> The change for non-AMP content to become eligible to appear in the mobile Top Stories feature in Search will also roll out in May 2021. Any page that meets the Google News content policies will be eligible and we will prioritize pages with great page experience, whether implemented using AMP or any other web technology, as we rank the results.
> In addition to the timing updates described above, we plan to test a visual indicator that highlights pages in search results that have great page experience.
Seems like a positive change. It will mean extra work as developers improve the performance of their sites. But having clear metrics to improve will make that work tractable. Also, advocating for that work to senior management will be easier when it's so clearly tied to SEO.
The upshot is that ordinary users will experience a more performant web. Not overnight but over a few years, like the shift to HTTPS and supporting mobile web versions. Both of those changes were driven in part by the desire for better ranking on Google.
I don't understand how this isn't a rehash of Google's PageSpeed push during early 2010s. I do remember having to do the same kind of procedure to get better SEO: measure against PageSpeed's metrics set and optimise the bad results.
This looks just the next step after PageSpeed and I have no idea why Google didn't push this before the whole debacle with AMP, such stupidity but expected nowadays from the tech giants...
Some of the metrics they judge are things that AMP basically implements for you, and are a pain to implement otherwise.
Cumulative Layout Shift is one of those things. Content blocks on the page need to have a fixed height, not one that is dynamic (which might happen with lazy-loaded content).
For some use cases, conditionally loading content (one of those being ads) becomes difficult/impossible if you're using a third party system and can't render server side.
Yes! I can't wait till its gone altogether. The whole AMP experience from an end user, really sucked. Pick a reason, but nearly every article always has something broken, missing, or misrepresented. Fifty percent of the time I would either need to click the original link, or give up on the content.
I used to Google things on mobile and append `site:reddit.com` to filter out SEO-laden blogspam and zero in on the familiar confirmation bias of other reddit addicts. Then I had to tolerate the following antipattern of the modern web:
1. tap a Google search result link
2. tap the tiny "i" icon on the left side of the stupid AMP page header to display the actual URL of the page I'm trying to navigate to
3. tap the displayed URL itself in the AMP header
4. close reddit's "this looks better in the app!" bottom banner
5. scroll down and tap "VIEW ALL X COMMENTS"
So fast. So usable.
On the bright side, this rigmarole has really done wonders for my productivity because I've simply stopped bothering.
The pre-amp world was also completely utterly terrible though.
Do you remember mobile news websites circa 2015? It was full of so much ad tech that if a site didn't make your phone hot and crash the browser the best experience you could possibly get would be a couple ad and email form click throughs, maybe a video fading in over the entire content like some trashy mobile app, followed by a scroll jack, a backbutton jacking, then more videos just magically appearing in between paragraphs pushing them apart like some kind of infestation, it was just utterly unusable.
The text that you were lucky enough to catch would quickly fly up and down the screen as more ads start rendering and load in at every div tag with multiple jingles and voice-overs for car insurance and refinancing playing out of your phone all at once. You think "well maybe I really don't care that much about what that diplomat said after all". It was a complete waste of time. They were almost all like this as if there was some secret competition among the news sites, like as if some coveted award was at stake for the craziest most unusable experience.
Until last year or so, Google intentionally gave a worse version of google search when using Firefox on Android. I installed a user-agent-spoofer to pretend to be Chrome, and I got the perfectly functioning page. But then I also got results including AMP links, so quickly disabled the extension and went back to the old ugly result page...
9 out of 10 times AMP pages in Firefox failed to be scrollable. Like the static/fixed top and bottom banner somehow screwed up scroll behavior.
Speaking from experience, it loads lightning-fast even on an ancient Android device on nerfed 2G data roaming internationally. And the user experience can't be beaten.
Wow, I didn't know this existed! It seems way nicer than the "full site", I think even your average user would probably agree. The "full site" feels like nothing but a downgrade, it doesn't really add anything useful.
Nice web design.
Now talking about the headlines itself, each and every headline is about a negative news story. If you only read npr you would think the world is on flames.
Great, you found one site that works great. Here's a million others that don't and take 10s+ to load on mobile. I'm not sure what your point is.
The day every website out there makes fast and performant websites like the above without any stick or carrot, then you will have a point, but unfortunately we don't live in such a world.
I really really want this to be true. Unfortunately I can just see some ambitious PM picking this up again and trying to push it even harder. "The real reason the previous initiative failed to gain traction was insufficient market education."
As far as I can tell, Google have the power to essentially end web bloat at one stroke: introduce severe Google ranking penalties for bloated pages. Websites would soon get the message and cut down on bloat.
Presumably the reason Google doesn't do this is that they'd have to punish many of the most popular websites, which might be seen as damaging the quality of their search results (at least in the short term).
I don't think that users complaints actually had any impact. It seems more likely that avoiding regulatory scrutiny was G's motivation in scrapping AMP.
It was the wrong long-term solution for sure. But I think it forced publishers to reevaluate their priorities with respect to bloat and loading times, whereas prior attempts at quietly calling attention to the problem apparently didn't make a shred of difference...
I agree, and whenever I bring up that web designers can do anything but wrong, I've been piled up on before.
I'd still take a mildly broken AMP page to read an article over the "intended experience" with ads and trackers everywhere and any attempts to block them would break the page further.
I get the sense that the only reason this happened is because amp sites were returning less advertising revenue for sites implementing it vs regular web. If the money was the same or better then I can't assume it would have ended up this way.
Good riddance. A thinly veiled power grab to make the web a walled garden. Now lets do the obvious thing and just do preferential treatment for fast loading pages.
>> The Top Stories carousel feature on Google Search will be updated to include all news content. This means that using the AMP format is no longer required and that any page, irrespective of its Core Web Vitals score or page experience status, will be eligible to appear in the Top Stories carousel.
It doesn't say AMP will not get preferential treatment, it just says your page doesn't have to be using AMP. Don't forget Google has Web Stories[0] to fill this gap as well.
I hope newspapers actually look at the alternative though. Some websites are so poor that I preferred sharing the AMP page instead of the original page since the article was not readable on the latter. That’s right. It was so ad- and popup-infested that it was literally useless.
AMP wasn’t cancer; The web itself is. Visit some non-major or local website and you’ll see they’re absolute rubbish, especially those that work on the web, like news agencies.
Unfortunately, AMP has a lot of inertia. I just tried a bunch of different queries on Chrome/Android, and all the carousel entries still have the AMP lighting bolt.
Newspaper dev shops probably don't have the money to justify a standalone "get rid of AMP" project. So it will take a while to see some migration away.
Anyone have a query that results in a carousel story that isn't an AMP one?
Edit: Found one. "Biden Covid" results in an NPR story in the carousel that is not AMP.
Reading HN threads about AMP has taught me that it's very easy for people with gigabit internet connections, fast computers and adblockers to ignore the fact that AMP made the web actually usable for large numbers of people who previously had to wait 5 minutes for a page to load.
I use off-shelf android browser and old phone. I dont have gigabit internet connection. And hate AMP.
Also, it is fair ty say that the people who hate consequences AMP the most are those who use reddit and discussions generally. Because that is where amp fails the most. Which is pretty close to average user.
People who dont mind amp are the ones who primary use long form static pages ... which is minority of internet.
I don't think that many people argue that page loading times weren't an issue, particularly when mobile networks were much slower. It's just that they think AMP was the wrong solution to that problem. There are other ways Google could have promoted and encouraged lightweight mobile friendly webpages without creating their own new standard.
"Your site can be faster than AMP without using AMP"
That isn't true. Google is able to cache AMP pages in their CDN and preload and pre-render them in the browser or in Google News. You can't beat that with even the most optimized site.
AMP, especially on iOS, is awkward for many reasons and having to support two formats by publishers isn't great, but it is unquestionably fast when rendered within a container that supports AMP.
you can easily beat downloading hundreds of kilobytes of amp JS stuff from supa-fast and mega-optimized google CDN by not downloading JS at all or using js very conservatively
> That isn't true. Google is able to cache AMP pages in their CDN and preload and pre-render them in the browser or in Google News. You can't beat that with even the most optimized site.
Surely you can do that same pre-rendering yourself, and serve the result of it?
The time to first paint for a smallish website from across the planet seldom crosses the two-second mark. I would happily take that over a website that fails to load from a server <100 miles from me because my packet loss is >40%.
The coverage of this has, I think, been misleading. Google has not officially said (anywhere I can find) that AMP won’t get preferential treatment. They have only said that AMP won’t be required to rank. Those are very different statements. “Sure, we will include a few non amp stories,” is different from assurance that you will not be punished if you remove amp support from your site. The second one might be true— but Google hasn’t confirmed it.
Am I the only person who experiences longer load time on amp pages? I literally have to click the little paperclip at the top of an amp page to go to the regular one to load in like 50% of the time. Is it because I use Firefox or something?
[+] [-] nindalf|4 years ago|reply
- https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/introducing-web-vitals-ess... introduces these metrics, what they mean and how to measure them.
- https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating... talks about how the search engine experience will change
> The change for non-AMP content to become eligible to appear in the mobile Top Stories feature in Search will also roll out in May 2021. Any page that meets the Google News content policies will be eligible and we will prioritize pages with great page experience, whether implemented using AMP or any other web technology, as we rank the results.
> In addition to the timing updates described above, we plan to test a visual indicator that highlights pages in search results that have great page experience.
Seems like a positive change. It will mean extra work as developers improve the performance of their sites. But having clear metrics to improve will make that work tractable. Also, advocating for that work to senior management will be easier when it's so clearly tied to SEO.
The upshot is that ordinary users will experience a more performant web. Not overnight but over a few years, like the shift to HTTPS and supporting mobile web versions. Both of those changes were driven in part by the desire for better ranking on Google.
[+] [-] donohoe|4 years ago|reply
Out of 71 tracked articles on news sites, only 3 or 4 score 85 or higher in overall Performance as tested by Google Lighthouse.
Article Performance Leaderboard: https://webperf.xyz/
[+] [-] piva00|4 years ago|reply
This looks just the next step after PageSpeed and I have no idea why Google didn't push this before the whole debacle with AMP, such stupidity but expected nowadays from the tech giants...
[+] [-] katzgrau|4 years ago|reply
Cumulative Layout Shift is one of those things. Content blocks on the page need to have a fixed height, not one that is dynamic (which might happen with lazy-loaded content).
For some use cases, conditionally loading content (one of those being ads) becomes difficult/impossible if you're using a third party system and can't render server side.
[+] [-] petee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EForEndeavour|4 years ago|reply
1. tap a Google search result link
2. tap the tiny "i" icon on the left side of the stupid AMP page header to display the actual URL of the page I'm trying to navigate to
3. tap the displayed URL itself in the AMP header
4. close reddit's "this looks better in the app!" bottom banner
5. scroll down and tap "VIEW ALL X COMMENTS"
So fast. So usable.
On the bright side, this rigmarole has really done wonders for my productivity because I've simply stopped bothering.
[+] [-] kristopolous|4 years ago|reply
Do you remember mobile news websites circa 2015? It was full of so much ad tech that if a site didn't make your phone hot and crash the browser the best experience you could possibly get would be a couple ad and email form click throughs, maybe a video fading in over the entire content like some trashy mobile app, followed by a scroll jack, a backbutton jacking, then more videos just magically appearing in between paragraphs pushing them apart like some kind of infestation, it was just utterly unusable.
The text that you were lucky enough to catch would quickly fly up and down the screen as more ads start rendering and load in at every div tag with multiple jingles and voice-overs for car insurance and refinancing playing out of your phone all at once. You think "well maybe I really don't care that much about what that diplomat said after all". It was a complete waste of time. They were almost all like this as if there was some secret competition among the news sites, like as if some coveted award was at stake for the craziest most unusable experience.
[+] [-] matsemann|4 years ago|reply
9 out of 10 times AMP pages in Firefox failed to be scrollable. Like the static/fixed top and bottom banner somehow screwed up scroll behavior.
[+] [-] enos_feedler|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bvanderveen|4 years ago|reply
Speaking from experience, it loads lightning-fast even on an ancient Android device on nerfed 2G data roaming internationally. And the user experience can't be beaten.
Make the web hypertext again!
[+] [-] Booligoosh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aero-glide2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehsankia|4 years ago|reply
The day every website out there makes fast and performant websites like the above without any stick or carrot, then you will have a point, but unfortunately we don't live in such a world.
[+] [-] myphs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iandanforth|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wkrsz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_duke|4 years ago|reply
I'm pretty sure that's the primary reason, which won't change anytime soon.
I'd also expect many publishers that adopted AMP to jump ship now, which means it will slowly die away.
[+] [-] pwinnski|4 years ago|reply
Slow, tracker-laden web pages are still terrible, AMP was just the wrong solution.
[+] [-] MaxBarraclough|4 years ago|reply
Presumably the reason Google doesn't do this is that they'd have to punish many of the most popular websites, which might be seen as damaging the quality of their search results (at least in the short term).
[+] [-] mthoms|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ridaj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kemonocode|4 years ago|reply
I'd still take a mildly broken AMP page to read an article over the "intended experience" with ads and trackers everywhere and any attempts to block them would break the page further.
[+] [-] Fordec|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] overcast|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jepper|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|4 years ago|reply
>> The Top Stories carousel feature on Google Search will be updated to include all news content. This means that using the AMP format is no longer required and that any page, irrespective of its Core Web Vitals score or page experience status, will be eligible to appear in the Top Stories carousel.
It doesn't say AMP will not get preferential treatment, it just says your page doesn't have to be using AMP. Don't forget Google has Web Stories[0] to fill this gap as well.
[0] https://stories.google/
[+] [-] contriban|4 years ago|reply
AMP wasn’t cancer; The web itself is. Visit some non-major or local website and you’ll see they’re absolute rubbish, especially those that work on the web, like news agencies.
[+] [-] tyingq|4 years ago|reply
Newspaper dev shops probably don't have the money to justify a standalone "get rid of AMP" project. So it will take a while to see some migration away.
Anyone have a query that results in a carousel story that isn't an AMP one?
Edit: Found one. "Biden Covid" results in an NPR story in the carousel that is not AMP.
[+] [-] AS_of|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] from|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] watwut|4 years ago|reply
Also, it is fair ty say that the people who hate consequences AMP the most are those who use reddit and discussions generally. Because that is where amp fails the most. Which is pretty close to average user.
People who dont mind amp are the ones who primary use long form static pages ... which is minority of internet.
[+] [-] hoppyhoppy2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ec109685|4 years ago|reply
That isn't true. Google is able to cache AMP pages in their CDN and preload and pre-render them in the browser or in Google News. You can't beat that with even the most optimized site.
AMP, especially on iOS, is awkward for many reasons and having to support two formats by publishers isn't great, but it is unquestionably fast when rendered within a container that supports AMP.
[+] [-] malinens|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmm|4 years ago|reply
Surely you can do that same pre-rendering yourself, and serve the result of it?
[+] [-] Seirdy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joegahona|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mitchellst|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rapnie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amcoastal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] king_magic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Tsarbomb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]