Missed keywords and description in the headers, didn't bold enough stuff, and didn't use H1 and H2 enough. :-)

    --
    Start a happiness pandemic
    1. Re:Brilliant, but... by gt_mattex · · Score: 3, Informative

      Also forgot a sitemap, alt text image tags and breaking the backend down structurally so all of your *important* text is at the top.

      --
      "No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture." - Learned Hand
    2. Re:Brilliant, but... by FinchWorld · · Score: 5, Funny

      I think this is closer to the truth.

      --
      "I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
    3. Re:Brilliant, but... by Hatta · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I hate meta tags. If I search for a string, I want that literal string to be in the results.

      --
      Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
    4. Re:Brilliant, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Of course, Google don't design for Google, hence they aren't even on the first page of results for a "search engine" Google search. I guess they went down the route of designing a good product without caring about what search engines want.

    5. Re:Brilliant, but... by Jellybob · · Score: 3, Informative

      In that case you'll be glad to hear that last I checked they are given almost no weight by search engines - many years of keyword stuffing in meta tags has made their content completely worthless.

    6. Re:Brilliant, but... by ShieldW0lf · · Score: 2, Insightful

      There are two ways you can look at your site.

      1) My site is just like everyone elses. I want it to be on top though. I need to figure out clever ways to make my site perfect for Google, then they will give me all the traffic.

      2) My site is fucking amazing. I dotted all the I's and crossed all the T's, and it's just right. I told some people, and they told some people, and it's still growing. Those search engine guys sure are using a lot of traffic with their robots. They're lucky I let them spider my site, but it's an open Internet... I guess it comes with success.

      Different people are after different goals, but I figure, it's not my responsibility to pay attention to Google and do their job for them. It's my responsibility to build something that is excellent and pays attention to the user.

      If you build excellence, and Google doesn't find a way to index it, they become less relevant, not the other way around.

      You can waste a lot of time that could have been better spent elsewhere trying to conform to other peoples idea of how to build for search engines and end up with a site that doesn't serve the user as well as it did before you started.

      --
      -1 Uncomfortable Truth
  3. The real question is... by ivan256 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If people designed their websites to serve their users instead of GoogleBot, would it matter that their pagerank was a little lower?

    1. Re:The real question is... by multipartmixed · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Would they HAVE any users if their PageRank was a little lower?

      Or - if a web page is put up on a server, and nobody is there to surf it -- does it make an impression?

      --

      Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
    2. Re:The real question is... by dryueh · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You mean like this?

    3. Re:The real question is... by DragonWriter · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Would they HAVE any users if their PageRank was a little lower?
      Sure. There are otherwise to get business other than free results in Google indexes. Advertising, word of mouth, etc. All designing for GoogleBot is is a way of spending money on advertising -- only, instead of paying the palce you want the advertising placed, you are paying a web designer, etc., who sells their services based on their claimed ability to get you ranked well in search results.
    4. Re:The real question is... by tknd · · Score: 3, Interesting

      There are other techniques for promoting a website other than using Google. One way is through word of mouth. For example there is no way I would have found slashdot because of a Google search. Rather, I found slashdot because I saw a friend browsing the site. Word of mouth is actually better than Google because it builds a trust relationship. For example if you go on Google expecting to buy something, how do you know that you should trust the first, second, or even third result on the page? You don't. But if a friend recommends a website to you because of their experience with it, you immediately have more trust in that website compared to some other random website.

      But as geeks, let's ignore that. After all, it involves socializing and dealing with people. Eww. Give me my Google exploits.

    5. Re:The real question is... by garett_spencley · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The advantage of search engine rankings over word of mouth is:

      1) Relatively instant results if you know what you're doing.
      2) (and perhaps most important) the results are MEASURABLE. You can see exactly how many users are hitting your site each day from search engines, you can see what they're searching for when they find your site, how your site ranks and you can use that information to further fine-tune.

      However, the drawbacks with search engine traffic is that once you hit the #1 listing for a targeted keyword your traffic becomes fixed. So obviously it is also important to focus on other traffic sources such as word-of-mouth, returning visitors, paid advertising etc. What any commercial site wants to do is snowball and that only occurs with the type of traffic that you can only get for free (returning visitors and word of mouth advertising etc.). The issue is that those types of "free compounding" traffic accumulates a LOT slower if you don't get the instant stuff. Of course you can also replace search engine traffic with paid advertising. But search engine optimization is often times free (assuming you know what you're doing) or a one-time cost (pay to learn it and then be on your way... "give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach a man to fish...").

      The other drawback is that if you're relying on search engine traffic then you are staking your business entirely in the hands of another business who has it's own interests. I've had excellent first page rankings getting thousands of unique hits from google every single day only to have it all snatched away one night without warning. Then a few months later it all comes back. For reasons that only google knows. I would not invest in any business that depends on search engine traffic alone.

      In short, any webmaster who knows what he's doing understands that search engine traffic is not the be-all/end-all but also does not dismiss it entirely. Search Engine traffic is gold when you have it but if you rely on it you can get burned very easily. Not to mention, it has a peak and once you reach it how do you continue to grow ? The answer is in the other forms of traffic. But you'll find that without some kind of quality traffic to start with, it's rather difficult to spread via word-of-mouth.

    6. Re:The real question is... by madprof · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Very good point and I understood you too. But it's a fact that Google got popular because they seriously improved search performance at a time when it was pretty dire.

      Google is also, by dint of being a search engine, always going to be wildly popular compared to other types of site.

      But you're right anyway - websites should try to serve their visitors better and not GoogleBot. The fact is all search engine bots try to think like a human being and thus optimising for humans is a good plan anyhow.

    7. Re:The real question is... by HarvardAce · · Score: 2, Insightful

      For example if you go on Google expecting to buy something, how do you know that you should trust the first, second, or even third result on the page? You don't. Actually, you probably can know that you shouldn't trust them...companies that spend all their money trying to get a high pagerank often are the ones you would want to otherwise avoid. There are obvious exceptions to this rule, but you can usually tell right away if the high pagerank is due to the pagerank algorithm working well or when it's being exploited. When it's exploited, that's when it's time to move along.
      --
      Note to self: Stop putting jokes in my insightful comments so I can get something other than +1 Funny!
  4. Must really be bad.... by magarity · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...my company's webfilter says I can't be shown it because the site has fallen in the "tasteless and/or gross" category.

    1. Re:Must really be bad.... by n+dot+l · · Score: 2, Funny

      ...my company's webfilter says I can't be shown it because the site has fallen in the "tasteless and/or gross" category. You don't happen to work for Google, do you? :)
    2. Re:Must really be bad.... by I'm+Don+Giovanni · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The difference being that the MS iPod video was made by MS itself; Microsft was calling itself out in order to improve their packaging of future products (and Microsoft has indeed used simple uncluttered packaging since then). Google is way too arrogant to do anything like that.

      --
      -- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
  5. NSFW Links in article. by RandoX · · Score: 3, Informative

    FYI.

    1. Re:NSFW Links in article. by WrongMonkey · · Score: 2, Funny

      HAHA, did you actually click on the "Hillary Dildo Bushwacker" link?

  6. Should read: What if Google was a useless site... by skiingyac · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...and had to design for Google?

    Lets see... counter examples... how about searching Google for the word "shipping". What do you know, UPS and Fedex are #1 and #2, and their front pages aren't a mess of useless, Google-pleasing crap. Maybe because they are real businesses and aren't pandering some direct ship junk or get rich quick scheme.

  7. If nothing else... by Arathon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...this article(?) was helpful in explaining to me why so many sites *do* look as disgusting as all that.

    It was pretty hilarious, too.

    Unfortunately, this gives me one more reason to be semi-disturbed by Google's obvious dominance in the web-o-sphere... ...as evidenced by my email address, for one.

    1. Re:If nothing else... by mstahl · · Score: 5, Informative

      As a web developer, I can honestly say that my arch nemesis in any workplace is always the search engine optimization "expert". I have had to do so many stupid things because of those idiots it's insanity. I've actually written a couple of Daily WTFs about SEO folk.

      The truth of the matter is that if you bother to play by the rules, Google will index your site just fine and if your site is popular you will end up high in the page rankings. If you want to become more popular through your page rank, you can always buy keywords, too. It's a really simple, non-mysterious process, but people get caught up and obsess about it and start paying consultants to torment their web designers and developers for no obvious gain.

      ( Interestingly enough, the company that had the SEO guy who didn't know his ass from his elbow was pretty much the only business doing what they did, was a Fortune 50 company, and absolutely refused to use metadata in their web site; instead of metadata they opted for super ridiculously long URLs. )

    2. Re:If nothing else... by R_Dorothy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It's funny because it's true.

      I have to sit through a monthly meeting with our SEO consultants reminding them why we aren't making out site look like the end product of that demo and that the technical reasons for not doing certain things haven't miraculously changed since last month.

      --
      Stupid flounders!
    3. Re:If nothing else... by GeoSanDiego · · Score: 5, Funny

      Wouldn't a surefire way to find the best Search Engine Optimizer be to google "Search Engine Optimization" and pick the first rank ?

    4. Re:If nothing else... by jvolk · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I can see your point. I used to be that SEO guy myself - and there was a lot of sleaze. I like to think I was one of the "good guys" though.

      Here's the rub: most people (even educated ones) don't know those basic "rules" you are talking about. Good content? Foster an active community? Invest in your site? Amazingly, these are the things I advocated and the things people didn't know. I've had quite a bit of success with that method.

      Oh, and making sure your keywords are on the page does wonders too...you'd be surprised how often people forget to use the terms people search for.

  8. the final product link by us7892 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The last page of this dude's site.

    http://www.meangene.com/google/google7.html

    Hey, it doesn't look half bad. I thought it would be much worse.
    How about a greater level of hyperbole...

    1. Re:the final product link by MontyApollo · · Score: 4, Funny

      It actually reminded me somewhat of Yahoo's page, but without all the advertising.

  9. Does it remind you of another search engine? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now it looks like Yahoo. Perhaps Yahoo is trying really hard to remain relevant.

  10. Re:Should read: What if Google was a useless site. by Lost+my+low+ID+nick · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Exactly. The only people I hear constantly bickering about Googles metrics and pagerank, are those who have sites that no one would miss if they were gone tomorrow. If you really put social networking spam links on your page to up your pagerank, you're just an attention whore. That's not bad per se in a attention economy, but don't complain if I just laugh in your face if bad bad evil google sorts your petty site to the bottom of search results for "witty blog". Create something unique, needed. Like, say, a good search engine.

  11. Re:Should read: What if Google was a useless site. by tendrousbeastie · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What about the millions of small businesses who have a legitimate product to sell in a competitive market? Fedex and UPS would be at the top of Google's list if their page was nothing but a white sheet with their phone number in the corner, but small company must genuinely worry about every little increase in the page ranking.

  12. Re:Should read: What if Google was a useless site. by moderatorrater · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Traffic to a site is a major factor in determining its relevance on the Google results. That's exactly his point. There are enough legitimate means to get people to your site and get noticed without being a google attention whore that if you can't get the traffic through other means, you don't deserve it. If you're a good shipping company, you don't need to be linked to on digg and you definitely don't need to do link farming.
  13. Underscores is not SEO URL by sobolwolf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    http://www.meangene.com/google/ google_internet_search.html

    Well not to be an ass, but just in case people get the wrong idea about how to do a seo url, one needs to know that:

    Google sees hyphens as dividers in URLs and body text, and ignores underscores (underscore is not considered as a divider by Google).

  14. Actually, I'm not sure that stuff would help them. by jonadab · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You can't believe everything SEO consultants tell you. I'm not convinced all that garbage would really significantly improve their indexing. Indeed, I tend to think some of that stuff would actively *hurt* their relevancy ranking, especially the link-farm malarke -- I mean, seriously, linkshare? That just screams, "Our site doesn't have any actual content to make it relevant, so we're swapping links with other irrelevant sites so that we can pool our irrelevance and be obscure together!"

    The best way to improve your ranking is to put interesting content on your site that people will want to look at, link to, tell each other about, and so forth. (Of course, what counts as "interesting" depends heavily on your target demographic.) The second best way is to make sure the search engine can actually read and index your content (that it's not, for instance, just a bunch of images without meaningful alt attributes).

    Crosslinking from one part of your site to another can help, but Google *does* do that -- their main web search links to the image search, to the video search, to the news search, and so forth. And vice versa.

    --
    Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
  15. looks like iGoogle by nikqu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The last page looks like iGoogle to me.

  16. That's because by Rix · · Score: 2, Insightful

    99.999% of small businesses are 100% irrelevant. That they don't show up easily on Google means it's working.

    You know what does make your small business show up easily on Google, even if you're totally fucking useless? Buying a goddamn advertisement!

    Problem fucking solved.

    1. Re:That's because by Mattintosh · · Score: 3, Informative

      Your rude manner aside, you're absolutely right.

      Why should I care about Joe's HVAC Repair in B.F., South Carolina? I don't live in SC, much less that particular part of SC. In fact, I've never been to SC. So why should I (or anyone else not in the area) care about Joe's HVAC Repair? 99.999% of small businesses are 100% irrelevant. Only the 0.001% that are near me and pertain to my search are relevant. Google Local was great for this, and integrating it with Google Maps has made it even better. If you want your business to be found by Google 100% of the time, register it with Google Maps as a local business. It's even free.

    2. Re:That's because by Knara · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Then they need to be spending money getting the word out.

      Become relevant, then get higher page rank as a result. Trying to do it the other way around is what spawned this sort of nonsense in the first place.

  17. They already do. by Egdiroh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Google already does code for google. They're the first hit.

    Seriously though, this article depresses me. The unspoken sentiment is that typical websites can't survive without google. Which implies that typical websites can't survive on word of mouth, aggregator sites, and features highlighting them on good websites. I can't think of a single site that I found through google. I use google to search large sites, go to sites with awkward URLs, or find one time use references. But apparently the good sites that can survive on word of mouth are not typical any more.

    It really saddens me because it reminds me of TV. Shows that can that do well via word of mouth get canceled or messed with before the audience peeks, and many of the shows that succeed do so because they are they slightly appeal to many demographics rather then being really well received by a few. What happens when the start up costs for websites go up and you need substantial ads from the get go, will there be any new great sites, that aren't flukes.

    In the end I don't think sites should be designed to optimize page rank, except for maybe online retailers that compete with other online retailers. If your site is good people will link to it and praise it and it's page rank will soar.

  18. WTH? by MBHkewl · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Am I missing something here?!
    What designers are you talking about that are trying to do simple pages for their users????

    From what I'm seeing so far, everybody's going for Flash-based websites, with no text to search around a page, and un-indexable pages, because of the embedded crap of Flash! And if it's not Flash, it's ActiveX From Hell. And on top of that mess, they still code for IE6, breaking almost every web-standard, and knocking on the gates of Hell!

    All you seem to be focusing on is linking, and that's not how indexing gets done; Meta tags, content, image titles, ALT text.

    Who ever wrote that page is clearly an idiot & has no clue how to design a website with a simple look & have ANY Search Engine Bot get it indexed.

    YOU FAIL!

    --
    Mod points are a dangerous tool. Abuse them wisely.
    1. Re:WTH? by Stormx2 · · Score: 2, Informative
      Your post would be completely accurate a few years ago. Back then, flash was new and shiny and everyone wanted a piece of the cake. Of course usability suffered, but back then it was the trend. Today's accessibility trend moves away from that, at least most modern developers (not ye olde dot-com-boom devs).

      All you seem to be focusing on is linking, and that's not how indexing gets done; Meta tags, content, image titles, ALT text.
      Uhhhggg... sort of. Linking is actually a very important part (and, unfortunately, one that can be abused). A link from a high-traffic website to yours, with the content "Metallica" or whatever will boost your search ranks a great deal; this is the whole basis of google's algorithms. META tags? Pfft. Barely useful, if at all. Your other points are fair, but miss out on the bigger picture:

      The word webpage hasn't lost all meaning - a webpage should still be viewed as a page - a document. It should have a title, and a structure that best fits its content. That means enclosing the "Google" image in header tags, using lists, and so forth. As soon as you nail down this basic, web devving becomes a bunch easier because every decision is an easy one. HTML was initially designed to be like this, but the browser wars screwed things up. It's only now that people are taking a critical eye.

      In summary: Search engines read webpages the same way you'd read the source code - it identifies headers, lists, links, etc. Having a shit load of embedded table cells is unreadable to humans, let alone bots. Designing with your source structure in mind scores you good search engine ranks. Every other optimization compared to this is nothing. Don't beleive the SEO people.
  19. To those griping about google indexing algorithm by blhack · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Google is so good because they are good at deciding what pages matter! Leave your page as it is and fill it with content. It isn't like all of the sudden *POOF* google appeared and now we all have to conform to their model. They evolved in parallel to web pages...meaning THEY ALREADY KNOW HOW TO INDEX YOUR SHIT!

    --
    NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
  20. Re:Should read: What if Google was a useless site. by Cederic · · Score: 2, Interesting


    My previous employer got around 40% of its business online. We're talking multi-billion dollar turnover.

    It's a travel company. When people search for 'beach holiday in thailand' on Google, they don't care whether they get our products or the competitions. Google doesn't care. Page-rank does care. It wants to give the searcher a set of results that talk about beach holidays in thailand.

    This makes it very important to make the site attractive and accessible to the Google bot, and get it ranked highly. Sure, we can (and do) buy ads on the search result page. But $20/click for an ad adds up very fast, especially when the margins on the products are $10-20 in the first place. Generating traffic through page ranks has payback in the tens of millions.

    Do we bicker about Google's metrics and pagerank? I wouldn't use the word 'bicker'. Does it make a significant difference to the business? Very clearly.
    Are our products ones the public wants? Our retail establishments are market leaders in their own right. Does our website suck? Personally I think so, but we get more traffic than our competitors, and we sell more products. We do have the product, it is at the right price, but online the market is hyper-competitive, and pagerank matters.

  21. And in first place is... by Xebikr · · Score: 3, Informative

    Sigh. Google

  22. Re:Should read: What if Google was a useless site. by hesiod · · Score: 2

    > Anyone who actually goes to a search engine is doing so because they don't want www.fedex.com or www.ups.com. Those are simple enough that no one needs to search for them.

    You need to meet more average Internet users (or maybe I need to meet fewer...). Their browser's home page is whatever it defaulted to when they bought the PC, and they _never_ type out URLs. If they wanted to find google, but their home page is Yahoo? They really will search for Google via Yahoo. If they want Fedex, they will search for FedEx through their home page's search engine.