
A letter about Google AMP - lainon
http://ampletter.org/
======
ehnto
I do not believe page speed should play a role in search rankings at all. It
has nothing to do with the content and the person with the correct and most
relevant content doesn't always have the relevant skills or a DevOps
specialist handy to meet the requirements.

This only helps the heavy handed SEO optimized sites with deep pockets and
time to kill get yet another edge.

The article with the best insight isn't likely to be the one with the perfecly
optimized website.

I understand that pagespeed effects end user experience when they hit a
website, however that's not what I searched for. I did not search "fastest
website with okay knowledge about dogs" I asked for "website with the best
knowledge about dogs".

I want Google to be able to show me the most awesome page about dogs. The most
in depth and relevant information. That niche dog blogger who is so passionate
that they spend all their time researching dogs. I don't want "10 cool facts
about dogs by Buzzfeed".

~~~
domenicd
This seems clearly false.

Let's say the page with the best information about dogs took an infinite
amount of time to load (never loaded). I don't think you'd want that page to
be ranked highly.

What about if that page took a year to load?

What about if that page took an hour?

A minute?

What's your cutoff? Let's say, generously, that you're willing to wait 30
minutes for the page to load. Why such a sharp cutoff? Why do pages that take
30 minutes and 1 second to load get penalized, but pages that take 30 minutes
are treated as fine? The user experience is basically just as acceptable (by
your standards) / just as bad (by my standards).

Perhaps maybe instead of a sharp cutoff we need some sort of sliding scale,
where pages that are only slightly slower than optimal are penalized only
slightly, and pages that are much slower than optimal are penalized more.

Gosh, that sounds familiar.

~~~
ehnto
Your assumption is that the time factor can't be handled by the user. Users
try somewhere else when a page doesn't load, and in my opinion that is fine.
Granted, it's my opinion. Perhaps most users don't agree and here we are.

If it is truly the best information, it is what I want and I will wait. If I
trust that Google can give me the best information then I would be willing to
wait. I give up easily now because I can't trust Google to give me quality
results. I will not wait for an ad bloated news aggregator.

~~~
UncleMeat
When a user does a search, clicks on a result, that result does not have what
they want so they hit back, and then they click on another result that is a
failure of the search engine. "Users can decide the site is worthless after
they click" is an opportunity for somebody to come up with a better system.

~~~
ehnto
I guess I simply don't agree. The search engine should give me the best
information, period. It does not, and one of the reasons it does not is
because it is busy prioritizing things that aren't relevant to content.

------
magicalist
> _Instead of granting premium placement in search results only to AMP,
> provide the same perks to all pages that meet an objective, neutral
> performance criterion such as Speed Index._

But _who_ will measure it "objectively" (leaving aside no one agrees on how to
universally measure load speed).

Googlebot? From what location and what machine types and how often? Should I
get search results based on an average of all possible variables or the
closest matching my locale and device? What happens when page content changes?
What happens when the page sometimes loads slow content (e.g. ads) and
sometimes doesn't? What happens when SEOers start cloaking their ad loads or
taking advantage of flaws in the benchmark?

It's good to have a speed signal in search rankings, but this petition
shouldn't pretend that's an objective replacement for something that always
displays content first and loads media and third party content async

~~~
ucaetano
GoogleBot runs only in a few datacenters in certain locations in the world
with amazing connectivity.

It is a horrible predictor of load times.

~~~
adtac
This is probably the easiest problem to solve. Hosting a GoogleSpeedTestBot in
every city with the sole purpose of speed testing a page would have laughably
negligible impact on Google's resources.

~~~
ucaetano
You're proposing hosting thousands and thousands of servers across every city
in the world where each server would be accessing all the top 1M sites in the
world every day and measuring the speed of each page in that site?

Seriously?

~~~
adtac
Not every day; at the time of publishing, and maybe few days later. (This
could be improved even further: you don't need to access every article. If you
could identify a page that's representative of a real article, that could
suffice. Maybe have periodic random checks to see if this is still
representative.)

Not every city; the top 500 cities would probably cover 90+% of the users.

You're not understanding the scale of Google. They're incredibly good at
exactly this stuff.

~~~
ucaetano
Oh, I am, but maybe you're not understanding the scale of the internet.
Connections, cables, CDNs change on a daily and weekly basis.

Is a cable is cut between Jakarta and Singapore, it can take months to fix as
Indonesia only allows Indonesian-flagged cable layers to operate in its
waters.

Individual datacenters, CDNs, cables are going offline constantly, so you'd
need to be continuously testing every site to rank it correctly. Not only
that, each page in a site might have a very different structure, so you can't
just rank a site, you need to rank individual pages and articles too, which
means testing every new page and article from every city.

I guess you're not getting the scale of that...

AMP standardizes the CDN serving part, largely eliminating that issue. AMP
articles can't prevent 3rd party CDNs from caching them, which means that they
can be served from the closest CDN after the first time they are used.

------
Andrex
I would normally never do this, but over the past couple weeks I've been
drafting a blog post proposing an open AMP alternative called Particle.

You can read it here: [https://andrewrabon.com/particle-a-proposal-for-tinier-
html-...](https://andrewrabon.com/particle-a-proposal-for-tinier-html-and-
css-1760ca148722) [Draft]

Would anyone here be interested in seeing the blog post completed and/or
helping me build it out? If so drop me a line at andrewrabon at gmail. :)

I also want feedback on if my ideas are actually solving a problem, and are
doing so in the correct way. I only recently joined a news publisher so I'm
not 100% cognizant of the issues at play.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
Sounds like extra work that websites would need to do in order to adopt. If
there was a way to say automatically remove the javascript and other html
extensions and the automatically serve the site via particle, then that would
facilitate adoption.

~~~
Andrex
Hm, maybe have a <link rel> to the Particle version and switch over to that
with a browser extension?

------
mburst
> Instead of granting premium placement in search results only to AMP, provide
> the same perks to all pages that meet an objective, neutral performance
> criterion such as Speed Index. Publishers can then use any technical
> solution of their choice.

Hasn't Google gone on record saying that AMP doesn't affect search results
given the same page load speed for non-AMP sites?

~~~
zentiggr
Except that AMP pages are often in the band of promoted results that show
above the remainder of the search results, at least in the mobile app. And are
prominently icon'ed in the desktop results.

So yeah, Google's not honest about this.

~~~
yegle
From my test the AMP icon in Google's search result is gone (Chrome, Android,
Incognito tab).

Disclaimer: I work for Google but not on AMP product.

~~~
ec109685
Search for Trump on iOS and you'll see an AMP icon.

~~~
ehsankia
Is the issue the icon or the carousel being at the top? I just checked and the
carousel had both AMP and non-AMP content for me.

------
bryanlarsen
Doesn't [https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/improving-urls-
for-...](https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/improving-urls-for-amp-
pages/) address one of their two demands?

~~~
bobfunk
To me the proposal there is arguably even scarier than what AMP is doing now.

It requires changing browsers, to let people distribute Google Hosted Apps on
their own domains (as long as Google approves). Sites distributed in this way
will get preferential treatment by Google.

This is essentially an App store model, similar to Google Play, and the really
big danger is that we end up in a place where you either distribute (and host)
your website through Google's AMP registry, or you're not actually on the web
(in the same way that distributing your Android app as an APK outside of the
Play store is not a realistic distribution channel).

I hope Firefox, Safari and Edge will resist this.

~~~
jopsen
> you either distribute (and host) your website through Google's AMP registry

As long as anyone can setup their own AMP-like cache and build a search engine
similar to Google, that also supports preloading... then I'm not sure it so
bad.

The proposal GP refers to has a lot of use-cases, it basically makes caching
of HTTPS by third-parties possible. At-least to some extent.

~~~
stfwn
> As long as anyone can setup their own AMP-like cache and build a search
> engine similar to Google, that also supports preloading... then I'm not sure
> it so bad.

Yes, anyone could build a cache. But can anyone build a cache that can compete
with Google's absolutely massive infrastructure and pile of money, not to
mention the reach they already have with search?

I'd say this is not a discussion on the level of ‘can you build a better
product and win from a giant company?’, more like ‘can you build a planet and
get everyone to move there?’

~~~
dx034
Cloudflare can (and does). So do Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and a few others.

Yes, the web is dominated by big companies more than ever before but there's
at least some competition left.

------
ttctciyf
Personally, speaking as a search user, all I want from Google regards AMP is a
setting that disables it in search results.

Google's results ordering is already sufficiently "optimized" away from my
needs that as often as not I end up in 'verbatim' mode or on page 3 of the
results before I get near what I'm looking for, so an extra layer of SEO-
gameable "user convenience" isn't likely to make my google experience _that_
much worse.

Since the presence of AMP results is based on device detection, it seems a
search setting removing them would be a simple matter. Google's unwillingness
to provide it speaks volumes about their actual intent, IMO.

~~~
Lio
This is exactly my position on this also and the reason that I've moved to
DuckDuckGo on my mobile in place of Google even though I much prefer Google as
a search engine.

~~~
ttctciyf
Thanks to Spivak, who mentions in another comment here [1] that
"[https://encrypted.google.com](https://encrypted.google.com) doesn't serve
AMP results" my phone now has a new default search!

1:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108896](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108896)

------
wetpaws
Google amp is a blessing on mobile, I don't give a damn't about site owners.

~~~
notatoad
yeah, as a user AMP is awesome.

Dear website owners who wrote this letter: yes, amp has it's downsides but the
reason we have amp is that the internet as a whole failed to make fast sites.
you had your chance for the previous ~30 years, and it's clear you couldn't be
bothered to make speed a priority. I'm glad you're angry that AMP is eating
your lunch, because maybe you'll actually start trying to compete now. But you
aren't getting my sympathy.

~~~
nobleach
The whole point is, Google has shut down the competition. One Google has
everyone on "the platform" they now get to mandate new rules. There may as
well not BE any more web frameworks. The idea that we "did this to ourselves,
and are now getting our just desserts" isn't going to fair well for anyone -
not even the user. Google is now the gatekeeper and independent attempts to
chip away at that foundation are almost a waste of time.

------
tabeth
I don't see the point of AMP. Why not just give certain sites a little
icon/preference if they're faster than XXXms? Glad to see this letter says as
much.

~~~
Klathmon
Because they did that, for years, and next to nobody changed anything.

Fast websites stayed fast, and slow websites stayed slow. They also gave out
tons of free "speed test" tools to make it easy for developers to test their
speed, and improve it. They even made apache and nginx plugins that would
auto-optimize assets as it served them! And still basically nobody used them.

Plus it's not just about "faster than XXXms". What is that time measured to?
Time to text on the screen? Can they game it by lazy-loading images, then
videos, then ads, then 6mb of other javascript and social networking stuff and
a comment system and...?

You could try a "size limit", but then you penalize asset heavy sites (like
high-resolution image sharing sites, or video sites).

So their solution was to make a very restrictive system where you are forced
to do things "the right way" (for at least one definition of "right"), and to
pump that up in the search results.

Plugins were made for common blogging and news platforms, and now a portion of
the web loads significantly faster for many, and I think that's a win.

It's not perfect, but it's at least the first thing that I've seen google try
in this area that is actually working.

Obviously there is benefit to Google as a company in that now results that are
served through their AMP system are faster than those of some of their
competitors, and AMP gives them a nice easy way to pull some structured
information from an article for things like the carousel or other non-search
offerings, but I genuinely don't believe that was the main motivator, seeing
as Google has years of examples of failed attempts to "fix" this problem
(though maybe I'm just not cynical enough!).

~~~
untog
But they _could_ do the best of both worlds if they wanted. The launch of AMP
was coupled with the "carousel" that appears at the top of search result
pages. Only AMP pages are eligible to appear in that carousel. Why not keep
the carousel, but prioritise by overall load time?

~~~
Klathmon
I believe they kind of do.

IIRC they treat AMP pages the same as any other in terms of ranking, but since
AMP is super fast, it gets a natural boost.

(obviously AMP gets other benefits like the lightning bolt badge and inclusion
in the carousel)

~~~
untog
Is that not a contradiction in terms? Placement in the carousel means you are
placed above all other search results, that's in no way being treated the same
as others in terms of ranking.

~~~
Klathmon
Ah I misunderstood what you said.

I believe that some of the data in the carousel is pulled from the way that
AMP is structured, however I'm not 100% sure.

------
tboyd47
I support this completely and I would go one step further. We need a search
engine that is free of CPM-monetization practices. It has become clear that
Google is driving the web intentionally in a profit-maximizing direction at
the expense of users and ordinary developers.

Move ad blocking to the indexing layer. Create a corner of the web that is
naturally fast and user-friendly again without resorting to corporate-defined
subsets of well-documented open web technologies.

~~~
Sahbak
And it will get paid... How? Ads are keeping your net experience free.

~~~
tboyd47
It would still be ads, but much nicer ones that come out of direct negotiation
between publishers and advertisers, instead of some shady clickbait ad agency
randomly selected to invade your site by Google's algorithms.

My experience has been that direct-sold ads produce more revenue for
publishers than programmatic ads. I would love to see research on this one
day.

~~~
TheCoreh
> My experience has been that direct-sold ads produce more revenue for
> publishers than programmatic ads

Yes, but do they provide an equally good ROI for advertisers? (And the same
level of granularity, tracking and reach as something like Google Adwords?)
That's the real issue at play.

~~~
tboyd47
If price is any measure of value, yes.

~~~
lm_nop
"Premium" sites (like the ones with engineering resources to build to AMP
spec) e.g. NYTimes, WA Post, WSJ, are not really prime concern - they can
afford to move to AMP and do whatever kind of ad sales they want
(direct/programmatic).

It's the smaller websites (Bob's Blog) who can't afford eng resources to build
to AMP, and to build fast ads, who are "suffering" a loss of search results
prioritistion. (These smaller sites may turn to shady ad networks, and suffer
further with shitty ad payload, further lowering search preferences if based
on page load).

Does that mean smaller websites are stifled? Not sure...

------
mikeytown2
I'll be giving a talk about what you can do to get your site to load faster
without using AMP in Portland, Oregon on February 4th.
[https://pnwdrupalsummit.org/2018/sessions/how-get-
perfect-10...](https://pnwdrupalsummit.org/2018/sessions/how-get-
perfect-100-google-pagespeed-insights-what-might-happen-if-you-dont)

Long story short 100/100 with page speed is possible with most sites; further
optimize for Speed Index by using rel="preload" for assets above the fold.
What else am I missing?

~~~
wmf
You're missing the lightning icon.

~~~
mikeytown2
So by not using AMP, Google search result pages will not display the lightning
icon next to the link to your domain? Is this what you mean?

~~~
wmf
Yes, and thus your boss won't pay you to optimize anything if he doesn't get
the lightning bolt.

------
rocky1138
Honestly, let's all of us web developers make an agreement together that we'll
focus on plain text and intelligently-compressed images rather than JavaScript
and auto-playing videos in our projects moving forward and recommend that we
do the same where we work.

People are trusting us to help them with technical decisions and we have a
responsibility to make sure the web is accessible to as many people as
possible. Our opinions have tremendous sway, even though it might not feel
like it.

The web really started to go sideways when we followed the trend away from
Progressive Enhancement. Let's get back to basics, pure and simple.

~~~
bigblind
When thinking about progressive enhancement, it's debatable what your baseline
should be. I'm not sure I agree we should take plain text as the baseline.
There's a development cost to everything. I genuinely believe you can create a
better experience with a JavaScript-powered app/site, where the server doesn't
have to re-render the entire page when someone interacts withit to show new
content, and developing server-side rendering so that the same page can be
rendered by the server, as well as constructed by JavaScript on the client,
with content from an API, takes a lot of time. Even though it'd make it more
accessible to clients who have JavaScript disabled, or where rendering the
page client-side takes longer than rendering it on the server and sending it
as a whole.

I completely agree about unnecessary annoyances such as auto-playing video, or
load-blocking ads. #perfmatters.

~~~
rocky1138
A close baseline is Hacker News. The site works perfectly without JavaScript
but is a bit faster (don't have to wait for page refreshes on upvote) if you
enable it. If Hacker News had a more responsive stylesheet, it would
definitely be something we could hold up as an example.

------
zaidf
I keep telling myself that when someone finally takes Google down, AMP would
standout as example of where Google went wrong. Basically, almost every search
result I click on now requires THREE clicks:

1\. click from the search page to the search result AMP page

2\. click on a link on the AMP page to see the _original_ link

3\. click on the original link to bring the original search result

~~~
Spivak
[https://encrypted.google.com](https://encrypted.google.com) doesn't serve AMP
results. Add it to your browser or access it from ddg.gg with !g bang.

~~~
knolan
Amp finally helped me make the switch to ddg. I’d completely forgotten about
it until I saw this thread.

~~~
lucb1e
Nice :)

I too have ddg as default search engine. I refuse to bookmark (or set as
default) google again, so to use it I need to type part of the domain, wait
for it to load, and either paste or retype the query. That cost also helps me
to stay off of it, even if they have a better search engine. The risks
involved with one company owning most of the things one does online, is not
worth it.

------
inian
I have constantly heard that they can't reliably measure the performance of a
website unless it is AMP. I don't buy this argument at all. Google already has
mentioned to using site speed for as a minor ranking factor, why can't they
use the same methodology for putting websites in the carousell too?

Also, they have Real user data for over a million websites -
[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/12/crux](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/12/crux)

This is a way better indicator of site speed as opposed to if the site is AMP
or not. Would be so cool if Google used this data as a pre condition to put
sites into the carousell!

------
rockdiesel
Maybe I'm being too cynical, but I would suggest removing, or at least adding
'nofollow', to all the personal hyperlinks at the bottom of the letter to make
it look less like SEO spam.

It devalues the letter, in my opinion, because I see them as people signing
the letter for the sole purpose of promoting themselves.

But like I said...maybe I'm being too cynical.

~~~
betenoire
Half of those appear to be twitter handles. So yeah, you are probably being
too cynical ;)

------
rsoto
I agree with all the points, but I would add one:

Show AMP results for all browsers. AFAIK, only Chrome (and maybe Safari, can't
confirm) are shown AMP links in the search results.

There is people (like me) who like to support other browsers , or like some
addons. I get it, Google: you want your browser to be the most popular. You've
done it. Now treat the rest of them like capable pieces of software.

~~~
edflsafoiewq
Ahh, that would be why I've never seen one. I was wondering what all this
hullabaloo was about.

------
coding123
It's sad that only Google is getting punished when Amazon owns a major portion
of sales. Facebook is increasingly becoming the "home page" of small
businesses all over the world. Etsy is now the ONLY place people can sell
small hand-made art pieces. Ebay is the only marketplace to sell wholesale
items on.

None of these platforms value add much that can't be built into whatever the
next web becomes... But no organization is as powerful as a single one of
them.

So Google is allowed to do this as long as all these other companies do what
they are doing. I think what happened is that all the other disruptions were
done to companies that don't know something could be better - they were not
technologists, programmers, etc..

This letter is written by technologists, developers, so they know what google
has done to steal the market. But no one here wants to apply the same logic to
the other ones.

~~~
geofft
Er, if having a public petition about you is "being punished," those other
companies have definitely been punished too.

------
zzmp
This letter just seems to affirm that Google made a good business decision
with AMP.

------
debt
It is odd all that everyone talks about the blockchain and the one problem no
one talks about that it could solve is journalism.

News committed to an anonymous blockchain, immutable and potentially
monitizable seems pretty interesting but maybe not as lucrative as other
ideas.

Because AMP isn’t about ads or speed, it’s about editorial control. The same
goes for Facebook and Apple.

I don’t care how many press releases they put out denying it.

------
rch
I like the idea of an independent system that doesn't require publishers to
opt-in to AMP. But in addition to Speed Index, I'd apply a perceptual diff to
an ideal content rendering based on AMP-like heuristics.

------
cosarara97
AMP, that thing you have never seen in the wild if you run firefox on your
phone.

~~~
lern_too_spel
AMP pages show up for me when I use Bing in Firefox but not when I use Google.

~~~
calvin
Bing supports AMP, too.

[https://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-
joins-...](https://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-joins-the-
amp-open-source-effort)

------
zeep
I switched to duckduckgo a few months ago and it has been the first time that
I felt that I was not missing something... I tried to switch a few other times
before that and the results were of much lower quality...

------
deftturtle
Page loads < 600ms on mobile are a non-issue. All of the RTT talk and TTFB is
not worth the tradeoff. If we can have this paradise where all content is
prefetched and served/encrypted from Google to only save a fraction of a
second, it isn't worth the sacrifice of freedom.

I'll take 500ms page loads any day when the content comes from the true
origin. I don't want 60ms responses from a Google server when I'm trying to
use the internet.

Why not just make google the internet?? There's power and freedom to be had
when publishers aren't tied to a tech behemoth.

------
sliverstorm
Has no one yet tried forking AMP and simply removing all the Google? Call it
OpAMP. You might not get into the carousel right off the bat, but if you get
the ball rolling you'd have actual leverage instead of writing open letters on
the internet.

~~~
manigandham
Because it's much less work to just make fast pages using the HTML we already
have. The problem is that fast isn't what google wants, they want their
special HTML fork called AMP.

------
em3rgent0rdr
Google is a for-profit corp. How are these proposed changes in Google's self-
interest?

~~~
kuschku
Google was just fined 3 billion EUR for the advantage they gave to Google
Shopping in their search, it is very much expected that if they continue with
AMP, the same will happen again.

------
prklmn
Does AMP open google up to new anti-competitive claims?

~~~
partiallypro
Probably not. Google and Apple both currently get away with things Microsoft
could have never even dreamed of in the early 2000s and are not only living to
tell the tale...but profiting by leaps and bounds abusing their power. The
only excuse each of them has is that technically you have another "choice."
Which somehow holds weight now but never did for Microsoft.

------
shp0ngle
I like what Twitter does with AMP.

If a page has AMP version, it redirects mobile users to AMP version, but on
that page, not on its own cached version.

------
Animats
Resistance is futile. Google is the web now. There are people who don't
realize that gmail connects to a bigger world of email.

------
_jomo
I was wondering when Google serves content via AMP because it never happened
to me. I mostly use DuckDuckGo but occasionally use Google when I'm not
satisfied with the results. Turns out when you use Firefox on Android, Google
serves a different (older?) version of the Google search that doesn't link to
AMP.

Is AMP opt-in for site owners? Or is it determined by page load speed? It
didn't use AMP for my website, but it also loads faster than google.com
¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
Dolores12
If google makes a copy of original content and it doesn't hold copyright, why
nobody sued them for breach of copyright?

------
mmanfrin
My work firewall blocks this site; can someone paste the letter's contents?

~~~
scott_karana
(URLs not copied, sorry)

A letter about Google AMP

We are a community of individuals who have a significant interest in the
development and health of the World Wide Web (“the Web”), and we are deeply
concerned about Accelerated Mobile Pages (“AMP”), a Google project that
purportedly seeks to improve the user experience of the Web.

In fact, AMP keeps users within Google’s domain and diverts traffic away from
other websites for the benefit of Google. At a scale of billions of users,
this has the effect of further reinforcing Google’s dominance of the Web.

We acknowledge the problem of Web pages being slow to load, relative to
alternative, proprietary technologies such as Facebook Instant Articles and
Apple News. Publishers (especially in news media) have long faced difficult
choices and poor incentives, leading to bad decisions and compromises, and
ultimately to terrible user experiences.

Search engines are in a powerful position to wield influence to solve this
problem. However, Google has chosen to create a premium position at the top of
their search results (for articles) and a “lightning” icon (for all types of
content), which are only accessible to publishers that use a Google-controlled
technology, served by Google from their infrastructure, on a Google URL, and
placed within a Google controlled user experience. (source)

The AMP format is not in itself, a problem, but two aspects of its
implementation reinforce the position of Google as a de facto standard
platform for content, as Google seeks to drive uptake of AMP with content
creators:

Content that “opts in” to AMP and the associated hosting within Google’s
domain is granted preferential search promotion, including (for news articles)
a position above all other results. When a user navigates from Google to a
piece of content Google has recommended, they are, unwittingly, remaining
within Google’s ecosystem. If Google’s objective with AMP is indeed to improve
user experience on the Web, then we suggest some simple changes that would do
that while still allowing the Web to remain dynamic, competitive and consumer-
oriented:

Instead of granting premium placement in search results only to AMP, provide
the same perks to all pages that meet an objective, neutral performance
criterion such as Speed Index. Publishers can then use any technical solution
of their choice. Do not display third-party content within a Google page
unless it is clear to the user that they are looking at a Google product. It
is perfectly acceptable for Google to launch a “news reader”, but it is not
acceptable to display a page that carries only third party branding on what is
actually a Google URL, nor to require that third party to use Google’s hosting
in order to appear in search results. We don’t want to stop Google’s
development of AMP, and these changes do not require that. We also applaud
search engines that give ranking preference to fast-loading pages. AMP can
remain one of a range of technologies that give publishers high quality
options for delivering Web pages quickly and making users happy.

However, publishers should not be compelled by Google’s search dominance to
put their content under a Google umbrella. The Web is not Google, and should
not be just Google.

Sincerely, AS INDIVIDUALS

<long list of names>

~~~
jwilk
Hyperlinks:

* Accelerated Mobile Pages: [https://ampproject.org](https://ampproject.org)

* Facebook Instant Articles: [https://instantarticles.fb.com/](https://instantarticles.fb.com/)

* Apple News: [https://developer.apple.com/news-publisher/](https://developer.apple.com/news-publisher/)

* source: [https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/about-amp](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/about-amp)

* Speed Index: [https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-webpag...](https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-webpagetest/metrics/speed-index)

------
krisives
AMP is borderline MITM.

~~~
jopsen
then you didn't read yesterdays announcement:
[https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/improving-urls-
for-...](https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/improving-urls-for-amp-
pages/)

Look at the underlying specs... They are talking about bundling web packages
and signing them with TLS certificates, so that anyone can distribute them...
and the browser can still verify the origin.

------
kinkrtyavimoodh
AMP is the solution the internet deserves for not coming up with the solution
the internet needed.

~~~
TulliusCicero
This is a perfect way of putting it.

"You don't need AMP to make websites fast!"

And yet, most popular websites sans AMP were/are indeed quite slow.

~~~
mimsee
And yet, it's a miracle how a few lines of CSS & JS server from a high-speed
server makes a website load faster. So, no, we don't _need_ AMP to make
webpages faster. To make a website fast (OTTOMH):

1\. Optimize the content we deliver, (HTML, CSS, JS, etc...). Minimise the
time for all content and First Meaningful Paint.

2\. CDN servers. Bring the servers closer to the user, geographically.

3\. File compression during transport. Stuff like gzip and HTTP/2.0 (which
isn't a compression algo, but inherently makes the pages load faster, which
was the objective)

Edit(s): Some formatting & content, somewhat new to HN

~~~
TulliusCicero
You're missing the point. I recognize that it was quite possible to make fast
websites without AMP, but as a consumer, a theoretical solution that few take
advantage of is useless to me.

AMP got (some) websites to _actually_ be fast, which is a lot more useful than
a hypothetical.

------
dontnotice
It's funny how no one was up in arms when facebook (the leading source of
publisher traffic) did their version of accelerated pages.

AMP serves a purpose for the end user and it does so well, it loads instantly
and doesn't consume much data in the process.

As for their "demands":

1\. Google already states that AMP pages are ranked higher because they're
faster to load.

2\. I'm not sure if it's related but they they addressed that only yesterday:
[https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/improving-urls-
for-...](https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/improving-urls-for-amp-
pages/)

~~~
Y7ZCQtNo39
So are you saying -- all else equal -- that if your webpage can respond just
as quickly as an AMP one, that your search rank won't be docked?

E.g., your site is just as performant as AMP, but you're not using AMP.

~~~
dontnotice
Yup, that was in the the blog post announcing AMP, and subsequent press
comments.

I'm of the persuasion that they can rank and display the results however they
please, it's their site after all, so it's a non issue either way.

~~~
dragonwriter
I wonder how Google manages the network topology for testing this so that the
fact that AMP is served from a Google-local cache does not give it a speed
advantage to Google's speed-testing bot beyond any it may have in typical,
outside of Google, use.

~~~
ec109685
Google preferches the amp content.

------
rsbartram
Not sure how or why AMP is better at delivering a better web experience to
anyone than a properly and efficiently designed website.

~~~
criddell
It isn't. It was a response to all of the bloated, slow websites that were
becoming the norm.

~~~
rcheu
This is inaccurate, the preloading that AMP on Google Search does is a
significant advantage over anything you can do with current web technologies.

------
andrewmcwatters
Then make another search engine, don't complain about using Google technology
in Google's search engine, on Google's browser.

~~~
Old_Thrashbarg
You could use that argument to argue against any regulation of any monopoly.

"You don't like that Comcast is going to decide what sites you can see? Then
make your own ISP"

"You don't like that the water company is pricing people out of drinking
water? Make your own water utility"

"You don't like that Golden Gate jacked their prices? Build your own bridge"

BTW, those examples aren't exaggerations. I imagine they're all no less
difficult than making a new search engine to compete with Google.

------
robtaylor
Complaining about google for using their bat and ball in their backyard?

~~~
jacquesm
The web is not Google´s backyard.

~~~
dymk
google.com's search results, which is where these AMP links are served up, is
Google's back yard.

~~~
bhtru
Naive to assume that the largest portal for the web can't have a detrimental
effect on the web. As that's what this is. The clout Google has in driving web
standards is both a positive and negative. In the case of AMP the consequences
of the trajectory Google is on now can set the precedent for other networks
and ultimately lead to further centralization of content.

~~~
dymk
That's fine, and it's also their backyard, not "the web", which is what the
parent comment said.

------
Old_Thrashbarg
Google registered a domain just to host a letter?

------
jak1192
When you navigate to an AMP site there is a very clear icon at the top to
click and go to the site's actual domain. I don't understand what this letter
is so upset about - if they have such a problem, they should build their own
search engine.

