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Comment by muglug | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big fan of the open web, but I also think Google is on the right track with AMP.

Whenever I'm on an AMP website I make an effort to use the "real" version instead by following the link in the top right corner.

Nine times out of ten that non-AMP page content is harder to read – the notifications more intrusive, the content jumps around while loading.

It looks like Google are now taking a more-refined approach to prioritising pages in mobile results, but I like that AMP forced publishing companies to take a hard look at page performance, for the first time in a while.

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The solution is not to let Google be the gatekeepers of the internet.

There are so many other things you could do that fixes your problem WITHOUT handing over the internet to a single company.

Ok. What are they and who's doing them? At a certain point we need to engage with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. In fact, one might argue that AMP would never have taken off if Google did not already serve that gatekeeper role.

Google is the disease itself. Clicks are a terrible way to incentivize, and this has been shaking the foundations of our democracies in the last decade.

You will note that Wikipedia, for example, doesn’t have the type of bloat that an online newspaper article does. Why is that? The question is one of incentives.

Incentives such as earning sufficient income to secure resources for one’s self and family.

It seems pointless to bring up a volunteer run website where people do charity work in a discussion about business practices of businesses that need to have cash flow to pay employees.

I don't think every Web site begging its users for money is a solution that will scale out. Wikipedia also has the advantage of not needing to pay its contributors.

Such as? I agree with the OP, for what it's worth. In the vast majority of cases amp content loads quicker, is presented better, and is less obtrusive, even browsing with an adblocker

Such as using page speed and the presence of annoying elements (ads, etc) as a ranking signal but without forcing websites to use AMP which involves having Google as a proxy.

This one makes it all the more obvious what Google is actually doing. They have a search monopoly and supposedly are heavily biased on speed as a ranking factor. Well golly gee, if you want the Web to be a lot faster, smash sites with brutal speed ranking penalties until they get the message. It wouldn't be difficult nor would it take much time to get the point across (in fact it would be trivially easy). There is no other logical explanation other than Google's intentions are gatekeeper (and plausibly much worse in time: hostage taker), not primarily to make the Web a better place (that's merely the lie they're pitching as a cover story).

I think the positive approach (use amp, the page will load faster, which users like) is a good alternative to the negative (downranking). It's not just "make your page faster, or else!", but provides a good solution, too. As I user, I love amp. As a developer, I understand the concerns (though I don't think they materialized in the way HN sentiment goes).

It doesn't provide a good solution.

It's Google's arbitrary proprietary subset of web technologies.

It's only fast because Google preloads all of JS while you search.

It aggressively hides the origin source, depriving sites of user traffic.

Google prioritizes AMP content over any other content even if that other content may be better and/or load faster.

> It aggressively hides the origin source, depriving sites of user traffic.

What does this mean? If I click a link on an amp page, I may end up on the full site, and if not, analytics and ads are supported. What do I lose other than the cost of rendering a page view?

> What does this mean?

You don't land on the original page. You land on a Google page. Even the URL says google.com. To get to the actual original page, you need to click on the tiny (i) in the corner. And even there the link is styled as non-clickable link.

If you swipe, for example, you end up on the next Google property ^W^W that is a news item that Google displays on its own domain.

And AMP may provably drive traffic away: https://kinsta.com/blog/disable-google-amp/

> You don't land on the original page. You land on a Google page. Even the URL says google.com.

Yes. So what? If I, from the AMP page, click on a link, I'll go to the full site (I just checked this on CNN's amp pages). Ads and analytics are still supported.

> If you swipe, for example, you end up on the next Google property ^W^W that is a news item that Google displays on its own domain.

This didn't happen when I just attempted it.

> And AMP may provably drive traffic away:

If you read the article, they say that they got more clicks and pageviews, but fewer conversions, likely because they hadn't spent time optimizing the AMP site for conversions.

You've portrayed amp as a positive change and basing search ranking on page load times as a negative change, while clearly some websites would be "downranked" with either system.

One could just as well portray "downranking slow pages" as "boosting fast pages". With the latter system developers would be encouraged to reduce filesizes and JS bloat on their existing pages. As a mobile, and desktop user, I would appreciate that.

But sites aren't doing that, they're serving up bloated pages with megabytes of JS and rammed with ads. Nothing is stopping them from doing that, and yet they're not. If they were, it's possible amp wouldn't exist (in it's current form)

Also, the parent said there was many things the GP could do, while the GP was talking about as an end user, not a developer. As an end user if my choice is between a fast smooth sleek amp page or a 10 second blank screen and a page that hides the content, has autoplaying videos, and required me to dismiss a 1/3 cookie banner, I'm going to pick the amp version.

Because they have no incentive to do otherwise. If Google could tune its PageRank algo to favor sites that load the fastest they could convince website operators to do lot of what AMP does heavyhandedly. Perhaps it could be the death of 20,000 JS loads every page

So now they do have an incentive, AMP, and we're here arguing about how amp is not the solution..

> Such as?

I realise the irony as this still relies on Google, but: I'm surprised that such user-hostile designs are still around, considering Google presumably takes steps to punish such designs in their search rankings.

Honestly, AMP shouldn't even be required. Bandwidth speeds are way up from before. We have a bloated ecosystem where ads come first and content second. They are putting a draconian bandaid on the problem. What we need is a more civilized internet with content FIRST. The old Google adwords worked in that way, as it was fairly unobtrusive text. But now visiting the vast majority of websites and it's tough to even find the content...

Completely agree. Given the choice between a lightweight non-amp page and an amp page, the choice should be the amp page. But that's not the choice, it's between a shitty bloated slow impossible to navigate (often times one that doesn't scale to mobile well) and a lightweight responsive amp site. The user isn't to blame if the site is making that decision

> I like that AMP forced publishing companies to take a hard look at page performance, for the first time in a while.

True and false. It forced companies to pay attention to page performance... and then create an entirely separate version of every page they have, using up valuable developer time that could have been spent making the original pages faster.

Google should (and now/soon are?) assess the performance of the page and rank it accordingly, not force everyone to make two versions of their site. But this is where the sneaky part of AMP comes in: they wanted that side-swiping carousel that meant you never engaged deeply with any one site and instead stayed on google.com (and kept those google.com ad cookies, natch). There was no way to force people into that without AMP.

All that "valuable developer time" didn't make any difference - AMP did.

I mean sure, Google put the gun to every website and said “We are using our monopoly power to ensure your business will fail if you do not conduct business as we see fit”. Really, really positive way of bringing about change.

...how do you think those AMP pages got made other than with valuable developer time? AMP versions of sites aren't just magicked out of thin air! Without "valuable developer time" there are no AMP sites.

I think the point you're actually making is that without AMP forcing these sites to be faster, they would still be slow. Which I agree with. But as I said in my original post, Google ranking sites according to their performance would have the exact same effect as forcing AMP on people, except that it would let sites choose their own implementation rather than be strong-armed into one controlled by Google.

Of course. The parent argument was that the time spent differently would have the same effect. Many years of crappy slow mobile pages show differently.

> The parent argument was that the time spent differently would have the same effect.

Again, no. The argument was that time spent focused on page performance would have the same effect. If Google punished slow pages in rankings that is all the incentive needed, not the creation of an entirely new platform.

Ah, I missed that, thank you. I'm still not convinced it would make so much of difference, but it's definitely more likely. Any good examples out there of sites which optimized for speed and achieved similar results?

> Google should (and now/soon are?) assess the performance of the page and rank it accordingly

If the reading I've done is accurate, Google tried this for quite a long time before AMP. The issue seems to be that there are just too many other factors with higher ROI for speed to be prioritized consistently.

IMO, AMP put companies in a position where speed mattered and most other things didn't. It focused minds in ways that using speed as a factor in ranking did not.

> The issue seems to be that there are just too many other factors with higher ROI for speed to be prioritized consistently.

That argument makes zero sense to me. Either they rank faster and lighter sites higher or they don't. AMP is completely orthogonal to that.

Overall, I think Google does prefer to rank faster-loading sites higher.

With that said, as far as I can tell, the difference between two sites is almost never a simple as a single factor. There are hundreds of things that influence rankings. So companies can and do worry more about other concerns, including squeezing more ad income out of each pageview and getting into more search results in the first place.

AMP took away a lot of the other things that companies would invest developer time in.

And the result are ... crappy amp pages so I have to edit url to see actual page.

Having to edit url would matter little on PC, but massively sux at mobile. And it is overall slower then however slow original page was.

What AMP could have been, which in my mind would have been a lot better, is some type of open standard that Google offers free hosting for, but does not require Google to use.

The m.foo.com usage has been around for ages in Internet time, it could do with some standardization and tooling to ensure it gives the quickest page loads possible.

That wouldn't be issue if google let people turn it off.

They do not, and they will not.

I don't like amp. I don't like that unrelated amp results get promoted over the actual content i was looking for (that can't be amped because it's dynamic content) in search results, I don't like that have to use to inferior search engines on mobile to get rid of it, and I don't like how watered down amp sites are.

I find the opposite to be the case. AMP websites often don’t scroll down in my mobile browser (Firefox), so I have to click on the link to the original article in order to be able to read it.

I use firefox on mobile. AMP is completely unusable - I can't use google news anymore.

If only there would be like...some incentive...for people to optimize their webpages towards usability. Like if we image a...giant monopolistic search engine...rating pages along certain parameters?

Maybe Google should just build something like this if usability is in their interest. Someone pitch this idea to them!

I think it's a missing piece of a lot of sites that AMP is trying to fill. Users landing from search don't have the same set of priorities as organic traffic. Have a page rendition explicitly for search visitors that is different than what you show to engaged users makes sense a lot of the time. Like the old 90/9/1 rule. AMP tried to fill that 90% segment with some generic rules that could be overlayed on any site. It's like the Squarespace of SEO pages. Easy to get to market, but not a natural fit and not worth it for any site that has enough resources to do their own version.

You dont need amp, just build better pages.

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