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The comments on this page alone are evidence, let alone the 100s of publishers my company has business relationships with and the feedback I get.

The only speed that search engines are responsible for is the results page. AMP has nothing to do with their user experience. And as stated several times, Bing joined for the same reason Google forces it, for more control over data by never leaving their domains.

And no, the ranking is not my problem. I don't know where you came up with that. The argument is that publishers lose ranking unless they use AMP and the same effective speed can be provided in much more neutral and friendly ways that doesn't require an extra copy of the site.

Anyways, it's clear that you're religiously defending AMP at this point with no acknowledgement of any of the arguments by myself or others on this page so I'll end it here.




> The comments on this page alone are evidence.... AMP has nothing to do with their user experience.

The comments on this page are from people who don't understand what AMP does and have a blind hatred for anything produced by Google, as I have repeatedly demonstrated. If people actually didn't like AMP, Bing wouldn't spend the money to support it.

> And as stated several times, Bing joined for the same reason Google forces it, for more control over data by never leaving their domains.

Where has that been stated several times? This is the first time you have used "Bing" in any comment in this thread. If it were really the case that people prefer slower loading articles, it would be a competitive advantage for a search engine not to support AMP.

> And no, the ranking is not my problem. I don't know where you came up with that.

Let me refresh your memory:

"There is no way around AMP if you don't want to lose ranking on an existing search results page. FB doesn't treat IA ranking differently from links. RSS doesn't treat content differently."

Notice how you even confuse a publishing technology (RSS) with ranking.

> The argument is that publishers lose ranking unless they use AMP

Because users prefer fast loading results! If users preferred slower loading results, a competing search engine could rank non-AMP results higher than AMP results or not show AMP results at all to win users from the search engine that shows instant loading AMP results.

> with no acknowledgement of any of the arguments by myself or others

I've quoted your arguments and addressed each one. As I've shown above, you've pretended arguments were made that weren't, and now you're blaming me for not acknowledging these phantom arguments.


Saying things like "blind hatred for anything produced by Google" isn't accurate or productive.

Bing cares about control like Google, that's why they also implemented it. I stated this, you quoted this, and yet you're changing the argument to be about slow sites for some reason. They are not related. Users can get fast sites as a secondary benefit of more control by search engines through AMP.

Nobody is confused about RSS, but you brought it up first and said AMP was the same. However using RSS does not give you higher placement. Are you disagreeing with that?

As for the rest, I'll try one last time: Users want fast sites, and nobody said they didn't, but Google can influence this speed through rankings without AMP. Rank sites by speed and you get the same outcome with sites that are fast enough. Instant is not necessary and doesn't nearly outweigh the extra cost of implementation and maintenance. This has been the argument this whole time, one that you haven't provided any rebuttal against.


> Saying things like "blind hatred for anything produced by Google" isn't accurate or productive.

I don't see anybody complaining about Bing's AMP usage, do you? Most of the commenters don't understand what AMP does, but they still hate it. You yourself didn't understand how AMP worked when we started this discussion, wondering why origin SSR was necessary when it is obvious to anyone who understands what AMP does, yet despite not understanding the problem AMP solves, you still hate it.

Google does some shady things, but contributing to AMP is not one of them. In fact, AMP is far less shady than its competing technologies that get far less attention on HN.

> However using RSS does not give you higher placement. Are you disagreeing with that?

What does that have to do with anything? Publishers implement RSS, which allows instant loading but gives even less control to publishers than AMP does, yet you are not complaining about RSS. As far as placement, implementing RSS gives them placement in news aggregators including Apple News. Forget about poor ranking — you can't get placement at all in these systems with just a plain HTML page and instead have to hand full control over to the aggregators.

> Google can influence this speed through rankings without AMP.

Who said they don't?

> Instant is not necessary

Says who? If instant weren't necessary, explain Apple News. They could have implemented it as links to existing web pages, but they instead make publishers give them a feed to ingest.

> This has been the argument this whole time, one that you haven't provided any rebuttal against.

I've repeatedly rebutted it by saying instant is necessary. You've been sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending it isn't. I strongly prefer to click on AMP links, and I can guarantee that most other users do as well, or why would the search engines bother labeling them with an icon?

If it were just about control, there is no reason to tell the user ahead of time that a particular link is to an AMP page. If it were just about control, what is the point of SSR on the origin and signed exchanges to make shared links not go to Google or Bing?


HN is a highly technical audience and the commenters here perfectly understand what AMP does. There's no irrational hatred here, and that's a silly thing to say in the face of multiple reasoned explanations of what people are finding wrong with it.

RSS is completely voluntary and used for inventory that is not serviced by websites. It has nothing to do with instant loading and can carry as little data as the pub wants. Apple News is Apple also wanting control, the same reason as FB-IA and AMP, and was also designed for offline use and device-local recommendations. Pubs willingly trade-off the loss of control for the extra reach but both FB-IA and AN support RSS feeds now because of pushback to use an existing syndication format.

You haven't actually provided as reason for why instant loading is necessary other than saying it exists and therefore it must be. That's not an argument, it's a tautology. If Google highly ranked sites loading under 1-second on the top half then you would get fast sites like HN. No AMP and yet here we are on instant loading website. Stackoverflow and dev.to are other examples, with no AMP required. Perhaps if publishers had both the incentive and didn't have to waste resources on AMP for SERP ranking, we could all be enjoying faster sites now.


> HN is a highly technical audience and the commenters here perfectly understand what AMP does.

You yourself provided a counterexample earlier in the thread. Here's another: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666920

These comments are highly upvoted, so the readers of the comments also don't understand AMP. If they haven't bothered to understand it but hate it anyway, that is clearly irrational, is it not?

> RSS is completely voluntary

Just like AMP.

> and used for inventory that is not serviced by websites.

Nonsense. RSS items almost always link back to plain web pages with the same content but with more publisher control.

> You haven't actually provided as reason for why instant loading is necessary other than saying it exists and therefore it must be.

I showed you an example of users preferring it. These results are clearly labeled, and users like me click them on purpose. If it was purely about control, they wouldn't be labeled.

As far as it being about control, you still haven't explained why Google ceded control to all other link aggregators just like RSS instead of following Apple's and Facebook's path.


And finally, if it were just about control, why wouldn't Google have set up a system for direct integration like Apple and FB instead of defining a publishing format that all link aggregators, including current and future competitors, could use and then make a steering committee for the format with only minority representation?


Because websites are standalone properties with much greater fidelity, design and content than a single article. Google is linking to results, not showing articles like FB or Apple News.

This is also why AMP is not used for much other than news sites, and yet another reason why it's limited, wasteful and unnecessary.


> Google is linking to results, not showing articles like FB or Apple News.

Results in general shouldn't be written in AMP. The AMP documentation is very clear that it is meant for content pages and by attacking it for a problem it isn't meant to solve, you are engaging in strawmanning.

> This is also why AMP is not used for much other than news sites, and yet another reason why it's limited, wasteful and unnecessary.

It is far less wasteful than Apple News, FBIA, and RSS, which are limited to the same problem but solve it in a much worse way for the publisher. Once again, why aren't you complaining about them?




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