Comment by chickenfries | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chickenfries | Hacker News Reader

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Exactly, all they did was add a link underneath the "..." menu to see the canonical URL. Apparently, the whole justification for the Cache is that smaller websites don't have CDNs or developer resources or something?

> For a small site, however, that doesn't manage its own DNS entries, doesn't have engineering resources to push content through complicated APIs, or can't pay for content delivery networks, a lot of these technologies are inaccessible.

https://developers.googleblog.com/2017/02/whats-in-amp-url.h...

However, I work for a publisher that delivers almost all our assets through a CDN, over https, etc... we don't really need our pages to be served through the AMP Cache, we could support users visiting the AMP version of our articles on our site, and hopefully get more second-page visits. I don't get it, who is AMP really for, big publishers or small publishers? If I am already a performance-minded developer, I don't need any of the things AMP provides, but I am forced to implement it for the magic google juice.

> I don't get it, who is AMP really for, big publishers or small publishers?

For the users. When looking at search results on mobile I usually go for the AMP ones, regular results take way too long to load.

Really ? I avoid them like the plague. I switched to DDG just to be rid of them. I want the full webpage, not some gimped mobile version.

And if most users are like you, I'm sure Google's internal metrics will show that and they will discontinue the format.

But I'd be willing to bet that most users are like me, but I have no data besides the fact the Google seems to be doubling down on it.

I'm willing to bet that most users don't even notice.

(They may or may not actually prefer the experience, but I think it'll be tricky to determine a real signal one way or the other)

Most users started to AdBlock. That's why amp is there. Everything else is people falling for propaganda explanations.

There's nothing preventing adblock from working on amp pages. Amp is currently a mobile only thing, and most users on mobile are not blocking ads.

I don't know where this myth comes from that amp is all about blocking adblockers: amp pages require a markup that specifically tags ads as ads and prevents running scripts after page load. The only two adblock-defeating techniques are to disguise your ads as content, and re-insert them after page load, both of which are rendered impossible by the amp spec.

> Amp is currently a mobile only thing, and most users on mobile are not blocking ads.

Most users anywhere are not blocking ads, adblocking by its nature as a non-default option and something you have to know how to do will most likely never be the thing that "most users do".

However, the idea that people on mobile do not block ads is just false: https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/

Worldwide, there are almost 150m more mobile adblock users than desktop adblock users. The trend of only blocking ads on your desktop is largely a North American phenomenon.

I can't speak to whether or not AMP is designed to try and stem this tide or not, but I can say without a doubt that mobile adblock is exploding, especially when considering the worldwide market, and that publishers are probably very nervous about this.

Most of the time if the main site is already crippled to death I am positive you won't see an AMP version and they probably don't care about performance at all by cramming a thousand ads/JS files in a single page.

Most decent website are already fast on mobile, I really don't get all the fuzz about AMP when in reality the small margin you gain from using it is almost non comparable to the real website.

What is considered fast or slow at this point? I can barely see the difference so why go through all this hassle just to please Google?

Its not that I hate it but their approach to page optimization is just wrong but lets just keep feeding the beast.

> Most decent website are already fast on mobile, I really don't get all the fuzz about AMP when in reality the small margin you gain from using it is almost non comparable to the real website.

That's not my own experience, and that's why I keep favoring AMP links when searching on mobile, but YMMV.

For the users.

lol. For the users looks like the Debian Social Contract. This is for Google's pocketbook.

Sure it is, and it works by giving users something they want: faster loading times.

Users vote with their clicks, and have far more power than publishers.

If it was a democracy a user could opt out of seeing Amp pages. What are you suggesting - don't use Google?

Not to defend AMP but the justification is pre-rendering the pages in hidden i-frames on the search result page. This indeed requires the URL hijacking.

However, the URL hijacking, combined with the obnoxious UI and making the big X sign return you to google rather than show the non-amp site make me still dislike AMP.

Agreed, the pre-rendering is a nice user experience, but you're right that it seems to mostly benefit Google and users, but not publishers.

AMP is for Google, to keep you on their domain.

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