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

Please Make Google AMP Optional

alexkras.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 457 posts

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#371

Post by IanCal »

endorphone wrote: post #337
IanCal wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Restricting what you use to the AMP subset would make your page quite fast, with a dependency on a javascript file that most mobile browsers should have cached, along with having your page in the top carousel loading in smoothly like all the others. This can all be detected from your main page when crawled (as it'll link to the AMP version) so depending on the device one or the other can be presented as a search resu…

None of that requires being hosted by google. Caching is a part of the platform and is entirely coherent with the goals, and if you want analytics or ads, you approach those in a different way. AMP caching isn't limited to Google - Bing, for instance, caches and serves AMP as well. Ultimately anyone could, and HN could cache and quick-serve AMP content for supporting sources. AMP is open source and any one can take p…

Coherent with the goals, sure, but not required for any benefit. [edit for clarity, while it may improve things, it is not required for at least some benefit]

What I dislike is not being able to choose simply to make and host an AMP content myself without google taking it and hosting it on their own servers. I cannot opt-in to this, nor can I opt-out. My only choice is to not do anything with AMP.

What is the way to host your own AMP cache? The AMP project under caching just shows the google cache and links to a google page.

As a side note, what if what I publish is not acceptable by google? Will they remove my content, despite having already taken it and given it to people under that URL? If AMP content must be loaded from the caches, is my content only valid AMP if google and the jurisdictions they operate under approve?

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#372

Post by tigershark »

boulos wrote: post #253
albedoa wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the other comments that you seem overly invested in this, but I'll play along: Do a search for "wwdc" on mobile. This was my first and only test against your challenge. It isn't just a matter of the AMP results being ranked higher — they are segmented from non-AMP pages. The eleven (!) "Top Stories" are all AMP pages. Under that is "People also searched for > WWDC iPhone 8", which consists of five (!) AM…

Disclosure: I work at Google (but not on search). You're confusing an important thing here: Google places news higher than the original source. Given that WWDC is over, this is actually preferable. It is true that all the news results are AMPed, but there was certainly a time when not everyone was onboard yet and the carousel included non-AMP results (I assume if you can find a news topic sufficiently obscure to have…

So you are confirming what is the mainstream thought in this thread: Google is actually ranking higher AMP pages compared to normal content. Because I think that each top ranking news website has also a non AMP-ed version. But, as per you admission and the anecdota in this thread, all the news are litterally dominated by AMP results. So I can't really see how people can still assert that AMP has no whatsoever influence in ranking when all the news results have a huge skew toward the AMP-ed version of any website instead of the original one.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#373

Post by notyourwork »

CydeWeys wrote: post #353
gub09 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that anyone can use an adblocker or Squid proxy filtering to block GoogleAnalytics, but if the site uses jquery from a Google CDN to render content, that cannot be blocked without making the site unusable. It's even worse if the Google CDN request is made with https, because then a redirection needs to be made inside the browser.

Can't you whitelist the specific jQuery library on Google's CDN though? Serving widely used libraries out of a CDN is a best practice for a reason. Most visitors will already have it in cache. What alternative are you supposing? Local hosting? That has drawbacks, including more cache misses and increased bandwidth costs for the website provider.

It's really not as beneficial as it sounds in theory. Sites uses different versions of these libraries. You would be better serving a single minified asset that is cached for your users.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#374

Post by corobo »

IshKebab wrote: post #327
corobo wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having been camping in a field for the past week but still needing my internet fix I think I'm going to start giving ddg a real chance (still hate the name though) until Google gives me a setting to disable AMP results I get the idea behind AMP but it's just far too late to the game for Google to be pushing it so heavily. Back on 2G internet I used Opera Mini, I don't use that now because I just don't need it anymore

Well lucky you for having an impossibly great internet connection. Do you seriously never go anywhere with slightly less-than-perfect coverage? Or travel by train? AMP is so much faster than 90% of websites 90% of the time I can see why Google push it so much.

Impossibly great? I'm not saying everything responds instantly but usually there's either signal or there isn't.

AMP pages don't work offline just as much as regular internet

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#375

Post by quadrangle »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #283
quadrangle wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person you're replying to just used the space quote as an example of saying "hey, this is frickin' amazing and you're complaining because it takes a second to load‽" And the space part is amazing when it's space and the non-space internet stuff in your pocket is amazing too, and let's not forget it.

> "hey, this is frickin' amazing and you're complaining because it takes a second to load‽ If it takes a second to load it's not amazing now is it. Also, that "be happy with what you've got" attitude is not helpful. If everyone thought like that we'd still be living in caves. Don't focus on the good stuff, focus on what sucks, that's the stuff that needs fixing. The good stuff doesn't need our attention, it's already…

On the contrary, we NEED to focus on BOTH the good and bad. If you don't focus on the bad, you won't fix it. If you don't focus on the good, you won't work to protect and preserve it!

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#376

Post by quadrangle »

tyingq wrote: post #361
quadrangle wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, sure. Going through a slide-show makes total sense. So, you're saying that there's no normal behavior on a plain website for swiping right (yes? I don't use mobile much myself), but AMP adds a Google-centric swipe-right function regardless of whether there would otherwise be no swipe-right function or some other expected one. Am I understanding now?

Yes, that's it. Google hijacks the back button, swipes, and the [X] button on the AMP banner...in favor of Google, and to the detriment of the publisher.

That is indeed horrible. I am glad to learn that there isn't otherwise some new trend of people constantly right-swiping for no apparent reason though.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#377

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

ciconia wrote: post #194

At 43yo I probably belong to the older folks on HN, but those modern devices all of us carry in our pockets to me seem just absolutely incredible and magical. They probably can run around machines that took up whole rooms just a few decades ago. At the risk of sounding like an old fart (I probably do), I fail to understand this frustration of normal mobile users with the so-called slowness of their mobile experience.…

Whether or not we want people to "slow down", that's not how people actually are. The data is overwhelming that even slight (i.e. 100 ms) reductions in speed result in significant losses and bounce rates: https://blog.gigaspaces.com/amazon-found-every-100ms-of-late...

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#378

Post by mabcat »

CydeWeys wrote: post #353
gub09 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that anyone can use an adblocker or Squid proxy filtering to block GoogleAnalytics, but if the site uses jquery from a Google CDN to render content, that cannot be blocked without making the site unusable. It's even worse if the Google CDN request is made with https, because then a redirection needs to be made inside the browser.

Can't you whitelist the specific jQuery library on Google's CDN though? Serving widely used libraries out of a CDN is a best practice for a reason. Most visitors will already have it in cache. What alternative are you supposing? Local hosting? That has drawbacks, including more cache misses and increased bandwidth costs for the website provider.

It's not always the user doing the blocking. A lot of sites broke for me when I was in China because they were trying to fetch resources from Google's CDN, which is/was blocked there.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#379

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

tangue wrote: post #166

AMP has been created for product managers. Everybody in a project knows that slow and bloated pages hurt users, but business requirements are making it impossible to do otherwise. Google AMP solves this problem, in an authoritarian way (hence the outrage), by defining what's good and bad for the Internet. Marketing has taken the lead in corporate websites projects to the detriment of the end-users, AMP puts the user…

Exactly. I read a good article where Google is basically admitting to being "bad cop", in other words product managers and devs often try to push back against "please just add my one more shitty ad and pixel tracking library" from marketing and business teams, but AMP gives them the power to just say "sorry, that's not technically possible with AMP".

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#380

Post by JoshMnem »

boulos wrote: post #253
albedoa wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the other comments that you seem overly invested in this, but I'll play along: Do a search for "wwdc" on mobile. This was my first and only test against your challenge. It isn't just a matter of the AMP results being ranked higher — they are segmented from non-AMP pages. The eleven (!) "Top Stories" are all AMP pages. Under that is "People also searched for > WWDC iPhone 8", which consists of five (!) AM…

Disclosure: I work at Google (but not on search). You're confusing an important thing here: Google places news higher than the original source. Given that WWDC is over, this is actually preferable. It is true that all the news results are AMPed, but there was certainly a time when not everyone was onboard yet and the carousel included non-AMP results (I assume if you can find a news topic sufficiently obscure to have…

> It is true that all the news results are AMPed, but there was certainly a time when not everyone was onboard yet

Not everyone is on board. Many sites don't want AMPified pages. Google takes AMP pages and puts a giant "back" button that takes the website's users back to Google Search rather than deeper into the website.

It breaks URLs and referrers, because the AMP pages are now hosted on google.com, not on the destination websites' own domains.

AMP is a terrible attack on the open WWW. Google is saying, let us appify your content on our own platform (not on your own independent website) and restrict your markup/monitization options or we will drop you out of the top spot of the rankings.

Post reply on HN