
The meaning of AMP - robin_reala
https://adactio.com/journal/13035
======
Touche
It's hard to have a good-faith debate about AMP when Google says that AMP
sites aren't given favor in search results, by defining the carousel as not
being part of search results.

~~~
rsoto
Even outside the carousel; three weeks ago we implemented AMP with our content
marketing strategy and we have received 34% more visits.

I don't think people our target is more inclined into clicking on AMP results
as they're non-technical, I'm guessing we're higher in the results.

~~~
sliverstorm
_I don 't think people our target is more inclined into clicking on AMP
results as they're non-technical_

The whole point of AMP is to target those users. Hence the little lightning
bolt. Even non-technical users can notice "hey this had a lightning bolt and
it was fast"

~~~
rsoto
I do user research for a living, and even technical users appear to be blind
to this kind of features. Maybe they're delighted by how fast the site loads
after they tap the result, but can't see them making the connection between
the bolt and the load speed.

But I'm digressing, what I'm seeing it's a sudden and constant traffic
increase in a short time span. I'm sure it's not because the result that was
on 3rd place now has a bolt icon and users are craving it; it's because my
result is higher.

~~~
gregable
There are thousands of threads on search ranking forums of folks reporting
traffic rising or falling significantly, right after making change X on their
site, for myriad values of X, many of which make zero sense as a ranking
factor.

Search ranking is complex, and sites move in search referrals by ~30% on a
daily basis without making any changes. Perhaps a different major site removed
pages. Perhaps a few important links were added to your site (or to a site
linking to your site).

~~~
leeoniya
as someone who tracks rank on a daily basis and in great detail. i can tell
you that rank [and traffic] changes can very clearly be attributed to specific
events or actions such as new inbound organic links or new on-page changes.
for web properties that have few changes which occur daily, it is very easy to
see the direct impact from deploying something specific within the following
week or two. there is no ambiguity as to where these things come from. our
rank is very steady across thousands of keywords over time and any
statistically significant changes are never a mystery.

to say that the boosted position/visibility of AMP can somehow get lost in the
"noise" of rank fluctuations from other factors is demonstrably false. i dunno
what kool-aid you guys are selling over there, but i'm certainly not buying
it.

the mission of AMP is fully Google-centric, not user centric. it is possible
and easy to build pages faster than AMP without any of AMP's additional
artificial limitations. AMP's carrot is that you get much greater visibility
and faster loading as a result of pages being hosted on google's servers and
loading via a pre-established TLS/TCP session.

you can read more here:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/78fevc/amplify_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/78fevc/amplify_automatically_convert_plain_html_to/)

real-world AMP pages are not what they're billed to be:

[https://imgur.com/a/OPVdN](https://imgur.com/a/OPVdN)

[https://imgur.com/a/mt6s6](https://imgur.com/a/mt6s6)

------
tboyd47
The crazy thing about AMP to me is that we wouldn't have nearly as much front-
end bloat on the web if it wasn't for the data-driven (read: click-driven)
form of advertising championed by (who else?) Google. They put the burden on
small time publishers for fixing a problem that they created.

Some of the stuff I see Google and Facebook doing to the web developer
community these days makes Microsoft in the mid-00s seem like a model citizen.

~~~
cobookman
If it wasn’t those two it’d be someone else. You might not even have the web
as we kno it without the ad analytics.

Unless you have a viable alternative monetization method?

~~~
recursive
I kind of liked it better when it was hobbyists and enthusiast sites. The "web
as we know it" isn't necessarily a great thing.

~~~
fooker
Hobbyists and enthusiasts do not scale to ~3 billion people.

~~~
recursive
Neither do most other things done by hobbyists. I don't understand what you're
saying. The only things that are good enough to do are those that scale to 3
billion people?

~~~
fooker
I am saying, if you want a web by and for hobbyists and enthusiasts, billions
of people has to be excluded.

Where do you think _new_ hobbyists come from?

~~~
recursive
I don't think lack of participation is the same thing as "exclusion". Bird
watching is another enthusiast hobby. Anyone can do it. But not everyone wants
to.

~~~
fooker
It seems clear at this point that several billions of people want to use the
web, not just hobbyists.

------
davethedevguy
Good article.

My main objection to AMP is not that is it being portrayed as a community
project (although, that does bother me). It is that Google are creating their
own subset of already well established standards (HTML, CSS), and forcing
developers to adopt them if they wish their content to appear at the top of
search results.

If this is truly a project to increase the speed and readability of the Web,
as it was initially promoted to be, Google have better tools for achieving
that outcome (demoting excessively slow sites in search results, for example).

In it's current guise, AMP is little more than Google aiming to force all
content on the web to be consistent with their own look-and-feel, and breaking
the fundamental philosophy of the web in the process.

~~~
SimeVidas
Why do you think has Google created these restrictions on HTML and CSS code in
AMP pages?

~~~
davethedevguy
I do believe that it is an effort to increase the speed of pages, by
preventing content creators from doing things that can harm the user's
experience on slower connections - I just don't think it's the right way to go
about it.

It also has the side-effect that all AMP pages must look fairly similar and
'on brand' for Google - which I doubt is an accident.

~~~
lllr_finger
What's the right way then? When I worked at a media conglomerate, AMP was the
only thing that reigned in and enraged the biz-dev and ad-ops departments. I'm
still proud that my AMP launch partner pages are out there and serving up
content really fast. I hate that it took this to provide that experience, but
I prefer it to the FB and AAPL walled garden syndication approach for business
and tech reasons.

~~~
falcolas
The right way: influencing ranking by load times for some exemplar (and easily
replicable) device and inter-actability events.

That way, sites like HN are boosted to the top, while sites which take 10
seconds for their JS frameworks and ads to load before showing text on the
screen are penalized.

~~~
lllr_finger
If a site gets 100m unique in a month they will be at the very top. They can
then choose to provide a fast site, or slap on a bunch of analytics, tracking,
and 3rd party bloat that provides business intelligence and millions in
revenue - while staying ranked at the top.

They get to have their cake and eat it too, and there was no incentive (before
AMP) to reign that in.

~~~
falcolas
That's the thing about parameters - they can be tuned. The factor for page
speed could have been tuned to matter as much, if not more than their unique
views, trashing their ranking the moment they started adding bloat.

Google appears to have decided not to, in an apparent effort to boost their
ecosystem, at the cost of the open web.

------
andy_ppp
Great article, I despise AMP and Google using its monopoly to peddle these
lies, and using this position to embrace and extend open web standards. We
have seen this pattern from a monopoly before and they are currently being
taken to task for this behaviour in the EU. I’m still a bit amazed that the
devs who work on this don’t understand what they are doing is squarely on the
side of evil but I guess it’s a pay check.

A few other things AMP lies about:

* Wastes bandwidth downloading content in the background

* Wastes battery rendering content in the background

* Downloads Google links you haven’t given permission you want to see

* You can’t even opt out

* Breaks the web url extending it for Google’s own purposes

* Copying URLs to send to friends or post online no longer works correctly

* Breaks the understanding that the domain you are on is the authority for it’s own content

* Traps publishers further inside Google’s web, not the open web.

~~~
SimeVidas
> Wastes bandwidth downloading content in the background. Wastes battery
> rendering content in the background.

That’s Google Search, not AMP. How much bandwidth does Search use? Is it big
enough to be a problem for some users?

> Downloads Google links you haven’t given permission you want to see.

Google Search can load assets from its own domain, like any other website. The
user can use browser extensions to block certain requests.

> You can’t even opt out.

You mean you can’t opt out of seeing AMP results on Google Search? Well, yes,
for obvious reasons. AMP is Google’s product. It would make little sense for
them to add such an option.

> Breaks the web url extending it for Google’s own purposes. Breaks the
> understanding that the domain you are on is the authority for it’s own
> content.

Yes, it does.

> Copying URLs to send to friends or post online no longer works correctly.

It works in iOS Safari and Firefox for Android (and probably other browsers as
well), which use the canonical URL when the user shares the page. There is
also a Share button in the header of the AMP page.

> Traps publishers further inside Google’s web, not the open web.

You can say that Google traps publishers, but not that AMP is not the open
web. Google AMP Cache is a website on the (open) web.

~~~
nailer
> That’s Google Search, not AMP.

That's AMP. AMP prefetches content from AMP sites which must be hosted on
google.com.

The AMP team, when asked about hosting AMP content outside google.com, mention
they can't prefetch from other domains with current tech as a blocker for
this.

~~~
SimeVidas
That’s Google AMP Cache, to be specific, which is used by Google Search. I was
pointing out that the (alleged) extra bandwidth and battery use happens then
the user visits Google’s website.

I’d limit the term _AMP_ to the library and framework for creating AMP pages.

~~~
tareqak
What term would you give for how Google Search treats AMP pages from regular
HTML pages?

~~~
SquareWheel
That's Google's implementation of the AMP Cache. It acts as a CDN for pages
that implement the AMP standard.

[https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/](https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/)

~~~
tareqak
OK, why does Google put AMP pages on Google's implementation of the AMP cache
above the carousel in mobile, or add the AMP icon to search results that are
AMP pages? If AMP pages are faster than regular HTML pages, then Google
Search's ranking algorithm would rank higher these faster pages organically.

~~~
manigandham
The biggest issue is that if search results were actually ranked by speed,
sites would already become 100x faster without any of this AMP nonsense.

~~~
SquareWheel
This seems to be a common misunderstanding, but page speed is already a search
ranking factor.

[https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-
speed-i...](https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-
search-ranking.html)

~~~
ENGNR
How fast do you have to be to get into the AMP carousel?

------
cobookman
I honestly love amp pages. They load in rural areas unlike other bloated
pages.

When you've got good service they load quick without annoying popups / ads.

If people hate amp, maybe it’s time to adjust the web standards to enable amp
experience with the html6 web.

(Disclaimer, I do work at Google)

~~~
sangnoir
Just yesterday an HNer was saying they are in Puerto Rico and the vast
majority of pages won't load due to bandwidth restrictions - except for HN and
one other site I'm forgetting. I would bet you AMP pages would load fine for
them. HN loves to hate on page bloat _and_ AMP, confusingly.

I have noticed HNers conflate AMP the standard and Google Search's caching
behaviour and/or ranking of AMP pages. I love the former, and not the latter.
They really ought to make it possible for mobile search users to opt-out of
getting AMP results.

~~~
mattmanser
How is it confusing?

I hate page bloat because it's slow.

I hate AMP as it's an obvious, extremely damaging, land grab.

~~~
sangnoir
I went on to differentiate between AMP the standard and Google's search result
and serving from Google's cache (the "land grab" aspect). Dismissing both is
throwing the baby out with the bathwater IMO - I'll get behind anyone who's
encouraging trim pages - such as adhering to the AMP standard.

~~~
pwinnski
I haven't seen anybody hating on making pages "adhere to the AMP standard."
When people express loathing of AMP, we're objecting to exactly what this
article describes: an expansive and dishonest land grab by Google.

It is reasonable and correct to hate both web page bloat and Google's so-
called "solution" that breaks the web.

------
dblooman
I have found some sites have made the "main" site better than AMP in terms of
speed and download, but because its often the first result, sometimes you get
an inferior experience. As someone who built and deployed the bbc news amp
experience, i didn't really know how it was going to be used, but i would have
raised serious concerns knowing what we know now.

------
digitalbase
I've been pushing back hard on adding AMP as a feature on our product and I am
glad I did. We host/publish millions of articles for our clients and I just
don't feel comfortable enabling AMP and allowing the big boys to get away with
this crap.

All large CMS players and publishing platforms should read this post.

~~~
tboyd47
I think a decent compromise (one I'd like to see more sites adopt) is only
putting a subset of your page's content on the AMPed version, with a "Read the
full article on XYZ.com" banner at the bottom. It gives you that preferred
real estate while also acting as a funnel to your site.

~~~
geofft
I've seen a bunch of sites do that, and honestly I appreciate that as an end
user because I want to get to the actual site, but at that point, AMP's story
that it makes the web faster is actively untrue: you have to wait for the AMP
page to load, scroll, and _then_ load the normal page.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Doesn't that make it win-win? It both gives the site the advantageous position
AMP offers it, while undermining AMP's entire purpose and hence discouraging
support of it.

~~~
cobookman
Even in that case I find it useful. You get enough context to quickly drop out
if the content didn't meet your needs.

Try looking for recipes. I only click read more if the recipe met my needs.
Else I swiped right to get the next matching recipe.

------
gaius
It's meaning is: _all your sites, sites, sites, sites, all your sites, are
belong to us_

------
johnhenry
Google promised a way to make your content more powerful, but it turned out to
be just an easy way to control it themselves...

It's like they took on the role of Sauron almost immediately after giving up
their "don't be evil" slogan.

------
dmitriid
Worse still, if you mention any of these issues on AMPs GitHub page, they will
be closed with “nothing to do with AMP, it’s how Google chose to implement it,
ask Google”

~~~
diggan
Do you have any concrete examples of this? Would like to see the actual issues
and wording from the AMP team on it. Not that I don't believe you, just want
to read it for myself.

~~~
dmitriid
The biggest discussion AFAIR is
[https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/6210](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/6210)

“This is a Google Search issue, not AMP issue”

------
tambourine_man
Same link, submitted yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15581276](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15581276)

I don't get HN dedup anymore.

~~~
throwaway2048
articles that get no real traction are not counted for dedup purposes. Its
annoying when you submit them, but then this comment topic wouldnt have
occured.

~~~
tambourine_man
IMO there should be a window, say a year. That way evergreen topics can be
rediscussed over and over. But the way it currently works fragments the
comments over multiple links submitted on the same week. This one, for
instance, is lost in the ether
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ocdtrekkie](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ocdtrekkie)

Why not aggregate on the same thread?

------
seanwilson
It's a shame there's so much controversy around AMP. It's not a simple task to
set up a performant website. Ignoring the search result preference and
caching, but AMP is an interesting attempt to tame website development so your
pages load quickly. People keep commenting you can make a website fast without
AMP, but this is difficult when you're working in big teams and with
management that don't put priority on performance.

~~~
jordanlev
If Google just flat-out said they would penalize sites in rankings for poor
performance, then management would very much prioritize it. Same thing
happened with responsive design a year or two ago and now https this year --
my clients never cared about doing either of these when presented with the
choice (since it would cost more money), but the second they received and
email from Google about it affecting their search rankings (or showing the
site as "insecure" in chrome, as per the recent push for https), they were
asking us to do this for them.

~~~
seanwilson
I'm curious about this as well. How easy would it be to game performance
measurements? For example, when you can lazily load content it becomes much
more difficult to measure. The advantage of the AMP restrictions for them is
that they know for sure certain performance metrics will be met but this is
much more difficult for arbitrary webpages.

~~~
vanadium
Run a WebPageTest on an AMP link and tell me it fits within the 1 second
promise AMP keeps making.

Without prefetch, on a lot of the pages I've cross-checked manually, it
doesn't. So there's already gaming from the other side of the aisle in a
sense.

------
FloNeu
Hmm, while some of the critic i see here may be valid and justified, i like
the enforcing of this strict rule set...

i am senior frontend-dev and imho we wouldn't need AMP if in 99% of the cases
devs, or better their customers would give a damn about doing their job right
( most of the time they just don't know better, because they are just
beginners and never learned much about 'advanced' html/css - i haven't seen to
much senior devs lowering themself to do html/css work and/or are
knowleadgable in this areas ).

Most of AMPs advantages regarding FOUC, Jumping-Content and Performance is to
enforcing good HTML/CSS practices. Again citing guardian as example... So at
least know i have a way to simple enforce a minimum best practice for mobile
pages...

Whenever i had to sign off a responsive/adaptive mobile page loading 'insane'
amounts of unused styles and/or javascript i wanted to hit something with a
hammer... I am for giving it some time and see how it develops..

------
tcsf
For a bit deeper understanding of AMP pages and how Google makes all of this
work – check out this talk from Segment co-founder Calvin French-Owen
[https://www.heavybit.com/library/blog/get-ampd-an-
introducti...](https://www.heavybit.com/library/blog/get-ampd-an-introduction-
to-accelerated-mobile-pages/)

------
gonational
I think Google should be allowed to do whatever they want, as long as they
don’t lie to their visitors and pretend they are a search engine, which is
what they’re currently doing.

Perhaps this is the solution; require Google to stop calling itself a search
engine.

~~~
Sylos
And why do you think that? I could understand why you'd want to be thinking
that, if you own lots of Google stocks, but either way this does not provide
any resolution to anything.

Whether you call it a search engine or a curated content platform, users
aren't going to suddenly stop using it now.

------
throw2016
Let all the hyper monetized, ad-funded, people stalking, profile building
content head to amp, google and facebook ecosystems.

The more egregious Google's creepy behavior becomes the more urgent the
solution becomes. This is an opportunity to find a solution.

------
nailer
I dislike AMP too, despite being an author of an AMP library for node
([https://www.npmjs.com/package/amps-in-the-
trunk](https://www.npmjs.com/package/amps-in-the-trunk)), but:

> AMP is, I think, best described as nominally open-source.

That's not how open source works. Projects are either under an OSD license or
not. See [https://github.com/ampproject](https://github.com/ampproject) for
the licenses involved.

The article's premise still stands, but the author probably meant 'nominally
open standard' or just 'nominally open', both of which are accurate.

------
generalpf
I just googled “house of cards cancelled” in Firefox on my iPhone and every
result for a several screens worth of scrolling are AMP. I can’t find a single
result that isn’t AMP.

------
waytogo
> AMP pages don’t receive preferential treatment in search results.

Think it’s true. At the beginning AMP pages got a huge rank bonus. Now, it’s
much less. I feel Google sees AMP just for news pages. Guess the project got a
lot resistance internally which is understandable: With the hundreds custom
AMP components they are actually rebuilding the web.

~~~
lucb1e
> At the beginning AMP pages got a huge rank bonus.

That they ever got such a thing is ridiculous to begin with. One of Google's
principles is that they're neutral, besides clearly labeled paid-for ads which
have always been the business model. I don't think they succeed 100% in
setting aside unconscious biases that the programmers must have that build and
tweak/configure the thing, but I believe that it is one of the basic ideas. If
you say that was not the case, and is "much less" not the case now, then
saying it's not biased is just weird.

~~~
elsewhen
if they are "clearly labeled" now, what terms do you use to describe what he
ad labels were in the past?

[http://www.benedelman.org/adlabeling/google-colors-
oct2014.h...](http://www.benedelman.org/adlabeling/google-colors-oct2014.html)

~~~
lucb1e
Good point, I didn't know that. I've not been on the internet much before 2006
or so, and have been using ad blockers for as long as I can remember. Just
that in my mind, they're currently clearly labeled. I never saw the chart in
the post you linked, that's very interesting. Thanks for linking!

------
erikb
lol. This doesn't even need a discussion. If you have a website hooking nearly
all over websites without asking the users consent and without giving the user
a recognizable way to opt out, then of course it is toxic. It is toxic by
nature.

------
SimeVidas
> 1\. AMP is a community project, not a Google project.

It’s a community project _and_ a Google project.

> 2\. AMP pages don’t receive preferential treatment in search results.

They do due to the AMP carousel at the top, but that’s it. AMP pages don’t
receive bonus points in the search ranking for being AMP.

> 3\. AMP pages are hosted on your own domain.

They are, but they’re also hosted on Google AMP Cache.

~~~
hnarn
>due to the AMP carousel at the top, but that’s it

Are you for real? Read your sentence aloud to yourself and realize how
ridiculous it sounds.

You're basically saying: "They're just at the top of the page because they're
in a specific AMP section of the page at the top of the page, but that's it.
They don't get bonus points in the search ranking, which affects how high up
you are in the search results, which is not on top of the page"

~~~
SimeVidas
English isn’t my first language. I didn’t mean to trivialize the carousel by
saying “that’s it.” My intention was to clarify that the carousel is the
_only_ form of preferential treatment on Search. A big one, yes, but the only
one.

------
cisanti
Copy of my comment from another thread: You can do your part as a developer
and tell managers about the dangers of AMP. It is a stupid idea technically
(we have HTML, you can build a slim sites, Google can rank them higher) and
stupid business wise by giving away the control, branding, options.

I have convinced one project manager to not implement AMP and will continue to
try in the future. Please do your part by spreading word of the dangers of
GOOG and FB.

