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Disclosure: I work at Google (but not on search).

You're confusing an important thing here: Google places news higher than the original source. Given that WWDC is over, this is actually preferable. It is true that all the news results are AMPed, but there was certainly a time when not everyone was onboard yet and the carousel included non-AMP results (I assume if you can find a news topic sufficiently obscure to have a non-AMP publisher, yet important enough for Top Stories it might show up).

If you instead search for "Iceland hikes" you get a useful one box of info, then an AMPed page then a non-AMPed result and so on.

tl;dr: Popular news publications are certainly all AMPified these days, and Top News is clearly prioritized. Regular search results aren't as clearly AMP leaning.




> It is true that all the news results are AMPed, but there was certainly a time when not everyone was onboard yet

Not everyone is on board. Many sites don't want AMPified pages. Google takes AMP pages and puts a giant "back" button that takes the website's users back to Google Search rather than deeper into the website.

It breaks URLs and referrers, because the AMP pages are now hosted on google.com, not on the destination websites' own domains.

AMP is a terrible attack on the open WWW. Google is saying, let us appify your content on our own platform (not on your own independent website) and restrict your markup/monitization options or we will drop you out of the top spot of the rankings.


One more comment about it:

This post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14536679) is an example of how AMP works. Someone has shared a link on HN. It's an AMP link, but I'm reading it on my laptop, and it's still AMP.

The end result is that all users (desktop too) are getting sent to an appified version of the page that restricts advertising/monetization options and markup options. It seems unlikely that the people who designed AMP were unaware of how this would work in practice.

I think that the core motivation for AMP has little to do with speeding up the Web, but is more about ensuring that Google's ads are delivered and so they have some say in which ad competitors are locked out.

It would be interesting to find out how much total traffic ends up on AMP pages, broken down by device type.

Restricted AMP version from the HN link: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-sues-former-aws-vp-non-...

HTML version: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-sues-former-aws-vp-non-...


What is the point of AMP? Google could have made the web faster by just de-ranking slow sites, what advantage does AMP actually provide beyond this?

The most glaringly obvious change is that you never leave google now. There's a nice little wrapper around the site with a back button that leads you straight back to google without even a page reload.

Oh but AMP isn't evil because it's open source. Open source but if you change a single byte in any file it doesn't verify anymore and arguably is no longer AMP.

Google wasn't even planning to show the original URL at all until people made a shitload of noise about it. And it took a month to add because reasons??? It surely looks like quite a difficult feature to implement, showing a URL and all. It must have been quite challenging.

I also enjoy the feature that there's no way to shut AMP off. Why would anyone want to? Maybe this is also to difficult a task for the AMP team to implement.


So you are confirming what is the mainstream thought in this thread: Google is actually ranking higher AMP pages compared to normal content. Because I think that each top ranking news website has also a non AMP-ed version. But, as per you admission and the anecdota in this thread, all the news are litterally dominated by AMP results. So I can't really see how people can still assert that AMP has no whatsoever influence in ranking when all the news results have a huge skew toward the AMP-ed version of any website instead of the original one.


I reckon the deeper purpose behind AMP is to fight ad blockers. Another google source in a thread from a few months back mentioned that the AMP team was within Google's advertising division.

The goal is to get all the content onto google servers so they can serve ads from the same origin that cannot be blocked.

Amp in combination with chrome's built in "ad blocker" is part of a broader Google strategy to protect their advertising model.


I know you don't work on search, but I still wanted to let you know I'm happy whenever an AMP site loads, because its instant, and that it loads at all, as opposed to other sites that may time out on my slow unreliable cellular connection in India. The UX is also more consistent, which lets me quickly read the article without wading through all the junk to find it.

Don't let the haters demotivate you :)


I think that most people who are opposed to AMP aren't against it for personal reasons as much as for what it does to the open WWW. If you give up your long-term freedoms for perceived short-term personal convenience, you will end up in a worse place. If you want news with a consistent interface, there are apps for that -- the open Web shouldn't be destroyed for the rest of us in the process.


I understand and respect that you're not against AMP for personal reasons.

An acquaintance of mine was complaining that Google didn't give him a way to opt his site out of AMP. If he's right, that's a bad move on Google's part. Google should let web site owners choose to not have their content served from google.com.

When I come across an AMP search result on my phone, I'm happy, because I know it will load, and load instantly. Web pages often don't load on cellular internet in India, and a web that works is more important to me than one that's "open". Not to mention that openness is ultimately about accessibility, and if hundreds of millions of people can't access it reliably, it's not open. You may not be able to relate to this since you're based in a developed country, where the Internet works reliably.

Maybe Google is acting in users' best interests, but not site owners'.

My view about AMP is more nuanced than a binary yes/no. Reducing it to a binary choice throws the baby out with the bathwater. Maybe you have a different view, in which case I again respect it, but we should agree to disagree.




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