5 ms·

Google to start sending search traffic to fast-loading AMP articles in Feb 2016

59 points by kevindeasis 11y ago

nattaylor 11y ago
Previous discussion on AMP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10507902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10507902 If nothing else, this seems to be making publishers rethink the cost of adding extra stuff on to content, which will hopefully be good for users.
mcguire 11y ago
Is it ironic that the AMP build is currently claiming to be broken? https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml Or that it makes pages faster to load by adding a Javascript library?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- nattaylor 11y ago
  If publishers behaved themselves then adding Javascript for optimization would be odd, but they don't behave: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-of-mobile-ads.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-... ...but overall I agree it does feel strange to have worked to hard to have highly capable browsers and then only use a tiny subset of functionality. From: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/about-amp.html https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/about-amp.html AMP JS The AMP JS library implements all of AMP’s best performance practices, manages resource loading and gives you the custom tags mentioned above, all to ensure a fast rendering of your page. Among the biggest optimizations is the fact that it makes everything that comes from external resources asynchronous, so nothing in the page can block anything from rendering. Other performance techniques include the sandboxing of all iframes, the pre-calculation of the layout of every element on page before resources are loaded and the disabling of slow CSS selectors. To learn more about not just the optimizations but the limitations, read the AMP HTML specification.
wiffleballmike 11y ago
Don't publishers themselves have control over their own page? Between this and Facebook's Instant Articles, should it be clear to publishers that their 2 largest source of referral traffic is telling them their site is too slow. What am I missing here, why aren't publishers seeing the light?
blackkettle 11y ago
Does this differ significantly in principle from the proxy-compression that Opera Mini has been doing since ~2006? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini#Functionality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini#Functionality Or is it primarily a new/better/alternative implementation of the same idea [probably it was also done by someone else before OperaMini...]
franze 11y ago
ok, lets take a look at https://www.ampproject.org/ https://www.ampproject.org/ which is a valid amp document. page speed insights https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ampproject.org%2F mobile 68/100 desktop 59/100 webpagetest.org https://www.webpagetest.org/result/151214_DW_X81/ first byte: 0.225s start render: 0.816s speed index: 3396 compare it to one of my sites where we did some speed optimization (wordpress based / responsive design) page speed insights https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.veganblatt.com%2Fnatuerliche-antibiotika mobile 71/100 (mostly thx to jquery) desktop 90/100 page speed insights https://www.webpagetest.org/result/151214_4T_X91/ first byte:0.145s start render: 0.712s speed index: 797 Amp is not per-se fast(er). But for this, they crippled HTML5, basically want us to forgo responsive design (responsive is not (only) about mobile), oh, and buy into another google dependency. and why? just because publishers are too lazy to make sites fast, and too dependent on third party crap (ads & an unbelievable amount of other crap). As a publisher and user, I hope Amp succeeds in disrupting the way publishers publish mobile. As a developer: OMFG, they throw the baby out with the bathwater. (they = Google, baby = html5, bathwater = internet)
hosay123 11y ago
Seems a fairly pointless tech to risk upsetting regulators over. What's the deal? "Use our <silly tech> or lose your ranking!"
- chatmasta 11y ago
  I'm surprised you're getting downvoted, because this seems like a valid criticism and was the first to pop into my head as well. How is this not anti-competitive? Google is favoring the ranking of sites that use its own tech. According to the AMP docs on third-party components [0], only 5 ad networks are supported, most of them Google-owned. [0] https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/third_party_components.html https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/third_party_component...
  - finnn 11y ago
    >AMP supports loading the bootstrap iframe that is used to load ads from a custom domain such as your own domain. according to https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/amp-ad.html https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/amp-ad.html
finnn 11y ago
No TLS requirement (that I can find). That's a shame. If they're going to be forcing publishers to get their shit together, you would think they would at least add basic TLS (if not full http/2.0 or something). I suppose since it's going through their CDN it's encrypted when it reaches the end user, but there's still the connection from their CDN to the publisher
frik 11y ago
WAP 4.0 (at least AMP reminds me of WML and WAP, that we had on Nokia/Siemens/Ericson cell phones 15 years ago)
- franze 11y ago
  more like cHTML 2.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-HTML
jtwaleson 11y ago
Interesting that they do this via partnerships with news outlets etc. Last year they adapted search rankings to get everyone producing mobile-friendly pages. They could have done the same here. Great for getting the web forward, but it's a bit mafia like. "Nice 1st search result you have there, would be a shame if something happened to it...". I would like if it they used this again to get other things on everyone's prio list: IPv6, HTTP/2.0, page load time. It's a bit of a nuclear weapon, but it gets things moving. More on topic: I have the strange feeling that AMP will somehow help them to "inline" the search results like they currently do with wikipedia etc.. That way your site becomes just a data source for Google, they're not actually driving traffic to it.
- shostack 11y ago
  This is where my questions drift to as well. What is the strategic play here? With FB's Instant Articles it is obvious they want to keep users on the FB platform and eventually tighten the noose on publishers while avoiding any ad blockers. Can't say I blame them. Not totally clear on what the end game is with Google here. They make a substantial portion of their revenue from the display inventory these publishers provide. --EDIT-- Just found an article that does a great job answering some of these questions. http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/12/14/does-amp-counter-an-existential-threat-to-google.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/12/14/does-amp-counter-...
patrickfl 11y ago
Just curious, I've been through the documentation a few times. Is there any kind of special sitemap we are going to have to do for each page. For instance lets say we have: http://www.example.com/normal-page.html http://www.example.com/normal-page.html and AMP enabled: htpp://www.example.com/normal-page.html?ampenabled=1 I realize a lot of people are going to do this with dynamic URLs or plugins, will Google just crawl these on their own? Also does anyone have any ideas for menus in AMP pages? SO far all the solutions I've seen don't have menus. I'd hate to see all this extra traffic and no way for visitors to browse other pages.
- cbowal 11y ago
  AMP versions have their own meta tag. <link rel="amphtml" href="AMP-URL"> It's not very well documented.

59 points by kevindeasis 11y ago

Previous discussion on AMP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10507902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10507902 If nothing else, this seems to be making publishers rethink the cost of adding extra stuff on to content, which will hopefully be good for users.

mcguire 11y ago

Is it ironic that the AMP build is currently claiming to be broken? https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml Or that it makes pages faster to load by adding a Javascript library?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
nattaylor 11y ago
If publishers behaved themselves then adding Javascript for optimization would be odd, but they don't behave: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-of-mobile-ads.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-... ...but overall I agree it does feel strange to have worked to hard to have highly capable browsers and then only use a tiny subset of functionality. From: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/about-amp.html https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/about-amp.html AMP JS The AMP JS library implements all of AMP’s best performance practices, manages resource loading and gives you the custom tags mentioned above, all to ensure a fast rendering of your page. Among the biggest optimizations is the fact that it makes everything that comes from external resources asynchronous, so nothing in the page can block anything from rendering. Other performance techniques include the sandboxing of all iframes, the pre-calculation of the layout of every element on page before resources are loaded and the disabling of slow CSS selectors. To learn more about not just the optimizations but the limitations, read the AMP HTML specification.

wiffleballmike 11y ago

Don't publishers themselves have control over their own page? Between this and Facebook's Instant Articles, should it be clear to publishers that their 2 largest source of referral traffic is telling them their site is too slow. What am I missing here, why aren't publishers seeing the light?

blackkettle 11y ago

Does this differ significantly in principle from the proxy-compression that Opera Mini has been doing since ~2006? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini#Functionality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini#Functionality Or is it primarily a new/better/alternative implementation of the same idea [probably it was also done by someone else before OperaMini...]

franze 11y ago

ok, lets take a look at https://www.ampproject.org/ https://www.ampproject.org/ which is a valid amp document. page speed insights https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ampproject.org%2F mobile 68/100 desktop 59/100 webpagetest.org https://www.webpagetest.org/result/151214_DW_X81/ first byte: 0.225s start render: 0.816s speed index: 3396 compare it to one of my sites where we did some speed optimization (wordpress based / responsive design) page speed insights https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.veganblatt.com%2Fnatuerliche-antibiotika mobile 71/100 (mostly thx to jquery) desktop 90/100 page speed insights https://www.webpagetest.org/result/151214_4T_X91/ first byte:0.145s start render: 0.712s speed index: 797 Amp is not per-se fast(er). But for this, they crippled HTML5, basically want us to forgo responsive design (responsive is not (only) about mobile), oh, and buy into another google dependency. and why? just because publishers are too lazy to make sites fast, and too dependent on third party crap (ads & an unbelievable amount of other crap). As a publisher and user, I hope Amp succeeds in disrupting the way publishers publish mobile. As a developer: OMFG, they throw the baby out with the bathwater. (they = Google, baby = html5, bathwater = internet)

hosay123 11y ago

Seems a fairly pointless tech to risk upsetting regulators over. What's the deal? "Use our <silly tech> or lose your ranking!"

chatmasta 11y ago
I'm surprised you're getting downvoted, because this seems like a valid criticism and was the first to pop into my head as well. How is this not anti-competitive? Google is favoring the ranking of sites that use its own tech. According to the AMP docs on third-party components [0], only 5 ad networks are supported, most of them Google-owned. [0] https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/third_party_components.html https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/third_party_component...
- finnn 11y ago
  >AMP supports loading the bootstrap iframe that is used to load ads from a custom domain such as your own domain. according to https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/amp-ad.html https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/amp-ad.html

finnn 11y ago

No TLS requirement (that I can find). That's a shame. If they're going to be forcing publishers to get their shit together, you would think they would at least add basic TLS (if not full http/2.0 or something). I suppose since it's going through their CDN it's encrypted when it reaches the end user, but there's still the connection from their CDN to the publisher

frik 11y ago

WAP 4.0 (at least AMP reminds me of WML and WAP, that we had on Nokia/Siemens/Ericson cell phones 15 years ago)

franze 11y ago
more like cHTML 2.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-HTML

jtwaleson 11y ago

Interesting that they do this via partnerships with news outlets etc. Last year they adapted search rankings to get everyone producing mobile-friendly pages. They could have done the same here. Great for getting the web forward, but it's a bit mafia like. "Nice 1st search result you have there, would be a shame if something happened to it...". I would like if it they used this again to get other things on everyone's prio list: IPv6, HTTP/2.0, page load time. It's a bit of a nuclear weapon, but it gets things moving. More on topic: I have the strange feeling that AMP will somehow help them to "inline" the search results like they currently do with wikipedia etc.. That way your site becomes just a data source for Google, they're not actually driving traffic to it.

shostack 11y ago
This is where my questions drift to as well. What is the strategic play here? With FB's Instant Articles it is obvious they want to keep users on the FB platform and eventually tighten the noose on publishers while avoiding any ad blockers. Can't say I blame them. Not totally clear on what the end game is with Google here. They make a substantial portion of their revenue from the display inventory these publishers provide. --EDIT-- Just found an article that does a great job answering some of these questions. http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/12/14/does-amp-counter-an-existential-threat-to-google.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/12/14/does-amp-counter-...

patrickfl 11y ago

Just curious, I've been through the documentation a few times. Is there any kind of special sitemap we are going to have to do for each page. For instance lets say we have: http://www.example.com/normal-page.html http://www.example.com/normal-page.html and AMP enabled: htpp://www.example.com/normal-page.html?ampenabled=1 I realize a lot of people are going to do this with dynamic URLs or plugins, will Google just crawl these on their own? Also does anyone have any ideas for menus in AMP pages? SO far all the solutions I've seen don't have menus. I'd hate to see all this extra traffic and no way for visitors to browse other pages.

cbowal 11y ago
AMP versions have their own meta tag. <link rel="amphtml" href="AMP-URL"> It's not very well documented.