Google and Page Experience
June 2, 2020
Just a short item, a question in reality: What’s a “page experience”? I understand a Web page. This is the digital equivalent of a note card or a sheet of paper. I understand experience; for example, a tumble down a flight of steps is an experience.
But “page experience”? Fuzzy, weird word pairing like those old school America Online word pairs.
“Google Will Factor Page Experience into Search Rankings” explains that the phrase means:
page experience will measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. To determine page experience, Google will consider Core Web Vitals, metrics that measure user experience, as well as existing signals, like mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing and HTTPS-security.
Interesting. The “secret” Google ranking algorithm gets another batch of signals to use to determine relevance. Does “relevance” mean which and how many ads can be matched to information retrieved from one of Google’s universal search indexes?
The article reports:
Google says it will still prioritize the best information…
For decades methods like precision and recall, Boolean logic, and controlled vocabularies provided mechanisms for matching indexed information to a user query.
Most people have zero idea how Google determines what information to display. Does it matter? To most people online information is accurate. Jibber jabber like “page experience” is a phrase with a hefty payload of content free suggestivity.
Advertising revenue is the point of the exercise, isn’t it? Perhaps there is a correlation between Amazon’s and Facebook’s growing online advertising businesses and Google verbiage?
Using Google in a quest to find relevant information is an experience in itself.
Stephen E Arnold, June 2, 2020
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
