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Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

danielmiessler.com

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Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#111

Post by CaptSpify »

xd1936 wrote: post #33
steffenweber wrote: post #6

Google should reward fast / jank-free websites instead of rewarding websites that use one particular technology (AMP). On SERPs, both the "flash" icon and the AMP carousel are AMP-exclusive which suggests that Google is abusing its market power.

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.

I hear this a lot, but whenever I search for something common like lyrics or weather, I get only large bloated webpages, while the lightweight and simple ones are nowhere to be found. Unless Google opens up their reasoning for ranking, I genuinely don't believe they add enough weight to load-times.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#112

Post by RodericDay »

apeace wrote: post #102

The core argument of this article is flawed. AMP does not break normal links--although the Google search engine sort of does. As an example of using AMP with normal links, see Cloudflare's implementation[0]. It is possible for many CDN-like services to implement AMP caches. Web sites link to each other normally, and mobile visitors can be served the AMP version. Remember that AMP is an open standard and accepting pul…

here's the idea: give pages amp ratings purely based on full-load page-speed. amp pages get it, vanilla hackernews gets it too.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#113

Post by chris_va »

greglindahl wrote: post #104
chris_va wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You perhaps underestimate the complexity and fidelity of the Google crawl, indexing, and ranking pipeline. Many intelligent people have spent many years trying to solve the sorts of problems you describe. (disclaimer: I work at Google, and used to work on Search)

I totally get that Google has done a lot of work on these issues. It is still the case that no website that wants good ranks should depend on Google executing their javascript. Implementing AMP, on the other hand, means that you know you're going to get a good mobile speed score. In no way was I dissing Google's crawl or crawl team. I'm just handing out conservative advice for website owners. (disclaimer: blekko Foun…

Nice to meet you too :)

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#114

Post by throw2016 »

This is probably the 5th article on amp in the last few days but its already a reality so it would perhaps have helped if this intense focus was put much earlier.

A large number of mainstream sites are already on amp. The rest will inevitably be forced to follow. It's done.

It's a clear abuse of power by Google which would ideally be illegal given its near monopoly search position. Trading convenience for a lock-in is an extremely poor tradeoff in the long run and its a miracle no legal action is in the offing. This is the negative outcome of capitalism, concentration of power which inevitably gets abused.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#115

Post by superkuh »

Cloudflare is doing this AMP crap too. If a cloudflare user enables AMP on his site then links from their domain to yours will trigger a visit of Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Cloudflare-AMP/1.0; +https://amp.cloudflare.com/bot) AppleWebKit/534.34" which then mirrors the content from your domain and re-hosts it on Cloudflare servers.

Then whenever someone goes to the Cloudflare user's website and clicks a link to your website they'll instead be fed a version of the page from Cloudflare and you'll never see that traffic.

And since you (or me, in this case) don't have a Cloudflare account you can't get any response from Cloudflare support to get them to stop re-hosting and serving your content from their servers.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#116

Post by bartread »

djrogers wrote: post #96
stonogo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing about Medium is lightweight. Consider this one-sentence article that results in a 1.2MB pageload: https://medium.com/@mceglowski/chickenshit-minimalism-846fc1... There are more examples and a broader examination available from idlewords: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

Lucky you - that medium link was a 2.19MB download on my laptop.

That's really strange. 760KB for me, but it was a good 3 - 4 seconds before everything had rendered. The article content was there much more quickly, but the recommendations and responses sections below took longer to appear.

Crazy because when you look at Medium it does appear to be very clean so this experience has certainly been somewhat disillusioning.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#117

Post by bartread »

headcanon wrote: post #22
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.

1. I can click a link to an article from a search result 2. I can read the article without having to wait 5 mins for every little javascript and popup to finish 3. Success Optimizing a rich content-heavy website is hard, and time consuming. While we all can moan about all the tracking and ads that appear on these sites, they are a fact of life, and simply relying on the engineering chops of every website to up their…

We haven't quite reached the point where performance is seen as core functionality. What I will say is that if they've built the site sensibly it should be a case of optimising templates and views rather than yak-shaving-optimising every single page, which is a much more approachable endeavour.

I'm probably going to get flak for this but tracking aside, and I can understand the arguments for that, from my experience a lot of poor performance is down to cargo cult development on the client side.

On the flip-side, if you want an example of a content heavy media site that gets it right: http://www.bbc.com/news.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#118

Post by davydka »

dragonwriter wrote: post #72
davydka wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It is also important to realize there's a trade off happening where you're further locked into Google and their ecosystem How am I locked in? Google isn't the authoritative host of AMP content, nor are they the only party running an AMP cache, nor does the existence of an AMP copy of a page prevent me from accessing the regular web copy.

Interesting! I was under the impression they were solely in control of the cache and the content. I will look further into this. Thank you.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#119

Post by davydka »

wffurr wrote: post #66
davydka wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Am I locked in? Bing and Cloudflare also both run AMP caches now.

I was unaware of this. Thank you.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#120

Post by apeace »

RodericDay wrote: post #112
apeace wrote: post #102

The core argument of this article is flawed. AMP does not break normal links--although the Google search engine sort of does. As an example of using AMP with normal links, see Cloudflare's implementation[0]. It is possible for many CDN-like services to implement AMP caches. Web sites link to each other normally, and mobile visitors can be served the AMP version. Remember that AMP is an open standard and accepting pul…

here's the idea: give pages amp ratings purely based on full-load page-speed. amp pages get it, vanilla hackernews gets it too.

IIRC Google already does this. But it doesn't solve the same problem as AMP does.

With your solution, site A can load at 2s and site B at 3s, and site A will win. With AMP, sites A and B can both load in 200ms by easily integrating with an open standard.

Also: all this talk of "lock-in" and "centralization". With the approach you proposed, the publisher with the most money to spend on dev resources wins the highest search ranking. Isn't that counter to decentralization? Isn't an open, simple standard like AMP a better solution (though not a perfect one)?

What I'd like to hear from an AMP critic is: how can we achieve what AMP achieves--lightning-fast speeds that users love--without the "evil" AMP approach?

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