[radium3d]

I agree, Google has gotten worse, I find more and more often lately I do not find what I am searching for. I try to change my question/wording and it just gets worse. I think their algorithm is failing. Did they lose their way? It used to supply useful information. I think they may need to reduce their reliance on website performance. Site performance does not equate good information. They are excluding the best information just because the site loads slightly slower. Sure, it's nice having a site load fast but that's not what I'm searching for. I want the best result slow or not. As a web developer I have had to spend a great deal of time optimizing sites and clients feel it's extremely important for SEO to have the fastest Google Page Speed score possible.

[xp84]

They probably didn't lose their way, so much as they slowly became less effective at combatting the exploits of black-hat SEO and the massive amount of complete garbage content farms out there, while simultaneously they have allowed the ad business to corrupt them completely, which deincentivizes them from showing good organic results because they sell more ads when it's hard to find the obvious things people want.

Your hypothesis on performance is interesting! I think someone altruistic thought "if we judge sites on this metric, everyone will be forced to do better" but they failed to realize that it's a hard problem at scale to NOT be a bloated mess (especially on the frontend! 'Let's add one more UI library, it's just 12MB!')

[SteveGerencser]

The whole site speed thing is purely a cost reduction on Google's part IMO. By convincing site owners that being fast is a ranking factor they can save millions in bandwidth costs as more and more people lighten their page load.

I have watched many web developers absolutely lost their mind trying to squeeze fractions of a second from their load time when there are far better ways to be using their time.