Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

shkspr.mobi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 130 posts

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#41

Post by untog »

hannob wrote: post #30

AMP is the result of webmasters being unable to provide any kind of reasonable site performance. Which isn't hard. Don't include content from dozens or hundreds of thirdparty hosts. Don't do crazy amounts of super slow javascript. If people would do that there would be no need for AMP. The whole concept is mostly "Google tells people their webpages suck and puts them into a cage where they can guarantee that they don…

It's worth pointing out, though, that the source of a lot of this performance drain is ads. And Google are the main provider of ads across the internet.

To me, AMP feels like a method for Google to sidestep the real issue at hand.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#42

Post by vlunkr »

hannob wrote: post #30

AMP is the result of webmasters being unable to provide any kind of reasonable site performance. Which isn't hard. Don't include content from dozens or hundreds of thirdparty hosts. Don't do crazy amounts of super slow javascript. If people would do that there would be no need for AMP. The whole concept is mostly "Google tells people their webpages suck and puts them into a cage where they can guarantee that they don…

Yeah you'd think that isn't very hard, but time has proven that we are quite incapable of writing websites with sane amounts of ads, trackers, and JS libraries.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#43

Post by EricBurnett »

invisible wrote: post #38
EricBurnett wrote: post #11

This post seems to conflate two ideas (1) AMP being an insufficient implementation (update-ping not working, and that being an awkward pattern anyways) and (2) AMP being actively harmful to the web ecosystem in principle. (1) Comments on the implementation I don't know nearly enough to contest. It's a new technology, and will take a lot of changes in and out of Google to get right. It's also early days - continue rai…

Although in theory AMP makes sense, I think the issue is actually more broad than just mobile. On desktop, lots of people rely on an ad blocker to make sites usable again. That mobile doesn't have a way to block ads is probably a failure of Google, Apple and other players to allow extensions. Google has a majority share of the first impression for ads so it's hard for me to really understand how they can't just stron…

> That mobile doesn't have a way to block ads is probably a failure of Google, Apple and other players to allow extensions.

To be honest, I see this as short-term painful, long-term desirable. Ad blockers make the incentives of the web worse - they mean that publishers get punished for bad behaviour of other sites. Whereas without, users make more direct value judgements...if your site is covered in ads and a terrible experience, I'll stop visiting it. (I'd accept arguments that 100% ad blocker adoption could push us to a better place so we should let this run its course instead, but when I think it through I think it more likely pushes towards walled gardens and the death of the open web, so I'm skeptical.)

To your second point, I don't think that Google has the power you think it does to strong-arm other ad networks, and that'd be a really dangerous thing for Google to consider doing anyways. Publishers are often struggling right now (especially newspapers), and so revenue is their only thought. They'll go with whoever brings in the most money, because otherwise hastens the death of their company. This is why I like the AMP argument - it isn't forcing anyone, but it makes the argument that "if users can expect a good experience, you'll make more money, in spite of not being able to be as free with the technologies you jam onto the page". Yes, it's a weaker appeal, but that's what I like about it...because it has to be predicated on actually working better, rather than about pushing people around.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#44

Post by jc4p »

jamies888888 wrote: post #40
jc4p wrote: post #32

@edent - what web server are you using? I wouldn't bother with any Wordpress plugins, but if you're using Apache or something you should be able to `mod_rewrite` pages ending in `/amp` to the same page minus the `/amp`, which _should_ work right? Hopefully then Google will notice the 301s and catch up. Posting this here because in the comments on the blog post he asked for any code that might help with that, I think…

Yep, I just posted almost exactly this on the blog.

The only thing that worries me about it is I haven't used Apache for years but I distinctively remember the last time I used Apache + Wordpress I failed to setup redirect rules that would keep my blog functioning but also let `/resume/` redirect to `/resume.pdf`.

If I got my redirect working, it killed all Wordpress's pretty url rewriting. Hopefully that was just an issue in my specific case though.

If the redirect rules don't work, there's lots of Wordpress redirect plug-ins though. I've used some in the past for when a post is edited and the slug is changed between initial social media burst and finalizing. Just a redirect from the old URL slug to the new one.

A plug-in like that alongside a script that allocates all the posts on the blog then manually writes into the plug-in's database table, that might work as a much uglier workaround.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#45

Post by ec109685 »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #23
PaulHoule wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serving everything from one hostname means (i) you don't get 20 DNS lookups to serve a page, one of which might hang up for 5 seconds; (ii) you can use a protocol like http/2 to avoid TCP and SSL renegotiations; (iii) you can stop people from loading up pages with 20MB of Javascript. There is no doubt that AMP is fast. The other angle is how it reinforces Google's position for advertising, analytics, search, video an…

I guess my question then becomes "why does this require AMP?". I mean, I can build a site using standard technologies that doesn't perform 20 DNS lookups or require 20MB of javascript to display. I can do it with 0B Javascript if you really want. Is AMP really about encouraging best practises rather than introducing some new revolutionary technology?

AMP allows google to prefetch and pre-render AMP content before a user clicks given it can ensure the content does not do malicious things because the AMP format is tightly controlled. The end result is that when clicking on an AMP result, it loads instantly.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#46

Post by edent »

jc4p wrote: post #32

@edent - what web server are you using? I wouldn't bother with any Wordpress plugins, but if you're using Apache or something you should be able to `mod_rewrite` pages ending in `/amp` to the same page minus the `/amp`, which _should_ work right? Hopefully then Google will notice the 301s and catch up. Posting this here because in the comments on the blog post he asked for any code that might help with that, I think…

Thank you for that. Not to seem ungrateful, but I'm wary of pasting "might work" code onto my blog.

What if it goes wrong? What if it has unexpected side effects? What if Google crawls it and makes things worse?

There are currently 3 variants of the above posted in the comments. I've no idea which to choose...

I guess I'll try and hope that it doesn't make things worse :-)

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#47

Post by velcro »

AMP is of course mostly meant for articles - but we wanted to see how it did for complex(er) layouts. Had a weekend hackathon to recode our main one-pager for performance and SEO recently + we also did an AMP version of the page at http://pag.es

The AMP version of the site is (as expected) not as performant as our custom optimised one. AMP version will load 1.2MB+ of data with 28+ requests, while ours makes due with half of that and 0.6MB with 17 requests. Some of that is due to AMP components that could be a bit more optimised (like we have a hidden youtube video that launches on click - and the youtube AMP component will load all of it dependencies on first start which is not ideal - our custom version does this when the user clicks/launches the video).

However - the new site release did wonders for SEO. Its probably not all due to just having an AMP version, but also just having a good mobile/optimised site - we still landed on 1./2./3. google search page results for some fairly generic terms. Really surprised us - kind of shocking actually, especially since we did little with the page before and didn't have that many inbound links, etc...

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#48

Post by jc4p »

edent wrote: post #46
jc4p wrote: post #32

@edent - what web server are you using? I wouldn't bother with any Wordpress plugins, but if you're using Apache or something you should be able to `mod_rewrite` pages ending in `/amp` to the same page minus the `/amp`, which _should_ work right? Hopefully then Google will notice the 301s and catch up. Posting this here because in the comments on the blog post he asked for any code that might help with that, I think…

Thank you for that. Not to seem ungrateful, but I'm wary of pasting "might work" code onto my blog. What if it goes wrong? What if it has unexpected side effects? What if Google crawls it and makes things worse? There are currently 3 variants of the above posted in the comments. I've no idea which to choose... I guess I'll try and hope that it doesn't make things worse :-)

It's a very understandable worry :) Writing rules that when they fail just go into server error logs is sub-optimal at best. The real solution would be Google allowing per-site AMP de-registration, but that's a fantasy I bet.

This is a good article on Apache URL rewriting, if you want to go down that path: https://24ways.org/2013/url-rewriting-for-the-fearful/

I believe in your use case you want to transform `all/urls/of/any/sort/that/end/in/amp/` and simply redirect to everything minus the `/amp/`, so the rewrite rule shouldn't be too bad to write (and test).

I wouldn't use the "might work" in my comment since I wrote it without even seeing if the regex works, but if you get an Apache test domain running off your blog you can test the redirect rules in isolation before putting them on your blog.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#50

Post by StavrosK »

untog wrote: post #41
hannob wrote: post #30

AMP is the result of webmasters being unable to provide any kind of reasonable site performance. Which isn't hard. Don't include content from dozens or hundreds of thirdparty hosts. Don't do crazy amounts of super slow javascript. If people would do that there would be no need for AMP. The whole concept is mostly "Google tells people their webpages suck and puts them into a cage where they can guarantee that they don…

It's worth pointing out, though, that the source of a lot of this performance drain is ads. And Google are the main provider of ads across the internet. To me, AMP feels like a method for Google to sidestep the real issue at hand.

Google doesn't force you to add ads to your site, though. It's disingenuous to suggest that it's the ad provider's fault that you wanted ads on your site.
Post reply on HN