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Comment by ec109685 | Hacker News Reader

Don’t you think they have run tests that trade off search speed for additional features and determined the features increase engagement / revenue?

There is a lot more going on than 10 blue links these days, including continual scroll on mobile. Perf versus features is always a matter of trade offs.

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I think its more that they have a monopoly on search in the current zeitgeist. So no, I don't think they've done that, and if they did, there's no pressure for them to optimise for speed, so they'd optimize for something bloated that helps someone get a promotion. This is why, for example, everything Microsoft Office does is a bloated trash fire, and how Apple gets away with telling a whole generation of phone purchasers that they were holding it wrong.

Even with a monopoly, they make more money the more often it’s used.

> and how Apple gets away with telling a whole generation of phone purchasers that they were holding it wrong.

Okay. I'll bite. What does this mean?

I hold my iPhone 13 the exact same way I held a Nokia brick in 2003. What did Apple tell us?

iPhone 4 had a bad antennae design. Jobs blamed the users. It was hilarious.

:facepalm: of course!

11 years ago, if your finger bridged the two antennae together on an iPhone 4, you lost signal strength. Half a percent of iPhone users complained about it, Apple offered a free cover to anyone affected.

They were HIT WITH 18 LAWSUITS about it OMG.

They settled all the lawsuits by ... offering a free cover or $15 refund.[1]

Depending on your viewpoint this is either one of many blips along the way of manufacturing tens of billions of products over a dozen generations, or a way for "mactards [to] realize Steve Jobs are out to milk their clueless a$$es with his oh so clever marketing gimmicks" (Yahoo News comment).

Bonus points if you can find anywhere Apple said "you're holding it wrong" or blamed users. Steve Jobs wrote "Just avoid holding it (the iPhone] in that way." which is somewhat pragmatic, and rather what you'd expect someone to say if they weren't filtered by a PR firm. Probably what I would say. Apple haters can't face this.

Macworld.co.uk said:

> "We don't really think there was anything substantial to the problem, and the iPhone 4 sold tremendously well. Customers didn't seem to notice, let alone mind, and Apple repeatedly pointed out that other mobile phones suffered the same effect."

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/settlement-reached-in-iphone-4-ant...

[2] https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/antennagate-11-biggest-ap...

Jesus relax man your favourite trillion dollar company can survive someone remembering the shitty stuff they do. I'm sure they appreciate your help though.

If you're going to get hurt feelings and need to turn to swearing and ad-homs when your comments are put in context with citations, maybe don't post them?

Apple aren't my favourite trillion dollar company and just because they have money doesn't mean everything they do is bad; or that the fundamental attribution error applies differently (similar applies to other companies, groups, organisations)

No, they have money and they use it to be do bad with it, that's what makes them bad.

Gmail has a fucking loading screen now. Have I switched? Not yet, but the reason I switched to gmail in the first place was for the minimal, fast interface.

Gmail was the original heavy webmail interface. All its competitors at the time were basic html (and providing only 5mb of space). Heavy js to provide a smooth interface was what made gmail such a big deal other than high storage limits.

Gmail always had a loading screen.

I suppose you are right. I can only guess that RPU is the primary KPI and somehow more scripts allow for more revenue extraction even if the performance is lower.

Or maybe just give it away to ppl and see if they like using it to find stuff?

Where did the love go....

I think you’re overthinking this.

You’re looking at cold start download sizes, but that’s not what people actual see after everything is cached follow the first load.

Google pages load plenty fast on every device I’ve used recently, including some very old android tablets. Most page loads don’t transfer much data at all due to caching. Combined with the high speeds of both browsers and devices today, there wouldn’t be much real change in a highly stripped down Google page relative to what they’re serving up today.

But it is not just a cold start problem. Check your network tab on a "warm" search.

Here is what I get:

https://imgur.com/a/Dl2B5Zo

2 seconds to load and 1.12MB transferred, all on "warm" start.

Using Chrome Dev Tools I'm seeing around 150-200KB actually transferred on each search page result (2MB resources, though most are cached).

I'm also seeing content loaded happen in under 1 second.

And the top half of the results is all ads! I don’t know how people stand Google.

Can't tell from your UI screenshot, but quite often loading a page with devtools open will disable the cache. I forget if this is the default behavior or not.

I am sure that is the case, but I am not sure it is good for the user: Google ads a lot of ads and behavior tracking that probably is for their benefit, not yours.

> determined the features increase engagement / revenue?

This. Nothing else matters.

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