Google to end the “top stories carousel” benefit to AMP next spring
themarkup.org
themarkup.org
If Google wants to prioritize fast pages, that's cool. AMP can be useful tool for making fast pages. But AMP is not necessary to make a fast page.
* To pages which are fast. This is based on measurement of a specified benchmark, regardless of the implementation used to achieve those results.
* To pages which meet an AMP specification (do this, don't do this, etc) and are validated to conform to the spec. Publishers can bring their own hardware (CDN/Servers) and their own code (serverside language, javascript framework) to do it. Google's AMP servers as the defacto/reference implementation, but publishers/competitors are free to deviate from it. (Look at prebid.js as an example).
* To pages which use the AMP Framework code as-is (serverside and clientside) provided by the Google Team, but you can bring your own hardware or have to use a set of accredited hosting providers.
* To pages which use AMP and are hosted by Google.
Obviously the last one is the "simplest" in regards to getting it off the ground, but AMP has been around long enough and Google has enough resources that they could definitely do one of the other options which go much more to the open web.
Note: if you first thought says "verification of any of these things is way too hard and it's so subjective, so we shouldn't even try", then I'd recommend looking at Google's policies for when you can use their "skippable ads" (TrueView) on your video player. It's very manual and up to a lot of human interpretation when you get into the weeds: https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/3522024?hl=en#tr...
Or if you think "maintaining a list of approved vendors is too hard of a problem", look at their list of approved vendors for Advertising: https://developers.google.com/third-party-ads/googleads-vend...
Having a faster site than a competitor should be a boost, but if their content is better, they should win the better ranking.
Google requiring Google's own technology is pretty blatant abuse everyone can understand.
Should a page with a fraction of a fraction of a percent better content that takes 20s to load and is barely functional on a mobile browser take precedence over something that actually works better for me as an end user?
Yeah, but that is asking a serious question looking for a serious answer. Ranking things is a challenge.
If Google's answer is "got to have AMP" then we might suspect the question was the rather less profound "how do we make the internet good for Google?".
In this context, I don't believe it was antithetical an an input for the best search results for searchers, the majority whom benefited from fast pages.
I can't find an updated stat for 2020 but I assume it's low enough that it is no longer makes sense as an input.
[1] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads...
[2] https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and...
A slower more useful experience for me please.
If it has to be this way, give us an option to prioritise page load times or relevance.
1) Which metrics get used in the algorithm? My list was tightly scoped to a process/ecosystem about tracking the metric of page speed.
2) How is that metric used in the algorithm? Boosting in the score in general? Is the top carousel treated differently?
3) It's also possible the application of the metric can change what is required from that metric. For example: Google regular results require one page speed option, but Google mobile carousel requires a more stringent page speed option.
Personally, I am fine with page speed being used as a metric in search results. Context: The main usecase for AMP, and the publishers who support it, are related to news (versus stack overflow, etc). So there is a lot of room for "kim kardashian birthday party" to have very similar content where page speed is a great metric to optimize between them.
I am less fine with Google requiring their hosted version of it - especially in the medium/long term once the project has gotten over its experimental phase and proven market adoption.
Google don't run Google Search as a public service. They'll rank pages to generate as much money for Google as possible - that's a balance between quality of results to keep users coming back, making sure the ranking order is bad enough that users have to click adverts instead of only using the search results, and making sure the ranking order is opaque enough to encourage companies to buy adverts rather than simply invest more in SEO.
The final point is the relevant one here - Google need to change the rules regularly in order to hamper company's SEO efforts, which makes them buy more adverts until they can make it back to the top of the SERPs again.
Google likes to attach your searches to your account, doesn't it? This means they should be able to personalise your search results based on your own preferences. It's weird that they don't do that.
1. website name so I can recongize it
2. page speed
3. page date
....
476. excerpt from the page text.
I consider the excerpt to be useless visual noise almost always, the page speed would be much more useful for me.
When searching for keywords (especially acronyms) with multiple distinct usages, excerpts provide context.
Additionally, they're a valuable tool to filter out junk.
I believe they've been doing this for quite some time. It hasn't been great for convincing people to keep their pages fast, though.
People will keep their pages fast in less than 1 month.
That's true, but almost no non-AMP news sites aren't total garbage (and some of them have even manage to make their AMP sites terrible). Without Google taking an aggressive approach, things will get worse, not better.
Time limit (load time and render time), and to a lesser degree, weight limit (ie total resources size).
This is hardly a new concept.
"Each useless tracker we add lowers our search rank. Are we sure we need to add this one?"
I don't think it's a simple problem.
Fill the special box with relevant results to the search, and use load time for the result as a weighting. So if your content is ridiculously on-topic but a little slower to load, you'll still probably be in the special little box, but a slightly less specific site thats super fast to load might be before your site.
As has been mentioned: google has used page load times as a metric for a long time. The difference is they didn't add a "special little box" to incentivise sites with otherwise shit decision making skills to do the right thing.
But sure. Tell me how forcing clients to download a bunch of javascript, and introducing forced 8 second blank pages for anyone who dares to not load said javascript is all about making pages faster.
Give me a fucking break. If you want to live in the fucking google sphere, that's your choice, but don't pretend that their motives are anything but hostile to the very concept of the open web.
[0]: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating...
Google could introduce rewards for fast web pages too, but chose not to.
If publishing slow, bloated pages would reliably come at the cost of not being featured in the first page of Google results, sites would soon change their ways.
If Google imposed a seriously strong penalty against bloated websites, people would promptly stop making new bloated websites, and would invest in lessening the bloat of their existing sites.
I can't think of a more certain spur to action than Google imposing a threat of going undiscovered. It's perfectly normal for web companies to flout the GDPR, say, as it's laughably unenforced, but Google rankings are no joke.
edit: a few tweaks
It's important to note that Google will continue to require AMP for things like swiping up to see the page an image search result comes from.
This is more able to be fairly rationalised, I believe, because it relies on technical improvements that AMP offers beyond speed, like static layout.
Still, I don't see why whether a page implements AMP is the only way Google can make that decision. Google already measures cumulative layout shift: https://web.dev/vitals/.
I think it's clear from everything Google has done and how they've pushed AMP that one of their goals is to get people to use AMP in particular, as opposed to get people to make mostly static, fast websites. And as we've seen, if huge swathes of the web feel compelled (or forced) to use AMP, it affords Google a massive amount of power over how people consume content on the web.
> Based on what we learned from AMP, we now feel ready to take the next step and work to support more instant-loading content not based on AMP technology in areas of Google Search designed for this, like the Top Stories carousel. This content will need to follow a set of future web standards and meet a set of objective performance and user experience criteria to be eligible.
Source: https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/03/08/standardizing-lesso...
Long story short, I don't see it as best practices that serve Internet users as a whole. They seem to be more closely tailored to the interests of Google. And, by extension, the subset of netizens from which they can generate the most revenue.
Your Core Web Vitals report in Search Console is based on Chrome User Experience Report data. Meaning that this is data from your real users, not Google running simulated tests of your pages on their own servers. I.e. when someone loads your page from Chrome, Chrome reports back how long it actually took the page to load for that user (it doesn't happen with all users, they have to meet various opt-in criteria [1]). So, if you see that 50% of pages are served too slowly on computers, it means that 50% of your real users actually experienced slow page loads (as measured by the Web Vitals metrics). Perhaps your static site isn't as efficient as you think, or your server is slow, or the devices/connection of your users is much worse than you assumed. That's the power of this data; it shows you that in the real-world the experience isn't as great as you're assuming and encourages you to investigate further.
(For the record) The landing page of the Core Web Vitals report does indicate where the data is coming from. Next to "Source: Chrome UX report" you see a question mark. If you hover over that question mark then click the "Learn more" link it takes you to this page: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9205520?ref_top...
Disclosure: Googler working on https://web.dev. I'm not on the Web Vitals team but interact with them.
[1] https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-user-experien...
So, yeah, Google may want to encourage a nice Web experience, but they don't want to back this with metrics that might discourage people from sending too much business in AdSense's direction, or fail to favor Chrome over alternative browsers.
Do agree that the proliferation of acronyms doesn't help with wrapping your head around it all!
Both of those metrics account for the visual completion of the page relative to its final appearance -- deferred resources would slow that.
At least they link to a lot of docs and advices.
Also funnily enough they complain about Google Analytics.
And, as I read in the article, it looks like behind this move there is some current "Antitrust Pressure" plus publishers quite pissed off about losing both control and revenue themselves (as much as 39% less conversions, they says.).
Clearly AMP was way more in Google master plans than a poor web performance palliative.
[Edit]
This was the article linked to this story when I commented (now changed to some Google Dev docs):
https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/11/19/as-antitru...
It was open source, it was used by many others including competitors, it was optional and it didn't block access from anyone. Having an AMP version in no way "locked" you to any garden, AMP versions aren't even meant to be the canonical page anyways.
It may have had a lot of issues, but "walled garden" would not be one of them.
And it was as optional as publishers were almost forced to jump in it to stay relevant in News SEO.
This "Google was just forcing publishers to fix their pages" meme desperately needs to die. Just consider all the extra standards crap they were pushing to introduce to perfect the deception. This was, as always, about owning the data.
Google doesn't need to own the data because Google is the world's gateway to the open web. They don't care who owns the data as long as they can crawl it.
It's absolutely Google’s job to decide what quality signals to incorporate into their search rankings.
https://joyfoodsunshine.com/the-most-amazing-chocolate-chip-...
The second recipe result is Betty Crocker and as you’d expect — recipe at top, steps with photos after.
I personally find more of the former than the latter when looking for specific recipes (Red wine chocolate cake was my most recent search)
They would indeed prefer to be utterly ignored by designers over being gamed to but SEO remains something optimized for like clickbait titles and headlines.
Google is also at a scale where they can improve the quality of everyone's web experience with their scale. It' not so much "their job" as "their obligation."
And then they plug that computer into a global multi-user network and their machine is botnetted and used to harm other users. In that context, people are no longer making simple decisions and accepting the consequences; a tragedy of the commons is instead created.
Your thinking works when computers are isolated from each other. When they're not, it's in the same category as "states require annual vehicle inspections." Because when you're sharing the road with other drivers, you owe it to them that your vehicle is unlikely to undergo catastrophic rapid disassembly.
In that sense, their approach is in some way more equitable than Microsoft's: they're not forcing change upon your system by way of mandatory updates, they're simply saying that if you don't play the same game they play, they're unwilling to do business with you.
If you're free to maintain your server to your standards, why should they not be free to maintain their search service to their standards?
Speed is valuable because it allows users to more quickly digest whether the result is relevant to them.
And I say this as someone that thinks that Google is the scariest company out there, right now.
My only complaint is the smirky, chipper PR front they package with it. Microsoft, at least, wasn't too insecure to show some fang without the Candyland faux-earnest horse shit when they were king.
The few things that bothered me the worst were, blank white pages while loading, to earn the 'one contentful paint'; fonts loading late; and it's difficult to share links, because they had the garbage urls because google was proxying. The fake address bar was the icing on the cake.
Maybe this is platform dependent? I'm using iOS.
It just has to be better on android because somehow their own engineers have to use it day to day and ship it in good conscience at the same time, right?
Nothing here makes AMP less able to deliver high-performance pages.
Page speed is the one metric you want SEO nuts optimizing.
So what I ended up doing, was to switch to DuckDuckGo as my phone's primary search engine, and then I blocked google.com from my phone. It seems drastic, but I am a big advocate of taking control of how you use your phone with the parental features, pointed at yourself.
I constantly notice that reading news on my phone makes me feel bad, but I have a hard time stopping. This addiction to the news, is very correlated with times where I am tired or depressed. It reminds me of drinking or smoking cigarettes in that respect.
I keep the PIN in 1Password, but I try to use it rarely and try to "forget" it. So there's an extra step to seeing the sites, looking up the PIN. It's helpful for me, perhaps it seems elaborate.
Because of all this, however, I am glad to see the AMP pages will be going away from Google's search results, although I have found in the interim, that DuckDuckGo actually works pretty well for me.
By the way, if you miss Google results quality, Startpage is like DDG, but backed by Google results.
An example of article going more into the details: https://time.com/5125894/is-reading-news-bad-for-you/
"“Try to be aware of how [the news] changes your mood or makes your thoughts more negative,” Davey advises. Breuning agrees, and recommends limiting your news consumption to one block of time each day—say, at lunch or before dinner—if not less. At the very least, don’t watch or read the news before bed, she says."
Google is probably just trying to reduce the likelihood of being broken up. AMP is widely adopted, so the damage of their preferential treatment has already been done.
Not publishers, who recognize it for what it is (a very, very thinly veiled attempt at stealing users, traffic and analytics, and Google building its own walled garden).
Not users, for whom navigation is broken, links and scrolling behave weirdly or break completely, and the address bar can't be trusted any more.
Competition. Replace it with something better using https://web.dev/vitals/
But isn't it also incredibly easy to switch off? At least I don't know any AMP-only website.
Parallel divisions will just result in the most recognizable names winning out. There is a simple and wrong idea that they can just break off Youtube, Android, and the search engine. Except that has as much logical coherence as saying Walmart should not be allowed to own their own pharmacies because they have too much dominance in groceries. None at all.
They only have angry old confused vested interests trying to protect their fiefdoms and no plan. It is a replay of the "Repeal and Replace!" bullcrap where after going on propagandizing for years prove they never had a goddamn plan and never tried. Mark my words - these techlash morons will be the dog who caught the car if they actually got what they think they wanted. Yet again like with the link tax where they complain about free advertising and then are outraged when nobody decides to link to them.
At this point I just wish all of those morons going on about antitrust would shut the fuck up because they know nothing but useless demagoguery and making things worse.
1. Chrome only showing the domain in the address bar
No, I doubt it'll make any difference here. Google's reasons for doing that are anti-fraud, not anything to do with AMP. And (I'll give up shouting this into the void one day, I swear) Apple did this with Safari years ago and no-one cared. It's outrage for outrage's sake.
2. The whole "web packaging" format issue
Google proposed a standard that let you "fake" the URL of a page (albeit with cryptographic signing to ensure it actually came from the right host). This might be dead in the water, yes. Mozilla and Apple already came out against it, and one the primary use cases was AMP. I doubt Google will un-implement it any time too soon, but I think it'll end up being a weird edge thing that very few people care about or use.
Which is a pity, because this could have been extended into a way to allow browsers to pin a specific version of a web app and warn the user if the server sent something different the next time they visited.
Having a TOFU security policy for web apps would have made them roughly comparable to native apps for certain threat models, especially considering that native apps often auto-update without giving the user a meaningful chance to check whether the update is backdoored.
For both web and native apps, though, it would be nice if there were independently run Binary Transparency logs published so that apps would only download an update whose source code had been publicly available (and reproducibly buildable) for some reasonable amount of time to allow an audit to occur.
The problem here is that google has an interest in hiding the URL other than anti-fraud. Apple isn't a major player in the internet market and they have a history of "dumbing down" features, or at least reducing their apparent complexity, to make the experience friendlier to the average user. So when Safari hid the full URL, that didn't raise many eyebrows.
Many of Google's moves in recent years, most notably AMP, appear to be part of a larger plan to make the internet require Google to function. Messing around with the URL visible in the address bar seems to fit in with this plan to reduce the average consumer's awareness of where exactly they are going on the internet.
There's not many issues that will gather enough reactions for Apple to ever respond. It would need to be something like removing the eggplant emoji to have anything sizeable from their perspective.
A decent amount of people cared about the move to hide most of the URL, just not enough for it to be a wide societal protestation wave.
By default (i.e. until you click the bar) only showing the part of the URL that the site doesn’t control is really good for security and avoiding phishing. Now apple.paypal.secure.wendys.scamsite.info/payus/wwwcitibank just shows scamsite.info. This is a good thing! And doubly because URL paths and fragments have been made largely irrelevant to end users as app routes.
If you're going to rant about the death of the URL you should complain to HN as well that only shows the domain next to posts.
>"URL paths and fragments have been made largely irrelevant to end users as app routes"
No. Some SPA scenarios, for some end users != "largely irrelevant".
It seems harmless to show the full URL and not bait-and-switch the text upon interaction. I don't see it as the browser's job to protect users from their incompetence.
If you care at all about the health of the web, you should support browsers in protecting users from their own incompetence. Users don't blame themselves for phishing & fraud, when it runs rampant on a platform they simply switch and the end result is that native walled gardens that do protect users win over the web. This is exactly what happened with news on the mobile web; mobile news websites got so slow that Apple & Facebook started gaining a lot of ground with completely closed & proprietary news platforms (Apple News, Facebook Instant), until Google released AMP which both helped & pressured news orgs to get their shit together on the web.
I see these kinds of features sort of like padding on football players. It enables (encourages?) carelessness. Maybe the jury is still out on the net outcome, but I'm so far away from web development and the overall ecosystem as to have no opinion.
Of course it encourages carelessness, that's what users want: they want to care less about the tech they use.They simply want the benefits of tech, not the maintenance or burden of care. It's why many prefer an iPhone that makes all their software choices for them. It's why many trust an email provider to sort & filter their email instead of doing it themselves.
I guess it's in Google's interest to force AMP.
You can also take advantage of this with an app like Opener to navigate to the real page in the cases where the amp site is in such a broken state that you cannot get to the fake browser bar.
Google is terrible at documentation. After reading the first few paragraphs, I have no idea what they're talking about. It's full of unexplained buzz words I've never heard before.
The first thing that comes to mind for me is a phrase my old boss used to say, "there's money in confusion".
Maybe it's more of a target group thing? This isn't really a "everyone needs to know" situation, it addresses the people that need to know and expects a certain pre-existing knowledge of the topic.
Yes, ideally all webdevs would make the non-AMP page bloat free. But as you know many a world pages are horrible and load tons of trackers.
Why is there is clear hate - AMP can be used for good and bad.
If it had just been about performance they wouldn’t have needed so much extra work and they wouldn’t have ignored the performance and reliability drawbacks to putting so much JavaScript into the critical path for page loads. Those 5+ second AMP mobile page views were completely avoidable if your goal was performance rather than control.
(ran, since firefox disabled the plugin on my phone)
It feels like a benevolent phishing scheme.
That's why I find it rich that Google groups this under "page experience signals".
This is the ugly side of market dominance.
Google is entitled to have the opinion that AMP improves page experience.
But without competition, there is no loss of market share to give them the "this sucks" signal.
So the world has to wait for Google to degrade to the point that a new competitor starts to eat their market share.
What does the world have to wait for? The world is who chooses when a competitor starts to eat their market share.
DuckDuckGo isn't fabulous either but it is faster to retry in Google from DDG than the other way around so it is my default search engine now.
I wonder: why is it soooo hard - for both DDG and Google to just respect + or "" or the verbatim option in Googles case?
Because an empty set is far more valuable to me than a rich set of irrelevant results?
(Lately it seems I've been assigned to an experiment that has slightly better results and also shows me the context they think are relevant in the results page. That helps immensely, but of course I have no way to get that to stick :-/ )
PS: If anyone wants a billion dollar idea, recreate Google from before the DoubleClick acquisition: contextual ads, relevant results. Because that spot is empty, and given Moores law, the fact that the original PageRank patent has expired and more it should cost a tenth today vs then. Also Google seems to be collapsing under their own weight so there's less chance they manage to catch up.
PPS: I'd pay 10USD a month and accept contextual ads on top of that to get back something like old Google.
I think what might work better is an unweighted filter. A google style search engine filters out all tom yum recipes below a certain quality or all health sites below a certain credibility level. And then it tosses you a random one. Google tries to make a one size fits all engine, so it's doing very poorly in many of these. But Bing/DDG isn't faring much better. Stack Overflow and wikis are basically just search engine plugins
I wish apple would create a no-AMP option in Safari and just auto redirect to the normal page.
If you are on a website in mobile safari, and you hit the share button, and select Copy. What gets copied into the clipboard is actually the Canonical url rather than the actual one you are at.
So for /amp/ pages, it ends up copying the non-amp url.
imo, it's a bad experience because sometimes canonicals and non canonicals aren't exactly the same. For example, if I'm looking at a specific filter or sort, then it might make sense for the canonical to be the non-sorted version. But if I'm sharing a specific url, I want it to share exactly what I'm looking at.
I hate AMP with a firey passion.
With Web Bundles the only thing that a cache can do is serve you an immutable asset that is signed by the original publisher exactly as if you had connected to the origin server.
If so I don’t like that either. They always feel a little bit broken compared to the real url.
But AMP as a solution to that seems to be completely misguided. Worse, I suspect the continued push for it demonstrates both a lack of leadership and the sort of ego-driven corporate politics where no one wants to admit they're wrong so just keep doubling down until you win.
AMP still breaks for me on iOS in completely fixable ways. I have poor eyesight. I use higher default zoom. I suspect this is the reason why AMP rendered content doesn't fit on my screen and I can't scroll to the part that doesn't fit. It's super-annoying.
On iOS you can force touch the link to render a preview and get the non-AMP version. There's no way to get that by default and that is a completely ridiculous situation.
I, as a user, should be able to opt out of this crap.
The fact that Google forced this down people's throats by giving AMP content ranking preference is an utterly stupid decision by leadership. It risks antitrust action, government investigations and all that entails.
If you want to prefer sites that load fast, that's fast. If you want to prefer sites that use a technology that you created and control that's completely different. This is a textbook example of abusing your market power. I'm sure the executives found legal advice to the contrary. If so, such advice ignores just how malleable government action is and the negative PR consequences.
Reducing that search ranking boost is a step in the right direction but it never should've happened in the first place. You can't turn back time of course but that ranking boost needs to disappear entirely. Immediately.
EDIT: Now the link has been changed back so this comment makes me look stupid. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151764
You sure it's not how Larry Page perceives the experience?
Or maybe it will add sufficient encouragement that Discourse gets faster :)
This is not a new thing (AMP) but it's the first time I realize that's exactly what they're doing.
I hate it. Even if I fully agree with their judgments on the specifics, this is not healthy for the web.
If it were just a vendor neutral technology that would probably OK. But with Google's dominance on the hosting side, that's not very good. Well, probably Google is one of the bigger funders of the Linux Foundation, so money goes over worries about anti-competitive behaviour.
This is NOT ending AMP, and I don't know where anyone's getting that idea.
It will continue to rank by "page experience signals", and presumably AMP pages will continue to be the standard to beat.
In other words, if you can go ahead and replicate AMP's loading speed on your own (maybe self-hosted AMP?) then awesome.
I do hope sites do that, because sites loading instantly rather than taking 5 seconds is a huge win.
But in practice non-AMP news sites are still filled with bloat that makes them take 5 seconds to load.
AMP has massively increased the performance of many news publishers forced to switch to AMP. We'll see if publishers are now motivated to try to make their native sites equally fast. I'm not holding my breath, though. I assume they'll stick with AMP because they don't want to re-architect their sites, or don't have the technical bandwidth to do so.
But this way Google appears more neutral with "objective" page performance measures, rather than explicitly favoring any single standard.
EDIT: the URL and title have since been changed by mods to a Google blog post. The original article/submission I was referring to was: https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/11/19/as-antitru...
If AMP becomes a lower bound for performance and non-AMP sites slim down their pages to compete, great. If sites that don't compete on performance die off as their search ranking decreases… also great!
The entire AMP design was driven by the need to make same origin serving of the content possible in a safe manner. That is where the performance gains come from, not from having lighter markup. And that is still just as true now as it was five years ago.
How can I possibly compete with AMP? I notice that even Reddit.com takes about 3 seconds to load. cnn.com, 2 seconds
Also, Reddit isn't exactly fast—it takes six seconds to load for me. Wikipedia and HN are better examples.
If you want the very lowest bound possible on latency for your internet connection, try loading https://cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/trace. That should load in milliseconds. From there, you can do a little more profiling work on your site.
2. Use a CDN and size images appropriately
3. Avoid JS as much as possible, use it only for enhancements
How are you going to achieve equivalent or better performance than instant? The whole point of AMP is that it can be safely prerendered.
This is the entire point of AMP, yet 90% or more of the commenters on AMP articles don't understand it, which makes the comments completely useless.
Furthermore, I don’t see why AMP specifically is needed for what you describe — it seems to me that Google could do the exact same thing with normal webpages.
Why else do you think it loads from Google's cache?
> it seems to me that Google could do the exact same thing with normal webpages.
Nope. The publisher needs to opt in to having their content served by Google; and the ad metrics, analytics, and login need to be delayed until the user clicks on the result. That can't happen without cooperation from the page. Hence AMP. I don't even do web development, and the design of AMP is mind-numbingly obvious even to me.
Where the idea might come from would be that many (particularly large) websites would have implemented AMP reluctantly, and currently incur extra maintenance cost for AMP as part of a deliberative ongoing cost-benefit analysis. This removes one of the major obvious benefits in that analysis (AMP pages may still benefit but it's harder to qualify), so there may be a stronger technical argument within companies to drop support.
> It will continue to rank by "page experience signals", and presumably AMP pages will continue to be the standard to beat.
This is a tricky prospect. A concrete "we will treat your AMP page preferentially" is a lot easier for tech managers to grok than "AMP stands a good chance of scoring well on metrics we prioritise, so may be preferred, if you believe you can't achieve these metrics without AMP".
On the flip side, it's completely conceivable that Google could continue to treat AMP pages preferentially while claiming it's due to proxy metrics, since their algorithms are not public.
Plus, you loose whatever customizations you turned on (dark mode) in web site settings. It is particularly bad on reddit.
I think most of us here know that 99% of publishers will not be able to match AMP in performance, so the incentives haven't changed.
I like the change though because this will force everyone to pay attention to website performance - something that's often an afterthought. We used to be able to use the internet over a dial up modem and it was OK, not great, but OK. Now that would be nearly impossible.
The article has a quote from the New York Times that suggests they will move away.
And the NYT quote doesn't suggest they'll move away at all. It just says it's "important" for Google not to make AMP a "requirement".
The first two components of your sentence are conditionals. Even IF they're both true, the very fact that they are uncertain, whereas before they were certain, makes the incentive MUCH MUCH smaller than before.
Any uncertainty at all will make internal discussions with technical leadership on maintaining AMP infrastructure weaker in companies like NYT. If they don't drop it immediately, there will at least be a ongoing internal dialogue about potentially doing so, brought up any time bugs need fixing in, or resources need reassigning to, AMP infra.
>But in practice non-AMP news sites are still filled with bloat that makes them take 5 seconds to load.
I wish people would stop saying "AMP means pages load instantly" as though it's an absolute. My experience with AMP pages has been the opposite; increased loading time, or pages that often don't even load at all. Come to find out in a HN thread from last year[0], AMP pages add an 8-second blank page delay if the user disable's Googles third-party js.
The thing is, the software I have on http://doomlaser.com is only for desktops. And I just noticed that a direct search for one of my apps, Cursorcerer, is now ranked #2 behind an entry for it on MacUpdate. A little frustrating. I guess I could redesign for mobile, but I would really rather not. Over 90% of my traffic is from desktops for a reason. Whatever happened to getting "the full Internet, not a mobile Internet" on your phone?
[1]: https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/11/19/as-antitru...
Edit: changed again; for posteriority, the title was "Timing for bringing page experience to Google Search" and linked to [2] at the time I wrote the above comment.
[2]: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/11/timing-for...
Not sure if it’s astroturfing, or what. This change is particularly egregious.
This has silenced my AMP anger.
Edit: and switching from Google Search to DuckDuckGo. The addon only needs to take care of amp links i get sent via messenger/mail/etc
Another way would be to stick with Fennec v68 from fdroid, but that is not such a great idea, but at least the extensions do work.
1. https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
Also, it's available from the same developer as an addon for Chrome desktop; I suppose if you were just annoyed by the experience and don't care about de-Googling it works there too.
Few people are going to spend their time giving away knowledge for free.
I am not defending Google, just being pragmatic.
Is there any way to tell.that the content of an HTML page isn't censored by the hosting provider used by the page owner, or by the browser vendor?
Doesn't seem AMP adds anything to that. Sure, you can't know, in theory, that the host (which may not be Google, Microsoft and others run AMP hosts) has censored it, but what does that actually change vs. HTML?