AMP pages no longer get preferential treatment in Google search

Most of the junk at the bottom of the list combines hostile web development practices with criminal negligence of good journalism. If nobody ever visits sfgate.com again, that will be a benefit to humanity.

It is very true! Giants might move slower (as always) but most ad-powered websites have been working like headless chicken to get these metrics in the green.

Granted, it's hard so some may be satisfied with orange metrics.

But I've seen on all publisher-friendly communities I am in how much of an Earthquake the CWV Google Update has been, even if it is now pushed back.

Let's hope more and more follow that trend because nobody hate a fast-loading site with good content!

I personally hated amp, because then I got version of page without dark mode and with limited content instead of real one.

I am actually fine waiting 200ms longer to get those.

A simpler explanation.

Google will eventually ban any big enough ad vendor tinkering too much with delayed loading.

They, obviously, cannot ban themselves.

>news organizations have generally terrible performance and deserve to be punished for it in search rankings.

I wonder how this affects that Australian law about having to tell news sites about algorithm changes, etc. or maybe is affected by.

> news organizations have generally terrible performance and deserve to be punished for it in search rankings.

Shouldn't the quality of a site's _content_ count more than its performance?

With AMP they just offload their concerns to Google, and I assume they will stay doing that. They have no alternative to their ridiculous ad-tech burderns so I can't see it changing.

But who this does help is websites who are capable of producing a fast experience and don't rely on a dozen ad-tech companies snippets, which will tend to be the smaller sites.

As much as I hate AMP (well, google specifically), you're right. News orgs will never, ever fix their heavy ass webpages unless they're forced to.

> news organizations have generally terrible performance and deserve to be punished for it in search rankings.

Most news on the internet is plagiarized off of a few original sources at best and then redistributed on various sites and portals.

This is a devastating problem for a democratic society. For example, local reporting in the United States has been eroded to the extreme. When a society does not have a commitment to factuality, people become more susceptible to fake news (propaganda), conspiracy theories (such as QAnon), and tend to become more uneducated. Yes, it is true, education can be very easily undone, including in highly intelligent, well-educated individuals.

Facts do not come naturally, nor do they come out of “progress”, such as technological progress. Factuality requires hard work and a lot of money, and it requires reporters on the ground, including in foreign places, such as in the case of foreign correspondents. Unfortunately, the use of foreign correspondents for American news services, physically on the ground in foreign lands, has almost been completely eliminated.

The lack of foreign correspondents means that when a crisis abroad occurs, Americans often have to fill in the gaps and infer what is going on. This allows bad actors to take control.

Of course people do not like to hear the facts. They are hard to listen to and believe in, but they are healthy, especially for a democratic and free society. Of course they are healthy for you as an individual.

The Financial Times has excellent reporting with foreign correspondents located in various countries across the world. The Financial Times also has great tech reporting. In the 8 years that I have been a subscriber, I have only found myself disappointed while reading one single article reporting on tech. Also, of course, I subscribe to local newspapers too.

CWV metrics are gathered and aggregated from field data with the variety of devices and internet speeds you would expect in the wild.

Uses Google Lighthouse. Takes average of last 3 days worth of tests. Each site usually tested 1-2 times per day.

All the data is here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcI...

> for instance the new Reddit website uses APM and isn't faster than the old one by lighthouse's metric

The AMP page will still load faster because it conforms to a spec which is known to be preload-safe. This means it can be served by services like search engines without any additional network activity, and with minimal layout calculations needed.

Ultimately that's what AMP was designed for. It's more than just a head-to-head speed comparison.

As a sidenote though, reddit's AMP implementation is horrendous for a dozen reasons. It's almost impossible to escape loading the real site, which is not at all within AMP's design guidelines.

Everyone always brings up Reddits shitty implementation whenever they want to complain about AMP. AMP was never made for the kind of content reddit serves, it's more for static content like news articles. Reddit's mobile web version is shit in all sorts of way, and it's clear that's intentional to push people towards the app. You can tell by the huge damn banners that show up every single time blocking the content, no matter how many times you dismiss them.

Thanks for the clarification here, but I wanted to confirm that when you're talking "huge site" and "tiny site" that this referring to the overall page load size and not the number of pages on the site?

At least they stopped with the "you deserve the best"

Can you publish them please?

If you log into Reddit you can configure reddit.com to use the old interface. (at least for now).

there's also this browser extension to always do that with reddit links, being logged in or not: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

Even old.reddit.com, coming from a google search kinda sucks. Only top level comments, after a few comments there is a more comment button then a GIANT section for posts from the same subreddit, then finally the rest of the comments. You basically have to go to the nav bar and hit enter (to get the context of coming from a google search out of the site).

I wish people understood how much power and information apps installed on phones had compared to websites.

“Nudging” to install an app you use to collect a ton more data because you intentionally broke the website is fucking evil.

Maybe someone has a Reddit app that isn’t a data mining jerk. IDK. But if not, I still prefer to give no one extra data over just not giving it to Reddit.

The back button hijacking is easy. You can "push" something into the "navigation stack" and then detect the "state change" of the back button. There's a few pretty simple ways to do this without magic.

The website you're thinking of that does it is slashdot, sorry for the bad news. It's long been merely a shadow of the past.

Amp initially didn't allow JavaScript. It had a bunch of restrictions.

I honestly think it was good people doing it for a good cause but then the corporate meat grinding machine had to process it and they turned it into a power play and data mining operation.

Once again, the solution is inescapable both for /. and the goog; take big money out of tech. Every significant computer revolution basically started on that premise. Time to roll it again. Consolidated power breeds incompetency.

Our most noble task in life is to make the necessary possible and then inevitable

It's not AMP's fault that some sites refuse to limit themselves to AMP's good practices.

Is it a positive story? Sounds it!

But... aren’t hate crimes already illegal? Was there some Asian Exclusion that is being removed? Is this feel good legislation? Or is this also an example of “world on fire” narrative?

>I wonder how one could measure above-average PM performance without tying it to product launches.

By understanding the circumstances and work of the people you're managing, so that you can subtract confounding factors and separate their influence from everything else. There is absolutely no substitute for that, but because it takes actual work and attention, businesses the world over have been trying to replace it with paper thin metrics since time immemorial.

1000 ms for application/html. How far we have come...

Google's ad/tracking code is generally measured in the tens of kilobytes. Compare that to e.g., the tens of megabytes that news sites routinely waste autoplaying videos on completely different stories to the one you clicked on.

Google clearly already knows whether a website is primarily a text-based site or a video-based site, as it displays the two differently in search results. If they immediately blacklisted any text-based site with autoplay video from ever appearing on the first page of search results it would cut about 50% of web bloat overnight.

Yeah they have competing interests when it comes to truly minimising unnecessary resource usage, but there's so much good that they could do without going anywhere near cutting into their own analytics.

I'm not sure. The article does say:

> If you want higher rankings and more traffic from search engines, you need to optimize your site for a better, more performant and faster user experience.

But wasn't this how things were meant to work before AMP? Google search never had harsh enough penalties to seriously deter bloat, and I don't know that they're going to change that, they're just going to remove the preferential treatment for AMP.

AMP pages are incredibly bloated with all the ad assets that slowly load in. Media sites browsed with aggressive JavaScript blocking are significantly faster.

Preloading the link can save a network roundtrip, but shouldn't the browser be able to do that (and parse and pre-render) as well? Other than that, surely replacing the entire page content involves the same amount of work for the browser as rendering a fresh page.