Hissingsid - 5:54 pm on Nov 17, 2009 (gmt 0)

Sorry to do a immediate follow up post but I wanted to say (rant) something about the general topic of this thread.

This is like Newspapers stopping reporting the news and trying to create it. Google's sheer might can steer the web where it wants it to go rather than in the direction its users want. They seem to think that the search engines are about finding answers. One of their senior people even said recently that he could envisage a day when you would do a search and Google would return one correct answer.

I happen to think that much of the massive increase in use of the Web is not about finding answers but rather about hobbies and entertainment (and other stuff). The Web, it seems to me is shifting emphasis away from text and onto media. People are using the web for entertainment and search engines give them a starting point on a voyage of exploration, questionable habits and obsessions.

I have been doing web sites since most people had 14K modems so habitually I do all I can to keep my code and images as small as possible. Having looked at research on ADSL usage I recently started giving myself the luxury of larger less compressed images on sites where it seemed to me users would appreciate better visual content. Now Google is in effect saying we care about 3 things - text, links and speed. Anything produced by an Adobe application just slows down your site so it's a waste of time.

I agree with others here that sites that are very unresponsive and those where a database back end slows them down to a trickle deserve to be penalised but pages that start to load quickly but have lots of content shouldn't suffer.

Cheers

Sid