
Airbnb is putting AMP at the core of its digital strategy - cpeterso
https://medium.com/swlh/how-airbnb-is-putting-amp-at-the-core-of-its-digital-strategy-d6b9cf1fc0ad
======
untog
Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.

The reason to use AMP is SEO. If you want literally any benefit other than
SEO, just improve the performance on your own mobile site. Then you won't have
to jump through weird hoops and come up with entirely new "magic carpet" user
flows, because you'll actually _control your own content on your own site_.

The talk attached to this Medium piece was given at "TechSEO Boost", but the
article itself dances around ever using the term. So we're left to wonder why
AirBnb is very worried about being able to link users to their native app,
while they apparently don't care at all about whether users are using their
web site. It's because of SEO.

> the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, which has some powerful backers
> including Google

> It would be fair to say that Google has been a very vocal supporter of the
> initiative from day one.

These are really weird ways of describing a Google-owned, Google-pushed
initiative.

~~~
callahad
In a large enough organization, improving site performance is _hard,_ as you
have to win political battles against your marketing / bizdev teams, denying
them the analytics packages they want in the name of performance.

"We could do that, but then we'd lose the special AMP placement on Google
SERPs" is a much more compelling argument, and preferable to starting a proxy
war between the CMO and the CTO.

Google has done a hell of a job flexing their Search muscles to encourage the
behavior they want, here. All the while somehow open-washing the project so
that SEO-types make the ridiculous statements you quoted, implying that AMP
isn't a Google owned-and-run project.

On an engineering level, I respect AMP. From an anti-competitive / social
engineering perspective, it's absolutely terrifying.

~~~
underwater
AMP has a whole suite of technical limitations that are unrelated to the
problem being solved. For example they limit pages to 50k (pre-gzip) of
unlined CSS rather than allowing stylesheets to be linked. This is not how
sites are generally built, and at least for me, meant rebuilding large parts
of my build process.

Google engineers seem to have a hard time differentiating between a platform
and a framework. PWAs and suffer from the exact same problem. They’re great if
you build a greenfield product to their exact specs, but difficult to use
otherwise.

~~~
dragonwriter
> AMP has a whole suite of technical limitations that are unrelated to the
> problem being solved. For example they limit pages to 50k (pre-gzip) of
> unlined CSS rather than allowing stylesheets to be linked.

How is limiting size and server round-trips of CSS not related to the problem
being solved by AMP?

~~~
SahAssar
Because that's a problem that should be solved with HTTP2 push, not with
inlining.

~~~
fooker
Why can AMP pages not use that? This seems like an orthogonal issue.

~~~
SahAssar
They can, but instead they do it the wrong way.

------
JoshMnem
It's a terrible idea. AMP is a shameful attack on the open WWW.

AMP is slower than hand-optimized HTML.

AMP pages are often hosted on a 3rd party domain, even sending the wrong
referrers to other sites.

AMP is also extremely slow on desktop browsers that have certain ad-blockers
installed. If 3rd party scripts don't load, the user gets a blank page for 8
seconds. (Try it if you don't believe me.)

~~~
Spivak
* But it's faster than HTML that people use in practice.

* Sure, but do you really care that users are using your physical servers or just that the content is out there? It's a trade that I think a lot of businesses would be happy to make. Who wouldn't want essentially free hosting complete with ad revenue?

* Do you think ad funded sites care about people who have a worse user experience with an ad blocker.

I don't disagree that AMP is bad for the open web, but it's not bad for the
people publishing with it.

~~~
JoshMnem
If someone is going to implement AMP templates they have the ability to
implement better HTML in the templates instead.

It does matter that users are on your physical servers. It affects referrers
and copied/pasted links, which affect brand recognition and SEO. Using AMP
also puts a giant back button on your site that takes users back to the search
engine results rather than deeper into your site. Many people do not want
that.

I don't think that airbnb is an ad-funded site. Even if it were, do ad-funded
sites really want a 3rd party dictating how they monetize their sites? If so,
I doubt that they are thinking through it all the way and considering the
long-term effects.

~~~
canadianwriter
"If someone is going to implement AMP templates they have the ability to
implement better HTML in the templates instead."

Not someone. A corporation. Think bigger companies, not tiny one person sites.
Just because it's possible doesn't mean they can win the sprint cycle.

~~~
JoshMnem
How would writing a whole new UI in AMP be easier than cleaning up the current
HTML templates or writing new templates in HTML rather than AMP?

------
dzink
Step 1. AirBnB, VRBO and others list inventory for free. Step 2. Google starts
offering rentals straight from search and forgets you have a site. Remember
Facebook News anyone?

~~~
vthallam
Exactly this! Google Flights is already a thing and the hotel search works
great too. Once they have enough people directly searching from Google, they
can either charge Airbnb or hotels to send traffic or build its own Airbnb
backend and roll it as Google product.

------
pg_bot
I'm still shocked that anyone treats AMP with anything other than contempt. Is
it really that difficult to make your site faster? Blaming your crappy
html/js/css on marketing demands doesn't pass the smell test for me. IMO too
many engineers pass the buck instead of owning up to bad decisions and
correcting them.

~~~
lazyjones
> _I 'm still shocked that anyone treats AMP with anything other than
> contempt._

The more people treat it with contempt, the higher its value becomes for the
others due to its only advantage, getting a SEO boost from Google.

Also, marketing people (in some cases for good reason) already feel locked-in
by and fully dependent on Google with >50% of their traffic coming from there.

------
dmitriid
Meanwhile in December AirBnB's HTML page weighed in at over 1MB. Of _just
HTML_ :
[https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/939097733260038144](https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/939097733260038144)

They shouldn't put AMP at the core of their strategy. It's enough to just make
proper pages (the page referenced in the link is now much slimmer)

~~~
api
But marketing wants this and this and this and this and this and this and this
and this and this and this and this and ...

~~~
TurningCanadian
Give the marketing team a performance budget to work within?

------
sitkack
Airbnb doesn't know how to make a front-end that can talk to a back-end w/o
breaking.

Seriously, use it on a connection with packet loss and it will corrupt your
application state so hard you will have to switch browsers to resolve it.

~~~
guitarbill
Not to mention their website just plainly sucks, and was clearly an
afterthought. Maybe nobody there could believe people wouldn’t want to install
yet another app?

~~~
rafi_kamal
Interesting, I use AirBnB quite a lot and like their UI (I primarily use the
desktop version, though). Why do you think their website sucks?

~~~
_red
Its an all around bad design. Not really a UI problem, its more of a state /
workflow problem.

Its levels upon levels. You keep having to drill 2 or 3 levels down, but then
lose the context of the higher levels when you do. For instance, when you
finally click on a property, this now opens a new tab. But now this property
tab doesn't show a map...so if you are looking at 4 properties, you now need
to keep the "main map" page open so you can manually cross-reference what
properties are where.

Effectively its impossible to get anything done with having 3 or 4 tabs open
all dedicated to Airbnb. Love the service and the places I wind up finding,
but their website really needs a re-think.

------
ggggtez
There's a lot of AMP hate on hacker news and I've never quite understood why.
They talk about it destroying the open web, as if the existence of Facebook,
Google, Amazon didn't already make a big dent in it. Really? AMP is the cross
you're going to die on? I just don't get it.

~~~
idle_processor
There's enough animosity out there to spread around between AMP and other
centralizing forces. Calling one out doesn't implicitly give the others a
pass.

Facebook (especially Instant Articles and video rehosting[0]) is awful for
very similar reasons.

What's pernicious about AMP & co. is seizure of control and immense abuse
potential that comes with preventing visitors from hitting content creators'
domains.

\---

[0] [http://splitsider.com/2018/02/how-facebook-is-killing-
comedy...](http://splitsider.com/2018/02/how-facebook-is-killing-comedy/)

------
pablo-massa
I have mixed feelings about AMP.

One thing that always I feel on discussions about AMP is that is something
that is going to happen, and is not, is happening right now, regular users are
already having better and great experiences on mobile.

That is the good side that I see of the project, Google was capable of do that
in about 2 years. Pushing development best practices seems that was not
enough, companies stills doing awful job on the performance side of their
websites.

AMP was like force companies to do other version of their websites with
limitations that prevent doing stupid development and design decisions like
js/css/html bloat, repeat components and more.

You like that beautiful readable and organized Medium post?, is a good
experience right?, well, it happens that the editor has a lot of limitations
like only let you choose 3 text hierarchies, 3 image sizes, one font family,
no colors, etc. For me AMP is something like that but in the development side
instead on the visual design side.

The terrifying part is that Google has created a parallel version of the web
who fill their needs, a stripped down version[1] that feels like an
authoritarian power blocks the freedom that the "native" web always has, also
happens that this parallel version has some advantages and people are loving
it.

I see AMP as a temporary patch of the web.

[1] [https://ampbyexample.com](https://ampbyexample.com)

------
stevew20
To those who think this could be a good idea: do some research on AMP, then
reevaluate your opinion.

To my mind, AMP is a content reassociation tool, not a content distribution
speedup tool. It succeeds in both, was designed as the former, and marketed as
the latter. If Airbnb goes through with this folly, how exactly will they
retain their business?

Google will be essentially filtering every booking that goes to Airbnb,
controlling both the customer and the listings. I see most comments on HN are
in agreement with this view, and those that aren't don't seem to meet the
quality level normal to HN. Makes you wonder who exactly made this decision...

~~~
fastball
I made my personal website AMP compatible. Took me an hour in total (including
research) and in the future if I don't want the google amp overhead I can
remove a single line of code and my website will run fine.

FUD.

~~~
dingo_bat
Or you could optimize your website and not depend on google at all forever.

~~~
fastball
The only thinking I'm depending on Google for is some post-loading. Otherwise
AMP _is_ just optimizations, most of them are just thinks I hadn't thought of
before trying to make my site AMP compatible (things like only using hardware
accelerated animations and such).

------
tyfon
So I have seen a lot of discussion about AMP but I have yet to see it in the
wild using my phone.

Is it something I have to turn on or is it restricted to certain countries?

I browse from Norway.

~~~
itslennysfault
Consider yourself lucky. I'm guessing it's because of location. A quick search
for "Google Amp" had this result near the top (an Amp version of a tech crunch
article). If you open it on a computer it just redirects to techcrunch.com,
but on a phone it should stay on the google domain and have a little top bar
added (unless it redirects you past due to region?).

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/amp-f...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/amp-
for-email-is-a-terrible-idea/amp/)

~~~
tyfon
I just opened it on my phone and I was redireced to techcrunch.com without any
overlays or whatnot.

Maybe they are afraid that EU will smack them down for anti-competitive
behaviour.

~~~
clan
In Denmark I get the AMP results.

The link posted above will show a prominent "techcrunch.com" at the top - but
the URL is still Google. I am not redirected to their own site.

~~~
dingo_bat
You can click on the link icon beside the "techcrunch.com" text at the top and
the actual link shows up. You can click it and go to the actual page.

------
dingo_bat
I don't see any performance measurements before or after. Are these presented
in the video? If not, this is a monumental waste of time in my opinion.

------
pavel_lishin
"Boys, gather up the eggs, have I got a basket for us!"

~~~
libria
AMP is just a subset of HTML/javascript so they're not out on a limb if AMP
disappers.

~~~
aphextron
>AMP is just a subset of HTML/javascript so they're not out on a limb if AMP
disappers.

That's not all there is to it, though. There's a whole Polymer-esque AMP JS
framework that Google is pushing people to use [0]. While it does some great
things, it's still absolutely an attempt at vendor lockin.

[0]
[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components)

~~~
untog
In fairness, Polymer is a Web Components-esque JS framework, so it is, in the
end, targeting an open standard. I'm still not a fan of it, but...

------
gaius
Two dodgy companies, made for each other. Maybe Uber could get involved
somehow .

------
jstewartmobile
And that great race-to-the-bottom we call the web gently accelerates. Its
trajectory, unchanged.

