Introducing the new Google Search Console | Hacker News Reader

Introducing the new Google Search Console

webmasters.googleblog.com

141 pointsTheVinous46 comments

Instead of making us follow these Amp non-standards, Google should give an AMP logo in Google search results and preference (the same as an amp site) if the load time of the page is under 100ms. So now you have a choice, either DIY or use Google's tech to make your site fast.

This way it will create dozens of tech companies competing with AMP focused on making the web faster - the end result that Google supposedly wants and this way everyone wins!

In reality both approaches will result in webpages faking being fast.

Why faking? As a user, I prefer AMP pages because they load much faster. Often it's just because they don't have as many ads (and a non-amp page would be as fast then) but I can't see that from the search result.

When there is a incentive, like more clicks, and it doesn't matter if you fake it, and it's easier to fake, then people will fake it.

Yes they should. But they will not. Because that is how small companies do it. Ride the wave of open standards and become big. Remember how Google embraced the web in the early days? Now it's time for them to lock users in and milk them.

I would love to see a startup tackling the issue. Creating a score that takes into account load time and other factors. If sites like HN and Reddit would use that score as a ranking factor, then this might get something rolling.

> Now it's time for Google to lock users in and milk them.

I don't think Google is remotely at that point, and from their competitive perspective they're still winning by letting their open-standards-straw reach all the way across the room and drinking Microsofts/Oracles milkshake.

And for a tech behemoth with Billions of dollars flying around and fingers in all the pies I think Google has one of the, if not the, best track records in standardization. Concretely, when comparing their products at the personal and Enterprise with their competition they're consistently more open...

I think not having a massive clump of RDMB revenue helps them think freely about problems :)

An extra logo (regular users won't understand) in all the search results? No thank you.

AMP results already have a symbol marking them.

Must be my script blockers then. Not seeing them.

It’s on mobile only AFAIK.

And how would you do that? Would the browser load every single page on a Google search and then badge?

You can't test a page's load speed from Google's servers and then expect it to load for the user in the same way.

Especially because one of the key points behind AMP is the use of CDNs, especially global ones (like Google's, Microsoft's or Akamai), which greatly speed up load times while also reducing traffic for the ISPs.

This. The web host is likely going to try to spoof a low load time by sending a fake page to Google's web crawler. Then it'll be an endless cat and mouse. Also, there are more than a few websites on the internet. It sounds fairly unreasonable to keep fresh numbers on page load times.

They might be able to crossreference the result from their crawler with metrics from Chrome users that opt-in.

Ok so it won't be perfect but it can be a very good approximate. They can benchmark the site from the user's city and use that value (hey if speedtest.net can have so many servers in every city I'm sure Google can arrange that too).

As far as CDN goes, nobody is stopping you from using it. If you want a site that rival's Google's AMP then you have to use a CDN. The only difference is now it's your choice what you use rather than being dictated to use their non standard tags and technology.

It will be like the new adwords. Looks pretty, but is missing half the features and eventually..once it comes out of its "beta" everyone who's been using this tool daily, will regret not staying on the older version.

Webmaster tools never had many features, so I'd be surprised if they reduced the featureset significantly.

I hope it won't mean less feature. However, I don't like the new Adwords either, the UI is better, but the whole UX is a crap, I have to read tons of articles to find the good old features.

Here is the link to the new search console:

https://search.google.com/search-console

My sites aren't available yet but looking forward to trying it

...and if you bookmark that URL for later, it'll simply be titled, "Status". Thanks Google.

Haha, the search engine gigant doesn't have to care about such :-)

Doesn't work well in Firefox. WTF google?

Hangouts doesn't work. Now search console too?

But it's Safari that's the new IE, right? Killing the 'open web'?

In my case it looks broken in both, I can't select anything...

Perhaps I'm missing something but why do we need a "console"?

Why can't we just post these search-engine related settings in a special file on our servers?

That way, we don't have to manage 10 consoles for 10 different search engines.

The Google console is quite helpful in tracking errors on your page. You can obviously do that yourself but for small projects, using Google's console is easier.

Search analytics is another topic that obviously needs a page on their side.

Overall I'm happy with Google's console, especially compared to Bing.

and having an insight into how google sees/crawls your site is invaluable

> The Google console is quite helpful in tracking errors on your page.

Google could publish an open-source tool that you can run to check your page for errors.

Bit of a weird introduction, as it does not contain a URL to the actual new console (apparently it has a different URL compared to the current 'webmaster tools').

Also, once you do find the URL, nothing seems to work (at least not for me on FF/chrome/safari). Can't see, select or add my websites to the console.

A link to the Search Console would have been great to have in the blog post.

Agreed. The article was pretty opaque.

"Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site's presence in Google Search results." -- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/4559176?hl=en

As posted in another thread here the link seems to be https://search.google.com/search-console

Shows zero of my properties and property selection menu appears to be broken.

Available only to select few users, maybe?

Search console is the most powerful tool available for SEO. It's weird that it was neglected for so many years.

Nice to see they still work on it sometimes. 16 months of data is massive. Now you have to export everything every 3 months to keep historical data.

It's not available to me yet.

Besides the old 3-month limit, the other annoyance was the search terms they provided would cut in and out. So sometimes they'd give you SERP info on certain keywords and then a few months later, they'd eliminate reporting on those keywords.

That was about time. I was always flabbergasted by how rough and confusing the search console was. I really like how Google are revamping their marketing/admin tools. The Google Optimize [0] tool is pretty nice and the only A/B testing tool I know that is already pretty powerful in the free tier. 0: https://www.google.com/analytics/optimize/features/

Relevant: "Conversion rates are much lower than they should be.".... "For Google, conversion rate is based on visits instead of visitors." Source: https://www.abtasty.com/blog/data-scientist-google-optimize/

I found it a bit clunky, personally, but you can't complain too much about free when the alternatives are rather expensive.

The majority of A/B tests I run are not "visual" and based on javascript DOM changes, along with CSS changes. That workflow takes very little time to execute in VWO but wasn't that apparent with Google.

dang when i saw console i was like awesome! then i went to the website :( our definitions of console are different :(

How does it compare, feature wise to the old one?

Wondering the same thing! These new releases tend to get a lot prettier but they almost always lose important, lesser-known features

My favorite is still Google Voice.

Google: "Ok, lets finally update the UX from a decade ago so we can thread messages... oh yeah but you can't actually configure your voicemail account with your carrier, or even view what your voicemail number is until you revert to legacy google voice. Actually just use legacy if you want to be able to reliably delete messages too"

This is definitely a different era of google

In what regard?

This product in particular seems like a fairly linear progression to me. No?

Care to illustrate some details?

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