Google Creates 'Dedicated Placement' in Search Results for AMP Stories
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
They keep using the ruse that AMP is important because it is all about fast loading sites and less frustrating user experience but they have page speed insights, and already rank sites based on load speed so why force this non standard on everyone? If they just said we'll give you a bolt icon and the perks for a site that loads under X ms no matter how you do it (AMP or anything else) a lot of people will welcome it.
Because then it wouldn't be a wedge anymore.
The key technique that AMP promises will beat the limits of network latency is precaching. Unfortunately, users have a strong privacy expectation that random websites will not be notified that you are interested in them until you actually click the link in search results (or news, or whatever). For precaching to work without violating user privacy, the data needs to be loaded from some server that already knows that the link was shown to you, so there is no privacy violation from giving it that information. AMP's solution is for the host company of the results page to fill that role.
The AMP lightning bolt is intended to mean "this page is already downloaded offline on your device, and so will load instantly", not just "this page is well-designed and fast". The difference is minor for blazing fast connections, but that isn't true for developing world users with weak connections and devices.
Google has said that when open web standards like Web Packaging finally show up which enable the same safe preloading behavior, those sites will be included in AMP carousels. We'll see whether they follow through with that. [1] [2]
* All experiments conducted with cache disabled, times are until Load event fires.
[1] https://blog.amp.dev/2018/03/08/standardizing-lessons-learne...
[2] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/contributi...
The first thing that effects page time is network latency and there is no getting around that. AMP may help because google has lots of servers that may be closer, but if the underlying network is slow. AMP will still be slow.
Also the next thing is frame size. If the network path has high latency, but the ability push large frames you can send more per request. This is where things like inlining can help. It also reduces the request number.
AMP can't get rid the properties of the network. It's also generally the last mile that is slow not back bone.
-edit- I find it interesting that the github link provided mentions portals are for "AMP Carousel like UI with navigation to publisher (alternative to iframe promotion)"
Sure, none of this is true if the user manually types into the address bar, but most web navigation isn't done that way.
It’s disingenuous to compare AMP style loading with a normal page visit and say “AMP is faster”; if I could preload my webpage before you click on it, it would be faster to load as well! That doesn’t actually mean the website is any faster.
It is perceived as faster by the users, and that's the only standard of speed that users really care about.
Saying there they removed latency is like saying they’ve removed the speed of light. Didn’t happen, they just preload content for you, because in you’re case, it’s possible to do so.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Preloading...
You can also prefetch.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Link_prefe...
Also preloading/pre-fetching does not get around latency. It just changes when it happens.
> Unfortunately, users have a strong privacy expectation that random websites will not be notified that you are interested in them until you actually click the link in search results (or news, or whatever). For precaching to work without violating user privacy, the data needs to be loaded from some server that already knows that the link was shown to you, so there is no privacy violation from giving it that information. AMP's solution is for the host company of the results page to fill that role.
I'm not sure that this is actually true, at least for the vast majority of users.
However, if the user has disabled pre-fetching what makes it okay for AMP to do it?
Disclosure: I work on AMP.
Do you all just not think about the long-term implications of what you're building? It's going to destroy the open WWW.
Web publishers (and other people who are paying attention) don't want AMP or Portals, but they are being strong-armed into it under threat of losing their traffic.
And the worst thing is, without these publishers, Google would have no content and therefore no value.
Yes, sub-100ms is attractive. But what do you compromise to achieve that goal?
Who pays the price? Publishers who are already struggling, so that the only content on the web becomes content farm affiliate sales shit?
(I don’t work at Google. I’m just guessing.)
There were so many ads, snippets, did you also means, and AMP widgets that there was only room for about eight actual search results.
How have they let their core product get so lost?
Luckily, DuckDuckGo has been improving and now it’s even what I recommend to non-technical people; as I never use “!g” any more.
They get in the way of actual results, steal traffic from the sites the content is from and don’t deliver enough information to be useful. Not once has a story card provided what I needed.
0: https://goo.gl/search/right+rectangular+pyramid+calc:+find+A
Funny thing is that I moved to DDG because Google couldn't reliably guess my answers, and I am satisfied with an engine that tries to guess to a much larger extent. This is because DDG guesses are better, and they don't hide the web results so I can fall back to them.
Bing: https://www.bing.com/search?q=do+i+have+to+turn+in+everythin...
Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=do+i+have+to+turn+in+everyth...
That doesn't mean it's good for the web, but "what (the most) users want" is Google's strong point. And this is par for the "the internet is now 4 websites" course, so I don't think it's possible to claim that this isn't "how the internet works" anymore.
People are not the memoryless automata that statistics handles best. People react positively to a bad change up to a point where they don't anymore, you don't even need to keep changing to trigger this.
Take a look outside your window. Have you understood quantum physics yet? No? I guess all of the available data doesn't help you, because it still requires effort and careful observation to glean insights from it.
The same goes for Google. Data by itself does not guarantee anything. You can look at a piece of data and not reach any conclusion, or reach the wrong conclusion. More data does not mean more insight.
In my field (biology) we are suddenly drowning in data - we are producing new datasets much faster than we can analyze them. Our understanding is not increasing at a commensurate pace because we lack the ability to turn these data into useful knowledge.
Data is the most valuable commodity today. The mountain of data and network effects Google has cultivated ensure they will remain on top for the foreseeable future. It's similar to the crazy expensive industrial supply chains that manufacturers in the past leaned on to maintain their market position. No other company (outside maybe Facebook/Amazon) has that kind of a data moat.
I still think Google today isn’t as good as Google 10+ years ago, but I don’t think anything is as good as Google 10+ years ago. They don’t have to be flawless, they just have to be better than the rest, and they are. I settle for DuckDuckGo when I can, but when the results matter, I’ll still end up using Google.
>You can’t beat Google when it comes to online search. So we’re paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs.
Still has ads -- but a sweet UI. Great find!
I’m a big boy, I’m not offended by most of it (the frequency of bizarre Simpson’s porn is a little weird) but it’s somewhat weird the way it appears.
I searched for “power Mac case door”, all fine (with safe search off), as you’d expect. Change “type” to gif, expecting to see images of the hinged door on the g3/g4 series... oh wow that’s a lot of porn. And lots of other weird unrelated stuff.
I have the same results for animated gifs with safe search off, but I think it’s more because of the presence of “power” or “mac” in so many of these gifs or related pages, compared to the number of gifs of computer related stuff.
Put it another way, I think these are legit results, and not false positives or usurping the search terms.
For nerds, this makes google search suck, because they still construct search queries they way they did in 2000 (that's me too). For most people, it makes google search magically good compared to what they would get from a more "precise" search engine.
If you just click the image tab, things look fine.
FWIW, when I search for "power Mac case door" on Google, I only get crap above the fold. I have to scroll before I get to the results, scrolling one page only gets me to the first two results.
I try it every few months for a week or so and then switch back to Big G when I find DDG isn't right for the types of searches I need.
I look forward to the day when I forget to switch back to Google.
Search is not their core product. Google is an advertising company, and everything they do is centered around that.
Google search has definitely gone down hill IMO because I find bing to be close enough in quality now that I don’t find myself searching on google a lot.
judging from what I understand of how people use Google, it looks more than enough.
This is absolutely Google trying to dictate what the web should be. If the US had functional antitrust authorities they would kill this.
The narrative is “we develop an open standard that is widely adopted, and we’re not responsible for what people do with it”.
The team lead, @cramforce will also tell you tgat AMP is good for tge web.
Got to justify that google pay check. Mostly to themselves, helps to do it out loud.
>It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
True 100 years ago, true today.
(Long-time DDG and Firefox user, doing my best to de-Google myself and my loved ones)
- https://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-joins-...
- https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster-Blog/September-2018/Introdu...
- https://www.bing.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2019/05/09/google...
Microsoft is part of the AMP Project's governance as well, along with Cloudflare, Twitter, and other members: https://blog.amp.dev/2018/11/30/amp-projects-new-governance-...
I wouldn't be surprised if AMP starts appearing in other Bing search results, or if they start supporting links to AMP pages other than news articles in their carousels (which when you get down to it is basically all this announcement is about).
Unfortunately, this kind of negativity routinely attracts upvotes, and its effect is amplified when it festers near the top of a thread. One thing we've begun doing more of as moderators is routinely downweighting indignant top subthreads to counteract this routine upvote-attraction effect. HN can't live by upvotes alone. There need to be countervailing mechanisms, or else indignation will dominate everywhere, making all threads the same.
Is it, though? The top comments include ad hominem attacks on Google engineers, such as the replies to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19886610
I appreciate how you responded to the worst attack, at least, but the general viciousness is still disappointing. I don't work for Google, but I'm sure not eager to present a contrary view if I'm just going to be mislabeled a shill. Doubly so for anyone who does work at Google, I imagine. Possibly developers from other members of the AMP Project's governing committees as well, including Cloudflare, Twitter, and Microsoft: https://blog.amp.dev/2018/11/30/amp-projects-new-governance-...
I don't want criticism of AMP censored, but I don't think AMP should be an exception to the rule against negativity either.
That's because the Web itself is under attack. Google is doing something completely unethical.
Each developer’s role is just small enough so they feel powerless or don’t recognize the larger impact of their work.
If you were paid to work on this, you are either wilfully ignorant or morally corrupt. Sure, this is only a small loss for the open web. But Google is a factory for small losses for the open web. I hope the pay is worth it!
I'm not a fan of AMP, but this is way over the top.
Why should we tolerate that? They are worthy of contempt.
And I don't think that one would have to uproot their lives, just quit and find another job. I hear there's a very strong market for FAANG engineers...
And AMP, a restricted web standard, is that's "worth of contempt"? Please, please, take a step back and think of it for a moment.
In the context of everything that's been happening with the Web, this move is relatively minor, and you can easily imagine a rationale for it (which involves an implicit "we're the good guys, so it's OK").
Our industry has been an amped-up (ha) sociopathic echo chamber for too long, and there's no longer much reference points for earlier Internet and Web visions of what's good and appropriate.
I think Google's founders had some sense of the earlier ideas, and that's where we originally got things like fair objective rankings, and Don't Be Evil.
I think the ignorance comes from living in a bubble. It's hard to notice the bubble when you're inside of it, and programmers get manipulated too.
Like someone else in the thread mentioned, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Not everyone is looking to uproot their lives, move to a crowded, overpriced city and sell their soul to adtech, all for a few more dollars, ya know?
The Internet is vast and wide and the lens through Google/Twitter/Facebook, et al, which many see it is getting foggy. A time will come when we look back at this era and see it as the growing pains from the massive transition to a globally connected world.
Amp pages are similar to a Page on Facebook or an Article on Amazon. The author is limited to what the platform allows. And the visitors stay on the platform.
I wonder how that will turn out for Google.
I wonder how that will turn out for the web.
[0] https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/08/googles-mini-apps-are-app...
Further away I can see devices completely disappearing. Surfaces of all kinds, contact lenses serve as information overlays. Eventually the physical world and that information layer might become indistinguishable and just sort of combine to create the new reality.
/complete guesswork
I'd be happy to help support it (through Patreon or something?). I'd even donate some labour if it were needed.
This is exactly the type of behavior antitrust is supposed to prevent, and it's the same reasoning behind the Microsoft antitrust action in the late 90s: it's OK if you built up a monopoly because you had a superior product, but it is NOT OK to leverage that monopoly to dictate other areas of the marketplace.
It would be OK if Google released AMP and everyone jumped on it because it was a great product. The only reason anyone uses it is because Google gives it prominent position in search results, and search position on Google is make or break for anyone publishing content on the web.
I'll echo the many here who report that, for everyday use, DDG is far preferable. I've only needed Google for arcane programming links or occasional news stories.
This new replacement for the Web will only fully work in Google Chrome, because Google is abandoning true web standards with things like AMP and Portals. (Being forced to include Google's JavaScript in your web pages under threat of losing your traffic is not a real web standard.)
The bulk of what is published online will have Google's visual branding (Material Design), and you might never leave Google's servers (as a user) or be able to fully control your own tech stack (as a publisher).
AMP is a vicious attack on the open Web and a completely unethical power grab. This is why one company shouldn't control the browser, the search engine, and the operating system at the same time.
For reference, you have to right-click and go to "copy link location"; then paste, and you will see.
It got removed from the W3C spec, but it's still in WHATWG which is generally considered the canonical spec anyway.
But, as a pretty staunch anti-Google company, why does DDG send me to AMP links? Give me the ducking (autocorrect pun!) canonical URL!
As a DDG user, I've never noticed this. Can you link an example?
I'll try to find an example and note down the site that it happens on.
Link to discussion on the proposed portal tag. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19866584
https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/contributi...
To be fair, they have more employees, and I don't assume bad faith in the downvotes — I've been wrong more than a few times. Still, I sense that Google elicits a gratitude that is unjustified when it comes to relationships between companies, customers and employees.
"This webpage works best in Our Browser™️" was just a pointer to the user for a faster experience. It came at the small cost of crippling the web for a mere 15 years, probably costing a few billion hours user time wasted at horrible UX bred in a hostile corporate controlled environment.
AMP is just the same all over again, just with a singular player which might just be too big to fail. Oh, and also this time things like the information source of the western world is at stake, not only fan sites of specific locomotive models by some geeks.
But at least my websites load....slower actually if the page was properly built[1]!
[1]https://digiday.com/media/google-amp-beat-facebook-instant-a...
while i agree with the overall sentiment that google is pulling a microsoft, i don't see how this line is true. if google went away tomorrow, how would it lead to an economic downturn?
it would suck if you're all in on google in some way, but most of their products have competitors and substitutes, so you could switch. maybe android losing some core services that aren't immediately replaceable might cripple phones for some folks. the engineers could certainly find new jobs, and a bunch would go on to create new companies from the things they're working on now while soaking up all the idle wealth around the world looking for any return at all.
i rarely use google for anything, so maybe i'm missing the obvious.
In general, HN has a pretty strong bias against Google and Facebook. I suspect it may be clouding the average user's judgement. AMP has done immense good for the majority of users of the mobile web.
I hate that every fucking google search result on mobile web has its stupid little icon
I hate that there is no way for me to disable it as a user
I hate that it has muddied the waters in what the url bar means
I hate that it has trained users to not question fake url bars.
I hate that cloudflare so thoroughly jumped on its dick
I hate that we invented a way to fake the address in the url bar just for this stupid fucking feature.
I hate that we now have a system where somebody can share a page url with a friend, and that friend can view it on t he same device model using the same browser with the same settings, and will get a different page because one was viewing an amp page but shared it's real url.
I hate that every fucking amp page is lower featured in some way, and almost never works in desktop mode.
And most of all, I hate that it leads to everybody offloading shit onto google's servers.
AMP is not fast because it's served from google's CDN. That's a lie, It has always been a lie, and it will always be a lie. AMP is fast because it's incompatible with 99% of the bullshit client cpu heavy tracking and ad libraries, so they don't get included inside AMP pages.
We could have just had that, without all this stupid bullshit CDN redirection/misdirection bullshit.
And you know what, You want me to get off my hate train? Get google and all of the other search providers using it to solve complaint #2. That's really all it would take to get most of the hate to go away.
I agree the world could have faster pages without AMP. What would that take though? Would it take web developers across the world pushing back against including megabytes of extra JavaScript for ads/tracking, at all the companies who are currently using AMP?
I cringe everytime I visit a page that's AMP enabled, and usually bounce or just get on a desktop. Sure, promote a 'faster' web, but if it's at the expense of a horrible experience, why?
Before that, people were massively moving to the apps because the web got too slow and unusable on mobile.
Okay, I can see that. The idea of Google being the gatekeeper and regulator of the Internet is scary though, especially given it's a for-profit corporation that has its own interests at hand. I think AMP would have been better if it started off as a proposal for it being a standard to HTML, voted on and governed by the W3C, instead of by Google.
> Web developers weren't professional enough to make the web fast
I would argue though, that web developers who are professional enough to adopt AMP, would be professional enough to ensure their site doesn't load bloat.
Don't shit on (other?) developers to make your point. It's revisionism that only serves the purpose of taking more control from users and developers, which just conveniently gives even more power to the stakeholders who most benefit from the structurally unsound game businesses have been playing.
By the same logic, I could say the Google Chrome team (not related to AMP — just a metaphor) isn't professional enough to make a browser that uses less RAM. In reality, the team deals with a myriad of constraints and other priorities, both technical and commercial, that sometimes clash. Rendering speed and security are its major selling points; if both are met, management is satisfied and Google makes billions.
I'm loath to say this, but performance isn't where a lot of websites make money. It's the ads that people click, way too often by mistake. To feed this system, a bootload of tracking scripts, A/B testing scripts, overeager live support widgets...
Google is coyly selling preferred placement in exchange for performance, which may be the only way to get some businesses to care about performance. Developers are cranking out what the business owners are asking for.
Ask yourself why Google did not take aim at the ownership side, why it did not arrange discussions with major media companies etc. to establish performance as a company-wide goal, instead, put the responsibility on developers.
> Before that, people were massively moving to the apps because the web got too slow and unusable on mobile.
Yeah, the thought process to go from seeing the "use our mobile app instead! It's so much better!" banner, closing it and sending my eyes onto the content that I wanted to read takes at least half a second.
Hence why web developers of HN are so angry at AMP - it bans them from building sites filled with 20MB of JavaScript bloat. If you read through HN history, you'll see hundreds of comments belittling anytone that complained about webpage size and slow loading - usually defending it with a "noone has time to optimize things and build without these huge libraries" argument.
Any examples? My limited reading experience here has been the opposite.
I think it's because comments we don't like make a much stronger expression than comments we do, so they weigh more heavily in forming our impression. This also explains why people arrive at such contradictory generalizations: it's because they like different things.
Which would of course include a lot of what Google does. So they "solve the problem" by not solving the problem.
Yeah, seems like you should be able to. Just curious, where would you want that option to appear, and how would you want to see the search experience change as a result?
Making it default for everyone and then forcing people to sign in to opt out would be counterproductive from a privacy standpoint.
Could also just provide the original link right next to the AMP link in search results and let users decide.
- Google has settings for search and a page for these settings. For example, I have sometime in the past went to that page and set my preferences there. And now they're taken into account when I use Google's search. Like settings are wont to do, y'know.
- We already know how search without AMP works.
As a user, I should just see whatever the site lets me see. If they decide AMP is best for user experience, I would no doubt get it. If they decide to show a responsive mobile friendly site because it works best, then show me that.
What do you want, to search for stuff or to feel that you're supporting the winning team or something?
It's a fact. There's no quick path to victory until mass tech community adoption rubs off onto regular folks; it hasn't hit that first milestone yet.
It won't win in the short term, which is where AMP adoption is
AMP is fast because of prefetching. That's not a "lie." You can measure this. When you click an AMP link, the page is already downloaded. Prefetched pages load faster than https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
But prefetching has a problem: when you visit a website, they can fingerprint you and track you. Prefetching from random websites in search results violates your privacy.
The only way to fix the privacy issues with prefetching is for the search engine (not just Google--Bing, too) to serve the prefetched page from their own CDN.
Except Google is probably the biggest threat to privacy on the planet. You're not "fixing" the privacy issues, you're making things worse.
I don’t like google google either, especially because of their history on privacy issues, but they’re not getting much additional info from this. Just a stronger foothold on the web
Even Internet Explorer will prefetch and render pages.
But mostly I hate that URL crap. Give me my URL bar functionality back with original host URL. And that there is no way to disable AMP from results.
We do not recommend our clients to use AMP.
Does it also keep every cookie on a page 1st party to Google, so they don't have (m)any more GDPR-type blockers?
No, I'm not. What gives you that impression?
As a developer, I hate that AMP is just another one of Google’s tentacles with which I have to contend.
It also breaks URLs – instead of the real URL, you get a google.com link which doesn’t have a good desktop experience.