It's hard to have a good-faith debate about AMP when Google says that AMP sites aren't given favor in search results, by defining the carousel as not being part of search results.
I think this one comes down to industry vs colloquial definitions.
In the search industry, the organic search results are what you're referring to when talking about the ranking algorithm, and of a ranking factor being given an advantage.
Having other verticals integrated like maps, news, or this carousal are seen as different elements altogether (eg. local search, shopping search).
But of course, colloquially, "search" just means any result that comes up when you search on the page. So this has created some friction when Google says that Amp pages have no impact on search.
The crazy thing about AMP to me is that we wouldn't have nearly as much front-end bloat on the web if it wasn't for the data-driven (read: click-driven) form of advertising championed by (who else?) Google. They put the burden on small time publishers for fixing a problem that they created.
Some of the stuff I see Google and Facebook doing to the web developer community these days makes Microsoft in the mid-00s seem like a model citizen.
> The crazy thing about AMP to me is that we wouldn't have nearly as much front-end bloat on the web if it wasn't for the data-driven (read: click-driven) form of advertising championed by (who else?) Google. They
Interstitial ads, pop-over requests to subscribe to a new letter. Multiple delay loaded banner ads that cause the page to jump around. Auto-play videos that jump around the screen as the user scrolls. I have even seen news sites with multiple videos that play at once.(!!) Pages that auto-forward after so many seconds on them (WHY?? I am trying to read your content!), pages that take over swipe behaviors so that I accidently end up on the "next" news story. Articles presented as captions under an image gallery, and somehow loading each JPEG is 2-3 seconds of jank.
There are lots of reasons things have gotten bad. Analytics JS is just one of them.
AMP takes care of all (most) of these problems. Pages load in less than 2 seconds, and articles can be scrolled through without the page incessantly jumping around.
My main objection to AMP is not that is it being portrayed as a community project (although, that does bother me). It is that Google are creating their own subset of already well established standards (HTML, CSS), and forcing developers to adopt them if they wish their content to appear at the top of search results.
If this is truly a project to increase the speed and readability of the Web, as it was initially promoted to be, Google have better tools for achieving that outcome (demoting excessively slow sites in search results, for example).
In it's current guise, AMP is little more than Google aiming to force all content on the web to be consistent with their own look-and-feel, and breaking the fundamental philosophy of the web in the process.
The look-and-feel argument is a misunderstanding of AMP. What you probably notice are pages generated by the Wordpress AMP plugin, which does not implement much in the way of different templates.
AMP has some severe constraints on javascript, but is pretty non-constrained on HTML and CSS.
Nearly all HTML5 tags and attributes are supported, including non-standard tags like <big>. It even allows super-non-standard tags like "<o:p>" which was part of an old microsoft word export-to-html feature.
Great article, I despise AMP and Google using its monopoly to peddle these lies, and using this position to embrace and extend open web standards. We have seen this pattern from a monopoly before and they are currently being taken to task for this behaviour in the EU. I’m still a bit amazed that the devs who work on this don’t understand what they are doing is squarely on the side of evil but I guess it’s a pay check.
A few other things AMP lies about:
* Wastes bandwidth downloading content in the background
* Wastes battery rendering content in the background
* Downloads Google links you haven’t given permission you want to see
* You can’t even opt out
* Breaks the web url extending it for Google’s own purposes
* Copying URLs to send to friends or post online no longer works correctly
* Breaks the understanding that the domain you are on is the authority for it’s own content
* Traps publishers further inside Google’s web, not the open web.
> Wastes bandwidth downloading content in the background. Wastes battery rendering content in the background.
That’s Google Search, not AMP. How much bandwidth does Search use? Is it big enough to be a problem for some users?
> Downloads Google links you haven’t given permission you want to see.
Google Search can load assets from its own domain, like any other website. The user can use browser extensions to block certain requests.
> You can’t even opt out.
You mean you can’t opt out of seeing AMP results on Google Search? Well, yes, for obvious reasons. AMP is Google’s product. It would make little sense for them to add such an option.
> Breaks the web url extending it for Google’s own purposes. Breaks the understanding that the domain you are on is the authority for it’s own content.
Yes, it does.
> Copying URLs to send to friends or post online no longer works correctly.
It works in iOS Safari and Firefox for Android (and probably other browsers as well), which use the canonical URL when the user shares the page. There is also a Share button in the header of the AMP page.
> Traps publishers further inside Google’s web, not the open web.
You can say that Google traps publishers, but not that AMP is not the open web. Google AMP Cache is a website on the (open) web.
Make site load speed a significant factor in search results ranking and the entire web would get faster without the duplicate work of maintaining AMP pages.
Also let's not forget that Google's Doubleclick (the most popular adserver) is the biggest and slowest component of most pages on the internet.
> If people hate amp, maybe it’s time to adjust the web standards to enable amp experience with the html6 web.
AMP is build on top of the web standards. It does nothing technical a normal webpage can't do. It's almost purely a political thing: It helps push these technologies by framing it as this cool and important new thing from Google (which many responsible for websites feel like they have to follow for SEO etc) instead of simply good engineering, which is a boring thing that nobody cares about if marketing wants to add another set of javascript to a site. In turn, it kind of punishes websites that already are efficient when they do not use AMP to achieve that.
Just yesterday an HNer was saying they are in Puerto Rico and the vast majority of pages won't load due to bandwidth restrictions - except for HN and one other site I'm forgetting. I would bet you AMP pages would load fine for them. HN loves to hate on page bloat and AMP, confusingly.
I have noticed HNers conflate AMP the standard and Google Search's caching behaviour and/or ranking of AMP pages. I love the former, and not the latter. They really ought to make it possible for mobile search users to opt-out of getting AMP results.
Pages load fast without bloat in iOS thanks to both the reader view and iOS's built in support of content blockers. What are the chances that Google will allow for third party content blockers and a reader view in Chrome that blocks all ads including theirs in Android?
I'm not sure what "enable amp experience with the html6 web" means, but surely you like non-amp pages too, particularly the ones well designed and lightweight code.
I'm just hearing about amp tonight and trying to understand what it is. Why are people saying it ruins the URL? Does it change the website address to a google URL? Why are people criticising it saying "hosted not cached"?
I gather the caching works similar to Akamai, with a configurable TTL on file types for the origin server?
I don't have any such issues and my phone doesn't even support 4g. A lot of the time it's still reasonable on EDGE.
And besides, I'm still for expanding 3g coverage instead of starting to experiment with / roll out 5g as they are... we don't need new tech (in this regard), we need to roll shit out and do shit properly.
Same for me, if I'm in the tube or in an area with weak coverage I only click on AMP links (and Facebook equivalent) whenever possible. That way I can search and load the result in the ~15-20 sec time window where I have wifi.
I have found some sites have made the "main" site better than AMP in terms of speed and download, but because its often the first result, sometimes you get an inferior experience. As someone who built and deployed the bbc news amp experience, i didn't really know how it was going to be used, but i would have raised serious concerns knowing what we know now.
I've been pushing back hard on adding AMP as a feature on our product and I am glad I did. We host/publish millions of articles for our clients and I just don't feel comfortable enabling AMP and allowing the big boys to get away with this crap.
All large CMS players and publishing platforms should read this post.
I think a decent compromise (one I'd like to see more sites adopt) is only putting a subset of your page's content on the AMPed version, with a "Read the full article on XYZ.com" banner at the bottom. It gives you that preferred real estate while also acting as a funnel to your site.
Worse still, if you mention any of these issues on AMPs GitHub page, they will be closed with “nothing to do with AMP, it’s how Google chose to implement it, ask Google”
Do you have any concrete examples of this? Would like to see the actual issues and wording from the AMP team on it. Not that I don't believe you, just want to read it for myself.
articles that get no real traction are not counted for dedup purposes. Its annoying when you submit them, but then this comment topic wouldnt have occured.
It's a shame there's so much controversy around AMP. It's not a simple task to set up a performant website. Ignoring the search result preference and caching, but AMP is an interesting attempt to tame website development so your pages load quickly. People keep commenting you can make a website fast without AMP, but this is difficult when you're working in big teams and with management that don't put priority on performance.
If Google just flat-out said they would penalize sites in rankings for poor performance, then management would very much prioritize it.
Same thing happened with responsive design a year or two ago and now https this year -- my clients never cared about doing either of these when presented with the choice (since it would cost more money), but the second they received and email from Google about it affecting their search rankings (or showing the site as "insecure" in chrome, as per the recent push for https), they were asking us to do this for them.
> It's not a simple task to set up a performant website.
On the contrary, I feel like it takes more planning to build something that's slow than building something fast. Only once you've made elaborate designs and hired people who are used to including the six megabytes of javascript libraries they've accumulated over the years, it gets tricky.
In the past I've been happily surprised when I wanted to look something up on my own blog over some slow, public WiFi, and it loads super fast compared to everything else. (I'm not the only one, of course, but most small websites don't have a huge team behind it and are not very popular.) It's just because it's a personal thing which I've kept simple and built from scratch.
Hmm, while some of the critic i see here may be valid and justified, i like the enforcing of this strict rule set...
i am senior frontend-dev and imho we wouldn't need AMP if in 99% of the cases devs, or better their customers would give a damn about doing their job right ( most of the time they just don't know better, because they are just beginners and never learned much about 'advanced' html/css - i haven't seen to much senior devs lowering themself to do html/css work and/or are knowleadgable in this areas ).
Most of AMPs advantages regarding FOUC, Jumping-Content and Performance is to enforcing good HTML/CSS practices. Again citing guardian as example... So at least know i have a way to simple enforce a minimum best practice for mobile pages...
Whenever i had to sign off a responsive/adaptive mobile page loading 'insane' amounts of unused styles and/or javascript i wanted to hit something with a hammer... I am for giving it some time and see how it develops..
I think Google should be allowed to do whatever they want, as long as they don’t lie to their visitors and pretend they are a search engine, which is what they’re currently doing.
Perhaps this is the solution; require Google to stop calling itself a search engine.
And why do you think that? I could understand why you'd want to be thinking that, if you own lots of Google stocks, but either way this does not provide any resolution to anything.
Whether you call it a search engine or a curated content platform, users aren't going to suddenly stop using it now.
How is it not a search engine? Opinions about what constitute proper search results has always been at the core of Google’s algorithm from the very beginning.
of course google should be allowed to do whatever they want -- they are a private company in a (currently) unregulated industry. users, developers and publishers should also be allowed to do whatever they want. the author of the article is recommending that others realize what google is actually doing with AMP and to stay away from the technology (despite is positive sides).
I just googled “house of cards cancelled” in Firefox on my iPhone and every result for a several screens worth of scrolling are AMP. I can’t find a single result that isn’t AMP.
> AMP pages don’t receive preferential treatment in search results.
Think it’s true. At the beginning AMP pages got a huge rank bonus. Now, it’s much less. I feel Google sees AMP just for news pages. Guess the project got a lot resistance internally which is understandable: With the hundreds custom AMP components they are actually rebuilding the web.
> At the beginning AMP pages got a huge rank bonus.
That they ever got such a thing is ridiculous to begin with. One of Google's principles is that they're neutral, besides clearly labeled paid-for ads which have always been the business model. I don't think they succeed 100% in setting aside unconscious biases that the programmers must have that build and tweak/configure the thing, but I believe that it is one of the basic ideas. If you say that was not the case, and is "much less" not the case now, then saying it's not biased is just weird.
lol. This doesn't even need a discussion. If you have a website hooking nearly all over websites without asking the users consent and without giving the user a recognizable way to opt out, then of course it is toxic. It is toxic by nature.
[+] [-] Touche|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsoto|8 years ago|reply
I don't think people our target is more inclined into clicking on AMP results as they're non-technical, I'm guessing we're higher in the results.
[+] [-] SquareWheel|8 years ago|reply
In the search industry, the organic search results are what you're referring to when talking about the ranking algorithm, and of a ranking factor being given an advantage.
Having other verticals integrated like maps, news, or this carousal are seen as different elements altogether (eg. local search, shopping search).
But of course, colloquially, "search" just means any result that comes up when you search on the page. So this has created some friction when Google says that Amp pages have no impact on search.
[+] [-] tboyd47|8 years ago|reply
Some of the stuff I see Google and Facebook doing to the web developer community these days makes Microsoft in the mid-00s seem like a model citizen.
[+] [-] com2kid|8 years ago|reply
Interstitial ads, pop-over requests to subscribe to a new letter. Multiple delay loaded banner ads that cause the page to jump around. Auto-play videos that jump around the screen as the user scrolls. I have even seen news sites with multiple videos that play at once.(!!) Pages that auto-forward after so many seconds on them (WHY?? I am trying to read your content!), pages that take over swipe behaviors so that I accidently end up on the "next" news story. Articles presented as captions under an image gallery, and somehow loading each JPEG is 2-3 seconds of jank.
There are lots of reasons things have gotten bad. Analytics JS is just one of them.
AMP takes care of all (most) of these problems. Pages load in less than 2 seconds, and articles can be scrolled through without the page incessantly jumping around.
[+] [-] cobookman|8 years ago|reply
Unless you have a viable alternative monetization method?
[+] [-] davethedevguy|8 years ago|reply
My main objection to AMP is not that is it being portrayed as a community project (although, that does bother me). It is that Google are creating their own subset of already well established standards (HTML, CSS), and forcing developers to adopt them if they wish their content to appear at the top of search results.
If this is truly a project to increase the speed and readability of the Web, as it was initially promoted to be, Google have better tools for achieving that outcome (demoting excessively slow sites in search results, for example).
In it's current guise, AMP is little more than Google aiming to force all content on the web to be consistent with their own look-and-feel, and breaking the fundamental philosophy of the web in the process.
[+] [-] gregable|8 years ago|reply
AMP has some severe constraints on javascript, but is pretty non-constrained on HTML and CSS.
Nearly all HTML5 tags and attributes are supported, including non-standard tags like <big>. It even allows super-non-standard tags like "<o:p>" which was part of an old microsoft word export-to-html feature.
Take a look at some of the examples on https://www.ampstart.com/
http://ampproject.org/ is AMP and https://daily.spiegel.de/ is AMP. These look very different.
[+] [-] SimeVidas|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andy_ppp|8 years ago|reply
A few other things AMP lies about:
* Wastes bandwidth downloading content in the background
* Wastes battery rendering content in the background
* Downloads Google links you haven’t given permission you want to see
* You can’t even opt out
* Breaks the web url extending it for Google’s own purposes
* Copying URLs to send to friends or post online no longer works correctly
* Breaks the understanding that the domain you are on is the authority for it’s own content
* Traps publishers further inside Google’s web, not the open web.
[+] [-] SimeVidas|8 years ago|reply
That’s Google Search, not AMP. How much bandwidth does Search use? Is it big enough to be a problem for some users?
> Downloads Google links you haven’t given permission you want to see.
Google Search can load assets from its own domain, like any other website. The user can use browser extensions to block certain requests.
> You can’t even opt out.
You mean you can’t opt out of seeing AMP results on Google Search? Well, yes, for obvious reasons. AMP is Google’s product. It would make little sense for them to add such an option.
> Breaks the web url extending it for Google’s own purposes. Breaks the understanding that the domain you are on is the authority for it’s own content.
Yes, it does.
> Copying URLs to send to friends or post online no longer works correctly.
It works in iOS Safari and Firefox for Android (and probably other browsers as well), which use the canonical URL when the user shares the page. There is also a Share button in the header of the AMP page.
> Traps publishers further inside Google’s web, not the open web.
You can say that Google traps publishers, but not that AMP is not the open web. Google AMP Cache is a website on the (open) web.
[+] [-] tootie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brainfire|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cobookman|8 years ago|reply
When you've got good service they load quick without annoying popups / ads.
If people hate amp, maybe it’s time to adjust the web standards to enable amp experience with the html6 web.
(Disclaimer, I do work at Google)
[+] [-] manigandham|8 years ago|reply
Make site load speed a significant factor in search results ranking and the entire web would get faster without the duplicate work of maintaining AMP pages.
Also let's not forget that Google's Doubleclick (the most popular adserver) is the biggest and slowest component of most pages on the internet.
[+] [-] detaro|8 years ago|reply
AMP is build on top of the web standards. It does nothing technical a normal webpage can't do. It's almost purely a political thing: It helps push these technologies by framing it as this cool and important new thing from Google (which many responsible for websites feel like they have to follow for SEO etc) instead of simply good engineering, which is a boring thing that nobody cares about if marketing wants to add another set of javascript to a site. In turn, it kind of punishes websites that already are efficient when they do not use AMP to achieve that.
[+] [-] pcwalton|8 years ago|reply
What does that mean exactly?
[+] [-] sangnoir|8 years ago|reply
I have noticed HNers conflate AMP the standard and Google Search's caching behaviour and/or ranking of AMP pages. I love the former, and not the latter. They really ought to make it possible for mobile search users to opt-out of getting AMP results.
[+] [-] scarface74|8 years ago|reply
And the pages aren't hosted by Google.
[+] [-] exodust|8 years ago|reply
I'm just hearing about amp tonight and trying to understand what it is. Why are people saying it ruins the URL? Does it change the website address to a google URL? Why are people criticising it saying "hosted not cached"?
I gather the caching works similar to Akamai, with a configurable TTL on file types for the origin server?
[+] [-] lucb1e|8 years ago|reply
And besides, I'm still for expanding 3g coverage instead of starting to experiment with / roll out 5g as they are... we don't need new tech (in this regard), we need to roll shit out and do shit properly.
[+] [-] dx034|8 years ago|reply
(I don't work at Google or Facebook or wherever)
[+] [-] dblooman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digitalbase|8 years ago|reply
All large CMS players and publishing platforms should read this post.
[+] [-] tboyd47|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaius|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnhenry|8 years ago|reply
It's like they took on the role of Sauron almost immediately after giving up their "don't be evil" slogan.
[+] [-] dmitriid|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diggan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tboyd47|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tambourine_man|8 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15581276
I don't get HN dedup anymore.
[+] [-] throwaway2048|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanwilson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordanlev|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucb1e|8 years ago|reply
On the contrary, I feel like it takes more planning to build something that's slow than building something fast. Only once you've made elaborate designs and hired people who are used to including the six megabytes of javascript libraries they've accumulated over the years, it gets tricky.
In the past I've been happily surprised when I wanted to look something up on my own blog over some slow, public WiFi, and it loads super fast compared to everything else. (I'm not the only one, of course, but most small websites don't have a huge team behind it and are not very popular.) It's just because it's a personal thing which I've kept simple and built from scratch.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|8 years ago|reply
You can! But so few people actually do. Kind of like abstinence-only birth control.
[+] [-] FloNeu|8 years ago|reply
i am senior frontend-dev and imho we wouldn't need AMP if in 99% of the cases devs, or better their customers would give a damn about doing their job right ( most of the time they just don't know better, because they are just beginners and never learned much about 'advanced' html/css - i haven't seen to much senior devs lowering themself to do html/css work and/or are knowleadgable in this areas ).
Most of AMPs advantages regarding FOUC, Jumping-Content and Performance is to enforcing good HTML/CSS practices. Again citing guardian as example... So at least know i have a way to simple enforce a minimum best practice for mobile pages...
Whenever i had to sign off a responsive/adaptive mobile page loading 'insane' amounts of unused styles and/or javascript i wanted to hit something with a hammer... I am for giving it some time and see how it develops..
[+] [-] tcsf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gonational|8 years ago|reply
Perhaps this is the solution; require Google to stop calling itself a search engine.
[+] [-] Sylos|8 years ago|reply
Whether you call it a search engine or a curated content platform, users aren't going to suddenly stop using it now.
[+] [-] danso|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elsewhen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emodendroket|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw2016|8 years ago|reply
The more egregious Google's creepy behavior becomes the more urgent the solution becomes. This is an opportunity to find a solution.
[+] [-] nailer|8 years ago|reply
> AMP is, I think, best described as nominally open-source.
That's not how open source works. Projects are either under an OSD license or not. See https://github.com/ampproject for the licenses involved.
The article's premise still stands, but the author probably meant 'nominally open standard' or just 'nominally open', both of which are accurate.
[+] [-] generalpf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waytogo|8 years ago|reply
Think it’s true. At the beginning AMP pages got a huge rank bonus. Now, it’s much less. I feel Google sees AMP just for news pages. Guess the project got a lot resistance internally which is understandable: With the hundreds custom AMP components they are actually rebuilding the web.
[+] [-] lucb1e|8 years ago|reply
That they ever got such a thing is ridiculous to begin with. One of Google's principles is that they're neutral, besides clearly labeled paid-for ads which have always been the business model. I don't think they succeed 100% in setting aside unconscious biases that the programmers must have that build and tweak/configure the thing, but I believe that it is one of the basic ideas. If you say that was not the case, and is "much less" not the case now, then saying it's not biased is just weird.
[+] [-] callalex|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikb|8 years ago|reply