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.
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.
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...
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.
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. 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.
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.
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...