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Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#391

Post by eponeponepon »

sammyh wrote: post #390

I actually really like AMP but not for articles but for products in webshops. The media on the internet is such a mess nowadays anyway that having AMP pages makes no difference whatsoever for the content, sharing and talking. How is google optimized content any different than having to print magazines so that they fit through your mailbox? It is just a alternative method of delivery. The truth is that for the everyda…

> How is google optimized content any different than having to print magazines so that they fit through your mailbox?

That's pretty much the point. The web was supposed to free us from those kinds of practical constraints - why let Google keep them alive for grubby commercial reasons?

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#392

Post by om2 »

askafriend wrote: post #217
cramforce wrote: post #165

With respect to scrolling: We (AMP team) filed a bug with Apple about that (we didn't implement scrolling ourselves, just use a div with overflow). We asked to make the scroll inertia for that case the same as the normal scrolling. Apple's response was (surprisingly) to make the default scrolling like the overflow scrolling. So, with the next Safari release all pages will scroll like AMP pages. Hope Gruber is happy t…

Is that really Apple's stance? I find the scrolling to be the #1 reason why I bounce from AMP pages. I would hate for them to make this a system wide behavior.

In current iOS Safari, webpage scrolling is inconsistent from all other scrolling on the system. This was an intentional decision made long ago. In addition, overflow areas are consistent with the rest of the system, and thus inconsistent with top-level webpage scrolling. This is semi-accidental. In reviewing scroll rates, we concluded that the original reason was no longer a good tradeoff. Thus this change, which removed all the inconsistencies: https://trac.webkit.org/changeset/211197/webkit

Having all scrolling be consistent feels good once you get used to it.

That doesn't necessarily mean it was a good idea for Google's hosted AMP pages to use overflow scroll all along. The inconsistency definitely did feel weird. And the way they do scrolling prevents Safari from auto-hiding its top and bottom bars. I believe all the desired scroll effects could have been achieved without the use of overflow scroll.

Edited to add: the AMP scrolling model also breaks tapping the top of the screen to scroll to top, and this won't be fixed by scroll rate changes.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#393

Post by codedokode »

danso wrote: post #71
MBCook wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's all Google truly cared about they could've simply put a heavy penalty on Pages that rendered slow or presented garbage. Instead they invented their own thing which caused you to stay on Google sites using Google services to read other peoples content… and said they did it to speed things up. It feels like that was either justification after the fact or that was with the original engineer had in mind but was…

> If that's all Google truly cared about they could've simply put a heavy penalty on Pages that rendered slow or presented garbage. There already is a penalty for slow-loading pages, but you make a good point that the penalty could be increased to the point where publishers would be forced to adapt accordingly. However, outside of the news ecosystem, that would end up penalizing a much larger base of content creators…

> However, outside of the news ecosystem, that would end up penalizing a much larger base of content creators who don't have the means and infrastructure to handle this.

AMP does the same thing. Many sites don't have resources to convert their content to AMP pages and they will get worse positions in search results.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#394

Post by __derek__ »

MBCook wrote: post #69
0003 wrote: post #34

So AMP benefits google because faster page loads = more DFP views (and also more $ for publishers); AMP benefits consumers because JS is not murdering their memory and dataplans. It seems like web developers are the ones that hate it.

Have you been to Daring Fireball? It's one of the fastest loading pages on the whole Internet because it's not crapped up with lots of stuff. Gruber's site is proof you don't need AMP to have fast loads. I honestly don't know this: how exactly are AMP pages monetized? Weren't there articles recently that publishers who went with AMP or Facebook's version saw steep declines in revenue?

> how exactly are AMP pages monetized?

AMP has an ad component.[1] It seems to have gotten a lot of ad network participation now, but it was pretty limited (i.e. effectively no money via AMP views) last year when I was working for a major content publisher. It's undoubtable that the company lost a lot of ad revenue in exchange for protecting its position in Google search results.

[1]: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/extensions...

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#395

Post by codedokode »

belorn wrote: post #150
MBCook wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand. But I don't know what else I'd want google to do other than turning up the penalty a lot. If there are pages that have to load slow for some reason then hopefully they're good enough to overcome that penalty. Or maybe they could choose to apply it only to news sites? The problem is that Google took this in such and embrace-and-extend direction that seems to benefit them and give them a lot more power th…

If you increase the penalty you also increase the artifacts from measuring the speed. Should it measure first byte, content above the screen size (and which size then), or fully loaded site. What about lazy load which neither method represent when a site is usable, but rather at what point javascript takes over the responsibility to load the site. A small penalty devalues gaming the way google measure the speed.

This penalty also can have negative consequences on image quality on websites.

I had to worsen JPEG image quality to get good score for a website in Google's PageSpeed tools [1] because our management believes it affects search rankings.

That tool is awful. I would never follow Google's recommendations on my own site. The compressed versions of images it suggests one should use have visible artifacts.

[1] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#396

Post by bsimpson »

discordance wrote: post #295
polishTar wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as a FYI, Bing is a really large supporter of the AMP project. “We started experimenting with AMP in our Bing App last May and have noticed that AMP pages load, on average, approximately 80% faster than non-AMP pages” says Marcelo De Barros, Group Engineering Manager in charge of the AMP integration at Bing. https://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-joins-...

It feels like the principles (minus the tracking) of AMP should become a W3C spec. Surprised Microsoft and others haven't pushed for this.

What tracking?

I'm not aware of anything AMP does differently than non-AMP with regard to tracking, except that it's declared in a way that allows it to be cached+preloaded without falsely triggering analytics.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#397

Post by sammyh »

eponeponepon wrote: post #391
sammyh wrote: post #390

I actually really like AMP but not for articles but for products in webshops. The media on the internet is such a mess nowadays anyway that having AMP pages makes no difference whatsoever for the content, sharing and talking. How is google optimized content any different than having to print magazines so that they fit through your mailbox? It is just a alternative method of delivery. The truth is that for the everyda…

> How is google optimized content any different than having to print magazines so that they fit through your mailbox? That's pretty much the point. The web was supposed to free us from those kinds of practical constraints - why let Google keep them alive for grubby commercial reasons?

Freedom would be to choose whether format you like. Web is anything but that as every developer and user has to rely on set of rules and software to be able to communicate and access it. In practice most of us have zero power on the system itself. Someone else (businesses and organizations funded by businesses, developers working in such organizations) have the power to control how the web works. At the moment google yields much of the such power as does facebook, amazon, twitter, apple and others. Truthfully I see the whole internet today as a business enterprise that as a side effect allows everyone to share their everything. Internet as we know it will never be free and thats probably part of the reason why there has been a movement to "fix the internet" (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs-creat...)

Practical constraints and solutions stem from real world problems. AMP is an attemp to fix broken thing. Yes, internet was created for very different use and with different motivations than what it stands for today. I truly understand the concern of having a big tech behemot take control over the content for monetary gain but I dont really see the problem as a technical one. Whether you use Bing, Google or even DuckDuckGo you rely on someone else to find you stuff and thus give them the control to feed you information they think you want.

The bigger issue is the legistlation and how basic economy works, especially in the states where companies probably yield the most power over the government than in any other place in the world.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#398

Post by imron »

amazingman wrote: post #366
julianmarq wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is amazing. A hypocrite (Gruber, as evidenced in another thread) calls the AMP team hacks who do terrible work. Turns out their "terrible work" is actually Apple's bug and the AMP team points this out both to Apple and to Gruber. In your eyes, this makes it all their fault. When called out on it, you double down by saying that the team is still to blame because they chose not to work around Apple's bug. You basi…

>A hypocrite (Gruber, as evidenced in another thread) calls the AMP team hacks who do terrible work I must have missed this. When did Gruber call the AMP team hacks? > Turns out their "terrible work" is actually Apple's bug and the AMP team points this out both to Apple and to Gruber. This is flat out disingenuous, unless you're talking about something other than the originally submitted DF article. There were multip…

> When did Gruber call the AMP team hacks?

The link of this thread was originally [0].

Although he didn't use the word 'hack' himself, Gruber said:

"Google has no respect for the platform. If I had my way, Mobile Safari would refuse to render AMP pages. It’s a deliberate effort by Google to break the open web."

So he sees them as intentionally sabotaging things.

0: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/20/gilbertson-amp

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#399

Post by [deleted] »

piyush_soni wrote: post #385
jwilcoxson wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checkout Duck Duck Go, still not Google-level results, but it's still pretty good, and not Bing.

For past few years, I go to try DuckDuckGo every once in a while (especially when someone suggests that again on HN), but it disappoints me every time with the quality of search results. Also, if it is using Bing on inside, I'm not then sure why the results are still different than that(even at the places where there's no scope for personalization). For example type this line exactly in both bing and ddg: difference…

[deleted]

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#400

Post by theclaw »

MBCook wrote: post #193
theclaw wrote: post #189

Looks like Google have recently added a means of getting out of the AMP "jail" and arriving at the original source site by clicking a little link icon in that irritating header that constantly pops over content while scrolling. This is very welcome. My biggest gripe with AMP was that there was no way out of it.

Too little for me. I still can't easily copy that URL, and there's no way to opt out of it. Instead of fixing their complete break to the way with the web works, they put in a little tiny patch and clean it's just as good.

If you're on iOS You can copy it by long-touching the URL that pops up when you touch the link icon.
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