Google Web Light

» see googleweblight.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Web Light never ran in Turkey and it was never meant to. Google turned it on in Indonesia in 2015 and later in Brazil and India, in the places where a large number of people reached the web over 2G on a handset that could not afford the javascript. If your search result was a heavy page and your connection was slow, Google did not send you to that page. It sent you to its own rewritten copy of it.

The rewriting was aggressive. The transcoder discarded most of the page weight and rebuilt what survived into something a cheap browser could paint, and Google's own figure for the result was 80 percent less data at roughly four times the speed. Publishers whose pages went through it saw about half again as much traffic to the transcoded version, because a page that loads is a page somebody reads.

It ran for seven years. Google retired it on 19 December 2022, saying that the increased affordability of more powerful smartphones had diminished the need for the feature. The googleweblight user agent stopped appearing in server logs and the help documentation came down, so the only place to read it now is an archive. Everything about that ending is unusual for this site: a product that stopped because the condition it existed for went away.

My own version of the problem it solved arrived the better part of two decades too early to be helped by it. I got online in 1998 on dial-up in Turkey and worked up through the modem speeds, on connections where the weight of a page was the whole experience of the page, and the fix available then was to switch images off in the browser and read whatever was left. Web Light is that same instinct built properly and at scale, for countries that reached the web the same way a decade later.

~ the record ~

~ what the transcoder did to your page ~

Web Light was a proxy, which means the page a reader saw was not the page the publisher shipped. It was served off googleweblight.com, restyled into Google's own template, and stripped of whatever the transcoder judged was not load-bearing. Publishers could opt out with a header. Plenty of them did not, because the traffic was worth more than the layout.

That had consequences nobody designed for. Content filters could not see inside a transcoded page, so Web Light turned into a way around them and several filter vendors ended up blocking the domain outright. The redirect was still being abused for phishing more than a year after the service was dead, because the URL pattern kept working long after anybody was maintaining it.

~ the constraint that lifted ~

The numbers behind the retirement are the honest part of the story. India had roughly 47 million 4G-capable devices when Web Light launched and around 650 million by 2021, and by then almost all of the country's mobile data was moving over 4G. A tool built for the 2G majority has no majority left to serve.

Google has run a long line of products aimed at people for whom the connection is the limiting factor, and most of them end the same quiet way once the market moves. What is worth keeping from this one is that the constraint was real and the fix was thrown away for the right reason. Almost nothing else buried here can say that.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »