We need to Speak about Google Code Quality
Tags: softwareengineering
Published: 2024-04-24 05:18:53

For decades landing a job at Google was most software developers' wet dream. Google's job interview was ridiculously difficult, and there are entire libraries written about how to land a job at Google.

I've got an [AI chatbot company](https://ainiro.io), and because of that, I have to somehow relate to Google code. Google code is _everywhere_, and creating a website without using Google code is almost impossible for these reasons. [Google Analytics](https://dev.to/polterguy/plausible-as-an-alternative-to-google-analytics-2l1p) being one reason, and [Google reCAPTCHA](https://dev.to/polterguy/using-bitcoin-and-blockchain-ideas-to-secure-our-ai-chatbot-k2j) being another reason. If you've got a website, there's a 99% probability that your site is running some Google code.

I always knew Google code was bad. Lots of people would tell me about its problems when the subject came up. However, just _how_ bad it was I didn't realise before this week.

## reCAPTCHA is JunkWare

For a year I didn't understand why our website couldn't make it up to anything more than the high 60s on [Page Speed Insights](https://pagespeed.web.dev). I did everything I could, but nothing would make the site score higher than 70.

Yesterday I was able to completely get rid of the last piece of Google JavaScript on my site, and immediately our site scored in the high 90s.

![Page Speed Insights without Google ReCAPTCHA](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/s2sqpqeutietvhudy21p.png)

I had tried everything at that point, knowing a high score on Page Speed Insights is crucial for SEO and other things required to create a highly converting website, but nothing seemed to work before I ripped out all Google code from the site. In the following video I demonstrate how Google's reCAPTCHA is actually consuming 1.7MB of bandwidth by simply embedding it on your page.

{% embed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfNqssUStPA %}

I need to emphasise that 1.7MB for an edge library doing simple CAPTCHA logic is literally __a disaster__. There's no way to sugar coat this fact, so I'll just say it out loud as it is ...

> Google reCAPTCHA is a hot smoking pile of garbage! Junkware who's primary effect on your website is to literally destroy it!

For reference purposes, the Magic CAPTCHA library I created is 20KB. That implies reCAPTCHA is **85 times larger than my own stuff**. I should probably clarify that I wrote Magic CAPTCHA in a couple of hours.

I've got 42 years of software developer experience, but I'm not _that_ good. However, according to neutral metrics, this implies I am singlehandedly almost 2 orders of magnitudes better of a software developer than the entire team that created reCAPTCHA is _combined_!

I could do the same exercise with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, but luckily I don't need to, since [Plausible already did](https://plausible.io). A piece of advice, rip out Google Analytics and use Plausible instead. It first of all doesn't destroy your website, and secondly it doesn't violate the GDPR - So you can embed it on your site without having to warn your visitors about that they're being spied on by Google.

## How's their backend code?

[David Sugar already pointed out how Google Maps code was](https://dev.to/dyfet/comment/2ee6o), but you don't need to believe David in fact. Just check your site's traffic in fact.

We've got an [AI chatbot](https://ainiro.io/ai-chatbot) as one of our products. This chatbot is embedded on our site. This gives us incredibly high quality feedback about what our users wants and what they're looking for. The reasons are fairly simple, some of our users are using the AI chatbot, and the questions they're asking gives us insight into why they came to our site in the first place.

If we're to sum up the effect of the traffic Google is sending to us, it would be as follows ...

> Google is sending us **exclusively junk traffic**

Literally, they're only sending us users who's got absolutely no interest what so ever in our product. Instead they're sending us mostly users who are looking for a free alternative to ChatGPT to do their homework. Poor students in 3rd world countries, trying to cheat at school. Literally, 98% of all traffic originating from Google has the above profile.

I've played with the idea of blocking Google _out_ from indexing our site for these reasons in fact. However, if their spider is equally bad as their search engine, it probably wouldn't even work at this point ... 😳

> How is it possible for _"the smartest search engine on earth"_ to only send us irrelevant traffic?

I personally believe our site is doing a very good job at explaining what it's about. Literally, the H1 header says;

> AI for Customer Service. Put ChatGPT on your Website

And the subtitle says _"Create your own AI chatbot from your own data and embed on your website"_. How is it possible to send traffic to such a website from users that are looking for an AI chatbot to do their homework?

Because of my work I happen to know a lot about embeddings and AI related search. In fact, we've got our own AI-based search component. Ours is several orders of magnitudes better than Google's apparently.

The only conclusion you can draw from the above fact, is that Google's primary product, their search engine that is, is also literally a hot smoking pile of garbage. Even Google's bread and butter product is arguably broken to the point where it's got no idea of what it's doing.

> At this point we'd be better of going back to Yahoo from 1995 ... 😕

## YouTube Ads

Have you noticed how all your YouTube ads have gone completely bonkers the last couple of years? Personally about 80% of ads YouTube is serving me are Greek ads. I don't speak Greek. This implies that companies are paying Google to show ads to people who have no ability to even understand what the ad is about.

For the record, the remaining 20% of ads I'm forced to watch on YouTube is also 100% completely irrelevant for me, and I haven't clicked a single ad in 5 years because of it.

I have no problem clicking a relevant ad if it seems interesting - But Google is 100% incapable of showing me anything that's even remotely interesting to me. This is kind of weird, realising companies are spending trillions of dollars on Google ads, so obviously, somewhere out there, there purely logically _have_ to be somebody paying Google for an ad I actually _want_ to see. Still somehow, Google seems to be incapable of showing me these ads for reasons I cannot explain using logic and reason ...

> The only remaining conclusion is that Google's backend code is also, you guessed it; _"A hot smoking pile of garbage"_

## Wrapping up

Google used to have some of the best products on the planet 20 years ago. They were the inspiration of our industry, and seemed to deliver high quality products, at a pace nobody could follow. Yet for weird reasons, at some point, everything simply turned into junkware.

I have no idea how this happened, but I know one thing - Which is that if you own GOOG shares today, my advice to you is to fire sell these as crazy - Because in the end ...

> Quality **always** wins! And Google has none of it!