Pardon my naivete, but Google validates whether a site is AMP-eligible by validating it conforms to its requirements, right? Can the Google bot that crawls the site not perform this same validation? I mean they can bait and switch the title of the page, the content, etc too but we don't require a Google proxy to make sure they don't. Can anyone else build a proxy that gives the same AMP guarantees and gets the same ranking benefits? More than a promise to the user, AMP is a promise to everyone where the bits are coming from.
Google is going to get in trouble stewarding their gateway into the internet in this fashion with these rules. Rules about slow page load times can be seen as universal. Rules about using a Google proxy however are just begging for political intervention. As someone with a small business, I'm upset that these companies, under the guise of helping users, are giving reasons for these liberal governments to act. It negatively affects me when these inevitable regulations come down because companies like Google can't remain provider-neutral. Arg!
> We need an HTML Lite as a mode in the browser that winnows down the enormous featureset of HTML. Not for all content, but for that content where text is king.
I concur here and have been thinking about this recently especially in the context of web browsing in the terminal. But it has to be driven by user adoption, not rules written on the walls of a few companies' gardens.
In the meantime, I would ask that the search engine not give preference to their proxy over anyone else's but instead define the guidelines that we can all reasonably meet.
> Can the Google bot that crawls the site not perform this same validation?
From what I am aware, in practice there are a large number of sites which provide different content or different behavior in response to the GoogleBot user-agent.
The benefits are nebulous in other instances. Here they are much more concrete, and thus will undoubtedly (in my mind) be abused to a much higher degree.
It is a web platform security restriction that prevents Google Search from coordinating with non-Google caches for prerendering.
Pinterest runs its own AMP cache for prerendering pages linked from Twitter. Bing runs its own AMP cache to prerender pages linked from Bing. Yandex runs its own AMP cache to prerender pages linked from Yandex. They can't use each others' AMP caches and get the same benefits.
Google is going to get in trouble stewarding their gateway into the internet in this fashion with these rules. Rules about slow page load times can be seen as universal. Rules about using a Google proxy however are just begging for political intervention. As someone with a small business, I'm upset that these companies, under the guise of helping users, are giving reasons for these liberal governments to act. It negatively affects me when these inevitable regulations come down because companies like Google can't remain provider-neutral. Arg!
> We need an HTML Lite as a mode in the browser that winnows down the enormous featureset of HTML. Not for all content, but for that content where text is king.
I concur here and have been thinking about this recently especially in the context of web browsing in the terminal. But it has to be driven by user adoption, not rules written on the walls of a few companies' gardens.
In the meantime, I would ask that the search engine not give preference to their proxy over anyone else's but instead define the guidelines that we can all reasonably meet.