10 ms·

We're Bullish on AMP

104 points by bergie 10y ago

ryanmaynard 10y ago
I recently setup a simple Jekyll blog that conforms to amp[1]. I used Amplify[2], a repo that was on Show HN[3] a few months ago. There are still a few issues with their docs at this point, but its basically just inline css/js. [1] http://ryanmaynard.co/ http://ryanmaynard.co/ [2] https://github.com/ageitgey/amplify https://github.com/ageitgey/amplify [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287540
- rikkus 10y ago
  I loaded this on a 4g connection and it took 14 seconds from click to progress bar disappearing. AMP talks about sub second load times on mobile. What might be in the way of that being realised?
  - 6DM 10y ago
    I just opened the site in chrome and did a hard refresh on the Good 2G setting of the chrome tools, only took 3 seconds. Maybe you're cell phone dropped the connection or something.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      It takes about 12 seconds on a 64k connection (the default if you used up your data cap). In contrast, HN loads in half a second on that connection. Obvious result: AMP is bloated.
      - ryanmaynard 10y ago
        I don't think its AMP. I think its my fault. Out of the box, you can't place analytics on the page. There is a special tag for any analytics. It seems I'm getting an error, and so Google has not cached it. Thank you for telling me. I need to debug that. That being said, I just received 239 ms with Pingdom.[1] [1] http://i.imgur.com/qeEyKqL.png http://i.imgur.com/qeEyKqL.png
        kuschku 10y ago
        Well, cache doesn’t matter when the page is almost a quarter megabyte, but you have only a 64kib connection. The majority of time spent will be on getting the 170kiB AMP lib.
  - ryanmaynard 10y ago
    Thank you for this. Google attempts to validate the AMP rules. If not validated, they won't cache it. Error on my part (misuse of their amp-analytics tag).
- mark_l_watson 10y ago
  Your site did load very quickly for me. Basically, Google is also your CDN with AMP?
  - ryanmaynard 10y ago
    Yes. There are limits to what you can place in an AMP site. Basically, its all static assets, so the entire AMP version is supposed to be cached by Google.
    - gorhill 10y ago
      > the entire AMP version is supposed to be cached by Google Does this means there is no way to opt out of connecting to a Google-controlled server in order for any AMP-based page to display properly?
      - ryanmaynard 10y ago
        Its the Google Amp Cache[1] > What gets cached? > If an AMP page is valid and is requested (so the Google AMP Cache is aware of it), it will get cached. Any resources in AMP pages, including AMP images, also get cached. > Can I stop content from being cached? > No. By using the AMP format, content producers are making the content in AMP files available to be cached by third parties. For example, Google products use the Google AMP Cache to serve AMP content as fast as possible. > Can the cache be crawled? > No. The Google AMP Cache is roboted to crawlers. We recommend that search engines process cache links according to the guidelines for crawling Google AMP Cache URLs. For more information, see robots.txt." [1] https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/faq https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/faq
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
anilgulecha 10y ago
AMP would be commendable if it came about as a open standard, and won in the marketplace. But it's come out controlled by the major search engine, that will promote and highlight pages in it's search rankings if you adhere to their new "open" standard. It may still be good, but leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
- MatthewPhillips 10y ago
  I mean, AMP is a bunch of custom elements and instructions not to use certain features that degrade performance. I'm not sure what part of this you want to be an "open standard", can you be more specific? AMP is more of a best practices guide than anything else.
  - anilgulecha 10y ago
    I mean google will show a lightning icon next to pages that follow the AMP standard (and plausibly use it as a positive signal in their ranking algorithm). A competing standard would not have these benefits.
    - MatthewPhillips 10y ago
      I was told by cramforce that there's no need to use AMP if your page is already fast on its own.
      - anilgulecha 10y ago
        Would you get the lightning icon without AMP?
        MatthewPhillips 10y ago
        The lightning icon is a carrot, you're assuming malice where it doesn't exist. The lightning icon will go away when being fast is the expectation.
ungzd 10y ago
Google reinvented WAP/WML in 2016 because cancerous news sites gone mad with javascript. Cool hack. Waiting for return of ringtones and pagers.
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  And tiny phones as a status symbol. And making sure you are the same network as your mates to call them for free after 6pm and at the weekends. Those were the days.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- retox 10y ago
  <marquee><blink>You are the 1,000,000 visitor to this thread!</blink></marquee>
- creshal 10y ago
  And yet AMP needs Javascript to work.
Yhippa 10y ago
> the bad one, in a suit and wingtips, that jets from office to office and shuts down Google Reader Ouch, that hit a nerve. Too early in the day, man. I've seen more AMP pages on the web than I have the Facebook version of it for what it's worth. The article went in to detail about how the pages were designated as an AMP. it seems somewhat elegant. It's opt-in but there's definitely an advantage to adding the mark-up to your page.
imaginenore 10y ago
I still don't get AMP. It's a different markup. Am I supposed to detect mobile devices (which is a massive pain) and serve them this separate HTML/JS/CSS? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the responsive design that we've been fighting for? And why is it for mobile only? If it's so fast, why not make it general purpose?
- bergie 10y ago
  You can keep AMP pages separate (different suffix, domain, whatever) and then let tools like Google discover them using rel="amphtml" https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/discovery.html https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/discovery.html
- _wmd 10y ago
  Google are very good at pumping out "standards" that fill short term commercial goals while in the meantime making a fragmented pig's breakfast of the rest of the web. Aside from HTML 5 (which I'm coming to accept was justifiably hostile to the W3 process), I have yet to see anything from Quic, SPDY, WebSockets, and now AMP that demonstrates any kind of long term thinking. WebSockets for a long time (is it still true?) could not run over a SPDY/HTTP 2 connection. SPDY itself had multiple fundamentally incompatible versions in the wild before things settled down (they changed how negotiation was implemented), WebSockets and SPDY duplicate many of the same concepts (yes, really), Quic seems utterly ignorant of the early history of the Internet and the importance of flow control, and now AMP. AMP it seems to me, is a standard designed around the current era shortcomings in the implementation of Google Chrome (and similar browsers). It's hard to get more myopic than that.
- Veen 10y ago
  > Am I supposed to detect mobile devices (which is a massive pain) and serve them this separate HTML/JS/CSS? No. It's the responsibility of search engines and apps to choose whether to send visitors to AMP pages. If Google crawls your site and finds AMP pages, it'll send mobile users to them from search.
K0nserv 10y ago
I'm not convinced of AMP. I've written before on HN about my own webpage[0] were the average page weighs in at around ~10kb. At one point I was working on integrating AMP and some of the constraints from AMP has made it into the site. Ultimately though the 170kb weight of AMP(17x my average page) is a no go. I think imposing the same constraint AMP imposes on you without actually using their JS is a good idea if you aren't after the special treatment from google. Another downside of AMP is that it just display a completely blank page if the user doesn't have JS enable or blocks 3rd-party JS. 0: https://hugotunius.se https://hugotunius.se
- esrauch 10y ago
  If your pages are 10kb then I think you aren't the target audience for amp. They say themselves that amp pages will never be the most light weight of all pages and never faster then perfectly hand tuned pages, just way way better than the current median website that loads MBs from 75 domains and relayouts 50 times before it's done loading.
  - K0nserv 10y ago
    You have a good point all though I'd like to put forth the argument that many websites could just as well focus on reducing their page sizes and external resources instead of/before adopting AMP.
    - esrauch 10y ago
      As an outsider (not remotely in any position to use amp or not) it looks like one of the positive aspects of amp is a utility with some associated carrot and stick to just get publishers to realize those things really are bad and need to be taken seriously.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Well, then Google should also include the search rating bonus and the "fast page" lightning logo for all pages smaller than 170kb directly.
- 10y ago
falcolas 10y ago
I like this write up, but it raised a question for me: if Google is serving amp pages directly, how quickly will updates to your page get reflected in Google's cache? Hardening back to "only two hard problems in programming" and all that.
- tantalor 10y ago
  "We're currently working on a programmatic solution for invalidation. We respect max-age headers for deciding when to refetch a page, but will keep serving the last known version until we have done so." https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/1901 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/1901
barrkel 10y ago
I thought AMP was an anti-ad-blocking play. It smells to me like Google is trying to use its dominant position in search to reduce consumer control of the browser; it's a risky road to go down for everyone, including Google. For me, as long as I disable javascript, the modern mobile web is plenty fast enough. That is, the bits of the web I want to use on the move: mostly text, occasional pictures. It takes real effort to break this with javascript disabled. Most JS on e.g. news sites, blogs, aggregators etc. is tracking and ad related, dynamically adding links to viral content, all that stuff you don't need and dramatically slows down sites through repeated reflow.
- chatmasta 10y ago
  Yep, this was also incredibly obvious to me when google introduced it. It's such a typical Google move to market something as "better for the web" when what they really mean is "better for our pockets." Fortunately for anyone with Apple phones, content blockers should still work on AMP pages.
  - sanderjd 10y ago
    Won't things like AdBlock still work on AMP pages? Do people outside the HN bubble turn off javascript to block ads (or for any other reason)?
    - Spivak 10y ago
      No, but I can imagine a future where ad blockers start blocking all non-essential JS. It would likely be more conservative than someone who uses policeman or uMatrix but I have no doubt users would appreciate the speed increase -- especially on mobile.
    - notatoad 10y ago
      i've seen this assumption made just about every time AMP is mentioned, that it's somehow about preventing adblock. AMP requires that all your ads are specifically tagged as ads, and that no javascript is modifying the page after it has loaded. Instead of making adblocking more difficult, it seems to be going out of its way to make adblocking easier to do and more difficult for publishers to prevent.
lllr_finger 10y ago
Working at a media conglomerate I probably have a different take than some - I love AMP, compared to the alternatives. For personal sites I don't see it as a big deal, but for news sites it's amazing. The devs working on news sites understand the current state of bloated pages is bad and are eager to create fast, sexy pages. Unfortunately there are entities such as BizDev and AdOps that want to add more stuff to the pages to make more money, and it's easier to quantify ROI for a new ad placement compared to shaving 100ms off page load times. So we end up with dozens of scripts and script loaders and all sorts of other things. Editors and product managers want responsive pages with ad placements and enhanced functionality. Along comes AMP, and all of the above are freaking out at the loss of control while I'm gleefully looking at super fast loading times and pages that still have most of the important functionality and ads. Yes, the script size is large, but it will be cached amongst all AMP pages and it's refreshing to not have to think about implementing responsive pages, lazy loading, etc. because AMP handles all that.
- untog 10y ago
  I have a different media take. Any attempt at making something other than a text article with a photo slideshow attached now carries an SEO penalty. I think that's a shame - not that every article should be some crazy one off creation, but in an industry that desperately needs to innovate and provide value to readers, closing off that many doors strikes me as dangerous.
  - shostack 10y ago
    You forgot high CPM auto play video ads.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
squeaky-clean 10y ago
Has anyone else noticed how Google is using AMP to provide content for searches without you ever leaving google.com? Here's an example of a quick search I did for "Sausage Party review" [0]. You can quickly flip through AMP articles by comicbook.com, USAToday, and others while clearly staying within Google. It seems to me like they're trying this a lot lately, Structured Data is the other example that comes to mind. Creating "web standards", that are supposed to help a website, but are really most helpful to Google and their crawler. Then giving an SEO boost to anyone who uses those standards. And then once enough people are using those standards, just display the relevant parts of the results directly on google.com I get that it being hosted on Google allows the servers to respond more quickly, but do you think news websites that added these features with the promise of better performance and an SEO boost were aware their articles would be one thumb-swipe away from a competitor's articles? [0] http://imgur.com/a/ZDXbQ http://imgur.com/a/ZDXbQ
- jayd16 10y ago
  Of all the conspiracy theories in this thread, I think "make easily crawlable pages popular again" is the most realistic.
- shostack 10y ago
  It frankly wouldn't surprise me if they made a move for "suggesting" publishers allow their article to be displayed in full in the SERPs/Google News while giving a cut of related AdSense revenue ala FB Instant ours fully own the experience, could curate the feed to maximize earnings, provide a significantly less bloated experience, and gain even more of an advantage in the SSP space to strengthen the moat for DoubleClick.
sametmax 10y ago
AMP = the page you should have created originally without bulk, light, fast and readable. But you didn't, and now you have 2 pages to maintain.
JustUhThought 10y ago
I love the markets, but would be happy to never see market terms like "bullish" on HN.
darkhorn 10y ago
I don't understand why should I put a JavaScript (AMP) file to my web pages while it doesn't have any JavaScript file.
chinathrow 10y ago
From the how-to: "Contain a <script async src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script> https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script> tag as the last element in their head (this includes and loads the AMP JS library)." This is the big no go for me here - why would I need an AMP library, hosted on a third party domain I have no control watsoever. They can inject what they like, track initial script load etc. The same goes on if you want to include further content such as tweets etc. What do other folks think about these requirements?
chinathrow 10y ago
"The Google AMP Cache is a proxy-based content delivery network for delivering all valid AMP documents. It fetches AMP HTML pages, caches them, and improves page performance automatically. When using the Google AMP Cache, the document, all JS files and all images load from the same origin that is using HTTP 2.0 for maximum efficiency." So the proxy learns all about my traffic patterns, usage stats and userbase. It looks like you can't opt-out of this feature or at least I couldn't find it.
pjmlp 10y ago
With Web = HTML + CSS - JavaScript we don't need AMP.

104 points by bergie 10y ago

I recently setup a simple Jekyll blog that conforms to amp[1]. I used Amplify[2], a repo that was on Show HN[3] a few months ago. There are still a few issues with their docs at this point, but its basically just inline css/js. [1] http://ryanmaynard.co/ http://ryanmaynard.co/ [2] https://github.com/ageitgey/amplify https://github.com/ageitgey/amplify [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287540

rikkus 10y ago
I loaded this on a 4g connection and it took 14 seconds from click to progress bar disappearing. AMP talks about sub second load times on mobile. What might be in the way of that being realised?
- 6DM 10y ago
  I just opened the site in chrome and did a hard refresh on the Good 2G setting of the chrome tools, only took 3 seconds. Maybe you're cell phone dropped the connection or something.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    It takes about 12 seconds on a 64k connection (the default if you used up your data cap). In contrast, HN loads in half a second on that connection. Obvious result: AMP is bloated.
    - ryanmaynard 10y ago
      I don't think its AMP. I think its my fault. Out of the box, you can't place analytics on the page. There is a special tag for any analytics. It seems I'm getting an error, and so Google has not cached it. Thank you for telling me. I need to debug that. That being said, I just received 239 ms with Pingdom.[1] [1] http://i.imgur.com/qeEyKqL.png http://i.imgur.com/qeEyKqL.png
      - kuschku 10y ago
        Well, cache doesn’t matter when the page is almost a quarter megabyte, but you have only a 64kib connection. The majority of time spent will be on getting the 170kiB AMP lib.
- ryanmaynard 10y ago
  Thank you for this. Google attempts to validate the AMP rules. If not validated, they won't cache it. Error on my part (misuse of their amp-analytics tag).
mark_l_watson 10y ago
Your site did load very quickly for me. Basically, Google is also your CDN with AMP?
- ryanmaynard 10y ago
  Yes. There are limits to what you can place in an AMP site. Basically, its all static assets, so the entire AMP version is supposed to be cached by Google.
  - gorhill 10y ago
    > the entire AMP version is supposed to be cached by Google Does this means there is no way to opt out of connecting to a Google-controlled server in order for any AMP-based page to display properly?
    - ryanmaynard 10y ago
      Its the Google Amp Cache[1] > What gets cached? > If an AMP page is valid and is requested (so the Google AMP Cache is aware of it), it will get cached. Any resources in AMP pages, including AMP images, also get cached. > Can I stop content from being cached? > No. By using the AMP format, content producers are making the content in AMP files available to be cached by third parties. For example, Google products use the Google AMP Cache to serve AMP content as fast as possible. > Can the cache be crawled? > No. The Google AMP Cache is roboted to crawlers. We recommend that search engines process cache links according to the guidelines for crawling Google AMP Cache URLs. For more information, see robots.txt." [1] https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/faq https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/faq
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

anilgulecha 10y ago

AMP would be commendable if it came about as a open standard, and won in the marketplace. But it's come out controlled by the major search engine, that will promote and highlight pages in it's search rankings if you adhere to their new "open" standard. It may still be good, but leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

MatthewPhillips 10y ago
I mean, AMP is a bunch of custom elements and instructions not to use certain features that degrade performance. I'm not sure what part of this you want to be an "open standard", can you be more specific? AMP is more of a best practices guide than anything else.
- anilgulecha 10y ago
  I mean google will show a lightning icon next to pages that follow the AMP standard (and plausibly use it as a positive signal in their ranking algorithm). A competing standard would not have these benefits.
  - MatthewPhillips 10y ago
    I was told by cramforce that there's no need to use AMP if your page is already fast on its own.
    - anilgulecha 10y ago
      Would you get the lightning icon without AMP?
      - MatthewPhillips 10y ago
        The lightning icon is a carrot, you're assuming malice where it doesn't exist. The lightning icon will go away when being fast is the expectation.

ungzd 10y ago

Google reinvented WAP/WML in 2016 because cancerous news sites gone mad with javascript. Cool hack. Waiting for return of ringtones and pagers.

bbcbasic 10y ago
And tiny phones as a status symbol. And making sure you are the same network as your mates to call them for free after 6pm and at the weekends. Those were the days.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
retox 10y ago
<marquee><blink>You are the 1,000,000 visitor to this thread!</blink></marquee>
creshal 10y ago
And yet AMP needs Javascript to work.

Yhippa 10y ago

> the bad one, in a suit and wingtips, that jets from office to office and shuts down Google Reader Ouch, that hit a nerve. Too early in the day, man. I've seen more AMP pages on the web than I have the Facebook version of it for what it's worth. The article went in to detail about how the pages were designated as an AMP. it seems somewhat elegant. It's opt-in but there's definitely an advantage to adding the mark-up to your page.

imaginenore 10y ago

I still don't get AMP. It's a different markup. Am I supposed to detect mobile devices (which is a massive pain) and serve them this separate HTML/JS/CSS? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the responsive design that we've been fighting for? And why is it for mobile only? If it's so fast, why not make it general purpose?

bergie 10y ago
You can keep AMP pages separate (different suffix, domain, whatever) and then let tools like Google discover them using rel="amphtml" https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/discovery.html https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/discovery.html
_wmd 10y ago
Google are very good at pumping out "standards" that fill short term commercial goals while in the meantime making a fragmented pig's breakfast of the rest of the web. Aside from HTML 5 (which I'm coming to accept was justifiably hostile to the W3 process), I have yet to see anything from Quic, SPDY, WebSockets, and now AMP that demonstrates any kind of long term thinking. WebSockets for a long time (is it still true?) could not run over a SPDY/HTTP 2 connection. SPDY itself had multiple fundamentally incompatible versions in the wild before things settled down (they changed how negotiation was implemented), WebSockets and SPDY duplicate many of the same concepts (yes, really), Quic seems utterly ignorant of the early history of the Internet and the importance of flow control, and now AMP. AMP it seems to me, is a standard designed around the current era shortcomings in the implementation of Google Chrome (and similar browsers). It's hard to get more myopic than that.
Veen 10y ago
> Am I supposed to detect mobile devices (which is a massive pain) and serve them this separate HTML/JS/CSS? No. It's the responsibility of search engines and apps to choose whether to send visitors to AMP pages. If Google crawls your site and finds AMP pages, it'll send mobile users to them from search.

K0nserv 10y ago

I'm not convinced of AMP. I've written before on HN about my own webpage[0] were the average page weighs in at around ~10kb. At one point I was working on integrating AMP and some of the constraints from AMP has made it into the site. Ultimately though the 170kb weight of AMP(17x my average page) is a no go. I think imposing the same constraint AMP imposes on you without actually using their JS is a good idea if you aren't after the special treatment from google. Another downside of AMP is that it just display a completely blank page if the user doesn't have JS enable or blocks 3rd-party JS. 0: https://hugotunius.se https://hugotunius.se

esrauch 10y ago
If your pages are 10kb then I think you aren't the target audience for amp. They say themselves that amp pages will never be the most light weight of all pages and never faster then perfectly hand tuned pages, just way way better than the current median website that loads MBs from 75 domains and relayouts 50 times before it's done loading.
- K0nserv 10y ago
  You have a good point all though I'd like to put forth the argument that many websites could just as well focus on reducing their page sizes and external resources instead of/before adopting AMP.
  - esrauch 10y ago
    As an outsider (not remotely in any position to use amp or not) it looks like one of the positive aspects of amp is a utility with some associated carrot and stick to just get publishers to realize those things really are bad and need to be taken seriously.
- kuschku 10y ago
  Well, then Google should also include the search rating bonus and the "fast page" lightning logo for all pages smaller than 170kb directly.
10y ago

falcolas 10y ago

I like this write up, but it raised a question for me: if Google is serving amp pages directly, how quickly will updates to your page get reflected in Google's cache? Hardening back to "only two hard problems in programming" and all that.

tantalor 10y ago
"We're currently working on a programmatic solution for invalidation. We respect max-age headers for deciding when to refetch a page, but will keep serving the last known version until we have done so." https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/1901 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/1901

barrkel 10y ago

I thought AMP was an anti-ad-blocking play. It smells to me like Google is trying to use its dominant position in search to reduce consumer control of the browser; it's a risky road to go down for everyone, including Google. For me, as long as I disable javascript, the modern mobile web is plenty fast enough. That is, the bits of the web I want to use on the move: mostly text, occasional pictures. It takes real effort to break this with javascript disabled. Most JS on e.g. news sites, blogs, aggregators etc. is tracking and ad related, dynamically adding links to viral content, all that stuff you don't need and dramatically slows down sites through repeated reflow.

chatmasta 10y ago
Yep, this was also incredibly obvious to me when google introduced it. It's such a typical Google move to market something as "better for the web" when what they really mean is "better for our pockets." Fortunately for anyone with Apple phones, content blockers should still work on AMP pages.
- sanderjd 10y ago
  Won't things like AdBlock still work on AMP pages? Do people outside the HN bubble turn off javascript to block ads (or for any other reason)?
  - Spivak 10y ago
    No, but I can imagine a future where ad blockers start blocking all non-essential JS. It would likely be more conservative than someone who uses policeman or uMatrix but I have no doubt users would appreciate the speed increase -- especially on mobile.
  - notatoad 10y ago
    i've seen this assumption made just about every time AMP is mentioned, that it's somehow about preventing adblock. AMP requires that all your ads are specifically tagged as ads, and that no javascript is modifying the page after it has loaded. Instead of making adblocking more difficult, it seems to be going out of its way to make adblocking easier to do and more difficult for publishers to prevent.

lllr_finger 10y ago

Working at a media conglomerate I probably have a different take than some - I love AMP, compared to the alternatives. For personal sites I don't see it as a big deal, but for news sites it's amazing. The devs working on news sites understand the current state of bloated pages is bad and are eager to create fast, sexy pages. Unfortunately there are entities such as BizDev and AdOps that want to add more stuff to the pages to make more money, and it's easier to quantify ROI for a new ad placement compared to shaving 100ms off page load times. So we end up with dozens of scripts and script loaders and all sorts of other things. Editors and product managers want responsive pages with ad placements and enhanced functionality. Along comes AMP, and all of the above are freaking out at the loss of control while I'm gleefully looking at super fast loading times and pages that still have most of the important functionality and ads. Yes, the script size is large, but it will be cached amongst all AMP pages and it's refreshing to not have to think about implementing responsive pages, lazy loading, etc. because AMP handles all that.

untog 10y ago
I have a different media take. Any attempt at making something other than a text article with a photo slideshow attached now carries an SEO penalty. I think that's a shame - not that every article should be some crazy one off creation, but in an industry that desperately needs to innovate and provide value to readers, closing off that many doors strikes me as dangerous.
- shostack 10y ago
  You forgot high CPM auto play video ads.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

squeaky-clean 10y ago

Has anyone else noticed how Google is using AMP to provide content for searches without you ever leaving google.com? Here's an example of a quick search I did for "Sausage Party review" [0]. You can quickly flip through AMP articles by comicbook.com, USAToday, and others while clearly staying within Google. It seems to me like they're trying this a lot lately, Structured Data is the other example that comes to mind. Creating "web standards", that are supposed to help a website, but are really most helpful to Google and their crawler. Then giving an SEO boost to anyone who uses those standards. And then once enough people are using those standards, just display the relevant parts of the results directly on google.com I get that it being hosted on Google allows the servers to respond more quickly, but do you think news websites that added these features with the promise of better performance and an SEO boost were aware their articles would be one thumb-swipe away from a competitor's articles? [0] http://imgur.com/a/ZDXbQ http://imgur.com/a/ZDXbQ

jayd16 10y ago
Of all the conspiracy theories in this thread, I think "make easily crawlable pages popular again" is the most realistic.
shostack 10y ago
It frankly wouldn't surprise me if they made a move for "suggesting" publishers allow their article to be displayed in full in the SERPs/Google News while giving a cut of related AdSense revenue ala FB Instant ours fully own the experience, could curate the feed to maximize earnings, provide a significantly less bloated experience, and gain even more of an advantage in the SSP space to strengthen the moat for DoubleClick.

sametmax 10y ago

AMP = the page you should have created originally without bulk, light, fast and readable. But you didn't, and now you have 2 pages to maintain.

JustUhThought 10y ago

I love the markets, but would be happy to never see market terms like "bullish" on HN.

darkhorn 10y ago

I don't understand why should I put a JavaScript (AMP) file to my web pages while it doesn't have any JavaScript file.

chinathrow 10y ago

From the how-to: "Contain a <script async src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script> https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script> tag as the last element in their head (this includes and loads the AMP JS library)." This is the big no go for me here - why would I need an AMP library, hosted on a third party domain I have no control watsoever. They can inject what they like, track initial script load etc. The same goes on if you want to include further content such as tweets etc. What do other folks think about these requirements?

chinathrow 10y ago

"The Google AMP Cache is a proxy-based content delivery network for delivering all valid AMP documents. It fetches AMP HTML pages, caches them, and improves page performance automatically. When using the Google AMP Cache, the document, all JS files and all images load from the same origin that is using HTTP 2.0 for maximum efficiency." So the proxy learns all about my traffic patterns, usage stats and userbase. It looks like you can't opt-out of this feature or at least I couldn't find it.

pjmlp 10y ago

With Web = HTML + CSS - JavaScript we don't need AMP.