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Comment by endorphone | Hacker News Reader

Do you think there would be an uproar? Apple introduced reading mode, built-in content/ad blocking, etc. AMP actually fits in the profile of Apple -- prioritizing a fast, usable solution.

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.

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> given that content creators intentionally volunteer their content to AMP

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.

>This is certainly not true.

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.

I mean, it's a closed source algorithm. Google provides guidance directly and indirectly but no one knows how the rank weights work outside of Google.

Amp obviously ranks higher it is the top hit in search for me. Results appear under it...

Exactly. Obscure AMP results appear higher thanbigher quality non-AMP results; What needs to be cited?

Which search result, and which obscure AMP result ranks higher than which non-AMP result? That's what needs to be cited, not an assertion free of evidence.

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.

I agree with the other comments that you seem overly invested in this, but I'll play along: Do a search for "wwdc" on mobile. This was my first and only test against your challenge.

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.

Disclosure: I work at Google (but not on search).

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.

> It is true that all the news results are AMPed, but there was certainly a time when not everyone was onboard yet

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.

One more comment about it:

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-...

What is the point of AMP? Google could have made the web faster by just de-ranking slow sites, what advantage does AMP actually provide beyond this?

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.

So you are confirming what is the mainstream thought in this thread: Google is actually ranking higher AMP pages compared to normal content. Because I think that each top ranking news website has also a non AMP-ed version. But, as per you admission and the anecdota in this thread, all the news are litterally dominated by AMP results. So I can't really see how people can still assert that AMP has no whatsoever influence in ranking when all the news results have a huge skew toward the AMP-ed version of any website instead of the original one.

I reckon the deeper purpose behind AMP is to fight ad blockers. Another google source in a thread from a few months back mentioned that the AMP team was within Google's advertising division.

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.

I know you don't work on search, but I still wanted to let you know I'm happy whenever an AMP site loads, because its instant, and that it loads at all, as opposed to other sites that may time out on my slow unreliable cellular connection in India. The UX is also more consistent, which lets me quickly read the article without wading through all the junk to find it.

Don't let the haters demotivate you :)

I think that most people who are opposed to AMP aren't against it for personal reasons as much as for what it does to the open WWW. If you give up your long-term freedoms for perceived short-term personal convenience, you will end up in a worse place. If you want news with a consistent interface, there are apps for that -- the open Web shouldn't be destroyed for the rest of us in the process.

I understand and respect that you're not against AMP for personal reasons.

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" on google.fr The very first result (top story) is not an AMP page. The other top stories are AMP pages. Then, in the regular search results, only the last one is an AMP page.

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.

I don't see us having a constructive exchange of views, where each person gets a perspective they didn't have earlier, so I won't reply. Have a good day.

> where each person gets a perspective they didn't have earlier

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.

lol okay thanks for coming back to the court to make us aware that you left the court in case we cared and didn't notice.

Try searching for pretty much any trending term on Google, on mobile. How many results in that top carousel aren't AMP pages? I'm yet to see a single one.

Google said that they prioritise fast pages, not AMP pages. You can use some other way to make your pages load fast, and it won't make a difference.

Unless you have solid evidence to the contrary, I see no reason to believe you over believing Google.

I do not really believe that. I have a site which is served way faster than it's Amp version. Obviously Google never really care to check whether original page is faster than AMP. Yes I have numbers. AMP version loads about 400ms. While the original was about 300ms. Almost certain for all pages.

That was likely a singular measurement, likely from your notebook. A user at some other location might very much disagree, unless your site has a CDN as extensive as 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."

Is it really that surprising that Google finds crawling pages stored on their own CDN to be faster than pages stored... anywhere else? They don't even need to leave the Google network.

I feel somewhat insulted by this. I am anti-AMP from a consumer perspective - I don't want to consume all my content via a Google CDN and I fear that this may be the end game that Google are playing for.

Agreed, I like AMP for many of the same reasons I liked Google Reader and RSS feeds: I'd rather consume my content in a form that's optimized for reading.

For someone with poor vision, I frequently have to zoom my browser (in landscape mode) on my iPhone in order to be able to read the text/font. When on an AMP page, the scroll mechanism gets locked when I zoom in and I have to i zoom out completely before I can scroll the page. Of course this doesn't happen on non-AMP pages.

I'd have a lot less problems with it if it didn't break my zoom functionality.

on my phone if i increase/decrease the default font size, AMP uses that.

It is absolutely true. How can you say otherwise? Business is free to chose.

> If Google blacklisted non-AMP content, sure there's an argument, but as of yet this notion that it's some content theft is quite strange.

Doesn't Google already admit to prioritising AMP pages in search results?

They do. They seem to be a little quiet about the idea that a right/left swipe on your content switches to a competitors page though.

It seems to be switching to the next article on the carousel. Which, at least for me completely breaks the web experience. Opening an amp page from google requires getting used to a whole new set of, in my opinion, unnecessary conventions.

I can't think of another search engine alternative - a truly objective one. It used to be Google. Then they gained a tremendous amount of market share. Even an English language verb - googled. Now it's them. And I ask, now what?

Try out DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com/). I've been using it for a few years and love it. They don't track you. They don't store your info. Plus, as far as I know they don't do anything besides search so they have no reason to not be objective.

I use DDG on all my devices at home and work. This whole thread has been a learning experience to me, because I never experience the various problems people have been reporting with AMP.

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.

Thus far it is purportedly not a ranking factor.

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]

I'm yet to see a single page in the carousel at the top of a search page not be an AMP page.

To be precise, it is not explicitly boosted in the rankings. One factor that Google Search takes into account is page load time.

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.

> To be precise, it is not explicitly boosted in the rankings. One factor that Google Search takes into account is page load time.

And AMP pages are hosted on a Google CDN. They are very clearly putting their thumb on the scale.

In the organic results or the carousel?

I don't think its comparable to Apple. Apple is trying to make the user experience of existing content better (where it is located)

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.

but Apple isn't commandeering the content itself like Google is

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.

> The core argument against AMP primarily seems to be a fear that users will actually prefer AMP content

How on earth did you arrive to that conclusion?

Exactly and thanks for pointing out. What matters most is the user and user experience, It is NOT about Google or Apple. Posts like they are the #2 corp or whatever is not relevant.

Huh? That doesn't hold true for whole iTunes, News stand, Music, iBooks, Podcasts and all other content silos Apple introduced. If anything they even deliberately make content consumption from competing sources harder on iOS devices.

>Google is taking the content and serving it themselves.

How is Google taking the content? Isn't it the creator that is publishing their content using AMP?

Google is grabbing a normal website and completely, utterly breaking it. Have you ever actually tried to use an AMP page, share it, etc?

AMP is garbage, and honestly whoever signed off on it shouldn't have a position at Google or wider tech community.

It's the creator of the content that creates the AMP page and publishes it on AMP.

That's not quite accurate. If you make an AMP page, Google will cache it. Google caching it is not optional.

https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/faq#can-i-stop-conte...

Why would you make an AMP page?

Restricting what you use to the AMP subset would make your page quite fast, with a dependency on a javascript file that most mobile browsers should have cached, along with having your page in the top carousel loading in smoothly like all the others. This can all be detected from your main page when crawled (as it'll link to the AMP version) so depending on the device one or the other can be presented as a search result.

None of that requires being hosted by google.

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.

Coherent with the goals, sure, but not required for any benefit. [edit for clarity, while it may improve things, it is not required for at least some benefit]

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?

"Open source" in that context is a meaninless buzzword. It is not "open" when giant companies appify your content in their walled gardens, even if you can read part of the code.

How can it be called an HTML subset when they've introduced custom tags like "amp-img"?

Custom Elements are a web standard. Anyone can just make up new tags, if they include a hyphen in the name. And with customElements.define() you can attach an ES6 class to that element and boom, DOM as an open component model.

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.

> 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.

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 are two things here that I feel are being conflated.

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.

Will not Google showing your pages on its domain decrease your visitor count and make your site less attractive to advertisers?

Reading mode is optional and at-will. You can disable pop-up blocking in Settings.

It's pretty clear, I think, Apple would've approached this just like they did reading mode.

You should really be careful of sourcing your news on fb, you're being spoon fed the news fb's algos want you to see.

> you're being spoon fed the news fb's algos want you to see.

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.

Choosing which separate media outlets to read gives far more control than leaving it up to one company, Facebook.

This extension is great: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...

Any newspaper or website doesn't have the most indepth pyschological insight about as Facebook.

I mean that I subscribe to the feeds of the media that I find useful, not that I follow their hot topics or suggested feeds.

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.

> Apple introduced reading mode,

A purely local feature that you have to select manually and doesn't infringe on your privacy or break the ability to share links.

> This author notes that they "feel bad" about consuming AMP content

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.

AFAIK AMP is just a list of Do's and Dont's that google qualify as AMP content. Even other search engines like DuckDuckGo and Bing could use it if the choose so. You can access AMP outside of google and host it yourself. You can go AMP-only if you o please. Instant Articles from Facebook on other hand is tied into facebook's platform.

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