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Comment by CaptSpify | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm mis-understanding, but then why would I want to use AMP? What benefit does it bring?

AMP is a strategy to take control away from the publishers, to prevent them from cluttering up the site with obtrusive ads and other heavy clutter around the actual content. The carrot that Google is offering the publishers in order to get them to relinquish this control is better placement in search results.

The best way to think of AMP is it's a list of things you're not allowed to do anymore when you make a website. It's just HTML with rules.

But then why use a whole new system, instead of just punishing sites that use too much crap?

I guess it's easier to measure the amount of crap when you've defined a list of no-no's and yes-yes, and on the other side it's also easier for publishers to understand.

Couldn't Google just say "If you do X Y and Z, we'll lower your ranking?"

A lot of the crap isn't loaded by the publisher's site directly but by third-party tracking/analytic/ad code. Many publishers would love to have faster loading sites but can't give up those third-party functions easily. Creating an ecosystem like AMP allows Google to also arm-twist the third-parties to clean up their act, if they want to be supported in AMP.

I guess I just don't see how this addresses my question. Why this would help, over just ranking those sites lower?

It seems like a roundabout way to do things.

They do prioritize faster sites over slower sites, and they announced it at least a year ago or more, but I think we can all agree that despite Google's announcement, the mobile web is still pretty slow. (Like, average page can take 8s to load.)

Google noticed that the mobile web is still pretty slow, and they also noticed Facebook's Instant Articles initiative. Under Instant Articles, news sites provide a special RSS feed with limited HTML features to Facebook, who caches the results and shares ad revenue with the news site. As a result, viewing participating news sites in Facebook is faster than viewing them in a web browser, e.g. in Google search results.

Google saw this as a strategic threat, and said: "How can we do what Facebook's doing, making news sites provide fast lightweight HTML to Google and our users, but in a more Open way? At least somewhat more open?" AMP was the result.

When you use AMP on your site, a third party (Google--in principle anybody, but in fact just Google for the moment) can verify easily that a site will load quickly, by design. They don't have to launch a browser and run a speed index test; they know, for sure, that the page is going to be pretty fast.

A third party also knows that all AMP pages allow third parties to cache them. (Again, only Google is doing this today, but it could be anybody, e.g. Facebook could present AMP pages from a fast Facebook cache, too.)

Google takes no ad revenue from AMP pages, and supposedly doesn't rank AMP pages higher (except by virtue of the fact that AMP pages tend to be faster and faster pages rank better). AMP pages do also get the lightning-bolt badge in search results, which might encourage users to click on them. And AMP has a github and accepts actual PRs, so AMP is open in that sense, too, except that it's officially governed by Google, so it's not really very open in governance.

Folks here seem to be pretty skeptical of AMP; I think it's a mixed bag. One positive outcome of AMP would be if its HTML components eventually become official elements in a future HTML document, built into browsers. Then AMP would be nothing more than a set of guidelines and a validator; that sounds pretty good to me.

I guess I'm still not seeing any advantage to using AMP, except as the obvious power-grab. I don't see anything in your statement that couldn't be done by just punishing sites for being bloated and slow, and stating why. Adding another layer onto something to combat complexity is two steps back.

I hate heavy sites probably more than the next guy, but pushing your own standard is the wrong way to go about it, IMO.

> I don't see anything in your statement that couldn't be done by just punishing sites for being bloated and slow, and stating why.

They tried that; they're still doing it. But it didn't work, and at this point I think it's naive to think that the mobile web will get much faster purely because Google ranks fast sites higher.

I'd argue that they haven't really tried it.

Maybe their failure is not prioritizing it enough in the algorithm. If I look for weather, there are tons of shitty, heavy-js sites. Yet http://myfreeweather.com/ (which still has some JS, but not a ton) is nowhere listed.

The first few pages of sites that google offers me are all terrible choices.

From what I can see, AMP is really less about "here's some cool new tech", and more "here's a buzzword and some conventions" to encourage sites to write lighter-weight, better designed web pages (or versions of web pages).

It seems like a sugar-coating over the "use modern HTML and make less bloated pages" pill.

So it's Google's ad/search-equivalent of Apple's MFI "Made for iPod/iPhone"?

Because Google will treat your content preferentially if you do. To quote an earlier post of mine from a different thread [1]:

AMP can impose constraints because it's a corporate effort to re-frame content in a way that provides centralized ad serving, tracking, and the like. It gives the content publishers the same tools (ads, tracking) they have to provide themselves with on the open web, while simultaneously benefiting those like Google who will put their own viewport and context around that content. It's not that much different from when an individual wants to publish on Medium or Tumblr, so the platform provides the author with a box to put text in, a dashboard, view tracking, and stuff the author wants, while they get to host interesting content with which to attract an audience for ads. It's a win-win, symbiotic relationship, while on the self-hosted web, every publisher is on their own.

This isn't about HTML vs AMP at all. It's about business models, which are given in AMP, but left as an exercise for the publisher on the open web.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12272973

So I'm giving up control of my site, so that Google can strong-arm themselves to extract more value from it?

I think I'll pass, thanks

It's more of a mutually-consented handholding with small amounts of arm-twisting. Your content needs to make money for you to stay afloat -- if it doesn't, you're not in the target market for AMP -- so Google gives you some tools to that they can surface your content, and you get their ad and analytics infrastructure and their preferential treatment; the premise is both Google and the publisher win more than they lose.

But this is clearly only a plus for Google, by abusing the relationship with the publisher. The logic is circular here. If Google wants people to make better sites, then why don't they just rank sites higher if they aren't full of bloat?

If I read the above posts correctly, it sounds like it's not just Google that benefits; supposedly Google provides ads and such, which provides the publisher with revenue -- the publisher would otherwise have to find ad networks and such themselves. If a publisher already has advertising revenue sorted out, and they're OK with the expense in terms of time spent managing that, then there's little incentive and so they pass.

How much of that is correct? I don't know. I'm just explaining what (I think) the posts above were trying to say.

(Edit: spelling)

For some it helps keep your own content lightweight: when your ad sales team tries to get you to make some change you know is bad (or if you dont know, amp tells you) you have a very explicit "we can't do that because it violates amp guidelines" response.

I'm pretty sure that value mostly applies to the Forbes and Techcrunches that have really started suffered from page weight and multiple relayouts after load, not for the individual blogs of hackernews readers.

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