<link rel="amphtml" href="https://www.example.com/url/to/amp/document.html">
Thus all google is doing is rewarding sites that have implemented this and as a result load fast, no? imo, its drastically different to Instant Articles because you can never ever find the Instant Articles version of a web page. its private and only fb knows it.
Also, the notion of hyperlinks are crucial to the Web and these projects break it. Hyperlinks originate from an article from 1945, "As We May Think"[1], and the term itself is coined by Ted Nelson in 1965 for Project Xanadu. That's how you create a web that is now called the Web. That's also what Google's PageRank algorithm depends on, at least at the beginning. Now, letting Google host your content, under a link such as `https://www.google.com/amp/www.example.com/amp/doc.html`, you are breaking hyperlinks: it is no more linking different websites together.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
If they don't do this already, they probably will if they keep going down the AMP rabbit-hole.
I think that’s a good idea, but I fear some users won’t realize there’s more or may not understand the abrupt change in layout/design/etc.
No. And Google could not care less if pages load fast -- it could incenticize making pages faster with traditional methods instead. It's all about capturing more eyeballs and proxying more traffic.
I agree that it's somehow yucky, but I don't see how it can be ascribed to malice intent, instead of an effort to improve the user experience that maybe goes too far.
It's not up to them to decide after that.
In some areas people understand care about such things, in those areas we did and still do see some optimisation effort. Far from everywhere of course, even within that subset, but I'd wager there was improvement overall (or at least things got worse less than they otherwise would).
In other areas though the available audience either doesn't understand or doesn't care (because their connection and CPU are fast enough to cope for instance, and they aren't on an expensive metered link) or both. I say "available audience" because for these sites the "target audience" is every-human-alive-several-times-over-good-god-we-need-more-ad-impressions-and-clicks - the likes of buzzfeed and the other click-bait filled "news" and "entertainment" sites where four sentences of content can be stretched over sixteen pages of large, slow loading, auto-playing, obnoxious adverts. The people who care about load time (and/or relevant technical or privacy matters) simply don't follow those links. The people who do follow the links aren't worth making page load optimisations for because they simply won't care or notice, so from the site's PoV the time is better spent on adverts-hung-onto-into-each-morsel-of-content optimisations instead. And that was when Google ranking was the main thing that mattered, more recently the operators of such sites are more interested in distribution via social media so Google ranking you lower for a slow load is less of a concern, or if it is a concern there are tricks (not all of which Google can easily filter for - it is an on-going war of attrition) to show Google different versions of the content that does load quickly.
AMP does (a) and (b); I don't know about (c); and doesn't do (d).
Still, I can see why people see echos of walled gardens in AMP.
There's a slightly-higher wall for advertisers, I believe. But Google is rightfully afraid of antitrust issues and seems eager to get advertisers besides themselves signed up. But it is a wall in that it requires whitelisting, as far as I remember.
There's a lot to criticise about AMP, but I don't think the "walled garden" metaphor fits.
Can I get the same display in the Google Search with or without AMP? No.
That’s the wall.
With AMP, I get a different search ranking if I use Google’s AMP version, or if I self-host the AMP scripts (to prevent users being tracked by Google).
I have to allow every user of my site to be tracked by Google if I want to get the AMP ranking advantage.
I can’t fork AMP.
The ranking advantage is given only if you use Google’s AMP cache.
How can you seriously compare this with HTTPS?
Or would it have to be something on the open web? And if only AMP pages get ranked well on Google in the future, how much harder would it be for such competitors to ever get noticed in the first place?
Currently, the only thing on Google results explicitly limited to AMP is the mobile news carousel. Presumably AMP pages also do well on the "loads fast" evaluation that affects normal rankings, but in theory it should be possible to do equally well without AMP. If this is changed, or turns out to not hold up in practice, then there is cause for concern, but I have not seen evidence of either.
News sites, of course, don't generally compete with Google's core services - unless you count Blogger, but in that case all news sites do). The one thing I can think of is that they might embed videos hosted on competitors to YouTube. When it comes to that, AMP is a mixed bag. Unlike on the open web, video players that use custom controls/iframes (like YouTube) need to be explicitly approved, since there's not much alternative without granting a blanket license to put arbitrary sites in iframes, which would (mostly) defeat the purpose. So Google acts as a gatekeeper. On the other hand, the spec [1] already lists like a dozen random video hosts you've never heard of; that's not evidence that Google wouldn't try to block a more serious competitor to YouTube, should one ever spring up, but there's certainly no evidence that they would.
[1] https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-vid...
And we all remember the kinds of crap Google did to try to foist Plus on users who had no interest in it. At one point 1/4 of the annual bonus of everyone at the company was tied to it.
http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-just-tied-employee...
Hint: none.
AMP makes it harder for real walled gardens to provide an attractive performance advantage to end-users, making it not only not a walled garden, but also a potent weapons against walled gardens.
How do I get my page into the carousel when using a fork of AMP that reduces the JS load?
So "any crawler" who is willing to slavishly follow whatever Google is currently doing, and currently doing in the open (who knows how long that will last), can technically get access to the same content so it's not a "walled garden".
To me it sounds like Google doing yet another non-standard thing without asking the rest of the web-community for input, and using their weight as a way to push this through in their usual, hostile manner.
And here on HN people are defending it as perfectly reasonable. The mob clearly has something to learn from these guys.
Not filling a page of what is effectively 80KB static text-content with 20MBs of JS, fonts, tracking-code and other "assets" would be a good start.
The web isn't slow. People deliberately create slow web-pages because they care more about user-tracking and "fancy" technology than they care about user-experience.
And making Google a pre-requisite for any web-page is NOT the solution to that problem. That's the wrong way around. We need less tracking. Less JS. Less Google.
I imagine if you expand and codify this idea, you will come up with something very close to AMP. I'm not sure if you're against the idea of AMP/AMP-like standard, or against Google's execution of it.
In fact, I'd say the much-derided Flash aesthetic/inefficiency kind of won, right around the time we were all celebrating killing Flash. Everything's whiz-bang shiny and so damn slow and resource-hogging. Plus flat design is a disaster in all but the most capable hands, so I'd say UX generally has suffered over the last decade.
This is a cyclical problem because people tend not to measure performance until they notice a problem, which means it's a function of both technical factors and user expectations. The rise of mobile added a confusion point since it basically dropped back to dial-up/DSL-class networking after the overall web community had had a decade to get used to cable modem-grade performance and made wasting bandwidth a direct cost rather than just inefficiency. In the mid-2000s, using a big JavaScript toolkit wasn't great but it wasn't so bad when you could assume that most users had better latency than even LTE delivers and user expectations hadn't adjusted for the post-IE era.
The other big factor is the ongoing decline of advertising as a viable business model. The worst offenders I see are either ads or the measurement tools publishers use to document their site's performance, and that's been getting continually worse as everyone keeps chasing diminishing returns.
More JS will make a slower site, especially on mobile.
Personally, as a consumer, I absolutely hate the fact that I can't quickly check my browser's domain bar to see what website I'm reading (to assess its credibility for example).
No they don't. The news carousel prioritizes AMP, but it has no known measure on search engine results.
AMP chatter on here has become incredibly one-sided to the point of absurdity, where karma is easily gained by denigrating AMP, talking about "leaving" it, etc. It is beyond reasoned discussion.
If you aren't a news publisher that's all very well and good for you, but that doesn't mean AMP has a huge effect on how people receive their news, and that it isn't worth talking about that.
Except that I don't write blogposts to please the Google search engine. A site can be found via many other ways. News sites like Reddit are a great way to be discovered, aswell as HN. There's also link dumps like Pinboard which are another way to discover, aswell as others. Twitter, etc
Yes, the cache is problematic, as it may allow Google, in a possible future, to filter some content, censor some other or not refresh often some pages. The thing is, if it does that, people will start using Google's caching, that's as simple as that.
Ideologically, I'm opposed for all the reasons listed in TFA. People work to create something, yet the content and website are being ferried around by Google. AMP rendering basically strips content down to a barebones text page of the content in question with some images. Not inherently bad. However the site loses a lot of navigability, and swiping to either side moves people off of the current site and to the next search result. It's basically loading the site I selected as a search result instead of actually giving me the site I want to navigate to.
It's the same as Google scraping content to respond to search queries. It's nice to be able to search for "28th US president" and get the answer, an image, quotes, some basic biographical information, and people related to Wilson. I get all that without ever have to leave the results page, yet all of the content creators who worked hard to catalog that information get no benefit. As a user: Thanks! Ideologically: Ouch.
On the other hand you say AMP aims to fix this - anyone doing that for the ad views etc would simply not enable AMP on their site. AMP does not fix this.
I just want a Web where people write a lean website that delivers your content with low overhead. Then do your best to use ad networks that aren't trying to set your users' computer on fire.
Google serving your pages?
Hijacking your domain for the server pages and obscuring links to the original content?
Use of a proprietary technology (whether open sourced or not, it's not a standard)?
Abuse of power with veiled threats of punishing content publishers who are not using recommending AMP to make their pages "fast and responsive"?
The only way to be any more against the free and open web is if they made Google search a web proxy where you never get access to the underlying page...
Give it some time. They are pulling more and more content into the search results pages which has roughly that effect, since people no longer click through.
- definition of a word
- lyrics of a song
- summary of a movie
- phone number and/or address of a business
- distance between places
- unit or currency conversions
- weather
So while I don't want to see Google monopolizing the Internet, I also don't like the model in which information is served by individual web pages (which can, and do, disappear all the time and get replaced by something different). So I wonder - how can we promote and develop the open web, while also making it better and more productive for people?
Maybe if people served data streams instead of web pages, things would be easier? Related, I'm all for every kind of way of taking control over the way a page looks away from their authors. The Web is increasingly becoming a place for designers to show off, and this wastes both users' time and resources. Ad blockers, noscript and reader modes are huge wins in this space, but I think we need more. Maybe some self-hosted auto scrappers that would help me answer my information queries without actually visiting full pages?
I'm increasingly more convinced that the best way to save open, distributed web would be to kill off Internet commerce. Think of it this way: when I'm searching for information, I'm like a fish searching for food. There are places where it naturally occurs, but more and more food is placed by businesses, who attach them to hooks in order to bait me into spending time and money on stuff I don't want. Great for the fishermen, but in this story I'm a fish.
(Sure it's a pipe dream, but it serves to highlight the conflict of interest. As an Internet user, I seek information - not deals, contracts, and all the other strings people try and attach to that information.)
No, there is such a thing as copyright. That Google ignores it doesn't make it any more right than when Hollywood balks at piracy because piracy tends to make bits available in 'the right format'. That knife cuts both ways.
> I'm increasingly more convinced that the best way to save open, distributed web would be to kill off Internet commerce.
Well, that won't happen.
> Think of it this way: when I'm searching for information, I'm like a fish searching for food. There are places where it naturally occurs, but more and more food is placed by businesses, who attach them to hooks in order to bait me into spending time and money on stuff I don't want. Great for the fishermen, but in this story I'm a fish.
Google is one of the fishermen, in fact, they are running the largest trawler on the planet.
Copyright is rightfully seen a problem on the Internet :). Personally I'm currently fine with both pirates offering bits in the "right format" and with Google offering information in a better format - especially that they don't have any monopoly for that, just enough man-hours and burnable cash to do it first.
(INB4: I do respect copyright (at least more often than not), but I still believe it's ill-suited for the digital age.)
> Well, that won't happen.
One can dream, though...
> Google is one of the fishermen, in fact, they are running the largest trawler on the planet.
I know. I don't want any form of Google monopoly. I don't like AMP either. My only point is that Google displaying content in search results is an example of a better interface to the Web than the regular site visit; it saves me time, clicks, and prevents me from being exposed to all kinds of crap I don't want to see. I'm definitely not arguing we need Google for that - just that I wish we'd all go much further into that direction, preferably with free and open-source tools.
Look at it this way: people doing internet commerce are also searching for food -- to put it on their table.
(Related, I wonder how many people in adtech actually use ad blockers.)
And in general: people need to earn their living, yes, but that does imply society should support any particular business model.
Do you also want the original content creators to starve and die off and the only competent content source left to be either Google's archive or Google's lacklustre service for the same thing?
Also, I didn't mean I want a Google-dominated reality. Only said that this particular feature - content in search results - is a step in the right direction; it showcases a better way to use the Web. The reality I want is made of free and open-source tools doing that, not Google.
I'm not sure what is stopping you from doing that now. You can blacklist domains that serve ads and stop visiting them. Or even better yet, hire someone to write a browser plugin that blocks websites with ads, should be fairly trivial to do. And release the source code so others can benefit.
So, like Netflix?
Netflix is a subscription service; I pay them, they stream me movies, the contract is straightforward.
Yeah, what's bad about that? It is, actually, a feature of a free open web: content is there, available to anyone, including Google, to be rehashed, kept, reserved, in anyway any one see fit.
Wikicache is a feature of an open web, that does a very similar thing to what Google is doing.
> Use of a proprietary technology (whether open sourced or not, it's not a standard)?
We have really come a long way if this is what we now call a proprietary technology. My understanding (but I could be wrong) is that the specification is open, everyone is free to implement it, fork it, make editors or readers about it.
Proprietary implies (or used to imply?) that some of these rights are limited: the MPEG consortium forbidding encoders without acquiring a proper license, Oracle claiming that you can't make a Java VM without making an agreement with them, etc...
My understanding is that AMP is as open as it could be: it was just proposed by a private entity. Criticism is a good thing, but saying it will break the open web is simply a warning I can not understand.
If something needs to be criticized, it is Google's quasi-monopoly on search, but even that is not that much of a threat given how many of its competitors are still easily accessible from any device and out there to gain a foothold as soon as Google's search results show any kind of weakness.
In the past, Google said "we will prioritize search results by load speed." That's completely fair and a move I can applaud – it points out a serious problem with the web and leaves it up to publishers to come up with innovative and creative solutions of their own to reduce load time.
Now, Google has changed the deal. It doesn't matter how much you've innovated to provide a good experience to your visitors – it doesn't matter if you created a version that loads ten times as fast as AMP and provides a better user experience, you will still be penalized by Google if you don't use AMP. You will not be allowed in the carousel, regardless of how well your site performs. You will not be prioritized above AMP results, you won't see the "lightning bolt," even if your site is legitimately as fast as AMP. It kills any motivation for any company or person to develop a better system for loading pages quickly, because sites using it will never be able to overcome the unfair advantage given to AMP sites.
I don't think they specifically reward AMP.
"I don't think"
Try looking for evidence instead. Do a Google search on mobile. Try to find a single carousel result that isn't an AMP page.
Boosting one thing while leaving the other alone, in this case, is effectively the same as punishing the other.
The [x] on the AMP banner is a back button that takes you back to Google. Most users would expect it to dismiss the banner and stay on the page.
If your AMP page was reached by a Google search carousel widget, they hijack left/right swipe on YOUR page to go to competitors pages.
And, after swiping, using the real back button skips any AMP pages in history and goes directly back to Google.
I suspect Google will do the same as they've done in search (ads vs organics)...keep taking ground in little bites over time, until it is a walled garden.
I assume you mean "stop", but you can't. There is no way, as far as I can find, that you can opt out of google rehosting your content.
What is ironical in that issue is that Google copying/caching your content is part of the free web. We would bitch about websites that prevent copying their contents somehow.
What people can opt out of is sharing links to AMP and AMP redirects, which will happen 2.7 seconds after Google starts censoring content.
Why? Because the article doesn't display alright on my mobile (screenshot here: http://mickael.kerjean.free.fr/public/IMG_1720.PNG) From a user experience, it's not great.
The way I see it, AMP is just another alternative to Bootstrap. Sure, it's not perfect but when I need to quickly add a few things to create something simple, it does the job. Like any piece of techs, there's some downside, but at least you benefit from:
- less ui bugs in your website as it was likely test accross more devices that you could ever do on your own
- would load faster than you bootstrap equivalent
Nearly every Google product spies on you to some extent, most of the time, to the furthest extent they legally and technically can. Google is DIRECTLY INCENTIVIZED to get as much info out of you as it possibly can, so that info can be distributed to advertisers and used to create a profile of you for the purposes of targeting ads. NONE OF THIS IS A SECRET, this is a business model that Google itself largely pioneered, perfected, and literally wrote the book on yet so many on HN especially are willing to give them a pass on it while deriding other, smaller companies for largely the same things on a smaller scale.
As for me, I've de-Googled to a very great extent and I feel better than ever. I miss a lot of the toys from Chrome especially but I just couldn't use it anymore, constantly feeling the stares of those digital eyes.
Maybe I'm just too cynical, but again and again, "free" services that were based on user data are either acquired by Google and rebranded, or they go out of business because they couldn't draw a profit. So either A: Google is hemorrhaging cash to provide all these things (which I doubt) or B: They are making money because they've figured out how, likely via volume and that social capital, to MAKE these things that seemingly few if any businesses can't make profitable, profitable.
No, they're trying to protect their bottom line. If they wanted to they could easily compute a page weight : content ratio and penalize severely on that alone.
Same thing. Maybe your words are better said.
> If they wanted to they could easily compute a page weight : content ratio and penalize severely on that alone.
Agreed.
The web is not free and open when platform A (Twitter) decides to overwrite links to other versions of a website by means of using a solution from platform B (Google).
Full stop. You choose to participate in AMP. You can't choose to not be throttled by an ISP, or to bypass censorship.
1. Users have no control: if you want real URLs or the full experience, you have to work around AMP or stop using Google.
2. It's technically true that publishers can choose whether to use AMP but Google rank is a make-or-break issue for many publishers and that means the decisions is made under the threat of losing out to competitors who use AMP even if your site is already just as fast using non-proprietary tooling.
It would be much better for the open web and innovation in general if Google maintained a separation between the two and only used the real user experience when deciding ranking or placement in the special top results carousel.
2. Yes. As a user who really enjoys amp and really hates that every single text-based news source takes over a minute to load on a 100Mb/s+ connection, I feel not bad at all. Not even the tiniest bit. Publishers entirely brought this upon themselves. Internet speeds are faster than they've ever been, and websites are the slowest they have ever been. This is fundamentally unacceptable.
It would be better for users, and by extension, the web, if publishers stopped building horrendously bloated websites. Since they absolutely positively refuse to, AMP seems the appropriate answer - if there's demand to take away their toys, someone is going to feed into it eventually.
I sometimes discuss principled reasons for disliking AMP in HN threads, but I'm coming to the realization that it's really just the experience i dislike, and those principles would probably be overridden by UX convenience, if it actually existed. I just think the AMP team has done a really bad job of implementation now.
There are all kinds of complaints on this very page about how AMP negatively alters the user experience (stupid urls, broken scrolling, bar covering 1/3 of the content, broken UI, inability to turn it off, etc).
Those don't sound to me like "exclusive" publisher complaints.