Out of 71 tracked articles on news sites, only 3 or 4 score 85 or higher in overall Performance as tested by Google Lighthouse.
Article Performance Leaderboard: https://webperf.xyz/
the amp detractors have always said that we don't need amp because authors can just make their websites faster instead. here's the chance to see whether or not that's true.
news organizations have generally terrible performance and deserve to be punished for it in search rankings.
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!
It was pushed back by 6 months, but it's live now.
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.
I am actually fine waiting 200ms longer to get those.
Hear that Google? The experience was so bad that I changed browsers to avoid it.
This extension is also actually kinda interesting in that it embeds a small domain specific language [1] that's interpreted with a lex-style parser in JavaScript.
This can itself be a bit heavy on the CPU if a website uses it too judiciously!
[1] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/extensions/a...
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.
I wonder how this affects that Australian law about having to tell news sites about algorithm changes, etc. or maybe is affected by.
https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2021A00021
https://about.google/google-in-australia/an-open-letter/
Everyone loses, frankly. It was one monopoly versus another, and the Australian people were never a concern.
Edit: ah, there's now a provision for this:
> (ii) if the change relates to a matter of urgent public interest—no later than 48 hours after the change is made; and
Shouldn't the quality of a site's _content_ count more than its performance?
All that is a bit irrelevant, this whole thing is about the news carousel specifically, which is basically showing a bunch of articles in a carousel at the top of search results. Previously only AMP articles showed, now I'm guessing you need some minimum threshold of performance. Seems reasonable, you don't want really slow pages that would push away users.
Google will eventually ban any big enough ad vendor tinkering too much with delayed loading.
They, obviously, cannot ban themselves.
Delayed/deferred loading is supposed to improve page performance metrics, not degrade them.
In light of this, I fail to see how you arrive at this conclusion after an article that essentially says that Google decided to de-prioritize AMP in search results and instead give top spots to well-performing websites regardless of whether they are AMP or not.
If anything, this move encourages delayed/deferred loading for all non-AMP websites, because that's one way to improve your website performance and get your search ranking higher.
Semi-unrelated trivia: Google lighthouse's own website is a disaster[3] by their own standards (with a score of 28), which I find pretty ironic.
[1]: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
[2]: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
[3]: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
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.
> served by services like search engines without any additional network activity
You mean AMP pages egt preferntial treatment by Google, and all AMP-related Javascript (IIRC, almost 1 MB of it) is loaded the moment you search anything through Google.
When you hit an AMP page, that JS is already preloaded and, true, there's "no additional network activity".
I'd love for Google to serve my pages' Javascript as well when I search something, and get preferencial treatment, but alas.
Promoting pages in a carousel above-the-fold is preferential treatment. Preloading Amp pages however is not. This capability works with any implementation of an Amp Cache, including the one used by Microsoft's Bing.
Ah, I guess preferential treatment by Bing makes it alright. If we forget for a moment that Google has 92% market share among search engines.
I really like how transparent you've made: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcI...
And I wanted to run something similar but for our own network of sites. (If so you can reach me on my email in profile). Have about 400 sites to access.
All the data is here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcI...
(It's "0.01" in the sheet, as I guess it considers the scores percentages.)