Color me pink, poking “Google” into the tech preview lists http://www.google.com as first link, and all 14 that follow point to the different subdomains like GoogleGroups, GIS, Google Toolbar and what not.

Works quite fine for me, ignoring the bad HTML.

So the question is, with this power to pervade, does it really even matter how good the code is?

There are three factors that make the quality of the code irrelevent, and all three are tied to the size of Microsoft.

Firstly, Microsoft have way more resources available to throw at testing than the average company. They don’t have to guess at whether something will work, even if it’s an error, as they can test with pretty much any combination under the sun.

Secondly, their high profile pretty much forces third-parties to work with them. If Mozilla screwed up rendering because of a mistake Microsoft made on the front page of msn.com, it wouldn’t matter who made the mistake, the pressure would be on Mozilla developers to work around it.

Finally, their high profile means that many surfers will pretty much put up with anything they are fed, short of a completely blank page. As people have noted above, some people aren’t even aware you don’t have to go through msn.com to get to other pages. Even if they get a screwed up page, as long as they can bodge their way through, they’ll stick with it.

Sadly, a lot of people point to companies like Microsoft and say “if they can get away with writing shoddy code, surely we can too”. What they forget is that they don’t have the resources or high profile of Microsoft.

We love our MSNs and our Googles and our Yahoos but none have yet to exhibit any real effort with regard to designing with standards.

A fair criticism but now its not entirely true. While Blogger.com (part of Google) doesn’t validate as XHTML…it’s awfully close. And a large effort has been placed to make its markup cleaner semantically. And seperates styles from content markup. And it emphasizes the importance of DOCTYPEs. And it degrades well on older browsers.

However, if you’re simply restricting the scope of your criticism to the search properties of those products, then, hell yah, there’s big room for improvement in standards advocacy.

So yes, clearly Blogger is on the right track, but 95% of all other projects at Google, Yahoo, and MSN put little emphasis on the code. Again, I’m not judging them as a whole based on this… just making an observation.

Blogger operates, for the most part, completely outside of the Google framework…

and that is because of the genius work of one Doug Bowman…

…and some others. :) And your first statement needs amending, Blogger is part of the Google codebase. There are even hooks in place for cross-product features. But, as is probably apparent, the move towards forward-thinking standards support in most of Google’s properties proceeds glacially. Some projects, however, can move a lot faster than others. However, there’s a lot of attention on standards here (and a near-unanimous appreciation for Gecko and Mozilla). I can’t speak for MS or Yahoo! but the scale of Google stuff and its worldwide, broadly-user-agent-compatible use makes UI change a sort of war of attrition.

I like very much the attention being brought to bear on this. I think the answer to your question “does the code matter” with regards to standards in markup, styles, and scripting is something like…”yes, increasingly so”. But I suspect that the question of degree to which the Big Co’s can create de-facto standards will be an important one to re-address soon. For my part, I’m hoping to help make things open.

Thanks very much for speaking up about this, and I hope I don’t appear to be picking on Google. I’m not. As I mentioned in the original post, I judge sites based on their overall utility, and quality of code is just a part of this. The overall utility of Google is clearly above and beyond its competitors, and thus, my opinion of them is as such. And yes, you are also of course correct in that Doug isn’t the only one responsible for Blogger’s excellent code quality.

Working at ESPN/Disney, I am all too familiar with the hurdles of making massive code revisions on huge sites. It doesn’t happen overnight and it takes everyone on board to “buy in” in order to really make it work. If you’ve got a few errors here and there, that stuff will eventually get taken care of, but the stuff on the new MSN Search page was just too ridiculous not to mention. Here’s a $100 million project, with only 2k of code on the front page, and they can’t even get that right. That shows a lack of caring and nothing more.

Of course that Google gives W3C as the first result.

Guess now we know why this is the case.

Funny… I never knew Javascript was a language HTML could be written in. Could it be that Microsoft are resting on their laurels?

In an amusing twist of reality, Mike Davidson has uncovered an amusing disregard for the web on the brand-new MSN Search site. In the very first line, no less. <html language=”javascript”> I know this makes me a total geek, but that… is hysteri…

You might not have noticed that MSN just gave its search portal a makeover. All very clean, crisp and Googlesque….