The meaning of AMP
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In the search industry, the organic search results are what you're referring to when talking about the ranking algorithm, and of a ranking factor being given an advantage.
Having other verticals integrated like maps, news, or this carousal are seen as different elements altogether (eg. local search, shopping search).
But of course, colloquially, "search" just means any result that comes up when you search on the page. So this has created some friction when Google says that Amp pages have no impact on search.
This is why we can't have the discussion with Google; they are knowingly deflecting.
I don't think people our target is more inclined into clicking on AMP results as they're non-technical, I'm guessing we're higher in the results.
Well yes, it is faster because of the strict guidelines you must follow; it's cleaner because we are not including the menu stuff and things we need for desktop, and it's better adapted for mobile since it's the only platform in which Google puts AMP results.
I'm very happy with the surge of visits, but my point was that if Google says AMP won't give you a better position on search results, what I'm seeing is the opposite.
The whole point of AMP is to target those users. Hence the little lightning bolt. Even non-technical users can notice "hey this had a lightning bolt and it was fast"
But I'm digressing, what I'm seeing it's a sudden and constant traffic increase in a short time span. I'm sure it's not because the result that was on 3rd place now has a bolt icon and users are craving it; it's because my result is higher.
Search ranking is complex, and sites move in search referrals by ~30% on a daily basis without making any changes. Perhaps a different major site removed pages. Perhaps a few important links were added to your site (or to a site linking to your site).
to say that the boosted position/visibility of AMP can somehow get lost in the "noise" of rank fluctuations from other factors is demonstrably false. i dunno what kool-aid you guys are selling over there, but i'm certainly not buying it.
the mission of AMP is fully Google-centric, not user centric. it is possible and easy to build pages faster than AMP without any of AMP's additional artificial limitations. AMP's carrot is that you get much greater visibility and faster loading as a result of pages being hosted on google's servers and loading via a pre-established TLS/TCP session.
you can read more here: https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/78fevc/amplify_...
real-world AMP pages are not what they're billed to be:
Some of the stuff I see Google and Facebook doing to the web developer community these days makes Microsoft in the mid-00s seem like a model citizen.
Unless you have a viable alternative monetization method?
Where do you think new hobbyists come from?
The web existed and was great pre-advertising.
I wonder what would happen if the major publications collectively decided to switch to impression-based rather than click-based metrics.
Interstitial ads, pop-over requests to subscribe to a new letter. Multiple delay loaded banner ads that cause the page to jump around. Auto-play videos that jump around the screen as the user scrolls. I have even seen news sites with multiple videos that play at once.(!!) Pages that auto-forward after so many seconds on them (WHY?? I am trying to read your content!), pages that take over swipe behaviors so that I accidently end up on the "next" news story. Articles presented as captions under an image gallery, and somehow loading each JPEG is 2-3 seconds of jank.
There are lots of reasons things have gotten bad. Analytics JS is just one of them.
AMP takes care of all (most) of these problems. Pages load in less than 2 seconds, and articles can be scrolled through without the page incessantly jumping around.
My main objection to AMP is not that is it being portrayed as a community project (although, that does bother me). It is that Google are creating their own subset of already well established standards (HTML, CSS), and forcing developers to adopt them if they wish their content to appear at the top of search results.
If this is truly a project to increase the speed and readability of the Web, as it was initially promoted to be, Google have better tools for achieving that outcome (demoting excessively slow sites in search results, for example).
In it's current guise, AMP is little more than Google aiming to force all content on the web to be consistent with their own look-and-feel, and breaking the fundamental philosophy of the web in the process.
It also has the side-effect that all AMP pages must look fairly similar and 'on brand' for Google - which I doubt is an accident.
That way, sites like HN are boosted to the top, while sites which take 10 seconds for their JS frameworks and ads to load before showing text on the screen are penalized.
It would seem like the reality is that page speed is not an important factor, and that re-tuning that factor would have been a better solution if Google's primary concern was for the health of the open web; not just Google's ecosystem.
I touched on this confusion elsewhere in this thread, but AMP is actually not a ranking factor. The carousel is a vertical which has been integrated into the page.
However, I do agree with you. It's confusing to end-users when it's described as a non-ranking factor because it still appears on the search page. It just doesn't influence organic search.
I would also like to see page speed become even more important, as performance is very important to user satisfaction. I spend a lot of time trying to minimize bits wherever possible.
It's not just pure loading times either, but perceived speed too. Small effects like animations can make a page feel faster, even if it's technically slower.
Personally, I wouldn't be surprised to see the carousel disappear once Google deems that AMP has become self-sustaining. I think they're using it as motivation to get publishers on board, and then they'll fall back to regular organic ranking afterwards (to which AMP pages will still benefit).
But in the mean time it's causing a lot of consternation.
They get to have their cake and eat it too, and there was no incentive (before AMP) to reign that in.
Google appears to have decided not to, in an apparent effort to boost their ecosystem, at the cost of the open web.
We're being forced to adopt a new subset of HTML, CSS, JS etc. that has been 'approved' by Google.
Stopping the bloat of the average web page is an admirable goal, but creating proprietary standards and penalizing those who don't adopt them is at odds with the fundamental ethos of the open-web.
I dislike walled gardens such as Facebook too, but I view AMP in much the same way. If a content creator wishes to host their content on their own server, with their own design, their audience is becoming more and more restricted - whether it is by Google promoting their competitor's AMP pages above regular listings, or because many people only view content behind the walls of Facebook etc.
Regardless of how fast a page is, content that conforms to Google's new 'standards' will be shown above regular search results. The article sites The Guardian as an example of this, where the non-AMP page is actually quicker, but appears below AMP results.
[1] https://searchengineland.com/google-now-counts-site-speed-as...
Google is overstepping their bounds by reducing standards to make their search better ultimately. Very similar to Microsoft in their IE4 overstepping days, led to years of stagnation and problems. Google is actively picking winners and losers based on whether they bend to how Google wants you to make your sites, a bigger encroachment than Microsoft ever made.
Businesses don't take on products unless it has a revenue impact to them or control impact.
- Do you think AMP is purely just to improve speeds or to get a further grip on content?
- Do you believe the business reasons are just to make sites fast?
How much is Google costing content creation businesses to implement ANOTHER standard? My guess is Google is going to force AMP into HTML6 or into standard bodies as well like they did with HTTP/2 and how they are now using Chrome like Microsoft used IE to kill common standards and make up their own using their power to force people to use it.
AMP is reminiscent of AOL's markup sandbox / terrible browser and Facebook's early specialized markup FBML, both maintained some control but eventually were long drawn out losses. How long until Google starts recompressing images and changing your content?
If AMP didn't influence search results in Google would people implement AMP? No as it costs money to change and add new per company standards. AMP is another smell that Google is going too far in control.
AMP does make sites faster, but good content sites already know how to do that and they should win in the open market not having to attach on to Google specific (sorry I mean "community" wink) standards.
Google regularly now kills common internet standards, offers an alternative that is only their standard, very late 90s Microsoft of them. I love Google but AMP is the first thing that really bothers me because you have to do it now to compete, not because it is necessarily better.
AMP has some severe constraints on javascript, but is pretty non-constrained on HTML and CSS.
Nearly all HTML5 tags and attributes are supported, including non-standard tags like <big>. It even allows super-non-standard tags like "<o:p>" which was part of an old microsoft word export-to-html feature.
Take a look at some of the examples on https://www.ampstart.com/
http://ampproject.org/ is AMP and https://daily.spiegel.de/ is AMP. These look very different.
A few other things AMP lies about:
* Wastes bandwidth downloading content in the background
* Wastes battery rendering content in the background
* Downloads Google links you haven’t given permission you want to see
* You can’t even opt out
* Breaks the web url extending it for Google’s own purposes
* Copying URLs to send to friends or post online no longer works correctly
* Breaks the understanding that the domain you are on is the authority for it’s own content
* Traps publishers further inside Google’s web, not the open web.
That’s Google Search, not AMP. How much bandwidth does Search use? Is it big enough to be a problem for some users?
> Downloads Google links you haven’t given permission you want to see.
Google Search can load assets from its own domain, like any other website. The user can use browser extensions to block certain requests.
> You can’t even opt out.
You mean you can’t opt out of seeing AMP results on Google Search? Well, yes, for obvious reasons. AMP is Google’s product. It would make little sense for them to add such an option.
> Breaks the web url extending it for Google’s own purposes. Breaks the understanding that the domain you are on is the authority for it’s own content.
Yes, it does.
> Copying URLs to send to friends or post online no longer works correctly.
It works in iOS Safari and Firefox for Android (and probably other browsers as well), which use the canonical URL when the user shares the page. There is also a Share button in the header of the AMP page.
> Traps publishers further inside Google’s web, not the open web.
You can say that Google traps publishers, but not that AMP is not the open web. Google AMP Cache is a website on the (open) web.
That's AMP. AMP prefetches content from AMP sites which must be hosted on google.com.
The AMP team, when asked about hosting AMP content outside google.com, mention they can't prefetch from other domains with current tech as a blocker for this.
I’d limit the term AMP to the library and framework for creating AMP pages.
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-i...
I doubt it'll be integrated as a vertical forever, but I understand the complaints against them doing so.
This doesn't make any sense. Why would a google trap be "the open web"? Google & Google Cache & Google Search isn't open web. It is deductive that google doesn't show you the best resources available on the web but the ones that are of their interest.
AMP is neither of those things. It’s a library and framework for creating web pages which are then hosted on the web, openly.
In practice it's a framework for hosting web pages on Google's domain. I haven't seen any amp sites outside of the google.com domain. To call google.com "the open web" is quite a stretch. I can't control anything about google.com, and I'm bound to Google's policies and practices when hosting content there. How is this open in any meaningful sense?
Google isn't the only one that operates an AMP cache (IIRC, Microsoft, Twitter, and a couple others do), but if you get to an AMP page from Google results you'll get the version from Google’s cache.
The actual authoritative source is hosted wherever the publisher chooses, and any cache just caches that.
When I think of "not the open web", I think of walled gardens like Facebook, Apple, and Amp.
When you've got good service they load quick without annoying popups / ads.
If people hate amp, maybe it’s time to adjust the web standards to enable amp experience with the html6 web.
(Disclaimer, I do work at Google)
(I don't work at Google or Facebook or wherever)
What does that mean exactly?
One advantage of a setup like this would be the possibility to instruct your browser to reject any non-AMP pages (or make them click to play, or otherwise indicate them), if you were on rural internet and didn't even want to bother loading a slow page.
I have noticed HNers conflate AMP the standard and Google Search's caching behaviour and/or ranking of AMP pages. I love the former, and not the latter. They really ought to make it possible for mobile search users to opt-out of getting AMP results.
I hate page bloat because it's slow.
I hate AMP as it's an obvious, extremely damaging, land grab.
It is reasonable and correct to hate both web page bloat and Google's so-called "solution" that breaks the web.
I'm not one to write much about AMP, but I don't see why simultaneously disliking page bloat and AMP is confusing. I simultaneously dislike (or like) many pairs of things that are apparently at odds with one another.
The charitable reading of those of us who dislike AMP and page bloat simultaneously is that we want developers (and, importantly, the people who give direction to those developers) to economize on their own. Stop adding every hip third-party script, social sharing widget, tracking library, and framework to your otherwise simple webapp. It's quite easy to trim the fat from a webapp; you just need the organizational conviction to do so.
AMP is a trojan horse, in more ways than one. One good: It uses a compelling marketing message to deliver much-needed trimming. But two things are obvious to most developers: (a) it's not necessary to adopt AMP to make your app trim and (b) AMP comes with a lot of baggage. So the message from HN is: there are better options, and they're not even technically difficult.
I'm just hearing about amp tonight and trying to understand what it is. Why are people saying it ruins the URL? Does it change the website address to a google URL? Why are people criticising it saying "hosted not cached"?
I gather the caching works similar to Akamai, with a configurable TTL on file types for the origin server?
This is because the way Google gets those lightning-fast results for AMP pages is to rehost them onto their own server and background-load them while you're viewing the search page. It's even a reasonable position -- they want to do the background-loading safely, so having known-good content helps them.
People are calling this rehosting because, well, your content is hosted on Google's servers, in a very visible way to anyone who sees the URL. If you share it, that's the URL that goes to other people rather than the canonical one.
That said, non-Google browser makers have been doing things to mitigate this. iOS Safari notices when you're trying to share an AMP URL and figures out the canonical one for you to share instead. (I hear Firefox does this, too, on Android as well.) It's a bit silly that the major browsers are all adding in Google-AMP-specific hacks like this, though.
Isn't copying the canonical URL the correct behavior? I've just checked and the AMP page you linked has the correct canonical tag set.
The normal behavior of "share sends the precise page I am currently viewing" has the advantage that you know what you're sending, whereas trusting the website's rel="canonical" opens up some potential confusion. (And, I guess, sneaky attack vectors, though someone who wanted to exploit that could do so easily enough via JS redirects on non-referer visits anyway.)
The Google Amp people certainly think that's the right way to do it, as we can see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15085159
EDIT: Actually, I'm seeing some claims that iOS Safari is just generically doing share-is-rel-canonical now. I haven't tested it personally, but...
So for instance if a user clicks the "comments" link on a blog post, it won't then skip the article when people view it.
Though I can also see downsides. For instance you might click on a specific version of a product on an ecommerce site. If you share it and say "I love this version!", that information could be lost in the process.
AMP is build on top of the web standards. It does nothing technical a normal webpage can't do. It's almost purely a political thing: It helps push these technologies by framing it as this cool and important new thing from Google (which many responsible for websites feel like they have to follow for SEO etc) instead of simply good engineering, which is a boring thing that nobody cares about if marketing wants to add another set of javascript to a site. In turn, it kind of punishes websites that already are efficient when they do not use AMP to achieve that.
And the pages aren't hosted by Google.
What are the chances that Apple would allow me to change the default browser on iOS?
Make site load speed a significant factor in search results ranking and the entire web would get faster without the duplicate work of maintaining AMP pages.
Also let's not forget that Google's Doubleclick (the most popular adserver) is the biggest and slowest component of most pages on the internet.
If some of you remember it, it was just another level of awful compared to regular ads and even pop-ups.
And besides, I'm still for expanding 3g coverage instead of starting to experiment with / roll out 5g as they are... we don't need new tech (in this regard), we need to roll shit out and do shit properly.
All large CMS players and publishing platforms should read this post.
Try looking for recipes. I only click read more if the recipe met my needs. Else I swiped right to get the next matching recipe.
I mean, you can already see many publishers (Reddit, ebay, some newspapers like USA Today) doing it. Already gaming AMP.
Technically speaking then, AMP isn't accomplishing a whole hell of a lot, and risks being relegated to "splash page technology", if that becomes a trend.
I'm curious how long it'll take for spammers to start inundating AMP, personally.
It's like they took on the role of Sauron almost immediately after giving up their "don't be evil" slogan.
“This is a Google Search issue, not AMP issue”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15581276
I don't get HN dedup anymore.
Why not aggregate on the same thread?
Without prefetch, on a lot of the pages I've cross-checked manually, it doesn't. So there's already gaming from the other side of the aisle in a sense.
You can! But so few people actually do. Kind of like abstinence-only birth control.
On the contrary, I feel like it takes more planning to build something that's slow than building something fast. Only once you've made elaborate designs and hired people who are used to including the six megabytes of javascript libraries they've accumulated over the years, it gets tricky.
In the past I've been happily surprised when I wanted to look something up on my own blog over some slow, public WiFi, and it loads super fast compared to everything else. (I'm not the only one, of course, but most small websites don't have a huge team behind it and are not very popular.) It's just because it's a personal thing which I've kept simple and built from scratch.
i am senior frontend-dev and imho we wouldn't need AMP if in 99% of the cases devs, or better their customers would give a damn about doing their job right ( most of the time they just don't know better, because they are just beginners and never learned much about 'advanced' html/css - i haven't seen to much senior devs lowering themself to do html/css work and/or are knowleadgable in this areas ).
Most of AMPs advantages regarding FOUC, Jumping-Content and Performance is to enforcing good HTML/CSS practices. Again citing guardian as example... So at least know i have a way to simple enforce a minimum best practice for mobile pages...
Whenever i had to sign off a responsive/adaptive mobile page loading 'insane' amounts of unused styles and/or javascript i wanted to hit something with a hammer... I am for giving it some time and see how it develops..
Perhaps this is the solution; require Google to stop calling itself a search engine.
Whether you call it a search engine or a curated content platform, users aren't going to suddenly stop using it now.
The more egregious Google's creepy behavior becomes the more urgent the solution becomes. This is an opportunity to find a solution.
> AMP is, I think, best described as nominally open-source.
That's not how open source works. Projects are either under an OSD license or not. See https://github.com/ampproject for the licenses involved.
The article's premise still stands, but the author probably meant 'nominally open standard' or just 'nominally open', both of which are accurate.
Think it’s true. At the beginning AMP pages got a huge rank bonus. Now, it’s much less. I feel Google sees AMP just for news pages. Guess the project got a lot resistance internally which is understandable: With the hundreds custom AMP components they are actually rebuilding the web.
I don’t like the entire AMP thing either but a bit more differentiation would be helpful here.
That they ever got such a thing is ridiculous to begin with. One of Google's principles is that they're neutral, besides clearly labeled paid-for ads which have always been the business model. I don't think they succeed 100% in setting aside unconscious biases that the programmers must have that build and tweak/configure the thing, but I believe that it is one of the basic ideas. If you say that was not the case, and is "much less" not the case now, then saying it's not biased is just weird.
http://www.benedelman.org/adlabeling/google-colors-oct2014.h...
It’s a community project and a Google project.
> 2. AMP pages don’t receive preferential treatment in search results.
They do due to the AMP carousel at the top, but that’s it. AMP pages don’t receive bonus points in the search ranking for being AMP.
> 3. AMP pages are hosted on your own domain.
They are, but they’re also hosted on Google AMP Cache.
is just rewording this sentence from this article:
> the Google Search team were at pains to repeat over and over that AMP pages wouldn’t get any preferential treatment in search results …but they appear in a carousel above the search results.
Nobody ever gave a shit whether they were the top search result. They care about being at the top of the page and getting more clicks. The usage of the term "search ranking" presumes that the top search result is at the top of the page.
> They are, but they’re also hosted on Google AMP Cache.
When I go to one of these pages, my URL says "Google.com" is the domain I'm at.
Just to check: how long have you worked at Google?
Maybe I wasn’t clear. I was trying to say that AMP pages are hosted and can be accessed from two locations: their original website and Google AMP Cache.
They also get the AMP icon which users are starting to equate with faster loading times. Another form of preferential treatment.
>They do due to the AMP carousel at the top, but that’s it.
Yeah I guess that's "it". But when the entire point of search engine optimization is to appear as high as possible in the results that's a pretty massive "it".
>They are, but they’re also hosted on Google AMP Cache.
So Google AMP Cache is actually Google AMP Host?
I agree, it’s a massive “it.” Poor choice of words from my part.
> So Google AMP Cache is actually Google AMP Host?
Yes, since the cached pages are accessible via URL.
Are you for real? Read your sentence aloud to yourself and realize how ridiculous it sounds.
You're basically saying: "They're just at the top of the page because they're in a specific AMP section of the page at the top of the page, but that's it. They don't get bonus points in the search ranking, which affects how high up you are in the search results, which is not on top of the page"
```A global distribution system (GDS) is a network operated by a company that enables automated transactions between travel service providers (mainly airlines, hotels and car rental companies) and travel agencies. Travel agencies traditionally relied on GDS for services, products & rates in order to provision travel-related services to the end consumers. A GDS can link services, rates and bookings consolidating products and services across all three travel sectors: i.e., airline reservations, hotel reservations, car rentals.```
https://www.tnooz.com/article/american-airlines-sues-sabre-o...
http://fortune.com/2016/12/21/american-airlines-15-million-a...
```The case concerned fees that Sabre and other travel reservation systems collect from airlines to display flights for booking.
At trial, Chuck Diamond, a lawyer for American Airlines, contended that Sabre used its power in the industry to “bully” airlines into paying unfair fees and signing unfair contracts that suppress competition and maintain its position.
The lawsuit claimed that provisions of a 2011 contract between US Airways and Sabre, including those governing what fares the airline makes available to a computerized network by Sabre used by travel agents, harmed competition.
The airline also contended that Sabre conspired with its competitors to not compete with each other for airline content like flight and fare information at the expense of consumers and innovation.```
...it sounds an awful lot _EXACTLY_ like this topic of discussion.
s/gds/search-engine/g
s/travel service providers/information service providers/g
For all of the talk about the carousel, it only appears for trending news type events. This is wholly irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of searches, and if anything is purely to keep Google's search a choice for news (where there are a lot of options).
Talking about AMP on HN is a bit like talking about Microsoft on Slashdot in the 90s. It isn't an illuminating or rational discussion.
and you think this is a fixed target? you have full trust in a company that basically lies saying that it doesn't have an impact in search results?
i think it is important to keep in mind that google is just a group of people, and the people there right now may be truly well-meaning. but these guys are _already_ lying - do you trust that future google won't turn the knobs after they have basically tricked much of the web to comply?
This is a strawman. AMP requires zero trust in Google. That has nothing to do with the argument.
Right now I am not particularly concerned by AMP. I think it's a benefit for a large class of users, and avoids the web tragedy of the commons. It's also open to use by any other party (Bing, for instance, has started processing and caching AMP). I would prefer a fully open, cross-industry "lite web" filling the same need, but everyone seems too focused on FUD about Google than rationally discussing the topic.
I have convinced one project manager to not implement AMP and will continue to try in the future. Please do your part by spreading word of the dangers of GOOG and FB.