Google is abusing its powers. The search rank is our currency and Google has pushed AMP sites to the top for some while. So, everybody is now building weird AMP layers for their sites. We went from a free to a proprietary mobile web in just a few weeks. And we can't do anything. It feels like the times when the Internet Explorer tried to rule except that more people were complaining.
The open solution to a faster mobile web would have been so easy: Just penalize large and slow web pages without defining a dedicated mobile specification. That's it. This wasn't done in the past, slow pages outperformed fast ones on the SERPs because of some weird Google voodoo ranking, heck sometimes even desktop sites outperformed responsive ones on smartphones. If they had just tweaked these odd ranking rules in way that speed and size got more impact on the overall ranking there wouldn't have been any reason for AMP—the market would have regulated itself.
I'm wondering who at Google is responsible for AMP. Who created AMP's random specs (no external CSS but external fonts files, preference for four selected font providers, no JS but their JS, probable ranking preference of Google cached AMP sites, etc.). Why did they decide on the spec themselves and not as a part of an industry group? Again why didn't they just tweaked their ranking algorithm and btw, they could have also made Android's Chrome faster, it's still significantly slower than iOS' Safari. I'd be happy if this person could comment on the abuse of power (Sundar Pichai?).
> The open solution to a faster mobile web would have been so easy: Just penalize large and slow web pages without defining a dedicated mobile specification
It's obvious they have a different view on this. You can see this first-hand on their pagespeed tool. Pagespeed ranks your pages mostly according to random features, irregardless of size and performance. Actual test you can perform: 1kb web page with no compression ranks lower than 1mb web page after compression: "because you should enable server-side compression".
Their mobile assessment tool is similarly a joke.
The sad thing is that I'm likely getting a lower ranking on my website with has 5kb vanilla uncompressed js (gasp, not even async!) compared to the glittered rating of a 5mb homepage which loads 5mb+ more excluding webfonts from external CDNs.
You can taste that this has spread into google monoculture by the performance of their own web services.
> I'm wondering who at Google is responsible for AMP. Who created AMP's random specs (no external CSS but external fonts files, preference for four selected font providers, no JS but their JS, probable ranking preference of Google cached AMP sites, etc.).
A bunch of people, but Malte Ubl is one of the main people and has the best tech talks on why they picked the techniques and hacks they did.
I use AMP on CertSimple but appreciate that AMP favors 'speed achieved using specific techniques' rather than speed per se. There's the RealPolitik element where we as site owners have to do what Google say.
> "The open solution to a faster mobile web would have been so easy: just penalize large and slow web pages, without defining a dedicated mobile specification."
A million times yes. As to why this didn't happen, I feel it would have been too restricted to "merely solving the problem", and not active enough on pushing Google's agenda to tighten its control on the web.
All other things being equal, option A being "efficient & neutral" (just penalize slow pages) is, as a business, inferior to option B "more convoluted but with potentially profitable side-effects" (AMP).
Other takes?
EDIT I should have better read the linked article before posting this, what I'm writing here is close to what the article "Lock In" section says.
They are a business, doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing.
It's up to us to find a way to kill google and take back our internet.
Edit, i love the downvotes for this. Google is legally required to act in their shareholders best interests. You all should understand fiduciary duty. They are building long term value for a massive (and growing) customer segment at the expense of a relatively small base of idealist tech users. Its morally reprehensible but still the correct decision in today's business climate.
The crazy thing is that AMP is open source and this is still happening. I've been tracking their GitHub and what is happening is that while yes, the source is open, they won't let you add anything they don't like.
Oh, and if you try to fork AMP you fail the official validators and suddenly your site isn't AMP anymore. What is happening in this case is that open source is doing nothing to stop AMP from being proprietary because it's worthless unless you have the "blessed" version.
Take for example the most obvious change, to make the original URL visible in the banner. There's tens maybe hundreds of GitHub issues on this and it's still languishing. In the rare case anyone official replies it's some bs about how it will affect the user experience or "interfere with Google's cache" in some roundabout and unspecified way. They leave a few of these issues open so that whenever you start another they can close it as a duplicate. Otherwise their repo would be overrun with them.
Open source doesn't matter if someone holds the keys to the kingdom and "validates" your sources. A dark pattern indeed.
AMP in its current form is certainly evil. The only way that could be changed is if Google opens up the ability to cache the page by a different provider with different validators.
AMP is one of the most frustrating experiences I've had with Google. the fact that it's foisted on users, with no option to disable it, makes it borderline infuriating.
If you're stuck on an AMP page in your mobile browser, you can click on the browser's "Request desktop site" option to load the full page.
2. It is my understanding that the team is actively working on
a way to "fix" the link issue, and give an easy way to get to original article, although it remains to be seen how they will approach it.
4. Most importantly, looks like there is even internal pressure to give people an option to Turn Off AMP on the search engine side, if they don't like it. See this, for example: https://twitter.com/slightlylate/status/820344221450125312
@cramforce is THE tech lead on AMP and @slightlylate is also a big shot at Google on Chrome Team.
Personally, I have mixed feelings about AMP, on one side I really like the speed, on the other I hate how it breaks the Web as we know it.
The navigation toolbar hiding is only part of the problem with the navigation on iOS: AMP also breaks the default iOS navigation bar hiding, so even with the AMP toolbar hiding screen real estate is still being burned. Your article also hadn't even mentioned scrolling: on iOS, at least, scrolling is "janky" and slow and unnatural; and that's before you realize the insanity of how they selfishly are breaking scroll left and right in their attempt to take control of the entire Internet as mere content for their website :/.
He, it's a bit funny your last remark, unless it's tongue in cheek on purpose. It's akin to say "I have mixed feelings about crashing with my car. On one hand I got to my destination really fast, on the other hand I died."
The downside of AMP seems to me so comically larger than the upside that this should be much more a black-or-white issue than it currently is. Good that they are moving to fixing it, but very bad that this thing exists as it is right now in the first place.
It's so strange to see Google repeating all the same mistakes AOL did so many years ago. No I don't want your fucking garden, I want the network. If you get in the way of that I'm done with you.
Everything seems to be moving towards gardens right now. Certainly not just Google. It's one of the things that depresses me most about tech right now.
I don't like AMP, and I very glad there is now some push back against Google's implementation of it. Fast pages are great, but I suppose I'm missing the background on why it was necessary to do this, when anybody who can implement AMP could presumably have implemented "lightweight non bloated pages" without using it.
It's bad enough that I've had to switch to using Bing on mobile, despite the worse results, and I'm actually genuinely fearful for the first time about the openness of the web.
One thing I love about AMP, that seems to never be mentioned when people discuss it, is viewing AMP-HTML pages on my laptop.
I wrote a small chrome extension that always forwards my page to the equivalent AMP page (if one exists) and the experience of reading the news is so much better.
AMP pages off mobile are really really amazing. Compare Non-AMP[0] vs AMP[1]
Yeah but here it's functioning effectively as a better ad-blocker (one that doesn't screw up site layout). Looking at how AMP works, I can see why : you'd have to decide before you know who the user is what ads to show.
Wouldn't that effectively mean that in a search query followed by an AMP site visit only Google has the opportunity to show targeted ads ?
The only problem with that (and with amp in general) is the few sites that implement it poorly, namely by simply installing a WordPress plugin and calling it a day with zero effort to test the implementation. Some sites are completely broken.
On the normal implementation, clicking links on mobile from Google search, this is mostly not a problem because you're unlikely to land on some random guy's WordPress from a serp. But if you're triggering a lookup of AMP wherever it's available, you end up on a lot of broken sites clicking links from reddit and HN and stack overflow sources.
I've found a better compromise is an extension that doesn't load amp by default, but just puts a button in your toolbar that you can request an amp version with.
Firefox has 'reading mode' that does similar, strips out all the stuff such as sidebars, etc, without most of the downside associated with AMP (being open, to start with). Occasionally it misses some media stuff (e.g. embedded videos), but works well vast majority of the time so I'm happy with it.
Yea - I was inspired by seeing how well AMP worked on some sites and actually converted my entire blog to use AMP for every page. It's incredibly fast and I'm happy with it although I'm sure I could have achieved most of the results with some highly optimized CSS and HTML: http://dangoldin.com/
It's about 100x harder to read the second link you posted because it fills the entire screen. Full-width text has been proven so many times to hamper readability...
Even with ads the original is an easier read on desktop....
This just seems to make up for Google never implementing a reading mode for Chrome. I wonder if they plan to use AMP to provide one only for AMP sites.
The only difference that I can see is that they didn't provide a pop up video on the amp version. I'd never use a site that forces me to load and click away a video on mobile anyway, not sure this has anything to do with AMP.
Man trying to go back a page on Reddit then clicking a link on that page and seeing "there was an error, please reload the page" gets me out of there so damn fast.
Can you give an example of how to view reddit via AMP? If I just search for "reddit" on my Android phone for example, there are no AMP links to reddit, only Business Insider etc.
I really prefer Google and still use it when I'm on my desktop, but I find myself using Bing more and more when I'm on my phone just to avoid AMP. If Google made an easy way to jump from the AMP page to the original page then I wouldn't mind it so much.
The # 1 reason why AMP bothers me is when I want to share a link with someone, I don't want to send an AMP link.
This, exactly. AMP pages get in the way of sharing content – or at least in the way of being transparent about what you're sharing and where it's coming from.
I'm glad AMP's weaknesses are finally gaining attention and making their rounds. Google should not be allowed to steal publishers' traffic and strong-arm them into going along with it.
And what happened to whole "don't build different markup for different devices" mantra that has been the accepted wisdom in web development for the past 4 or 5 years (whenever responsive design was discovered)? Feels like "m." sites all over again (but this time with google's CDN as a required intermediary).
As someone happy with their AMP site, I'm only happy with it on the basis that my Jekyll theme builds the whole site as a single site that happens to support AMP on the desktop page.
I couldn't imagine dealing with supporting two deployments.
I make my own amp pages by keeping JavaScript turned off on my phone. 95℅ of pages work and load instantly. Those that don't, I turn on JavaScript. If I go to those pages a lot I add them to my exception list. Sorry but I'm not an amp believer.
It just took me 8 clicks and a couple swipes to disable JS in my mobile browser, Chrome on Android. Another 8 clicks and couple swipes to enable JS. Is there a faster way to do that?
Possibly off-topic, but the article isn't displaying[0] for me on Chromium 55.0.2883.87 (64-bit), running on Arch Linux, unless I go in the dev tools and manually remove "Fira Sans" from the font-family list in .container[1]. Not sure whether the problem is with me or the site, I'm surprised it doesn't fall-back to sans-serif before I override manually.
On AMP page, clicking the X on the header box should load the HTML page. Instead it kicks you back to the search results. I think I would be okay if they fixed that one thing.
There's little power for us when Google abuses the trust the community has afforded to them.
Let's assume this got much worse, and evidence came out that private political interests worked with Google to interfere with informed consent by reprioritizing what some called "fake news", when really what was being called fake news was actually anti-government activists pointing out collusion between tech companies and the government. Clearly, Google would be an agent to destroying democracy.
I imagine detecting that a visitor came from Google, and showing them an interstitial informing the user they have come from a state-sponsored search engine, and letting them know what that means and the alternatives to Google.
I think it's actually pretty trivial to build something like this with recipes for the popular CDNs and servers out there. Even a JS snippet would be totally fine.
Google is pursuing AMP not because it wants to promote a better experience on the web, but because Google wants to be the provider whose technology and own practices perform best on SRPs. They are acting like capitalist pigs, and we should coordinate a protest against Google to let them know they can't just walk all over us with no consequences.
My biggest problem is simply being unable to open up an amp link in a new tab. Often in Google News for example I prefer to open up several tabs and read through them at my leisure. But with AMP this became impossible - though I'm unclear if this is simply a limitation of the implementation.
I don't generally disagree with this article but I'd be interested to see research behind "it is a lot easier to stop using the Facebook app or Apple News app than it is to avoid Google search." - for Facebook specifically.
I know a few people who view Facebook's app on their phone as the Internet and who would never think to Google search a question. I'd be interested to know how widespread that actually is among Facebook's vast user base, in comparison to how many use Google and avoid Facebook.
AMP made me switch to DuckDuckGO on my iPhone as default search engine. Day 5, and so far I am surprised how well it works! I might switch on my computers too... Google just went too far with AMP in my opinion, pure abuse of power. Reminds me of something that would Facebook do, where they push changes down the consumers throat, but they aren't aware of their dependency on users (but most people don't care, bitch and whine about something that they do not like and don't sanction the product/company).
The joke of AMP is this: I lost a few rankings for an important keyword to a competitor. My page loads in milliseconds without AMP, whereas the competitor shovels 300 HTTP requests down the visitor's throat with several MB worth of ad trackers and junk.
The technical side of SEO – and thus the justification of AMP – is a joke if a trash website like my competitor's can be on #1.
I am unfamiliar with AMP, so I apologize if this question is based on a misunderstanding. The article says that all links in AMP pages begin with "https://www.google.com/amp/" right? Isn't this an invitation to bad actors of every flavor to produce AMP pages which will, to the users who know to look at their address bar and note the source domain, appear to be legitimate?
[+] [-] greenspot|9 years ago|reply
The open solution to a faster mobile web would have been so easy: Just penalize large and slow web pages without defining a dedicated mobile specification. That's it. This wasn't done in the past, slow pages outperformed fast ones on the SERPs because of some weird Google voodoo ranking, heck sometimes even desktop sites outperformed responsive ones on smartphones. If they had just tweaked these odd ranking rules in way that speed and size got more impact on the overall ranking there wouldn't have been any reason for AMP—the market would have regulated itself.
I'm wondering who at Google is responsible for AMP. Who created AMP's random specs (no external CSS but external fonts files, preference for four selected font providers, no JS but their JS, probable ranking preference of Google cached AMP sites, etc.). Why did they decide on the spec themselves and not as a part of an industry group? Again why didn't they just tweaked their ranking algorithm and btw, they could have also made Android's Chrome faster, it's still significantly slower than iOS' Safari. I'd be happy if this person could comment on the abuse of power (Sundar Pichai?).
[+] [-] usernam|9 years ago|reply
It's obvious they have a different view on this. You can see this first-hand on their pagespeed tool. Pagespeed ranks your pages mostly according to random features, irregardless of size and performance. Actual test you can perform: 1kb web page with no compression ranks lower than 1mb web page after compression: "because you should enable server-side compression".
Their mobile assessment tool is similarly a joke.
The sad thing is that I'm likely getting a lower ranking on my website with has 5kb vanilla uncompressed js (gasp, not even async!) compared to the glittered rating of a 5mb homepage which loads 5mb+ more excluding webfonts from external CDNs.
You can taste that this has spread into google monoculture by the performance of their own web services.
[+] [-] nailer|9 years ago|reply
A bunch of people, but Malte Ubl is one of the main people and has the best tech talks on why they picked the techniques and hacks they did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfekj564rs0
I'd recommend watching that for how it works than asking @amphtml questions.
Node people: I did a node specific presentation at LNUG you might like:
https://mikemaccana.github.io/quick-wins-with-node-and-amp/#...
I use AMP on CertSimple but appreciate that AMP favors 'speed achieved using specific techniques' rather than speed per se. There's the RealPolitik element where we as site owners have to do what Google say.
[+] [-] ronjouch|9 years ago|reply
A million times yes. As to why this didn't happen, I feel it would have been too restricted to "merely solving the problem", and not active enough on pushing Google's agenda to tighten its control on the web.
All other things being equal, option A being "efficient & neutral" (just penalize slow pages) is, as a business, inferior to option B "more convoluted but with potentially profitable side-effects" (AMP).
Other takes?
EDIT I should have better read the linked article before posting this, what I'm writing here is close to what the article "Lock In" section says.
[+] [-] wheelerwj|9 years ago|reply
They are a business, doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing.
It's up to us to find a way to kill google and take back our internet.
Edit, i love the downvotes for this. Google is legally required to act in their shareholders best interests. You all should understand fiduciary duty. They are building long term value for a massive (and growing) customer segment at the expense of a relatively small base of idealist tech users. Its morally reprehensible but still the correct decision in today's business climate.
[+] [-] mike-cardwell|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nrjdhsbsid|9 years ago|reply
Oh, and if you try to fork AMP you fail the official validators and suddenly your site isn't AMP anymore. What is happening in this case is that open source is doing nothing to stop AMP from being proprietary because it's worthless unless you have the "blessed" version.
Take for example the most obvious change, to make the original URL visible in the banner. There's tens maybe hundreds of GitHub issues on this and it's still languishing. In the rare case anyone official replies it's some bs about how it will affect the user experience or "interfere with Google's cache" in some roundabout and unspecified way. They leave a few of these issues open so that whenever you start another they can close it as a duplicate. Otherwise their repo would be overrun with them.
Open source doesn't matter if someone holds the keys to the kingdom and "validates" your sources. A dark pattern indeed.
AMP in its current form is certainly evil. The only way that could be changed is if Google opens up the ability to cache the page by a different provider with different validators.
I smell antitrust
[+] [-] freyir|9 years ago|reply
If you're stuck on an AMP page in your mobile browser, you can click on the browser's "Request desktop site" option to load the full page.
[+] [-] akras14|9 years ago|reply
After which I was invited to meet Google AMP team and to express my concerns, you can read my Q&A here: https://www.alexkras.com/i-had-lunch-with-google-amp-team/
TLDR; A lot of concerns are getting addressed
1. Minor, but the bar at the top is now scrollable on all devices, including (finally) iOS: https://www.alexkras.com/amp-toolbar-is-now-scrollable-on-sa..., it was not when I first wrote the article, so it's a good sign.
2. It is my understanding that the team is actively working on a way to "fix" the link issue, and give an easy way to get to original article, although it remains to be seen how they will approach it.
3. You can opt out from AMP cache on the web site end, but it really defeats the purpose. Read more here: https://www.alexkras.com/i-had-lunch-with-google-amp-team/
4. Most importantly, looks like there is even internal pressure to give people an option to Turn Off AMP on the search engine side, if they don't like it. See this, for example: https://twitter.com/slightlylate/status/820344221450125312 @cramforce is THE tech lead on AMP and @slightlylate is also a big shot at Google on Chrome Team.
Personally, I have mixed feelings about AMP, on one side I really like the speed, on the other I hate how it breaks the Web as we know it.
[+] [-] saurik|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikk14|9 years ago|reply
The downside of AMP seems to me so comically larger than the upside that this should be much more a black-or-white issue than it currently is. Good that they are moving to fixing it, but very bad that this thing exists as it is right now in the first place.
[+] [-] 65827|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] space_fountain|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twsted|9 years ago|reply
In many respects I like gardens, I like curated contents.
But I like the web more. The web needs diversity. We need more search engines for instance.
[+] [-] CommanderData|9 years ago|reply
On a serious note. Escaping Google on the internet is impossible. Can't be done without inconvenience.
[+] [-] matthewmacleod|9 years ago|reply
It's bad enough that I've had to switch to using Bing on mobile, despite the worse results, and I'm actually genuinely fearful for the first time about the openness of the web.
[+] [-] davedx|9 years ago|reply
Time to give DuckDuckGo another try I guess...
[+] [-] lmm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Traubenfuchs|9 years ago|reply
Where?
It seems there is no alternative for those who care about their rank and clicks.
[+] [-] ejcx|9 years ago|reply
I wrote a small chrome extension that always forwards my page to the equivalent AMP page (if one exists) and the experience of reading the news is so much better.
AMP pages off mobile are really really amazing. Compare Non-AMP[0] vs AMP[1]
[0] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Trump-on-the-minds-of-...
[1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/amp/Trump-on-the-minds-of-MLK-...
[+] [-] candiodari|9 years ago|reply
Wouldn't that effectively mean that in a search query followed by an AMP site visit only Google has the opportunity to show targeted ads ?
[+] [-] monochromatic|9 years ago|reply
edit: This is with an ad blocker on though.
[+] [-] notatoad|9 years ago|reply
On the normal implementation, clicking links on mobile from Google search, this is mostly not a problem because you're unlikely to land on some random guy's WordPress from a serp. But if you're triggering a lookup of AMP wherever it's available, you end up on a lot of broken sites clicking links from reddit and HN and stack overflow sources.
I've found a better compromise is an extension that doesn't load amp by default, but just puts a button in your toolbar that you can request an amp version with.
[+] [-] gedrap|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangoldin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macandcheese|9 years ago|reply
Even with ads the original is an easier read on desktop....
[+] [-] mcintyre1994|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucb1e|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cavemanmike|9 years ago|reply
Is it possible to set it as default on iOS/Android somehow? AMP really frustratingly breaks link sharing, and I'd like to totally avoid it.
[+] [-] robryan|9 years ago|reply
It also results in lower quality news appearing at the top of searches in cases where they have implemented AMP and the better sources haven't.
[+] [-] freehunter|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristianp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpkeisala|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] booleandilemma|9 years ago|reply
The # 1 reason why AMP bothers me is when I want to share a link with someone, I don't want to send an AMP link.
[+] [-] incongruity|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattmanser|9 years ago|reply
AMP doesn't work on firefox.
[+] [-] colept|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordanlev|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] technion|9 years ago|reply
I couldn't imagine dealing with supporting two deployments.
[+] [-] alistproducer2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amorphid|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teddyh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abusque|9 years ago|reply
[0] http://i.imgur.com/qJKSvMC.png [1] http://i.imgur.com/zYDZrtr.png
[+] [-] conductr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vajrapani666|9 years ago|reply
Let's assume this got much worse, and evidence came out that private political interests worked with Google to interfere with informed consent by reprioritizing what some called "fake news", when really what was being called fake news was actually anti-government activists pointing out collusion between tech companies and the government. Clearly, Google would be an agent to destroying democracy.
I imagine detecting that a visitor came from Google, and showing them an interstitial informing the user they have come from a state-sponsored search engine, and letting them know what that means and the alternatives to Google.
I think it's actually pretty trivial to build something like this with recipes for the popular CDNs and servers out there. Even a JS snippet would be totally fine.
Google is pursuing AMP not because it wants to promote a better experience on the web, but because Google wants to be the provider whose technology and own practices perform best on SRPs. They are acting like capitalist pigs, and we should coordinate a protest against Google to let them know they can't just walk all over us with no consequences.
January 20th seems like an ideal day.
[+] [-] adzm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcintyre1994|9 years ago|reply
I know a few people who view Facebook's app on their phone as the Internet and who would never think to Google search a question. I'd be interested to know how widespread that actually is among Facebook's vast user base, in comparison to how many use Google and avoid Facebook.
[+] [-] Philipp__|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WA|9 years ago|reply
The technical side of SEO – and thus the justification of AMP – is a joke if a trash website like my competitor's can be on #1.
[+] [-] otakucode|9 years ago|reply