People have been railing against Google's Amp on HN for years, and I think I finally figured out what it's for.
It's Google way of combatting phone apps.
If all of the world's information — especially current news and similar information — moves from the open web into apps, then Google can no longer crawl, index, or scrape that information for its own use. The rise of the mobile phone app is a threat to Google on so many levels from ad revenue to data for training its AIs.
So Google comes up with Amp to convince publishers to keep their content on the open web, where it can be collated, indexed, and otherwise used by Google for Google's services like search and those search result cards that keep people from visiting the content creators.
Google's explicit carrot in all this is the user benefit of page loading speed. Google's implicit carrot in all of this is page rank. But Google's real motivation is to have all of that information available to itself.
Can you imagine what would happen if content from even one of the big providers was no longer visible to Google? New York Times, WaPo, or even Medium? It would create a huge hole in a number of Google products and services, make its search results look even weaker than they already are, and cause people to look for search alternatives.
Amp was a reaction to Apple News and Facebook News: using those applications to read the news was a much better experience than using the web. Why? Mainly for two reasons:
1/ Apple and Facebook were hosting all the content.
2/ The content did not come with megabytes of JS and other unnecessary crap.
Amp is an attempt at saving the web, and Google is interested in that for the reason that you gave: they make their money from the web.
> Amp is an attempt at saving the web, and Google is interested in that for the reason that you gave: they make their money from the web.
Yes; attempting to save the web in much the same way that the parasitic wasp is trying to oviposit in your thorax and take over your behavior, in order to save you from being eaten by the spider.
This has already happened in China, where Baidu (The Chinese equivalent of Google) can’t crawl any articles from WeChat (The Chinese equivalent of Medium), as a result, the usefulness of its search result has deteriorated significantly. Recently, Baidu has been trying to start its own publishing platform with little success.
Also food ordering, travel reservations, health care appointments, banking, government services, and a whole lot of other things that would take too long to list. It's not an exaggeration to say the entire Chinese consumer experience runs through WeChat.
I think this is a fairly cynical take, as having news on the web is also pretty great for users.
Imagine if instead of having all news stories a quick search away you instead had to install apps from X different news sources (and inevitably grant them permission to access your location, contacts list, name of first born child etc.). It'd create lots of little silos of news with very little ability to go outside those silos.
Put another way, the web is a great platform for news. It does benefit Google, but it also benefits the billions of people who can freely access a huge range of sources.
Interesting theory. One hole is that companies want to be on Google's results. It hurts WaPo not to be in the top N results, so they have an incentive to make it at least possible.
I bet non-techie people _already_ read their daily dose of news from 1 to 2 news websites at most. Installing a dedicated app is not much different than surfing the same 2 websites everyday.
Also, for techie people, do you consider RSS as part of the "web" ? To me, an RSS aggregator app is superior to browsing 20 different news websites, all with different formats.
"web is just way more practical" isn't obvious. It depends about what you put in the "web" bag, and the use cases. Most apps use "web" protocols, so they are technically part of the web.
Apple and Facebook really doesn't care if the web dies as long as their platform take the lion's share. But for Google, search as a product can exist only if the web itself remains relevant and this is why it's trying to keep display ads alive even though it doesn't really give them much money compared to search ads but all the privacy complication coming from third party tracker.
Interesting, though the barrier for users to install a new app seems to be very high these days. Most people only install a few necessary apps and thats it.
In addition, we are talking about publishers here. There are thousands of news sites, no user has more than a couple of news apps. That’s why they have to keep up their website anyway, with or without amp.
It's Google way of combatting phone apps.
If all of the world's information — especially current news and similar information — moves from the open web into apps, then Google can no longer crawl, index, or scrape that information for its own use. The rise of the mobile phone app is a threat to Google on so many levels from ad revenue to data for training its AIs.
So Google comes up with Amp to convince publishers to keep their content on the open web, where it can be collated, indexed, and otherwise used by Google for Google's services like search and those search result cards that keep people from visiting the content creators.
Google's explicit carrot in all this is the user benefit of page loading speed. Google's implicit carrot in all of this is page rank. But Google's real motivation is to have all of that information available to itself.
Can you imagine what would happen if content from even one of the big providers was no longer visible to Google? New York Times, WaPo, or even Medium? It would create a huge hole in a number of Google products and services, make its search results look even weaker than they already are, and cause people to look for search alternatives.
That's my theory, anyway.