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Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

danielmiessler.com

161–169 of 169 posts

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#161
post #50

I feel sometimes the web is going in circles. A) First we had simple web pages B) Then people want to do fancy stuff on it. It became slower C) Back to A Instead of going back to "A", it seems like there new are ideas are coming out (like AMP) but in the end, I really wish we would just go back to "A". HTML is HTML.

The company who is selling you the B+ package (ads, tracking) now reinvented A to leave the same + "features" intact.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#162
post #150

Google started stealing content a long time ago on their search page... sometime displaying almost whole pages of content as the first "search result" so that the user doesn't even need to visit the source.

Does it count as stealing if websites opt into it?

Some call it "SEO optimization" I call it extortion because they'll get better ranks and a "carousell".

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#163
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so the solution is to create a standard subset of elements and create an open tool to test your site against the standard. If your page meets the requirements it gets the pagerank boost. If it doesn't meet the requirements somewhere then it points out what you need to change. No need for AMP. Why wouldn't this work?

That would work (and personally I would prefer if AMP went in that direction) but it would be merely fast instead of crazy fast because apparently prerendering is only possible if you use the Google CDN.

Why? Chrome has been prerendering pages on search results for years. The only thing I could think of that would make it slower is that you may need to do a DNS request for a different domain, where google's domain is already resolved. (And google probably has a better CDN.)

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#164
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

really? cause I don't see any discrete indicator that this page loads blazing fast. just rankings. meanwhile, people itt are claiming that they deliberately seek out the little thunderbolt as proof of quality. why can't the little thunderbolt be awarded to HackerNews too, even outside the AMP ecosystem?

That's a fair argument. Since this page loads as fast as AMP it should get the same nice thunder bolt. But that's different from the argument being made in the article, which is that AMP as a performance booster is "bad" because it "breaks links".

well, I'm no genius, this surely came up at Google. the real question you should be asking is why Google didn't do it this way.

This is what a lot of people are worried about.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but let's be realistic—this absolutely ruins any online experience. AMP just ads another layer of suck over an already sucky experience.

I disagree with that. AMP pages load and work for me without fail. Most non-AMP news sites are unreadable on my phone. Saying it adds a "layer of suck over an already sucky experience" doesn't give AMP nearly enough credit.

How do you find the URL of an AMP page? What's the point of it if I can't? Sharing content from mobile is near impossible without also tracking the sharing.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#166
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 sacrificing the open web in exchange for a is-this-fast indicator. If the search engine just made note of the site's speed during its crawling, and made that information available to the user, then sites everywhere would find their own ways of speeding up their whole site instead of just some proprietary search result.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not talking about developer/technical blogs, which are generally very lightweight, and the person making it likely takes pride in things like efficiency. Your typical content publishing platform on the other hand, is a giant mess of wordpress plugins, tracking, ads, and scripts that pull in other scripts that pull in other scripts. Is it efficient from a technical perspective? No, but it gets the job done for t…

The problem is that their framework is too big and bloated. Your suggestion is to have them add another layer on top of that, rather than remove the bloat?

Welcome to the real world my friend. Good engineering takes a backseat to clicks and pageviews in the online publishing industry.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Certainly, and a lot of it depends on the kind of engineering culture that the particular organization has. Shops like BBC and (especially) Bloomberg have really solid engineering org, which means they have a high degree of give-a-shit, and they have the flexibility to try more cutting-edge solutions that may require in-house maintenance. But as we all know, developing a good engineering culture is difficult and expensive and not everyone can do it.

Re: Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing

#169
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you give DuckDuckGo a shot?

I was thinking earlier, why don't mozilla or the FSF take a shot at building their own search engine? Imagine how many projects the monetization could fund?

Because, building a search engine is not the solution to everything?
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