This author notes that they "feel bad" about consuming AMP content. Which is extremely weird given that content creators intentionally volunteer their content to AMP (aside from this user who got famous claiming that Google was stealing their content because they had enabled a Wordpress plug-in haphazardly).
If Google blacklisted non-AMP content, or even just deranked it, sure there's an argument, but as of yet this notion that it's some content theft is quite strange.
Google's intention with AMP is obvious, and obviously not anti-web: Facebook is becoming a primary medium where users are accessing a lot of content. I personally read all news via Facebook now, where they've integrated it heavily with a built-in browser and now instant articles (Facebook's AMP). Compared to this, the traditional web is just an obnoxious mess, not because of the web but because of the abuse that AMP restricts.
This is certainly not true. The reason no many content creators and publishers moved to AMP is to not hurt their SEO. If you check most of the AMP articles targeted to publishers, it's addressed as get on the AMP wagon now or else you are doomed when Google starts ranking AMP pages higher.
Oh but it's entirely true. If you buy the conspiracies and allusions of the anti-AMP crowd, there should be some sort of citation you can leverage. As is, the primary real concern among those who denounce AMP is that users will prefer it. Which is a pretty bizarre thing to fight against.
Amp obviously ranks higher it is the top hit in search for me. Results appear under it...
Second, even if that does happen, the question is whether it would have happened without AMP. In other words, is it a bug in the search algorithm, independent of AMP.
It isn't just a matter of the AMP results being ranked higher — they are segmented from non-AMP pages. The eleven (!) "Top Stories" are all AMP pages.
Under that is "People also searched for > WWDC iPhone 8", which consists of five (!) AMP pages.
Only then does it go into non-AMP pages, starting with Apple's own WWDC page. That's not just rank prioritization. There is a visual break between AMP and non-AMP pages.
It is crazier for you to blindly trust Google on this than it is for us to infer from a pattern we see over and over again, and for you to require that we provide proof that you acknowledge we can't obtain might be crazier.
You're confusing an important thing here: Google places news higher than the original source. Given that WWDC is over, this is actually preferable. It is true that all the news results are AMPed, but there was certainly a time when not everyone was onboard yet and the carousel included non-AMP results (I assume if you can find a news topic sufficiently obscure to have a non-AMP publisher, yet important enough for Top Stories it might show up).
If you instead search for "Iceland hikes" you get a useful one box of info, then an AMPed page then a non-AMPed result and so on.
tl;dr: Popular news publications are certainly all AMPified these days, and Top News is clearly prioritized. Regular search results aren't as clearly AMP leaning.
Not everyone is on board. Many sites don't want AMPified pages. Google takes AMP pages and puts a giant "back" button that takes the website's users back to Google Search rather than deeper into the website.
It breaks URLs and referrers, because the AMP pages are now hosted on google.com, not on the destination websites' own domains.
AMP is a terrible attack on the open WWW. Google is saying, let us appify your content on our own platform (not on your own independent website) and restrict your markup/monitization options or we will drop you out of the top spot of the rankings.
This post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14536679) is an example of how AMP works. Someone has shared a link on HN. It's an AMP link, but I'm reading it on my laptop, and it's still AMP.
The end result is that all users (desktop too) are getting sent to an appified version of the page that restricts advertising/monetization options and markup options. It seems unlikely that the people who designed AMP were unaware of how this would work in practice.
I think that the core motivation for AMP has little to do with speeding up the Web, but is more about ensuring that Google's ads are delivered and so they have some say in which ad competitors are locked out.
It would be interesting to find out how much total traffic ends up on AMP pages, broken down by device type.
Restricted AMP version from the HN link: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-sues-former-aws-vp-non-...
HTML version: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-sues-former-aws-vp-non-...
The most glaringly obvious change is that you never leave google now. There's a nice little wrapper around the site with a back button that leads you straight back to google without even a page reload.
Oh but AMP isn't evil because it's open source. Open source but if you change a single byte in any file it doesn't verify anymore and arguably is no longer AMP.
Google wasn't even planning to show the original URL at all until people made a shitload of noise about it. And it took a month to add because reasons??? It surely looks like quite a difficult feature to implement, showing a URL and all. It must have been quite challenging.
I also enjoy the feature that there's no way to shut AMP off. Why would anyone want to? Maybe this is also to difficult a task for the AMP team to implement.
The goal is to get all the content onto google servers so they can serve ads from the same origin that cannot be blocked.
Amp in combination with chrome's built in "ad blocker" is part of a broader Google strategy to protect their advertising model.
Don't let the haters demotivate you :)
An acquaintance of mine was complaining that Google didn't give him a way to opt his site out of AMP. If he's right, that's a bad move on Google's part. Google should let web site owners choose to not have their content served from google.com.
When I come across an AMP search result on my phone, I'm happy, because I know it will load, and load instantly. Web pages often don't load on cellular internet in India, and a web that works is more important to me than one that's "open". Not to mention that openness is ultimately about accessibility, and if hundreds of millions of people can't access it reliably, it's not open. You may not be able to relate to this since you're based in a developed country, where the Internet works reliably.
Maybe Google is acting in users' best interests, but not site owners'.
My view about AMP is more nuanced than a binary yes/no. Reducing it to a binary choice throws the baby out with the bathwater. Maybe you have a different view, in which case I again respect it, but we should agree to disagree.
Searching "wwdc iphone 8" (not in the "people also searched" list for me) yields about 50% AMP pages. The first result is but the second isn't.
I don't really see a pattern here. The only part where AMP seems mandatory is the news carousel.
That's not really how arguments work. I mean, sure, sometimes it works that way, but other times, like this time, one person is clearly in the wrong, and is simply refusing to listen to the other side.
Unless you have solid evidence to the contrary, I see no reason to believe you over believing Google.
"Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski already recreated the Google AMP demo page without the Google AMP JavaScript and, unsurprisingly, it's faster than Google's version."
I'd have a lot less problems with it if it didn't break my zoom functionality.
Doesn't Google already admit to prioritising AMP pages in search results?
Perhaps my results could have been loading faster? I'm not willing to make a deal with the devil to find out. I'm pretty satisfied with what I have now.
https://moz.com/blog/google-amp-search-results https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/07/06/is-google-amp-a-ran...
[just to be clear, just because you read it in some HN thread doesn't make it true. Let's see a single citation that it actually influences ranking]
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-i...
There was a vicious spiral at work related to advertisers not caring enough about page load, and adding that signal was not enough. AMP shifted the game by placing the burden on Google of specifying a way to hit advertisers' goals while offering a faster experience.
And AMP pages are hosted on a Google CDN. They are very clearly putting their thumb on the scale.
Google is taking the content and serving it themselves.
The problem is sites being slow in the first place, but Apple isn't commandeering the content itself like Google is by creating a mode where the browser can enhance legibility of any article.
Content authors voluntarily publish their content in AMP form, so it doesn't seem fair to say that they commandeer anything: AMP is a subset of HTML intended for a fast mobile experience, and if you decide to take part you publish flags allowing Google to cache it. Google isn't unilaterally converting content to AMP.
The core argument against AMP primarily seems to be a fear that users will actually prefer AMP content. Which is ultimately rather anti-user.
How on earth did you arrive to that conclusion?
How is Google taking the content? Isn't it the creator that is publishing their content using AMP?
AMP is garbage, and honestly whoever signed off on it shouldn't have a position at Google or wider tech community.
https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/faq#can-i-stop-conte...
None of that requires being hosted by google.
Caching is a part of the platform and is entirely coherent with the goals, and if you want analytics or ads, you approach those in a different way. AMP caching isn't limited to Google - Bing, for instance, caches and serves AMP as well. Ultimately anyone could, and HN could cache and quick-serve AMP content for supporting sources. AMP is open source and any one can take part.
I should add a side note that many of the comments on here have taken the predictable turn of claiming that people who defend AMP are "over invested" or must work at Google. I have nothing to do with Google, and have a reasoned, fact-based opinion on AMP. I think it's a last-ditch salvation for a web where sites are demonstrating a tragedy of the commons. Nor do I think everyone denouncing AMP works for Apple or some competitor.
What I dislike is not being able to choose simply to make and host an AMP content myself without google taking it and hosting it on their own servers. I cannot opt-in to this, nor can I opt-out. My only choice is to not do anything with AMP.
What is the way to host your own AMP cache? The AMP project under caching just shows the google cache and links to a google page.
As a side note, what if what I publish is not acceptable by google? Will they remove my content, despite having already taken it and given it to people under that URL? If AMP content must be loaded from the caches, is my content only valid AMP if google and the jurisdictions they operate under approve?
AMP is a subset because in addition to the elements, they provide a set of restrictions that would make your page "valid AMP" and cached by Google's creepy CDN thingy.
They do kind of do this. AMP pages get highlighted and populate the top results( at least for me) which kind of has the same effect as reducing the rank of normal websites.
There's the AMP library and format. That is a huge part of what you're talking about with speed, annoying popups, etc. It's an open source library and people can use it or not.
Then there's Google grabbing all of the AMP pages, rewriting them and putting them on a Google domain.
You cannot opt out of the second part. There's not a lot of abuse I can think of that's being restricted by this, and it feels like it would be a simple problem to fix.
It's pretty clear, I think, Apple would've approached this just like they did reading mode.
This comment is applicable to all media sources: replace "fb's algos" with any newspaper, website, or TV channel name. You might want to be careful of sourcing your news from one single source instead.
This extension is great: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
And many of those media sites use Instant Articles (Facebook's AMP) and honestly I've found that I greatly prefer them, because it really sucks to click a story and have an abomination that grinds my device to a halt, starts a hidden autoplay video, etc. The same forces are at play: Controlling sites that destroy the web by making it such a miserable experience.
A purely local feature that you have to select manually and doesn't infringe on your privacy or break the ability to share links.
I found this comment interesting as well. I really like the instant load aspect and would much rather not waste time waiting for a slow page to load.
I think the author feels that the free hosting provided by AMP is overshadowed by the loss of personal ad revenue from the traffic.
I'm not using it too, but not because of that (and I was unaware of amp before). DDG shows instant wiki, stackoverflow, lyrics previews, while google only does that for wiki. I don't use gmail because of crappy ui, ux and designs. I wouldn't use annoying youtube if dailymotion was not blocked. Translate is only bearable for english. Local maps are way better in navigation/street/company info (probably not true for US/EU).
Summarizing, I clearly see no value in google services for me today and it was surprisingly easy to get rid of it completely.
Edit: and in search regard, ddg/yahoo links lag far less than google's redirects and ddg never presented me "you're a robot, enter captcha to not get to our search service anyway" for hours.
Other services were mentioned only to support "completely" part, which is criticism, but not search-related.