Google Chrome To Begin Marking Sites That Are Slow / Fast

[Teggs]

Badges?

We don't need no stinkin' badges!

[Templar82]

They are awful and will remain awful because they don't need to care about how awful they are. People will use their website regardless because they have no other choice.

Which just exemplifies how pointless this new plan by google is, people already stop using slow websites when they can and don't need an icon telling them a website is slow.

This will end up being just another way to censor websites google doesn't like.

[re:fi.64]

Hmmm..., like Google maps, Google drive, Gmail, Youtube, Google news, Google image search, etc etc?

Google Search loads like lightning though...

[starshipeleven]

How is this going to do anything other than shame other people for living in Europe? Literally what is the point other than to tell people their ping is bad by no fault of their own? Maybe it's to sell Google Cloud or something. This is pretty disgusting, then again so is Google.

This isn't about ping but about sites being efficient and not calling content or ads from slow sources.

Also why single out Europe? Do you think Internet doesn't suck balls in most of the US territory too?

[starshipeleven]

Literally all the big names (ISPs, banks, utilities, etc) are going to get tagged as slow. They are all awful lol.

They are awful and will remain awful because they don't need to care about how awful they are. People will use their website regardless because they have no other choice.

[starshipeleven]

Sites would load much quicker if the ad spots didn't keep changing. A static ad is fine, but lately the damn thing loads 1 ad for a few seconds and loads a different ad. So in essence the page never fully loads. And to think it's all Google's fault in the first place for selling ads on auction and starting this downward trend.

Way to solve your self created problem Google.

Decent ads are chosen when the page is loaded and remain the same ad until you refresh it. If that does not happen, it's an "innovation" that didn't come from Google.

[starshipeleven]

What’s the point of this? Wouldn’t it be obvious if a site is slow by the mere fact that it’s...slow?

They are training an AI software to detect this automatically, most likely end goal is to use this to lower their score in Google search results.

[starshipeleven]

Strange because when you use an ad-blocker websites tend to load pretty fast...

If enough people use an adblocker the websites won't load at all.

The goal here is to weed out crappy ad providers and pointless external content.

[starshipeleven]

"Be fast, implement Google Amp! Use ads from our whitelist of ad purveyors to ensure fast load time and ad revenue.
Host your site on the Google CDN for the best performance."

I'm pretty sure none of the above has passed through the heads of Google management.

Google-served ads do have to follow stricter guidelines than most already. They blocked any flash-based ads a long time ago too.

So Google adsense is "our whitelist" already.

[starshipeleven]

As much as contemporary bloated website annoy me, I don't really like the idea of Google becoming the gatekeepers of the internet.

I'm not sure that telling people that a slow website is slow is really that helpful anyway, I'm sure they noticed.

This is just the first step. Once they are sure their algorithm is decent enough, they will put it into production in the search engine "evaluation" of how likely any given site is going to come up, like they already do with other metrics, like https support.