Completely disagree. They should focus their energy on fixing their search engine. And all the bugs in gmail. And the bugs in their advertising engine. And maybe stop tracking everyone. and...
> I'll certainly favour a search engine that prioritises fast, easy-to-read pages over one that doesn't.
I won't. I'll favour a search engine that gives me pages that have the best information on them. A search engine that helps me to find the hidden nuggets of information that are hiding in the far corners of the Internet, even if they don't appear on a fast, popular site that earns revenue for google through google ads or by harvesting user data via google analytics.
What use is the "best information" if it's on a page that takes forever to load and is so cluttered that you can't actually find the information there? I don't search for the sake of searching, I search because I want to find a particular piece of information, which means the end-to-end process - not just finding the "right" page, but finding and understanding the part that I actually wanted from that page - is what's important.
> that earns revenue for google through google ads or by harvesting user data via google analytics.
That sounds pretty backwards - IME the fastest, least cluttered sites tend to be those with the fewest ads.
I have been on connections ranging from 500k, to 500M, to ~2.1G (presumably bottlenecked on the wifi but you get the idea) and the app seems to load at exactly the same rate for me.
That would have been equally painful for the developers, but not for the users.
They should penalize more instead of forcing us to use AMP almost as a power move from them.
Oh, how horrible it would be if the whole web were fast to load, easy to understand and devoid of unwanted clutter or mess.
I hate AMP because it makes my web experience slower and worse - lately it seems like Chrome on android has taken to loading broken "offline" versions of any suggested pages, making me refresh to read anything, and whenever a search takes me to reddit I have to edit the url to get a version that respects my page settings (and, strangely enough, loads a lot faster than the AMP version). But I don't see the chaos of the current web as inherently virtuous; encouraging web pages to load faster and be easier to read is absolutely something Google should be doing, and I'll certainly favour a search engine that prioritises fast, easy-to-read pages over one that doesn't.