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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

That's an interesting viewpoint and makes a lot of sense, but still - why couldn't Google have accomplished this goal through web search policies? Have the crawler say that if it sees JavaScript with certain behavior it will be de-prioritized compared to a similar website with less annoying JavaScript. Which, to some extent, you get just by focusing on load time: if the crawler emulates a normal browser and measures the time until everything has rendered, it'd be able to penalize annoying JS ads that block loading. Or if it emulates a normal browser and indexes text rendered on the screen, it'd be able to penalize sites that display a pop-over ad that you have to interact with.

(Would that have been more prone to an antitrust lawsuit than AMP?)

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I don’t want to speculate too much on the legals of the situation, so I won’t talk about anticompetitive matters.

As for why not do this in indexing, of course they’re doing that. They’ve been doing that for a very long time, but that approach can only go so far. There’s a constant cat and mouse game between websites and search providers, and AMP is a way to end it once and for all.

It’s important to stress that the motivation here is largely user-focused. People tend to ascribe to Google these shady Oracle-like motivations around screwing users and developers, but the truth is that moves like this are largely motivated by a desire to improve the experience. Not out of any sort of altruism, mind you, but because what’s good for the user is generally good for Google.

I'm not ascribing Google a motivation of wanting to screw over users and developers. I'm ascribing Google-as-a-whole the motivation of wanting to improve the experience because that's good for Google's bottom line, and Google-as-individual-employees the motivation of wanting to do that by shipping new products instead of shipping improvements because that's good for their personal bottom line. Neither of these are shady. They are both individually rational decisions. You don't become Google because you altruistically want to help people without profit; you don't work for Google for that reason, either. You work for Google because you want to do interesting work while being paid well.

I think Google made lots of mistakes with AMP that will be long-term harmful for the web, but I don't think they were malicious in doing so—they made genuine mistakes that it just so happens they wouldn't have been incentivized to make if there were no individual pressure to ship products.

I'm just saying that this pressure exists, and that I personally don't want to be subject to it.

Google's only obligation is to its shareholders. AMP serves its interests. So does building covert search engines to help root out chinese dissidents.

That 'cat and mouse' game is the natural order of things. There is no stopping that other than making things anti-competitive which is what Alphabet clearly wants to do.

Google has become evil and we should expect nothing less from a multibillion dollar conglomerate like Alphabet. This isnt the Google we grew up with. This is the publically traded company Alphabet which will do anything to increase their bottom line whether its ruining the internet with things like AMP or selling search services used to imprison chinese citizens.

Google should be ashamed of itself. Would never take a job at a company like Alphabet. It conflicts with my sense of ethics and morality.

What is a "company like Alphabet"? Can any company of the size and scale of Alphabet, or aiming to be such one day, avoid these pressures? Why isn't this the Google we grew up with, given that this is what Google was growing up to be all along?

A serious question is whether a young company in roughly the state Google was in the early '00s can reasonably commit to never becoming a multibillion-dollar conglomerate.

Probably not. I think going public ruins the ability of such a company to maintain a moral compass. It certainly vanquished any idea of maintaining their 'don't be evil' motto.

They simply could have committed not to becoming a publicly traded company. I know every YC investor looks at going public as the end all be all for every company on earth but I think the pursuit of the public market at all costs mindset typically espoused by communities like this one is morally devoid and obviously has long term consequences in the tech community at large.

Go public at all costs is the mindset here and in most VC communities. Make money at all costs is really what they mean to say. Get rid of that mindset.

Google used to have a moral compass. That was the Google I grew up with. Before all the pressures of being a publicly traded multibillion-dollar conglomerate got to them and now they are basically no better than ATT.

If every YC investor looks at going public and only one has ever gone public, they were looking in the wrong direction. Most VC funded companies either get acquired or go bust.

I think you're being too generous. The usability of AMP sites on an iPhone is utter garbage with their extra address bar and broken scrolling. It's not necessary to break scrolling in order to create fast loading websites, in fact, quite the opposite. It's clear that users were a very low priority here.

Measuring load times and ranking sites that way produces a relative ordering of fast and relevant sites. (Slow sites can still do well if they're faster than other sites.) Making sites implement AMP absolutely ensures that the site is fast.

Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on any AMP related stuff.

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