The 'other industry' part. AMP clearly expands and entrenches their power in parts of the web they are already in, but it's unclear what other or newer industry it is supposedly helping them dominate.
> but it's unclear what other or newer industry it is supposedly helping them dominate. The entire web?
Indeed. They control the content, and the technology: It could become technically impossible to provide new alternatives for ads, privacy, or any other future use case or interaction.
What would it even mean to be better RSS? The idea is sites can preload an AMP page safely so that when you click on it, it can display to the user instantly. In that specific case, isn’t Barb correct, no chills needed?
The fundamental change is that now the content comes from Google's servers. Google is hosting the Internet. Of course Google can't host illegal content on their service, right? And won't host content that goes against a future AMP user agreement... From there they can tighten the screws against competitors, or future attempts at privacy, or basically anything they get away with.
Your concerns don't give them any more power than controlling the search results already gives them. They are free to deindex anything.
The AMP links to visit the original site are working fine for me on Brave (based on Chromium) on Android: clicking on the "(i)" icon shows the URL. The easiest way to to get rid of all AMP pages in Google search results is to disable javascript on www.google.com/*.
I don’t think you can disable AMP if you’re not signed in.
Quite a few Google features to help you manage the level of intrusiveness they can exhibit are only available if you log in.
Unfortunately, Google can rank by whatever criteria they want and we are forced to implement it. And it isn't always in the best interest of the end user. E.g. at a company we had to add "useless" content on our shop pages, otherwise google ranked the pages lower due to having not enough content.
The Google Search team is always ranking pages to get the best metric (ctr, time-spend-on-website), s.t. it indicates that users are happy with the result. If any feature/change introduces a regression, they will not ship it. (That kinda indicates that people outside of hn actually like amp) Keep in mind that: amp team != search team.
I have heard the AMP team is/was part of the search department.
It's ironic to me that AMP is a problem we all brought upon ourselves, really. It's almost (jokingly) a Prisoner's dilemma [1]. Had no one ever opted into it, it probably would have just been swept under the rug by Google, and a win-win for us all. But since a competitor of yours ( probably ) opted into it to get ahead of you, you now have to opt into it also, to compete and get the same SEO "power juice" it gave the…
You are talking about a small fraction of companies. Anyways, I would not bend over for Google not for AMP not for anything similar to it.
I'll rephrase what he said. AMP was only ever needed because so many made their pages so artificiality heavy in the first place and had no incentive to make them lighter. AMP SEO advantage is a great incentive to make them lighter. The thing is, Google could have pushed their algorithm toward performance more and make it clear on their page too and have the same effect. They just found a way to get more control from…
I think the real trouble with AMP is that it really does bring a better experience to users. It's harder to argue against AMP when it has undoubtedly helped with the web bloat problem. Even I find myself semi-subconsciously preferring the results with the little lightning icon because it means I don't have to wait for the page to perform 3-4 tectonic shifts and wait a couple of seconds to read something that could've…
My experience is the exact opposite of yours. Amp drives me insane. It shows a bastardized version of most pages, it doesn't behave the way I expect. It has this weird swipe side to side thing that makes no sense and gets triggered accidentally. It also breaks scrolling in iOS, causing the header and footer to always show. I've gotten so sick of the terrible AMP browsing experience that I actually have to click the little i in the top corner to navigate to the real page. Which causes more data use, a worse user experience, and more difficult time getting to the content that I want.
Unfortunately, Google can rank by whatever criteria they want and we are forced to implement it. And it isn't always in the best interest of the end user. E.g. at a company we had to add "useless" content on our shop pages, otherwise google ranked the pages lower due to having not enough content.
The Google Search team is always ranking pages to get the best metric (ctr, time-spend-on-website), s.t. it indicates that users are happy with the result. If any feature/change introduces a regression, they will not ship it. (That kinda indicates that people outside of hn actually like amp) Keep in mind that: amp team != search team.
Time spent on a website is an interesting metric. I am curious if there are studies linking it to happy users. I would guess there are some interesting findings after you remove immediate bounces from the data.
Counterpoint: WE don't live in an ideal world and AMP is my only option of getting de-bloated webpages. I would love if managers and directors would do this themselves and AMP wouldn't be needed, but that's just not the case. I have to choose between downloading some text and images to read an article or load 5MB JavaScript SinglePageApp with tracking, ads, auto playing video's... I know in an ideal world AMP would b…
I understand your point, but I guess I just wish it wasn't an "either or" world, so we both could enjoy the web how we would respectively like. Why won't Google let us have both? Right now, I don't believe there is a way to disable AMP ( unless you use like a Firefox mobile extension for that specific use case ). That's what bothers me the most, personally. Google shoving it down our throats, and force feeding us AMP…
> Right now, I don't believe there is a way to disable AMP
Desktop mode disables AMP on Chrome Android for me. I haven't tested with iOS though.
Not true. Sites can’t safely preload and pre render non-amp pages, so non-amp pages will never be as fast as amp pages.
What websites need to not only regularly preload+prerender other webpages but also webpages outside their trustzone? And when does the performance of half a millisecond matter?
Latency to remote servers isn’t half a millisecond. A click off from google would normally take a second or two to render and be much worse at the p95 page load time.
With AMP, this is cut down to tens of milliseconds.