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

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

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 238 posts

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

#181

Post by djtriptych »

dang wrote: post #121
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…

If you want to write something about your experience with this, I'm sure the community here would appreciate a fact-based third-party article. If you wrote it in the same style as your comment here, we would put such an article in the second-chance pool ( https://news.ycombinator.com/pool , explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 ), so it would get a random placement on HN's front page. Email me at…

Thanks! I'll run it by stakeholders internally and see if I can de-anonymize :)

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

#182

Post by godshatter »

topicseed wrote: post #50

AMP was great for those with very low speed internet. The philosophy and implementation of AMP can be questioned (URL masking, content stored away from the origin) but it did show that users really wanted to click on pages that loaded fast. Core Web Vitals, as a publisher myself, are a nightmare. But at least we know what goes wrong as it's clearly laid right in front of the developer's eyes. So we go and fix thing a…

> And some pages just won't get fixed because of some ads.

This makes me wonder if the choice between leaving in ads that lower page rank due to CWV and removing some ads to get a better page rank will lead to less advertising overall. I can only hope, I guess.

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

#183

Post by topicseed »

godshatter wrote: post #182
topicseed wrote: post #50

AMP was great for those with very low speed internet. The philosophy and implementation of AMP can be questioned (URL masking, content stored away from the origin) but it did show that users really wanted to click on pages that loaded fast. Core Web Vitals, as a publisher myself, are a nightmare. But at least we know what goes wrong as it's clearly laid right in front of the developer's eyes. So we go and fix thing a…

> And some pages just won't get fixed because of some ads. This makes me wonder if the choice between leaving in ads that lower page rank due to CWV and removing some ads to get a better page rank will lead to less advertising overall. I can only hope, I guess.

I definitely removed ads on some pages, but because they were monetized differently. I think even small publishers are going to be more aware and granular at the page-level.

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

#184

Post by nightpool »

dmitriid wrote: post #114
nightpool wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. Webkit's opposition to Signed Exchanges (ironically, canonically expressed in an HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19679621 ) means that I'm stuck with AMP for good performance on iOS for the foreseeable future.

Not just WebKit. Mozilla is opposed, too. And they have a whole document on Web Packaging: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ha00dSGKmjoEh2mRiG8FIA5s...

Sure, I've read Mozilla's standard-position document and I understand their objections, I'm just saying that Webkit's objection is the major blocker to me personally adopting sxg (since Firefox is basically 0% of my mobile traffic)

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

#185

Post by topicseed »

netr0ute wrote: post #166
topicseed wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hot Take: If your website needs ads to survive, it wasn't that good to begin with.

Cold Take: I never mentioned survival, so take this word back to your imagination.

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

#186

Post by cratermoon »

tomjen3 wrote: post #169
cratermoon wrote: post #19

I've decided that while Google ostensibility makes it possible to search the world's knowledge*, that's just the bait. Google's main product is selling ads in what amounts to a glorified yellow pages. *In reality, about 1% of human knowledge, by some estimates.

You make it sound like searching 1% of human knowledge is not a fucking big deal. The Harry Potter books created an awesome series of magic, with instant teleportation, flying objects and invisibility coats. Yet they had nothing comparable to Google, which would have destroyed the plots to at least 3 books since the answers could have been found trivially that way.

It's not that 1% isn't astounding, it's that choices, human and automated that go into deciding which 1% is cataloged. Are the Harry Potter books really more valuable than 99% over everything else humans know? Or does Google simply provide a catalog of the things that can be pressed into service to generate revenue, either for themselves or their ad-buying customers?

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

#187

Post by Fuzzeh »

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…

Core web vitals is a joke. Literally 4 days ago it started bitching to me about breadcrumbs telling me that data-vocabulary.org schema deprecated

Google ; New Breadcrumbs issue detected for site xxxxx 24 Jun 2021•Breadcrumbs

So I look into it, knowing I'd fixed that ages ago....

Google ; Last crawled : 13 Nov 2019

Triggering stuff because you eventually got round to looking at it 19 months later? and it's all like that full of massive holes that make zero sense.

Google; "This product doesn't show how many reviews it has"... Me; "It has no reviews" Google; "ERROR! ERROR! ERROR! ERROR! zero is not a valid number!!!!" Me; "Fuck you Google" Google; "This product doesn't show how many reviews it has"...

I'm not even going to get into how shitty pagespeed insights is* - it's not even close to lighthouse. It tells you to increase your caching but doesn't use caching in performance measurements. I presume google has a giant ass that it pulls most of the figures out of on each run. I live in an area of the UK with one of the worst mobile phone signals known to man, pages load in I really don't enjoy spending hours of my days having to check that Google haven't moved the goalposts yet again.

* I lied, I am.

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

#188

Post by gjvnq »

jeroenhd wrote: post #94
undfg wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cookie laws have destroyed my web browsing experience much more than amp ever has.

It's not the laws that have destroyed the experience, it's the reckless and senseless selling of data. Websites don't need to show any popups, they choose to. Honouring DNT should be trivial, no user interaction needed to stop tracking and therefore the need for 99% of these popups.

There is a good solution: force DNT to be honoured.

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

#189

Post by WillPostForFood »

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…

You can not scroll faster than images load.

The typical WordPress lazy loading script doesn't start loading the image until it is scrolling into view. Try a typical food blog, scroll moderately slowly and you'll still get to see every single image load.

edit: your example works great, but is in outlier in the implementation, and benefits from tiny images that load quickly.

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

#190

Post by WillPostForFood »

onli wrote: post #158
kuschku wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not talking about browser features, I'm talking about the lazy loading JavaScript libraries that many (most, I'd wager) use.
Post reply on HN