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

Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

danielmiessler.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 169 posts

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#51

Post by mort96 »

wffurr wrote: post #48

I love AMP because I can easily tell which sites will actually load fast and give me the info I wanted directly from the search results page. Publishers are still able to track pageviews and serve ads, so I don't get what the hullaballoo is all about here. There's nothing in the AMP spec that stops links from working. I just searched for "Is Google AMP a good thing" on my mobile, and got the OP's post as the first re…

I see you have never wanted to link someone to an AMP page. You also somehow didn't notice that there's a huge useless bar at the top of the page.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#52

Post by jjnoakes »

lox wrote: post #47
xd1936 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do. They reward sites that load fast. They also offer AMP as another way to speed sites up, which in turn makes them rise in rankings. But Google offers a large suite of tools to help web developers speed up their websites.

They penalize slow sites, its very different.

I don't immediately see the vast difference between ranking fast sights higher and ranking slow sites lower. Clue me in please.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#53

Post by vorpalhex »

lox wrote: post #47
xd1936 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do. They reward sites that load fast. They also offer AMP as another way to speed sites up, which in turn makes them rise in rankings. But Google offers a large suite of tools to help web developers speed up their websites.

They penalize slow sites, its very different.

If all websites fall into one of two categories: fast or slow, and you penalize one, it's the same as helping the other and vice versa.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#54

Post by mikewhy »

mort96 wrote: post #51
wffurr wrote: post #48

I love AMP because I can easily tell which sites will actually load fast and give me the info I wanted directly from the search results page. Publishers are still able to track pageviews and serve ads, so I don't get what the hullaballoo is all about here. There's nothing in the AMP spec that stops links from working. I just searched for "Is Google AMP a good thing" on my mobile, and got the OP's post as the first re…

I see you have never wanted to link someone to an AMP page. You also somehow didn't notice that there's a huge useless bar at the top of the page.

The fact that the person receiving the link will also get a fast loading well behaved page with a bar at the top is not such a deal breaker for everyone.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#55

Post by vorpalhex »

interfacesketch wrote: post #20

Do we really need Instant Articles (Facebook) and AMP (Google) when we can accomplish fast loading pages with plain, uncomplicated HTML and CSS? I feel that many web developers don't realise that simple HTML and CSS is often all you need to make clear, fast loading pages. No complicated tricks or techniques required. You can make the page reasonably pleasant in appearance too. Think of the sites you often visit: news…

I mean, really, that's most of AMP: a restriction on a bunch of elements that may slow things down and a bit of special mark up so things can be further accelerated.

If most websites actually did load quickly, then I don't think AMP would have a reason to exist. But if most websites can't manage to slim down their bloat, then one potential answer may be to take away some of their toys (and I'm not saying it's the right answer, just a large part of AMP).

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#57

Post by asdfologist »

mort96 wrote: post #51
wffurr wrote: post #48

I love AMP because I can easily tell which sites will actually load fast and give me the info I wanted directly from the search results page. Publishers are still able to track pageviews and serve ads, so I don't get what the hullaballoo is all about here. There's nothing in the AMP spec that stops links from working. I just searched for "Is Google AMP a good thing" on my mobile, and got the OP's post as the first re…

I see you have never wanted to link someone to an AMP page. You also somehow didn't notice that there's a huge useless bar at the top of the page.

I don't care and I doubt most users do. AMP has made my mobile browsing experience effectively much faster.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#58

Post by jsnell »

mark242 wrote: post #28
CJefferson wrote: post #4

Out of interest, is there anyone who wants to defend the current Google AMP (not the concept of lighter webpages, but how google has gone about it?) I haven't found anyone yet personally.

Sure. AMP is a good thing. Google is simply the first company to implement the AMP cache-- Cloudflare has recently spun up their own and outbound links from Cloudflare-enabled sites can use an AMP cache that doesn't rely on Google, so they get the speed benefits as well. The implementation of AMP is one of those technologies that's "the more it gets deployed, the better it is." Reading the spec, it's clear that Googl…

> I could see mobile networks implementing their own AMP caches, so their inbound traffic winds up terminating mostly at the cache layer. This speed boost will win the mobile networks customers.

How would that work? Google can replace links to AMP pages with links to their own AMP cache in their search results, since they're the ones generating those resutls. Cloudflare can serve the AMP version of their customers' pages since they are the ones actually terminating the TLS connection.

Mobile operators don't have either type of access. At best they could try to do this for non-encrypted content with some kind of a transparent proxy. But the share of non-encrypted content is plummeting quickly, and might as well not exist soon. No operator is going to invest any money in HTTP-only services at this point.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#59

Post by davydka »

wffurr wrote: post #48

I love AMP because I can easily tell which sites will actually load fast and give me the info I wanted directly from the search results page. Publishers are still able to track pageviews and serve ads, so I don't get what the hullaballoo is all about here. There's nothing in the AMP spec that stops links from working. I just searched for "Is Google AMP a good thing" on my mobile, and got the OP's post as the first re…

It's true that loading fast and giving you the info you wanted directly from the search results page is a good thing. It is also important to realize there's a trade off happening where you're further locked into Google and their ecosystem. It's a pretty dramatic change to the way search has worked up until now. It more mimics the way internal webviews work in Apps like Twitter and Facebook apps.
Post reply on HN