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Comment by dontnotice | Hacker News Reader

It's funny how no one was up in arms when facebook (the leading source of publisher traffic) did their version of accelerated pages.

AMP serves a purpose for the end user and it does so well, it loads instantly and doesn't consume much data in the process.

As for their "demands":

1. Google already states that AMP pages are ranked higher because they're faster to load.

2. I'm not sure if it's related but they they addressed that only yesterday: https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/improving-urls-for-...

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So are you saying -- all else equal -- that if your webpage can respond just as quickly as an AMP one, that your search rank won't be docked?

E.g., your site is just as performant as AMP, but you're not using AMP.

Yup, that was in the the blog post announcing AMP, and subsequent press comments.

I'm of the persuasion that they can rank and display the results however they please, it's their site after all, so it's a non issue either way.

I wonder how Google manages the network topology for testing this so that the fact that AMP is served from a Google-local cache does not give it a speed advantage to Google's speed-testing bot beyond any it may have in typical, outside of Google, use.

Google preferches the amp content.

I don't care at all about AMP really, but this:

> I'm of the persuasion that they can rank and display the results however they please, it's their site after all, so it's a non issue either way.

I don't get why anybody says this. Of course they are in control. Nobody can force them to do it differently (maybe the government but whatever).

Most people aren't saying that Google has no right to do what they're doing. People are saying that Google _should_ be doing it differently.

> I'm of the persuasion that they can rank and display the results however they please, it's their site after all, so it's a non issue either way.

Of course they can legally do it, and we're not judges debating that.

There's a difference between what they are allowed to do legally, and what they can do that keep me coming back as a user. This is legal, but it makes me use DuckDuckGo instead.

Your site will never be faster than AMP because google can’t prefetch content from your site.

They can't? Or they won't?

They could've made an open standard that not only websites but other search engines could implement as well, but then again why would they do that? They'd lose a competitive advantage. I think AMP is very deliberately locked in to google.

Any site can implement an amp reader. E.g. Cloudflare has setup an amp cache third parties can use. I believe twitter makes use of this.

This new open standard they are pushing will eliminate the need to even have an amp cache for a site to consume amp, win win.

Good luck trying to get to AMP performance without using AMP. That will likely be more work and in the end you come up with AMP in all but name.

> It's funny how no one was up in arms when facebook (the leading source of publisher traffic) did their version of accelerated pages.

Hmm, I guess it depends where you look. I saw quite a LOT of people upset by it. Many participated because they felt like they had to in order to get views.

> 1. Google already states that AMP pages are ranked higher because they're faster to load.

Cool, so how do I get my plain text page which loads faster than the motherfuckingwebsite.com into the AMP carousel?

Look at the source of motherfuckingwebsite.com. You'll find that it loads a certain analytics script. Motherfucker indeed.

Exactly. Which is why I have sites that load even faster than motherfuckingwebsite.com, yet they don't get any of the search ranking benefits.

And it's well aware, right before loading the script in the HTML is:

    <!-- yes, I know...wanna fight about it? -->

The script is also loaded async, so it's not that bad.

Who cares about facebook? This is the web! AMP threatens to force even small blogs to convert from open web to walled garden where Google decides what will be published and what will get blocked.

Why convert? I find it pretty easy keeping an amp and non-amp version on the same codebase. Just a few switches what's activated where. And many of the restrictions (images with set sizes, no style tags, no use of !important) make a lot of sense for any page. And going once through Bootstrap CSS and deleting everything you don't need also helps improving user experience.

If anything, supporting AMP has accelerated my non-AMP pages a lot.

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