Completely agree, while technically AMP is suitable but it creates a walled garden by using Google - who actually boost page rankings if you use it, so they have publishers by the balls "forcing" them to use AMP to get higher in their rankings.
<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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
It's not up to them to decide after that.
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