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How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

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Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#21

Post by PavlovsCat »

ossworkerrights wrote: post #10

I really doubt google will become "irrelevant" anytime soon. What most of us nerds forget is that tech products become popular when they solve real life issues for non technical people. We can sit here and debate all day what protocols are better, and which browse is cooler, and why Google is evil, because it will not become irrelevant anytime soon unless there is a better end user product. Happy bashing Google, Face…

> Happy bashing Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc because no one cares, really.

I'd rather work with 10000 people on something we can get excited about because it's actually cool and "pure" at least in intent, if not in implementation, than with 10 billion people on the current trajectory of chained prisoners shuffling down a damp hallway. You're boring as fuck.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#22

Post by shadowgovt »

"How to make your sites faster than AMP without using AMP" leaves out "locally cache a copy of your site in a CDN that is geographically close to your users." Which is the actual mechanical part of AMP that makes it technologically interesting / valuable to content providers and countries distant from the creation of most content.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#23

Post by brianzelip »

Here's one great takeaway:

> Treat the cause: Third-party requests slow down the web

> ...

> - Google owns 7 of the top 10 most popular third-party calls

> ...

> So you can see why there must be some kind of internal struggle at Google. They understand the value of a faster web but they also cannot go after the main cause of the slow web. And this is how technology such as AMP gets invented and makes things worse.

It blows my mind how many devs around here are devoted to their browser and search.

Stop using chrome. Honestly, wtf?! Firefox is awesome. FF dev tools are awesome. FF, like Wu Tang, is for the kids.

STOP USING google SEARCH! USE DUCKDUCKGO! Use the `!gm` google maps bang when you need it. Use the `!g` google bang in a pinch, but for all of our sake, please wean yourself off of google search.

These two steps are immensely easy to do, and yet a MAJOR investment in all of our future.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#24

Post by justinph »

shadowgovt wrote: post #22

"How to make your sites faster than AMP without using AMP" leaves out "locally cache a copy of your site in a CDN that is geographically close to your users." Which is the actual mechanical part of AMP that makes it technologically interesting / valuable to content providers and countries distant from the creation of most content.

It also omits the part where google starts preloading and rendering the AMP page when the user is still on the search results. Without that, AMP is often no faster than many non-amp pages.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#25

Post by mcv »

justinph wrote: post #16

I agree with all of this, but until google provides a way to appear in the discover box without having AMP-published pages, this is a non-starter for publishers. Ironically, by creating AMP, google has disincentivized publishers from making their canonical pages faster. Publishers hate that google holds them hostage with AMP in this manner, but the situation is what it is, until someone from the Justice Department st…

I think the fact that Google gives higher ranking in their search results to sites that use Google technologies should be addressed in anti-trust investigations.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#26

Post by maxaf »

mlok wrote: post #20
maxaf wrote: post #7

> Don't use Google search. This is easier said than done, as the other search engines are still not as good as Google, even though Google's results have been getting worse. This may be a controversial opinion, but it's not what my comment is about. I'm going to make a more scandalous suggestion. Don't use search engines at all. The idea that a centralized one-size-fits-all search engine is necessary is preposterous.…

!bangs in DuckDuckGo enables you to do searches right on the destination website https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Nice! I had no idea.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#27

Post by [deleted] »

bla3 wrote: post #18

I like AMP. It's possible to write fast websites without it, and I do do that for my sites. For for big, non-tech sites AMP has provided sufficient motivation to offer a fast version. Nothing else has managed to do this before. I'd rather have fast AMP pages of all those news sites than having to load the slow default view. Experience suggests that the options aren't "fast with AMP or fast without AMP", but "fast or…

[deleted]

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#28

Post by sergiotapia »

whb07 wrote: post #5
thejohnconway wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can they just penalize slow/large file size sites in their index? Well, that would be bad for the independent web, wouldn't it? I mean, you'd be penalising sites with large amounts of content, that aren't on a CDN. Large images or videos, for example, might be the entire point of the page in the first place. I don't want to be directed to to a webpage about an artist (for example) that has the crappiest, smallest a…

well no, not really? Perhaps you could imagine a world where it default loads a smaller file and right underneath there is a link to a larger file? This used to be a more common thing...

This is _literally_ what people do to game the paint speed of websites for Chrome Lighthouse tests.

They render a

Loading

so it gets a paint score of 100, then when their behemoth js app finishes loading+parsing it removes this dom element.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#29

Post by throwaway13337 »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #2

I think there needs to be a real alternate solution from Google for longer term change. (if Google wants to stay relevant) Can they just penalize slow/large file size sites in their index? This seems like the underlying goal behind AMP and Chrome's Lighthouse (site audit tool) any way. This would make a lot of sites fast in the next couple months. But maybe Google doesn't really want that?

The reason that they do not just penalize slow loading sites in a big way is because those are the sites that they directly profit on.

Most page weight seems to come from tracking and ads. Google IS the most popular tracking and ad provider on the web.

If google penalized slow loading very much, they'd be hurting their own revenue and data collection. It's a conflict of interest.

AMP allows these big, ad-driven, heavy-weight sites to still take all the top spots on the web. Meanwhile terrific content is buried because it's failure to implement AMP.

Google's self-interested ranking of sites is shaping the web very negatively - towards more tracking and more ads.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#30

Post by soyyo »

I worked on amp for a leading newspaper, and everyone who says that amp is about "making the web faster on mobile" is either very naive or doing marketing for google.

For publishers, amp is about trying to top the results on google search and capture traffic, it's their only motivation to publish their content using amp, and the only metric they look in order to evaluate the results.

Once they have their amp content, they will look how to load it with ads and tracking, which very conveniently is supported on amp, just as they do in their regular sites.

So the "fast" part, besides using their CDN, actually comes from limiting what you can do on almost every other part of the site, you can only do the stuff that is packed in the amp components controlled by google, which in practice means that google controls the web behavior.

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