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Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

theregister.com

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Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#151

Post by bingidingi »

Fast pages are good for the web generally, but Google treats the entire internet like pages of search results and this can punish some people who aren’t building search results. There are lots and lots of good experiences on the web that are optimized for multiple page views because they’re communities, educational, or some other kind of application - they’re designed for people who stick around.

I worry that if core vitals becomes too strong of a signal it will over homogenize things to the point that we’re further ostracizing parts of the web that aren’t built like fast results pages to get an answer and bounce off of. We need more differing alternatives to Google.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#152

Post by djtriptych »

eli wrote: post #122
djtriptych wrote: post #66

I've been working on core web vitals for the better part of a year at a major news outlet. I have seriously mixed feelings. There's probably an hour-long talk about this in me but briefly: - It's really nice and maybe unprecedented to have an alignment of business, user, eng, and seo goals. Google is using it's monopoly to change roadmap priorities across the industry. The web vitals themselves are unquestionably goo…

Getting wildly different numbers from different tools is super annoying but I'm pretty sure the data they'll actually use in rankings is crowdsourced from Chrome users: https://web.dev/chrome-ux-report/ Which of course you can only see weeks in retrospect.

Yeah not only is there a 28 day lag time, but _new_ content on your site is grouped with "similar" URLs, using some secret Google special sauce to determine other pages on your site to use as a baseline. This has been one of the most frustrating parts.

Or to take it further, it's still nearly impossible to use google's tools and determine that a particular DIV or Ad is causing damaging shift _in aggregate_.

Worse, it's impossible (and probably will always be) to tell the dollar value of getting all the web vitals to "green". They are pretty agressive targets for most publishers I think, but it's unclear exactly how much these fixes are worth (in additional traffic, seo performance, carousel inclusion, etc).

This is a bit "the nature of the beast" when dealing with Google rankings, their most valuable corporate secret, but still, this is a big, hard, expensive job, with relatively clear inputs and measurement, but with totally opaque outputs / ROI.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#153

Post by kuschku »

onli wrote: post #138
WillPostForFood wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* The web vitals themselves are unquestionably good for the user* Fast pages are good, but Google is using their tools like Page Speed to push you to adopt Google’s ideas of fast, like using WebP for images. So now you might have a bunch of cruft in your page to support multiple image types. Also, as user, I hate lazy loading. I can scroll faster than images load. I’d rather everything load in the beginning, and have…

You can not scroll faster than images load. You can maybe jump via the scrollbar faster to a page position than images load, but that's it. That's at least with the HTML5 async image standard in Firefox. It's up to the browser after all, so if yours loads images too slow the issue might be there. And sure, if the images are huge they will take a long time to load, but that's also covered by the core web vitals. A sit…

On slower networks, it's common to load a page, do something else until the page is 100% done, and then expect to be able to view the whole page without any further loading.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#154

Post by kuschku »

topicseed wrote: post #62
fddddd wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

adblockers like uBlocker Origin was even better for low speed internet than amp.

Well, I do appreciate my ad revenue to pay my team members and myself so I won't be the one recommending that.

Of course, harming people always pays well, doesn't make it something you should be proud of.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#155

Post by nonbirithm »

jeffbee wrote: post #27
swiley wrote: post #4

The replacement they're whining about is "core web vitals" IE the metric you can view at[1]. This is what AMP should have been in the beginning and I was surprised they did something else, it made Google search unusable on mobile. [1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9205520?hl=en This means that your hand-coded-in-vim static pages will rank near the top.

That’s an extreme claim that requires some backing evidence. Mobile search quality is the main metric google uses to judge its search products. The idea that google search is “unusable on mobile” is pretty silly, if you’re literally the only person who ever noticed.

I also don't understand why more people aren't making a firestorm over how user-hostile Google search is at times. They don't even follow their own rules. The "People also searched for" popup causes layout shifts nearly every time you go back to the search page. It's infuriating.

I know this is only orthogonal to AMP, but it sounds like the kind of thing Core Web Vitals was meant to disincentivize.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#157

Post by scott_w »

nybble41 wrote: post #143
scott_w wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re trying to do business in another country with different rules. If you want to sell food into the EU, you need to comply with their food safety regulations. Why does this magically change when someone utters the words “the internet?”

> You’re trying to do business in another country with different rules. You are not doing business in another country. First, there may not be any "business" involved at all. More importantly, however, you are not in the other country . The other person is. If physical property is involved then someone—not necessarily you —is going to need to worry about import/export regulations when moving it across the border. Whe…

This is not about “data” moving over borders. This is about services being provided from one country to another. This is something governments already regulate within their borders (and have for centuries).

This is something that’s already heavily regulated for other industries e.g. financial services. There’s nothing novel about the GDPR in that aspect.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#158

Post by onli »

kuschku wrote: post #153
onli wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can not scroll faster than images load. You can maybe jump via the scrollbar faster to a page position than images load, but that's it. That's at least with the HTML5 async image standard in Firefox. It's up to the browser after all, so if yours loads images too slow the issue might be there. And sure, if the images are huge they will take a long time to load, but that's also covered by the core web vitals. A sit…

On slower networks, it's common to load a page, do something else until the page is 100% done, and then expect to be able to view the whole page without any further loading.

I'm aware :) My HP Veer had a funny "feature" where after some inactivity it would reload the page when you then scrolled it.

It depends though on the content page and on how slow the network is exactly, doesn't it? I often enough preferred to have the text already and decide based on that whether to wait for the images. Async with non-jumping base content (which the core web vitals also cover) is great for that.

And with it being a browser feature, even if Google pushes for it the user can always deactivate it. On real browsers at least.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#159

Post by wutwutwutwut »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #104
wutwutwutwut wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the person signing the paychecks wants the page to have 15MB of sketchy third-party JS, then the page will have 15MB of sketchy third-party JS. I was asked by management to add Google Tag Manager to the company site. When I saw that GTM included 15-20 tracking scripts I told them that unfortunately we can't include it until we have ensured that all of them act in accordance with GDPR. Legal was involved and agre…

> You're technically correct, but people who write pay checks often can be argued with. That's true, but the proliferation of ad tech junk is strong evidence that this is the exception rather than the rule. Capital will persuade labor to do its bidding far more often than not.

Do you have strong evidence that developers think about these things and bring it up with legal? I'd not, then the only strong evidence is that developers are sloppy.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#160

Post by tomjen3 »

BigBalli wrote: post #29

"some arbitrary set of performance standards"? Less than 3s load time, reasonable DOM size, and low FID are all widely accepted as a "good UX". Just another veiled article criticizing Google's dominance rather than a technical one.

3s load time is crazy high. You need to get below 0.1 second before it feels instant, which would be a huge upgrade compared to most websites (it should still feel instant if you load the ads after that, just so long that you don't change the layout on the page at all).

I have a gigabit connection, so it is not a question about not downloading fast enough, I can browse wikipedia this way. It is a matter of not using so much javascript.

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