How Google Makes The Net Suck

Some people like to compare developers to artists. When it comes to web development, some people say there's always a man behind the curtain. Whether you agree or not, there are definitely certain freedoms that web developers enjoy. As a web developer, what are the greatest limitations and obstacles in your way? Once it may have been browser quirks. Now maybe it's all those annoying users who still use IE6. However, I think the greatest obstacle to progress is Google.

Now Google would have you believe just the opposite. I do not think they are disingenuous. In a large organization, it's all too easy for different groups to have different motivations. But ask yourself this, how much money does Google from Chrome? What does Google make money from? That's easy: advertising on search. And that is what is hold us all back.

If you have endured my purple prose to this point, I will finally cut to the chase. One of the most important aspects of any web page is how its PageRank. If your web page is all about deep sea diving, where does it surface when somebody searches Google for deep sea diving? The black art of making your page get a higher PageRank has given birth to an entire cottage industry known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO.)

As a developer I have never given much thought to SEO. I always thought that SEO was about the content of the page, and web developers are not responsible for the content. We are responsible for retrieving/generating that content from all kinds of sources, as well as creating applications that are easy and intuitive for the user to interact with a meaningful way. But, if we go back to the deep sea diving example, we're not responsible for providing information about deep sea diving. Heck you are lucky if most developers even known how to swim, but I digress.

But I was wrong. SEO is not just about content. It is about structure. If you want a good PageRank, then quality content about deep sea diving will lead to other people linking to your page and that will increase your PageRank. But there are much more instantly gratifying things you can do. For example, your page should a title and it better contain the term deep sea diving. No big deal, right? The title is really just part of the template outside of the main contents of the page. Its value has little effect on anything, besides PageRank that is. However, it gets worse.

To maximize your PageRank, then immediately after your page's body tag you should have an H1 tag whose contents should contain the term deep sea diving. Oh maybe you put the phrase on the page, but you put it in a div that styled quite nicely? Not good enough. It needs to be in an H1 tag. Maybe you used some JavaScript to create the H1 tag? That is no good at all. Why? Because The All-Mighty Googlebot does not understand how the page looks to a user. It only understand basic HTML constructs. That's right, it's time to party like it's 1999.

Oh, maybe your organization hired an artist who created a killer deep sea diving logo and you load it on to the page as an image? Not good enough. If you put deep sea diving as the alt text, that will win you some bonus points from the Googlebot, but it is still dwarfed by the rewards you could receive by busting out the H1. Nothing compares to the mighty H1 tag. And don't just put that H1 tag anywhere on the page. Heck you might even get penalized for having more than one! Nope only one, and it better appear (in the HTML source code) as close to the body tag as possible.

Ok, so maybe you give in and put the catch phrase in an H1 tag. That wasn't too bad, right? Now back to your regularly scheduled hacking? Not so fast. Do you have some hierarchical information on the page? Sections, headings, menus, etc? How are you going to do those? Again you better not even think about using things like JavaScript to create them dynamically. Nope, they have got to be static on the page. Back to divs, spans (maybe a table or two), along with some oh-so-clever CSS? Forget about it. Let me introduce you to H1's other friends: H2, H3, H4, H5, H6. That's right, if you want that damn Googlebot to "understand" the hierarchy of concepts on your page, then you better put away your divs and spans.

Maybe you think that's going overboard, but it's not. Do you have a section on your deep sea diving page called "Gear" ? Then if you want to show up on a search for deep sea diving gear, you better have the term Gear wrapped in an H2 or an H3 tag.

What about RIA technologies? Again, if you dynamically create things with JavaScript, it will get picked up, but it is non-optimal. You have to do things the way that the Googlebot wants it done to get best results. What about Flash or Silverlight or JavaFX? Flash will get you screwed on about the same level as JavaScript. Silverlight or Java might as well be black holes. Whatever is in there, is never getting out.

There are tricks you can employ like progressive enhancement. There you do things the way that the Googlebot wants them, then dynamically obliterate that garbage and replace it with rich content that your users actually want. This can backfire. If the Googlebot figures out that you are tricking it, then it will banish you to purgatory.

What if you just make a great web application that users will love and don't bother to worry about the Googlebot? That's fine of course, it just means that people will not find your application by searching for it. Is your business model and marketing efforts robust enough to not need SEO? Yeah, I didn't think so.

So now do you understand? The Googlebot ties your hands, or at the very least makes you jump through all kinds of hoops. There are all these great technologies you could use to make your site as interactive as any desktop application, but The Googlebot does not like this. You've got to play his game whether you like it or not.

The City of San Jose

The Man has been keeping me down lately. Time for a laundry list of complaints about the city I live and work in.

Licensure -- Last year I got a letter from The City telling me that I owed them money, and lots of it. They said that I had a business in San Jose, but that I had not been paying my Business License Fee. Not only did I owe money for the License, but I owed it for the past couple of years plus penalties for not paying it. This was because of money I make for writing for IBM. Of course I had to also pay this License fee again this year...

Crime -- As I mentioned a few months ago, my wife's mini-van got broken into and the DVD player was stolen. I filed a report with The City. The City's response? That would be no response. That is what I should expect, right?

Police Harassment -- Last month, we were parked in downtown San Jose, taking the kids to get ice cream at Ben & Jerry's. The spot was a metered spot. We went past the time limit by 10 minutes and of course we got a parking ticket for $28.

Trespassing -- This is the worst. On Monday, I was walking to my car about to go to work. I notice a piece of paper on my wife's mini-van. I look, and it is a ticket. The $35 ticket was for blocking the sidewalk. Our van was parked in our driveway, but the rear of the van did indeed protrude on to said sidewalk. It did not prevent it from being used, and there was more driveway past the sidewalk, so there was plenty of room to walk by my house without having to use the street or walk in our yard/driveway. Whatever. It was very aggravating to me that I could have our car parked at our house and a policeman could come on to my property to give me a ticket.

All in all I feel that The City of San Jose is doing a lot to take money from me, but doing very little in return. I guess this can be said of any government. A lot of my fellow libertarian-thinkers like to favor local (state, county, city) over federal, but this is just a gentle reminder that even the smaller governments will screw you over as much as possible.

Bad Writing

I like reading Marc Andreessen's blog. He has good insight. Today I saw the news about Google's Open Social initiative. I noticed that Ning was a participant, so I figured Marc would have something interesting to say about it. Reading his entry reminded me of many other entries by him and how incredibly annoying his writing style is. Let me give some qualification to this statement.

My 10th grade English teacher, Dr. Deluzain, was really tough. He made all of his students write a lot, and he absolutely tore up everything you wrote. I give him tons of credit for making me into a decent writer. In college, the biggest advantage I had over other Caltech students was not my mathematical abilities, it was my writing skill. Math bailed me out in many situations, and led to my only A+ (in quantum chemistry if you can believe that,) but I was always the best writer in every "soft" (literature, history, political science, etc.) class I took. Thanks Dr. D.

One of the lessons I learned from Dr. Deluzain was that you should never use styling in writing. This was 1991, so word processing had become popular. Of course people wanted to use bold and italics, or large fonts, to drive home points. Dr. D. taught me this was obnoxious and unnecessary. It showed poor skill. If you had to resort to such tactics to emphasize your point, then obviously you were doing so to make up for a lack of writing skill.

Fast forward back to the pmarca blog. Andreessen has to be the worst person I've ever seen at using italics and bold all over the place. Normally I just ignore it. College taught me that most technical people never need to hone their writing skills, so why should Andreessen be any different. The first full paragraph (most of his first few paragraphs are actually just sentences, but I digress) has 102 words in. Of those, 27 words are either bold or italics. Of the other 75 words, 21 are in quotations, which is a similar sign of poor writing (one I'm guilty of too, though it's not quite as bad.) It just makes my head hurt. I hate being a writing snob, but I needed to vent and that's part of what my blog is for.

I dislike writers who can only bring up negatives and never offer solutions to problems. So I decided to re-write his paragraph. I tried to keep his words as much as possible.

"Technically, Open Social is implemented as what I call a plugin API, or a Level 2 platform. In other words, it's not a web services API -- rather, it's a way for external applications to plug into a host environment (container). The external app literally shows up insides the pages of the container, and can make Javascript calls to retrieve information from the container and perform functions within the container. For example you can make a Javascript call to get a list of all of the user's friends, or to inject an event into the user's activity feed."

Isn't actually a lot less work to write it like this? Or has the web redefined good writing style? Maybe my way is antiquated and Marc's is exemplary...