15 ms·

Search Results are officially AMP’d

219 points by cramforce 10y ago

MBCook 10y ago
I don't know about everyone else but I HATE AMPed pages. The idea is good, but being Google they've done.... something. I'm on iOS and the way pages scroll means they feel like they've got a different weight, they've adjusted something. And it makes interacting with the frustrating because the Google results page feels like any page in Safari and then you click into an AMP page (which does load very fast) and it suddenly feels wrong. I bet it feels 'normal' on Android. I have a feeling this is going to drive me nuts.
- Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
  Do you find that it feels like the page is a lot "lighter"? It seems like a flick of the thumb moves it a lot further than any other page. It's especially jarring since the search results page is just as "heavy" as any other page, then the AMP'd page feels like you're moving a feather.
  - MBCook 10y ago
    Exactly.
- oneloop 10y ago
  They've had them in Google News for ages. I've been using them for a while, work great (I'm on Android). So well in fact even though I am on the 0.1% of the population that's consciously aware of their tactics, they have already trained me to subconsciously prefer clicking on websites that have their AMP logo, compared to the rest, because I subconsciously know they load much faster.
  - MBCook 10y ago
    When I first saw it (in the 'News' section of results) I was happy to see it. After clicking 2 or 3 of the links I quickly learned to avoid it and either go to another site or find the non-AMP link in the results below. I really wish sites (AMP isn't the only thing to do this) would stop deciding they know how to implement scrolling better than my browser/OS does it. Here's a hint: YOU DON'T. Let the user have what they're used to. Sudden behavior changes for tenuous-at-best benefits ("It scrolls faster!") are obnoxious.
    - Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
      It would be so nice if there was a knob to disable whatever JavaScript API (or part thereof) enables this yet keep everything else. Of course, it would have to work seamlessly without breaking anything, so it might be asking a little much.
      - oxguy3 10y ago
        Unfortunately, blocking that API (listening for 'wheel' events) will entirely break large portions of many sites -- any element where they've manually implemented the scrollbar or have fancy stuff or whatever won't work. I tried writing a Greasemonkey script that killed smooth scrolling, but it broke way too many sites. One thing that does work though, at least in a lot of cases, is using an adblocker to block the URLs of common smooth scroll scripts. My adblock filter rules are in a comment in this gist if you want them (actually, this gist is my aforementioned Greasemonkey script): https://gist.github.com/oxguy3/ebd9fe692518c7f7a1e9 https://gist.github.com/oxguy3/ebd9fe692518c7f7a1e9
    - cramforce 10y ago
      AMP doesn't implement scrolling in software. It is native GPU accelerated scrolling. iOS does have 2 modes and it might be that AMP hits the one some people don't like. Edit: Filed https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/5125 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/5125 to see if AMP can switch to other GPU scrolling mode.
      - Touche 10y ago
        Why does AMP do anything with scrolling at all?
        JohnDotAwesome 10y ago
        Knowing where the viewport is relative to the document is pretty valuable; It means that AMP can defer loading potentially sluggish content until the viewport lands on a particular position.
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    They do not work as well on iOS. Two examples of this are "scroll to top" by tapping the title bar is completely broken under AMP. The other is that Safari Reader is mostly broken under AMP. That said, the experience with super fast, virtually instant loads, is great, and I think these are definitely kinks that can be worked out. I'm just confused why they made it through to consumer release without someone else questioning them. These are major features of the most popular browser on [one of the two] most popular mobile OS that Google is choosing to break. Edit: Added "[one of the two]"
    - spot 10y ago
      " the most popular mobile OS " iOS at 23% and falling... http://bgr.com/2016/06/02/apples-mobile-market-share-sees-big-drop-in-may-as-android-skyrockets/ http://bgr.com/2016/06/02/apples-mobile-market-share-sees-bi...
      - tedmiston 10y ago
        I just edited it to say one of the two most popular to avoid going there. I don't think it changes my point.
        oneloop 10y ago
        Doesn't it? I think it straight up answers your question.
        tedmiston 10y ago
        The point I was trying to make was that iOS, and Safari on iOS, has a massive, massive user base. Throwing #1 vs #2 into the mix is distracting from that point.
      - npunt 10y ago
        A cursory look at those stats should tell you they're bogus. Going from 32% to 23% market share (about a 30% decline) in two months is not even remotely likely.
- 2bitencryption 10y ago
  I wouldn't start complaining about Google providing a good experience on Android while making users suffer on iOS. Traditionally the Google services experience has been better on iOS than on Android. iOS had the most amazing Google Maps long before Android got that update... Even after so much time and updates, I still prefer the Google experience on iOS to the one on Android.
- Fricken 10y ago
  I was wondering what 'AMP' meant. I found it great for searching breaking news events and scanning quickly through reports from different sources.
- mrb 10y ago
  Is it (1) the home page news.google.com that exhibits the problem, or is it (2) the individual AMP news pages? If #1 then the problem is completely unrelated to AMP it's just a subpar js scrolling engine that they decided to use on Google News. If #2 then that would indeed be an iOS-specific issue because on Android AMP pages are just using native scrolling to my knowledge.
  - MBCook 10y ago
    I don't remember the last time I went to news.google.com, I see it on news results suggested at the top of the page after I do a normal Google search. As I said, I wouldn't be surprised if Google was adjusting scrolling settings on iOS (using CSS or JS or something) to make it 'feel' more like Android, since that seems to be their MO recently: make everything feel like Android, not the native platform. Same way they apply material design to all their iOS apps instead of doing things the iOS way. I hate it. All you did is make your software feel wrong and thus broken. I know all the "It's more consistent if you switch between platforms" stuff. Switching between OS X and Windows never bothered me, and I don't use other platforms much so that benefit doesn't apply to me. I only get the downsides.
  - garaetjjte 10y ago
    news.google.com used to work fine, but some time ago they broken scrolling on mobile firefox and it is completly unusable.
- JohnDotAwesome 10y ago
  As far as the scrolling goes, I'm fairly certain they're just using native scrolling (as in, not using a JS implementation that doesn't get the weighting right). The AMP Runtime needs to know scroll position, and they seem to just be capturing scroll information on the scroll event See https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/src/service/viewport-impl.js#L795 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/src/servic... I may be wrong on this, as I don't know enough about the codebase. However, I'm pretty sure it's just native scrolling.
  - MBCook 10y ago
    > The AMP Runtime needs to know scroll position Just querying the existing position shouldn't cause it to feel faster. What do they need to know that for anyway? I promise you 100% that it doesn't feel right. I'm not saying they invented their own page renderer in JS and are using a canvas element for output, but they've done something that changes the feel. I've seen it on other sites too, I assume it's some JS/CSS thing.
    - wnevets 10y ago
      >Just querying the existing position shouldn't cause it to feel faster. What do they need to know that for anyway? tracking.
    - charrondev 10y ago
      It's a simple CSS overflow property that Apple has included in Safari.
- kristopolous 10y ago
  They mangle the URL and there is no link to the actual article. They do have a "share" link on the previous page that does not have a copy to clipboard or a send as email. (why someone would share before reading something remains an unanswered question) So in the share interface, you can share on Twitter, which gets the url rewritten. Then you copy it from the share text and paste it on mobile in a new browser tab to get the real url, then you can copy that to the clipboard again and actually share. Who the heck approved this crap?
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    I don't see the share links, but I have noticed on Google News articles with the thumbnail on the left side, clicking the thumbnail opens the original source. This doesn't seem to work (and I can't find a workaround) for the headline stories at the top though.
    - kristopolous 10y ago
      Share is on the initial page before you read the article. When you tap, there's a popup that has the source in green, making it look like a link, but it's not one - it's just green text. (They've disabled the long tapping context menu btw) There's a share on google+, facebook, and twitter. facebook and google+ is a "card" without the source URL ... only the twitter share exposes a url (a shortened one). This doesn't sound like a big intrusive ui thing. They already have an over-sensitive "swipe left" and "swipe right" so you can read another mystery story. When you swipe back because the "send me to mystery story" isn't a feature anyone asked for, amp scrolls to the top ... losing your place. So now you have to make sure your down and up swipes are directionally perfect otherwise you go to some other story. Mobile ad tech on news sites is the climax of insanity, but google long ago went into the deep end of the designer dictatorship - lobbing off useful features to create fragile, unpredictable, inconsistent, error-prone interfaces with, miraculously some of the core functionality removed and really useless things triggered with no way to disable them (a poorly connected aux cable triggering google now is a personal favorite).
      - 10y ago
- ashearer 10y ago
  I appreciate the effort to define a fast subset of HTML, but the AMP loader on google.com makes the whole page-loading experience different and worse in many ways. Several times today while trying to visit different sites, the AMP JS loader has broken down, displaying only the Google address bar, a fake AMP address bar below it with the intended URL, and a multicolored Android-style circle spinning endlessly (on an iPhone). All the native browser controls for page lifecycle (including timeouts and Reload button) were completely ineffective. It's important for the loader to get its replacement for these things right if it's going to try to supplant the browser's built-in functionality, and it currently doesn't succeed at that.
  - nateguchi 10y ago
    This happens to me fairly frequently in a desktop web browser after typing a search query in chrome. Obviously not optimised for poor internet
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    I've noticed it just straight up doesn't work with Purify enabled, refreshing the page with content blockers disabled has fixed it every time.
- anonred 10y ago
  It's not a JS scroller—it's just a scrollable div with `-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch` which enables momentum-based scrolling. I've done hybrid (and native) iOS apps before, and this is fairly common practice to make things feel more native in webviews. For those who are interested: by default, iOS sets webview scrollviews to have a fast deceleration rate (UIScrollViewDecelerationRateFast). This is because old iOS devices weren't able to quickly render webpages, so they needed to set a soft limit on scrolling. I actually believe that native (AMP-like) scrolling offers a better experience now that mobile devices are fairly snappy.
  - MBCook 10y ago
    > I actually believe that native (AMP-like) scrolling offers a better experience now that mobile devices are fairly snappy. Doesn't matter. Personally I disagree, but that's not the real sin. The real sin is inconsistency with the rest of the web on Safari. If Apple thinks that's the way things should work then they'll make that change. Until then having the random page behave differently feels very strange to the user.
    - derefr 10y ago
      Presumably, Apple thinks that "the way things should work" is that the webpage author has the choice. After all, they're the one who put that CSS property into Safari. They wouldn't have done that if they thought one of the options was definitively better.
      - MBCook 10y ago
        > Apple thinks that "the way things should work" is that the webpage author has the choice. No, the way Apple thinks it should work is expressed in the defaults, the options are there if the author is trying to do something else. There are cases where it may be a good idea. I don't see how this is one. I get Google thinks they know better (and I really do wonder what they think the benefit is), and I now avoid one of their products that I actually liked quite a bit because of it.
    - 10y ago
- Camillo 10y ago
  Could you link to an example page? I don't even know how to find out if a page is using AMP on iOS. Is the main AMP site AMPed? It doesn't feel any different from any other site to me.
- dingo_bat 10y ago
  Yes this is exactly what turns me off on android too. The scrolling is different! Also, no js means no page at all. Not even text.
- _pmf_ 10y ago
  > I bet it feels 'normal' on Android. > I have a feeling this is going to drive me nuts. You can rely on this not being entirely accidental.
oneloop 10y ago
And so Google edges a bit closer towards complete and through world domination.
- dfar1 10y ago
  They "hijack" the search result url on any result. If you copy the address from the search result link, you always get a google link. But you could be talking about another url.
  - Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
    At least when you follow the link you end up at the "real" URL. With this it doesn't appear that you do.
  - mastax 10y ago
    Google's done that for years (not that it makes it any better, it's just not related to AMP). e.g. if I search 'Hacker News' and copy the link I get: https://www.google.com/url?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/&rct=j&frm=1&q=&esrc=s&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwiMmOfD3J7PAhVIViYKHUwNA68QFggVMAA&sig2=EarAE_Bk4tSkZ0fm0ew2_Q&usg=AFQjCNEYN7cAgtoYSsq0i5ihAB7QX-fxlQ https://www.google.com/url?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/...
nxzero 10y ago
Super annoying feature, since Google hijacks the URL in the process. There should be a way to opt-out that is simple and does not require the user to be signed-in to do. Ironically, almost positive that Google hates when links are wrapped like this.
- gruez 10y ago
  But google already does that
  - nxzero 10y ago
    Unless I'm misunderstanding you, believe you're talking about the search result redirects that Google does; which is different, because the user get redirected the the real URL. AMD'd links never redirect, if you click the X you're sent back to Google's results, there's no way to get to the real URL that an average user would easily be able to do, if the link is bookmarked the link it's not the real link, etc.
    - __derek__ 10y ago
      They don't redirect for mobile devices, that is. If you visit an AMP URL on a non-mobile device, you'll end up at the original piece of content.
      - nxzero 10y ago
        As you likely know, AMP'd stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages Project; meaning AMP'd is for mobile traffic.
dfar1 10y ago
AMP makes pages fast by forcing you to drop all the website fluff. Most will argue that fluff is not needed on mobile sites (I agree)... but try telling your client that.
- kbenson 10y ago
  Well, if you include in your discussion that most internet traffic is now mobile, and mobile users want quick access, and Google is giving them a way to distinguish whether you site will likely be quick (AMPed) or possibly not, and it may be in their best interest to signal to users that they provide a good mobile experience, it might go smoother.
- Spivak 10y ago
  I think AMP makes it easier to tell the client that. "Sorry, we can't add X because it will hurt your search engine rankings"
helthanatos 10y ago
I'm not sure if I don't like AMP... Sometimes the page looks better and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you try to find a comments section that isn't there because it was amped out. AMP pages are pretty finicky for me (and still only top stories).
- gregable 10y ago
  That's under the control of the publisher, so it's up to them to make decent amp versions of their pages, it's not a fundamental limitation of the format. Agreed though that in some cases, these sites are throwing up an amp version that is simply inferior.
rocky1138 10y ago
Just switch to DuckDuckGo and be done with it. The results are mostly good.
- ultramancool 10y ago
  Really? I tried it but I always found the Google results much better, especially when you're on the hunt for a weird error you're getting or a bootlegged copy of something obscure.
  - 5ilv3r 10y ago
    Since google stopped substring matching and started picking and choosing on it's own which keywords are important and dropping the ones it doesn't like, these things are no longer really working in google search either.
    - CaptSpify 10y ago
      The more google tries to figure out what I want, rather than searching for what I tell it to, the worse the results get. I find quoting helps a lot
      - ino 10y ago
        I too feel google results gave been getting worse in the past 6 years. It's hard to describe, but it feels like the internet is somehow getting smaller. But duck duck go results are still noticeably worse, sadly.
        icelancer 10y ago
        I have the same combined experience of you two posters - DDG is worse than Google and Google is worse unless you start liberally using quotes, which I have switched to doing (and I actually would argue use of these delimiters has improved Google experience).
8ytecoder 10y ago
AMP makes normal browsing so much harder. My pet peeve is there's no way to see/copy the URL making sharing something a PITA. The interface doesn't feel right either.
- zuccs 10y ago
  What interface? Every website can build it how they want?
  - pbarnes_1 10y ago
    It just feels different to non-AMP pages on iOS. Like, bad different.
    - RickS 10y ago
      Some other comment threads here have linked it to different page scroll behavior. Is that what you're experiencing?
geldan 10y ago
This feels very regressive. I thought we got rid of "m." for a reason. Is there anyway to effectively "AMP" a page without maintaining a separate set of HTML/CSS/JS?
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  Sure. You can make your regular site not a piece of crap. AMP is really just a straitjacket for web publishers. You can make your own straitjacket.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - geldan 10y ago
    Yes, but even if you follow all of the best practices and deliver a fast page, your site won't show up as "AMPed." In order to be "AMPed" it appears that you need to employ a whole slew of custom elements and syntax. Unless I am missing something in these examples: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/tree/master/examples https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/tree/master/examples
    - LeoPanthera 10y ago
      Protectionism at its finest. Nice search result you have there. Be a shame if something happened to it.
  - bsimpson 10y ago
    Although AMP is just a subset of HTML, if your site passes AMP validation, it gets cached by Google's CDN. I believe that's what makes AMP pages feel fast. You can certainly write HTML that doesn't do anything of the things that AMP prohibits, but if it's hosted on a slow server, your users won't get the lightning-fast experience. By caching the pages, Google takes the quality of a publisher's host out-of the equation. (In fact, since the pages are being cached anyway, publishers probably have less of an incentive to invest in speedy server rendering.) (This is my understanding. I don't work on AMP.)
raldi 10y ago
I'm on a vanilla iPhone 6S running iOS 10 and can't get this to work on Chrome or Safari. Does anyone have an example search term?
- Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
  Try searching for "The Western Star". It's a newspaper that's been AMPd.
- zukee 10y ago
  The change is still rolling out and is not yet available for all users. But if you search for something like "obama" you can see AMP already in use in the "Top Stories" section of the results page
Touche 10y ago
When I do a search on google.com I have to scroll down half the page to find any search results, AMP or not. Top half is covered by ads. Try: hotels near SomeCity, CA To see
- kuschku 10y ago
  Indeed, google recently has doubled the amount of ads shown. Without uBlock Origin, Google is basically unusable for most people.
Touche 10y ago
When I do a search on google.com I have to scroll down half the page to find any search results, AMP or not. Top half is covered by ads. Try: hotels near SomeCity, CA To see
strictnein 10y ago
<html "Imagine a Lightning Symbol Here" > Really? I know you can just use <html amp> but why are we going down this road? edit: Well, that should have had a weird lightning symbol next to the <html but I guess HN ate it up. See the example: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/create/basic_markup.html https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/create/basic_mar...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- bsimpson 10y ago
  My hypothesis, as someone who doesn't work on AMP, is it forces people to copy/paste the boilerplate rather than writing their own version (and maybe getting it wrong).
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    I think he's implying the use of an emoji in the html tag is kind of ridiculous. Personally, I'm split being it being ridiculous and being pretty cool.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
zeppelin101 10y ago
I guess I'm the only here who loves the idea of clicking on an AMP'd page and having it load instantly? I can start reading the article immediately, instead of waiting for allll of the assets and javascript to load. Including ads.
- MBCook 10y ago
  That's why I have an ad blockers. Honestly the IDEA is pretty good, I just find their implementation horrible (see my other comment, quite possibly iOS specific issue).
- kccqzy 10y ago
  I already install content blockers on my devices and even without AMP articles load immediately.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  Don't get me wrong I LOVE the user experience of the loading but everything else about it, in my opinion, is very negative. You can't even share it like you normally would on the web so it breaks the web in far too many ways just to hard code Google analytics / ads into the website.
  - themacguffinman 10y ago
    I'm not sure how sharing is broken. As far as I know, AMP pages render on any standards-compliant browser and have a normal URL.
    - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
      I can't check right now but last I looked you can't share AMPed search results and I thought a few pages depending on how they were structured. I could be wrong but I don't remember being able to generate a good URL from some AMP pages.
      - themacguffinman 10y ago
BinaryIdiot 10y ago
So now if you buy more into Google's ecosystem (AMP) you get a special flag next to your content in search results? Interesting... You know I don't understand this whole AMP'd thing. It's possible to make something just as efficient if you don't ruin your mark-up to begin with. The big advantage with AMP, as far as I can tell, is the Google caching mechanism. There is no reason someone can't use actual standards to create the exact same results. It really bothers me that, to get preferential treatment, I have to now work with Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles. If I don't the competition will. We originally had web standards for a reason, now we're doing this non-standard stuff.
- kuschku 10y ago
  > If I don't the competition will. We originally had web standards for a reason, now we're doing this non-standard stuff. I suggest you file a complaint here, if you believe you have to use AMP to not get a competitive disadvantage (because that would be unfair influence on the market by Google): http://ec.europa.eu/competition/contacts/electronic_documents_en.html http://ec.europa.eu/competition/contacts/electronic_document... EDIT: The parent comment complains that the market is unfairly influenced by two large almost-monopolies in their respective markets – so why do I get downvotes for linking the official reference for filing antitrust complaints?
- cramforce 10y ago
  Note, that this launch is explicitly not a ranking change. Your non-AMP result will continue to be displayed in the same spot. This is just a frontend change: If there is an AMP version of a URL, link there is instead.
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    It shows a flag. This is an indication to the user to pick this site over others. Maybe not initially but unless someone proves to me, with data, that this won't affect what users click on I do not believe this won't affect user behavior. This is an indirect ranking.
    - 10y ago
IshKebab 10y ago
I don't see why they need to highlight these pages. Apparently they already use page load speed as a signal in their search rankings. Why not just increase its importance?
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  > I don't see why they need to highlight these pages. To lock more sites into their system. Sure, they don't need to, but it's definitely beneficial to them. > Apparently they already use page load speed as a signal in their search rankings. I hear this a lot too, but I don't think they really place much importance on load speed. Try searching for "weather", and see how many sites are slow to load, but are at the top of the list. Meanwhile fast-loading sites like http://myfreeweather.com/ http://myfreeweather.com/ are buried in the results. I have no insight to the other multiple factors of their ranking algorithm, but I've never found speed to play much importance.
- Sylos 10y ago
  Because increasing its importance could be seen as tampering with the results for their own benefit, i.e. pushing a web-technology that they control. Adding a flag to it is sort of the same, but I'm guessing they are testing the waters with this and if they don't get legal repercussion, they'll actually change the search rankings.
  - IshKebab 10y ago
    No I'm not saying they increase the rankings of fast AMP pages. I'm saying increase the rankings of pages that are fast regardless of the technology they use. You can have a fast page with normal HTML.
rckclmbr 10y ago
I work in developing markets, and am really excited for AMP. The web on 2g networks is a horrible experience -- imagine browsing the web today at netscape-era speeds. My only big gripe with AMP is it's only built for publishing. It's missing a key feature of making the web complete: the ability for users to interact (ie no forms).
- cramforce 10y ago
  Forms support is launching within a few days/weeks.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  > The web on 2g networks is a horrible experience Completely agree. But instead of adding another layer of complexity and bullshit on top of the existing stack, why not just take away the existing layers of bullshit and complexity? I like the premise behind AMP, but we already have a solution for that. This is just another attempt to lock sites into google.
  - JeremyBanks 10y ago
    We already had a solution in theory, but that's worth little when in practice we've had a mess that was rapidly getting worse with no sign of turning around. AMP is not the optimum, but it's actually happening, and it's one heck of a lot better than most of the status quo.
    - CaptSpify 10y ago
      The only reason AMP is happening is because Google ignored the original problem for so long. If they had payed attention, we wouldn't be in this crappy situation in the first place. This is just them making another power grab and pretending it's for everyone else's benefit.
malyk 10y ago
So after 2 decades of dealing with really bad cross browser incompatibilities that we are just now emerging from we are going to dive into cross search engine incompatibilities to an even greater extent. AMP for Google, something else for Bing, another format for duck duck go, one more for yahoo...ugh!
- zukee 10y ago
  Bing has actually started using AMP in their results. See the last paragraph of this article: https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/20/google-brings-non-news-amp-links-to-its-mobile-search-results/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/20/google-brings-non-news-amp...
cauterized 10y ago
Ugh. Guess I'm switching my default Safari search engine to DDG...
atdt 10y ago
Per the spec[0], AMP pages must load the AMP runtime via a script tag that references a Google-controlled server, cdn.ampproject.org. This means you are handing over both your site security and your traffic logs to Google. This is a non-issue for the many sites that have already made that bargain (by using Google Analytics, Google Hosted Libraries, Google Fonts, etc.), but it is definitely an issue to some. [0]: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec.html https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec.html
- sintaxi 10y ago
  Great point. IMHO Regardless if you use GA or not, AMP will be a non-starter for any respectable developer who advocates for the open web for this reason.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- bduerst 10y ago
  How is that different for publishers that use any other third party script or service? The Economist landing page alone uses 22 different such services.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Because in some locales, that’s illegal. In Germany, for example, loading third-party scripts from foreign servers that might track users is illegal. So every "like" or "share" button is a two-click button: first click loads the button, second click activates it. Everywhere. AMP would fall under the same legal issue, if it includes tracking.
    - bduerst 10y ago
      Are you so sure about that? http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/02/google-news-starts-showing-accelerated-mobile-pages-in-6-more-countries/ http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/02/google-news-starts-showing...
chinathrow 10y ago
Forced 3rd party JS you must include... no thanks, no AMP for my sites.
benologist 10y ago
Because the takeaway from ad blocking is everyone wants their privacy and security relentlessly undermined faster.
ldng 10y ago
Can you now invalidate Google cache ? Because by the look of that issue, you don't have any control. https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/1901 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/1901 So basically you are completely at the mercy of Google's crawler.
- cramforce 10y ago
  Update happens independent of crawler and you can ping for it https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/update-ping https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/update-ping
pmarreck 10y ago
I'm fine with AMP as long as i can get a link to a result that is opted out of it. Which i did not see a way to easily do, recently. So basically, I'm not fine with AMP. Because SPOF's are bad. Not just from an architectural perspective, but from a privacy, independence and total systematic perspective. You want to be an agent in between me and the Internet that basically caches a fast version of everything after being pushed through your systems? Let me opt out.
- __derek__ 10y ago
  You can easily opt out: don't use Google.
AJ007 10y ago
There are three stories here. Each is serious and should be evaluated separately as not to bias the conclusions of any. #1 There is a big problem with mobile sites. I'm using a recent iPhone and many popular news sites, without ad blockers, are as close to unusable as the worst websites I've ever been to, dating back to using Internet Explorer in 1999. Auto playing inline video ads that slide in to view, just insane. These things clearly kill time on site and reader retention. I have theories about why publishers are ignoring this, but who knows. #2 Google is using AMP to co-opt publisher's traffic. This means users are scrolling to another story from another publisher or easily bouncing back to the Google results when they land on your content. (See the X in the story link on the animated gif example.) There goes your time on site and long term user retention. If #1 was a problem for you already, you probably don't notice. #3 AMP & Instant articles are going to put a stranglehold on third party ad networks and represent a very real anti-trust issue. There are a bunch of other privacy implications too, which have been discussed in length. Publishers should be thinking really hard about their future.
- lucb1e 10y ago
  > I'm using a recent iPhone and many popular news sites, without ad blockers I think I found your problem. Jokes aside, I see your point. But if those sites are shit, stop using those sites. They are currently popular but they don't have to be.
Zhenya 10y ago
Does this mean that you must enable JS for simple pages with text to load if they have been AMP'ed?
- kuschku 10y ago
  Yes.
  - Zhenya 10y ago
    and the JS is served from a google domain?
    - kuschku 10y ago
      Yes.
wodenokoto 10y ago
As far as I can tell, there is not single link to an AMP article anywhere in the blog post. Does AMP only work from Google search results page?
- bduerst 10y ago
  Seems like it. What it appears to do it swap in the AMP links for supported sites when you search via mobile.
DivineTraube 10y ago
So AMP does two major things: (1) It prescribes a stripped-down version of HTML and uses a JS loader to render fast and load as much resources as possible asynchronously (2) It caches the website in the Google CDN and delivers it via HTTP/2 By applying best practices of structuring web applications and optimizing for the critical rendering path (1) can be achieved, too. The AMP loader is just an opinionated way to do this for simple pages. Everyone can get similar results without AMP by following web performance best practices like [1]: - Reducing the critical resources needed - Reducing the critical bytes which must be transferred - Loading JS, CSS and HTML templates asynchronously - Rendering the page progressively - Minifying & Concatenating CSS, JS and images And there is lots of good tooling for this (e.g. postcss, processhtml, cssmin, UglifyJS, imagemin, critical, gulp-rev-all, ...) (2) is not only harder. It is what limits the broad applicability of AMP. Cached data in the Google CDN cannot be invalidated, neither in the CDN itself nor in ISP interception caches, corporate proxies or the browser cache [2]. The effective consequence of this is that you can only use AMP when the content is mostly static. This is the case for news websites or other publications that are only changed by human editors. It completely breaks down when you try to create a dynamic site, for example a social network or a shop. That is why our startup Baqend [3] takes a different route. We say that developers are clever enough to use existing tooling to achieve (1): an efficient rendering and loading experience. And for (2) we add a caching scheme that also employs CDNs for delivery but keeps data consistent. This is made possible by a simple process: 1. When a browser connects to a Baqend-based website, it loads a Bloom filter containing all potentially stale cached URLs. 2. Every stale URL is requested using HTTP revalidation to refresh stale copies and update caches. 3. When an update operation changes a resource (e.g. an image, JSON object or even a complex query result) its URL is instantly invalidated in the CDN [4] and marked as stale in the Bloom filter. 4. When loading resource, a statistical estimation of the expected TTL (cache liftime) is made. Whenever that prediction fails, the Bloom filter and the automatic CDN invalidation compensate the difference between estimation and real lifetime. Using this scheme (developed at the University of Hamburg in cooperation with Baqend), every kind of dynamic data can be treated as cachable data and the applicability of is not limited to data that seldomly changes and even works for write-heavy resources with rich consistency guarantees (Δ-Atomicity, Read-Your-Writes, Monotonic Reads, Monotonic Writes, Causal Consistency) [5]. Of course I'm biased but you'd like to see AMP-like acceleration coupled with fresh cached data plus tooling, layout and frameworks of your choice, have a look at our Backend-as-a-Service. [1] https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/critical-rendering-path/analyzing-crp https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/c.... [2] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/1901 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/1901 [3] http://www.baqend.com/ http://www.baqend.com/ [4] https://www.fastly.com/blog/building-fast-and-reliable-purging-system https://www.fastly.com/blog/building-fast-and-reliable-purgi... [5] http://www.slideshare.net/felixgessert/talk-cache-sketches-using-bloom-filters-and-web-caching-against-slow-load-times http://www.slideshare.net/felixgessert/talk-cache-sketches-u...
massysett 10y ago
Is Google or anyone else making any effort whatsoever to explain this AMP thing to anyone other than Web developers? For weeks, I thought AMP was some sort of news service. I would get news articles that were apparently from someone else, but they said "AMP" so I figured it was some kind of syndicator or something. I tapped on the "AMP" and the lightning bolt thing and nothing happened. So I gave up on figuring out what it was and then I stumbled on some story like this one. Does Google just not care that people do not know what this thing is?
biot 10y ago
"Though most tags in an AMP HTML page are regular HTML tags, some HTML tags are replaced with AMP-specific tags" If Microsoft were introducing this, I suspect we'd see a lot of "embrace, extend, extinguish" comments.
malchow 10y ago
The evidence seems to suggest that the push for AMP us all about making sure Google gets its ad tags hardcoded on your pages. Otherwise, Google could release a YSlow type package of best practices. I believe it once considered doing this under the title Page Speed Project.
- themacguffinman 10y ago
  I disagree because the <amp-ad> tag [1] supports many non-Google ad networks. It doesn't force you to use Google's services at all. It seems to me that they used this particular approach because best practices are a lot easier to ignore or misinterpret than AMP's "your page will literally break if you try funny stuff". It's why something like TeX was invented rather than releasing a "best practices" package for making Word documents. [1] https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/extended/amp-ad.html https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/extended/amp-ad.ht...
shaunrussell 10y ago
The best part about AMP is it provides an incentive for major content publishers to create non-bloated pages. Without the AMP standards marketing teams start adding "all of the things" causing page loads to become much heavier.
shostack 10y ago
Any ad network folks here care to weigh in on how you view AMP and its impact on the industry? Seems like a major moat-building exercise ala FB Instant Articles since Google has all the leverage with publishers.
dvcrn 10y ago
I like amp but what is with responsive pages? I thought the best practice went towards not serving a different page for mobile users and have everything full responsive. Now with amp, the opposite seems to be the case
SubiculumCode 10y ago
I hate the Google News AMP section from my phone. I don't know if related but it seems to have also disabled opening google news results in new yabs on Firefox on Android ever since they changed the page.
michaelmior 10y ago
Has anyone who implemented AMP on their personal site actually seen the AMP result show up in search? I implemented AMP some time ago just for fun and I see no sign of it in search results for my blog. The AMP validation tool as well as the Search Console say there are no problems.
- hyperhopper 10y ago
  Same experience for me. Amp validates, If I go to the google cache url I can see it there as well. No AMP icon.
frik 10y ago
The end user will stay longer on Google and Facebook. That's what they want. Anyway, it feels pretty broken on iOS. Would be great if Adblockers would mangle the Google search results to replace the AMP links with proper links to the full website of e.g. WashingtonPost.

219 points by cramforce 10y ago

I don't know about everyone else but I HATE AMPed pages. The idea is good, but being Google they've done.... something. I'm on iOS and the way pages scroll means they feel like they've got a different weight, they've adjusted something. And it makes interacting with the frustrating because the Google results page feels like any page in Safari and then you click into an AMP page (which does load very fast) and it suddenly feels wrong. I bet it feels 'normal' on Android. I have a feeling this is going to drive me nuts.

Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
Do you find that it feels like the page is a lot "lighter"? It seems like a flick of the thumb moves it a lot further than any other page. It's especially jarring since the search results page is just as "heavy" as any other page, then the AMP'd page feels like you're moving a feather.
- MBCook 10y ago
  Exactly.
oneloop 10y ago
They've had them in Google News for ages. I've been using them for a while, work great (I'm on Android). So well in fact even though I am on the 0.1% of the population that's consciously aware of their tactics, they have already trained me to subconsciously prefer clicking on websites that have their AMP logo, compared to the rest, because I subconsciously know they load much faster.
- MBCook 10y ago
  When I first saw it (in the 'News' section of results) I was happy to see it. After clicking 2 or 3 of the links I quickly learned to avoid it and either go to another site or find the non-AMP link in the results below. I really wish sites (AMP isn't the only thing to do this) would stop deciding they know how to implement scrolling better than my browser/OS does it. Here's a hint: YOU DON'T. Let the user have what they're used to. Sudden behavior changes for tenuous-at-best benefits ("It scrolls faster!") are obnoxious.
  - Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
    It would be so nice if there was a knob to disable whatever JavaScript API (or part thereof) enables this yet keep everything else. Of course, it would have to work seamlessly without breaking anything, so it might be asking a little much.
    - oxguy3 10y ago
      Unfortunately, blocking that API (listening for 'wheel' events) will entirely break large portions of many sites -- any element where they've manually implemented the scrollbar or have fancy stuff or whatever won't work. I tried writing a Greasemonkey script that killed smooth scrolling, but it broke way too many sites. One thing that does work though, at least in a lot of cases, is using an adblocker to block the URLs of common smooth scroll scripts. My adblock filter rules are in a comment in this gist if you want them (actually, this gist is my aforementioned Greasemonkey script): https://gist.github.com/oxguy3/ebd9fe692518c7f7a1e9 https://gist.github.com/oxguy3/ebd9fe692518c7f7a1e9
  - cramforce 10y ago
    AMP doesn't implement scrolling in software. It is native GPU accelerated scrolling. iOS does have 2 modes and it might be that AMP hits the one some people don't like. Edit: Filed https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/5125 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/5125 to see if AMP can switch to other GPU scrolling mode.
    - Touche 10y ago
      Why does AMP do anything with scrolling at all?
      - JohnDotAwesome 10y ago
        Knowing where the viewport is relative to the document is pretty valuable; It means that AMP can defer loading potentially sluggish content until the viewport lands on a particular position.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  They do not work as well on iOS. Two examples of this are "scroll to top" by tapping the title bar is completely broken under AMP. The other is that Safari Reader is mostly broken under AMP. That said, the experience with super fast, virtually instant loads, is great, and I think these are definitely kinks that can be worked out. I'm just confused why they made it through to consumer release without someone else questioning them. These are major features of the most popular browser on [one of the two] most popular mobile OS that Google is choosing to break. Edit: Added "[one of the two]"
  - spot 10y ago
    " the most popular mobile OS " iOS at 23% and falling... http://bgr.com/2016/06/02/apples-mobile-market-share-sees-big-drop-in-may-as-android-skyrockets/ http://bgr.com/2016/06/02/apples-mobile-market-share-sees-bi...
    - tedmiston 10y ago
      I just edited it to say one of the two most popular to avoid going there. I don't think it changes my point.
      - oneloop 10y ago
        Doesn't it? I think it straight up answers your question.
        tedmiston 10y ago
        The point I was trying to make was that iOS, and Safari on iOS, has a massive, massive user base. Throwing #1 vs #2 into the mix is distracting from that point.
    - npunt 10y ago
      A cursory look at those stats should tell you they're bogus. Going from 32% to 23% market share (about a 30% decline) in two months is not even remotely likely.
2bitencryption 10y ago
I wouldn't start complaining about Google providing a good experience on Android while making users suffer on iOS. Traditionally the Google services experience has been better on iOS than on Android. iOS had the most amazing Google Maps long before Android got that update... Even after so much time and updates, I still prefer the Google experience on iOS to the one on Android.
Fricken 10y ago
I was wondering what 'AMP' meant. I found it great for searching breaking news events and scanning quickly through reports from different sources.
mrb 10y ago
Is it (1) the home page news.google.com that exhibits the problem, or is it (2) the individual AMP news pages? If #1 then the problem is completely unrelated to AMP it's just a subpar js scrolling engine that they decided to use on Google News. If #2 then that would indeed be an iOS-specific issue because on Android AMP pages are just using native scrolling to my knowledge.
- MBCook 10y ago
  I don't remember the last time I went to news.google.com, I see it on news results suggested at the top of the page after I do a normal Google search. As I said, I wouldn't be surprised if Google was adjusting scrolling settings on iOS (using CSS or JS or something) to make it 'feel' more like Android, since that seems to be their MO recently: make everything feel like Android, not the native platform. Same way they apply material design to all their iOS apps instead of doing things the iOS way. I hate it. All you did is make your software feel wrong and thus broken. I know all the "It's more consistent if you switch between platforms" stuff. Switching between OS X and Windows never bothered me, and I don't use other platforms much so that benefit doesn't apply to me. I only get the downsides.
- garaetjjte 10y ago
  news.google.com used to work fine, but some time ago they broken scrolling on mobile firefox and it is completly unusable.
JohnDotAwesome 10y ago
As far as the scrolling goes, I'm fairly certain they're just using native scrolling (as in, not using a JS implementation that doesn't get the weighting right). The AMP Runtime needs to know scroll position, and they seem to just be capturing scroll information on the scroll event See https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/src/service/viewport-impl.js#L795 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/src/servic... I may be wrong on this, as I don't know enough about the codebase. However, I'm pretty sure it's just native scrolling.
- MBCook 10y ago
  > The AMP Runtime needs to know scroll position Just querying the existing position shouldn't cause it to feel faster. What do they need to know that for anyway? I promise you 100% that it doesn't feel right. I'm not saying they invented their own page renderer in JS and are using a canvas element for output, but they've done something that changes the feel. I've seen it on other sites too, I assume it's some JS/CSS thing.
  - wnevets 10y ago
    >Just querying the existing position shouldn't cause it to feel faster. What do they need to know that for anyway? tracking.
  - charrondev 10y ago
    It's a simple CSS overflow property that Apple has included in Safari.
kristopolous 10y ago
They mangle the URL and there is no link to the actual article. They do have a "share" link on the previous page that does not have a copy to clipboard or a send as email. (why someone would share before reading something remains an unanswered question) So in the share interface, you can share on Twitter, which gets the url rewritten. Then you copy it from the share text and paste it on mobile in a new browser tab to get the real url, then you can copy that to the clipboard again and actually share. Who the heck approved this crap?
- tedmiston 10y ago
  I don't see the share links, but I have noticed on Google News articles with the thumbnail on the left side, clicking the thumbnail opens the original source. This doesn't seem to work (and I can't find a workaround) for the headline stories at the top though.
  - kristopolous 10y ago
    Share is on the initial page before you read the article. When you tap, there's a popup that has the source in green, making it look like a link, but it's not one - it's just green text. (They've disabled the long tapping context menu btw) There's a share on google+, facebook, and twitter. facebook and google+ is a "card" without the source URL ... only the twitter share exposes a url (a shortened one). This doesn't sound like a big intrusive ui thing. They already have an over-sensitive "swipe left" and "swipe right" so you can read another mystery story. When you swipe back because the "send me to mystery story" isn't a feature anyone asked for, amp scrolls to the top ... losing your place. So now you have to make sure your down and up swipes are directionally perfect otherwise you go to some other story. Mobile ad tech on news sites is the climax of insanity, but google long ago went into the deep end of the designer dictatorship - lobbing off useful features to create fragile, unpredictable, inconsistent, error-prone interfaces with, miraculously some of the core functionality removed and really useless things triggered with no way to disable them (a poorly connected aux cable triggering google now is a personal favorite).
    - 10y ago
ashearer 10y ago
I appreciate the effort to define a fast subset of HTML, but the AMP loader on google.com makes the whole page-loading experience different and worse in many ways. Several times today while trying to visit different sites, the AMP JS loader has broken down, displaying only the Google address bar, a fake AMP address bar below it with the intended URL, and a multicolored Android-style circle spinning endlessly (on an iPhone). All the native browser controls for page lifecycle (including timeouts and Reload button) were completely ineffective. It's important for the loader to get its replacement for these things right if it's going to try to supplant the browser's built-in functionality, and it currently doesn't succeed at that.
- nateguchi 10y ago
  This happens to me fairly frequently in a desktop web browser after typing a search query in chrome. Obviously not optimised for poor internet
- snuxoll 10y ago
  I've noticed it just straight up doesn't work with Purify enabled, refreshing the page with content blockers disabled has fixed it every time.
anonred 10y ago
It's not a JS scroller—it's just a scrollable div with `-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch` which enables momentum-based scrolling. I've done hybrid (and native) iOS apps before, and this is fairly common practice to make things feel more native in webviews. For those who are interested: by default, iOS sets webview scrollviews to have a fast deceleration rate (UIScrollViewDecelerationRateFast). This is because old iOS devices weren't able to quickly render webpages, so they needed to set a soft limit on scrolling. I actually believe that native (AMP-like) scrolling offers a better experience now that mobile devices are fairly snappy.
- MBCook 10y ago
  > I actually believe that native (AMP-like) scrolling offers a better experience now that mobile devices are fairly snappy. Doesn't matter. Personally I disagree, but that's not the real sin. The real sin is inconsistency with the rest of the web on Safari. If Apple thinks that's the way things should work then they'll make that change. Until then having the random page behave differently feels very strange to the user.
  - derefr 10y ago
    Presumably, Apple thinks that "the way things should work" is that the webpage author has the choice. After all, they're the one who put that CSS property into Safari. They wouldn't have done that if they thought one of the options was definitively better.
    - MBCook 10y ago
      > Apple thinks that "the way things should work" is that the webpage author has the choice. No, the way Apple thinks it should work is expressed in the defaults, the options are there if the author is trying to do something else. There are cases where it may be a good idea. I don't see how this is one. I get Google thinks they know better (and I really do wonder what they think the benefit is), and I now avoid one of their products that I actually liked quite a bit because of it.
  - 10y ago
Camillo 10y ago
Could you link to an example page? I don't even know how to find out if a page is using AMP on iOS. Is the main AMP site AMPed? It doesn't feel any different from any other site to me.
dingo_bat 10y ago
Yes this is exactly what turns me off on android too. The scrolling is different! Also, no js means no page at all. Not even text.
_pmf_ 10y ago
> I bet it feels 'normal' on Android. > I have a feeling this is going to drive me nuts. You can rely on this not being entirely accidental.

oneloop 10y ago

And so Google edges a bit closer towards complete and through world domination.

dfar1 10y ago
They "hijack" the search result url on any result. If you copy the address from the search result link, you always get a google link. But you could be talking about another url.
- Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
  At least when you follow the link you end up at the "real" URL. With this it doesn't appear that you do.
- mastax 10y ago
  Google's done that for years (not that it makes it any better, it's just not related to AMP). e.g. if I search 'Hacker News' and copy the link I get: https://www.google.com/url?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/&rct=j&frm=1&q=&esrc=s&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwiMmOfD3J7PAhVIViYKHUwNA68QFggVMAA&sig2=EarAE_Bk4tSkZ0fm0ew2_Q&usg=AFQjCNEYN7cAgtoYSsq0i5ihAB7QX-fxlQ https://www.google.com/url?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/...

nxzero 10y ago

Super annoying feature, since Google hijacks the URL in the process. There should be a way to opt-out that is simple and does not require the user to be signed-in to do. Ironically, almost positive that Google hates when links are wrapped like this.

gruez 10y ago
But google already does that
- nxzero 10y ago
  Unless I'm misunderstanding you, believe you're talking about the search result redirects that Google does; which is different, because the user get redirected the the real URL. AMD'd links never redirect, if you click the X you're sent back to Google's results, there's no way to get to the real URL that an average user would easily be able to do, if the link is bookmarked the link it's not the real link, etc.
  - __derek__ 10y ago
    They don't redirect for mobile devices, that is. If you visit an AMP URL on a non-mobile device, you'll end up at the original piece of content.
    - nxzero 10y ago
      As you likely know, AMP'd stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages Project; meaning AMP'd is for mobile traffic.

dfar1 10y ago

AMP makes pages fast by forcing you to drop all the website fluff. Most will argue that fluff is not needed on mobile sites (I agree)... but try telling your client that.

kbenson 10y ago
Well, if you include in your discussion that most internet traffic is now mobile, and mobile users want quick access, and Google is giving them a way to distinguish whether you site will likely be quick (AMPed) or possibly not, and it may be in their best interest to signal to users that they provide a good mobile experience, it might go smoother.
Spivak 10y ago
I think AMP makes it easier to tell the client that. "Sorry, we can't add X because it will hurt your search engine rankings"

helthanatos 10y ago

I'm not sure if I don't like AMP... Sometimes the page looks better and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you try to find a comments section that isn't there because it was amped out. AMP pages are pretty finicky for me (and still only top stories).

gregable 10y ago
That's under the control of the publisher, so it's up to them to make decent amp versions of their pages, it's not a fundamental limitation of the format. Agreed though that in some cases, these sites are throwing up an amp version that is simply inferior.

rocky1138 10y ago

Just switch to DuckDuckGo and be done with it. The results are mostly good.

ultramancool 10y ago
Really? I tried it but I always found the Google results much better, especially when you're on the hunt for a weird error you're getting or a bootlegged copy of something obscure.
- 5ilv3r 10y ago
  Since google stopped substring matching and started picking and choosing on it's own which keywords are important and dropping the ones it doesn't like, these things are no longer really working in google search either.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    The more google tries to figure out what I want, rather than searching for what I tell it to, the worse the results get. I find quoting helps a lot
    - ino 10y ago
      I too feel google results gave been getting worse in the past 6 years. It's hard to describe, but it feels like the internet is somehow getting smaller. But duck duck go results are still noticeably worse, sadly.
      - icelancer 10y ago
        I have the same combined experience of you two posters - DDG is worse than Google and Google is worse unless you start liberally using quotes, which I have switched to doing (and I actually would argue use of these delimiters has improved Google experience).

8ytecoder 10y ago

AMP makes normal browsing so much harder. My pet peeve is there's no way to see/copy the URL making sharing something a PITA. The interface doesn't feel right either.

zuccs 10y ago
What interface? Every website can build it how they want?
- pbarnes_1 10y ago
  It just feels different to non-AMP pages on iOS. Like, bad different.
  - RickS 10y ago
    Some other comment threads here have linked it to different page scroll behavior. Is that what you're experiencing?

geldan 10y ago

This feels very regressive. I thought we got rid of "m." for a reason. Is there anyway to effectively "AMP" a page without maintaining a separate set of HTML/CSS/JS?

honkhonkpants 10y ago
Sure. You can make your regular site not a piece of crap. AMP is really just a straitjacket for web publishers. You can make your own straitjacket.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- geldan 10y ago
  Yes, but even if you follow all of the best practices and deliver a fast page, your site won't show up as "AMPed." In order to be "AMPed" it appears that you need to employ a whole slew of custom elements and syntax. Unless I am missing something in these examples: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/tree/master/examples https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/tree/master/examples
  - LeoPanthera 10y ago
    Protectionism at its finest. Nice search result you have there. Be a shame if something happened to it.
- bsimpson 10y ago
  Although AMP is just a subset of HTML, if your site passes AMP validation, it gets cached by Google's CDN. I believe that's what makes AMP pages feel fast. You can certainly write HTML that doesn't do anything of the things that AMP prohibits, but if it's hosted on a slow server, your users won't get the lightning-fast experience. By caching the pages, Google takes the quality of a publisher's host out-of the equation. (In fact, since the pages are being cached anyway, publishers probably have less of an incentive to invest in speedy server rendering.) (This is my understanding. I don't work on AMP.)

raldi 10y ago

I'm on a vanilla iPhone 6S running iOS 10 and can't get this to work on Chrome or Safari. Does anyone have an example search term?

Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
Try searching for "The Western Star". It's a newspaper that's been AMPd.
zukee 10y ago
The change is still rolling out and is not yet available for all users. But if you search for something like "obama" you can see AMP already in use in the "Top Stories" section of the results page

Touche 10y ago

When I do a search on google.com I have to scroll down half the page to find any search results, AMP or not. Top half is covered by ads. Try: hotels near SomeCity, CA To see

kuschku 10y ago
Indeed, google recently has doubled the amount of ads shown. Without uBlock Origin, Google is basically unusable for most people.

Touche 10y ago

When I do a search on google.com I have to scroll down half the page to find any search results, AMP or not. Top half is covered by ads. Try: hotels near SomeCity, CA To see

strictnein 10y ago

<html "Imagine a Lightning Symbol Here" > Really? I know you can just use <html amp> but why are we going down this road? edit: Well, that should have had a weird lightning symbol next to the <html but I guess HN ate it up. See the example: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/create/basic_markup.html https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/create/basic_mar...

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
bsimpson 10y ago
My hypothesis, as someone who doesn't work on AMP, is it forces people to copy/paste the boilerplate rather than writing their own version (and maybe getting it wrong).
- tedmiston 10y ago
  I think he's implying the use of an emoji in the html tag is kind of ridiculous. Personally, I'm split being it being ridiculous and being pretty cool.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

zeppelin101 10y ago

I guess I'm the only here who loves the idea of clicking on an AMP'd page and having it load instantly? I can start reading the article immediately, instead of waiting for allll of the assets and javascript to load. Including ads.

MBCook 10y ago
That's why I have an ad blockers. Honestly the IDEA is pretty good, I just find their implementation horrible (see my other comment, quite possibly iOS specific issue).
kccqzy 10y ago
I already install content blockers on my devices and even without AMP articles load immediately.
BinaryIdiot 10y ago
Don't get me wrong I LOVE the user experience of the loading but everything else about it, in my opinion, is very negative. You can't even share it like you normally would on the web so it breaks the web in far too many ways just to hard code Google analytics / ads into the website.
- themacguffinman 10y ago
  I'm not sure how sharing is broken. As far as I know, AMP pages render on any standards-compliant browser and have a normal URL.
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    I can't check right now but last I looked you can't share AMPed search results and I thought a few pages depending on how they were structured. I could be wrong but I don't remember being able to generate a good URL from some AMP pages.
    - themacguffinman 10y ago

BinaryIdiot 10y ago

So now if you buy more into Google's ecosystem (AMP) you get a special flag next to your content in search results? Interesting... You know I don't understand this whole AMP'd thing. It's possible to make something just as efficient if you don't ruin your mark-up to begin with. The big advantage with AMP, as far as I can tell, is the Google caching mechanism. There is no reason someone can't use actual standards to create the exact same results. It really bothers me that, to get preferential treatment, I have to now work with Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles. If I don't the competition will. We originally had web standards for a reason, now we're doing this non-standard stuff.

kuschku 10y ago
> If I don't the competition will. We originally had web standards for a reason, now we're doing this non-standard stuff. I suggest you file a complaint here, if you believe you have to use AMP to not get a competitive disadvantage (because that would be unfair influence on the market by Google): http://ec.europa.eu/competition/contacts/electronic_documents_en.html http://ec.europa.eu/competition/contacts/electronic_document... EDIT: The parent comment complains that the market is unfairly influenced by two large almost-monopolies in their respective markets – so why do I get downvotes for linking the official reference for filing antitrust complaints?
cramforce 10y ago
Note, that this launch is explicitly not a ranking change. Your non-AMP result will continue to be displayed in the same spot. This is just a frontend change: If there is an AMP version of a URL, link there is instead.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  It shows a flag. This is an indication to the user to pick this site over others. Maybe not initially but unless someone proves to me, with data, that this won't affect what users click on I do not believe this won't affect user behavior. This is an indirect ranking.
  - 10y ago

IshKebab 10y ago

I don't see why they need to highlight these pages. Apparently they already use page load speed as a signal in their search rankings. Why not just increase its importance?

CaptSpify 10y ago
> I don't see why they need to highlight these pages. To lock more sites into their system. Sure, they don't need to, but it's definitely beneficial to them. > Apparently they already use page load speed as a signal in their search rankings. I hear this a lot too, but I don't think they really place much importance on load speed. Try searching for "weather", and see how many sites are slow to load, but are at the top of the list. Meanwhile fast-loading sites like http://myfreeweather.com/ http://myfreeweather.com/ are buried in the results. I have no insight to the other multiple factors of their ranking algorithm, but I've never found speed to play much importance.
Sylos 10y ago
Because increasing its importance could be seen as tampering with the results for their own benefit, i.e. pushing a web-technology that they control. Adding a flag to it is sort of the same, but I'm guessing they are testing the waters with this and if they don't get legal repercussion, they'll actually change the search rankings.
- IshKebab 10y ago
  No I'm not saying they increase the rankings of fast AMP pages. I'm saying increase the rankings of pages that are fast regardless of the technology they use. You can have a fast page with normal HTML.

rckclmbr 10y ago

I work in developing markets, and am really excited for AMP. The web on 2g networks is a horrible experience -- imagine browsing the web today at netscape-era speeds. My only big gripe with AMP is it's only built for publishing. It's missing a key feature of making the web complete: the ability for users to interact (ie no forms).

cramforce 10y ago
Forms support is launching within a few days/weeks.
CaptSpify 10y ago
> The web on 2g networks is a horrible experience Completely agree. But instead of adding another layer of complexity and bullshit on top of the existing stack, why not just take away the existing layers of bullshit and complexity? I like the premise behind AMP, but we already have a solution for that. This is just another attempt to lock sites into google.
- JeremyBanks 10y ago
  We already had a solution in theory, but that's worth little when in practice we've had a mess that was rapidly getting worse with no sign of turning around. AMP is not the optimum, but it's actually happening, and it's one heck of a lot better than most of the status quo.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    The only reason AMP is happening is because Google ignored the original problem for so long. If they had payed attention, we wouldn't be in this crappy situation in the first place. This is just them making another power grab and pretending it's for everyone else's benefit.

malyk 10y ago

So after 2 decades of dealing with really bad cross browser incompatibilities that we are just now emerging from we are going to dive into cross search engine incompatibilities to an even greater extent. AMP for Google, something else for Bing, another format for duck duck go, one more for yahoo...ugh!

zukee 10y ago
Bing has actually started using AMP in their results. See the last paragraph of this article: https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/20/google-brings-non-news-amp-links-to-its-mobile-search-results/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/20/google-brings-non-news-amp...

cauterized 10y ago

Ugh. Guess I'm switching my default Safari search engine to DDG...

atdt 10y ago

Per the spec[0], AMP pages must load the AMP runtime via a script tag that references a Google-controlled server, cdn.ampproject.org. This means you are handing over both your site security and your traffic logs to Google. This is a non-issue for the many sites that have already made that bargain (by using Google Analytics, Google Hosted Libraries, Google Fonts, etc.), but it is definitely an issue to some. [0]: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec.html https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec.html

sintaxi 10y ago
Great point. IMHO Regardless if you use GA or not, AMP will be a non-starter for any respectable developer who advocates for the open web for this reason.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
bduerst 10y ago
How is that different for publishers that use any other third party script or service? The Economist landing page alone uses 22 different such services.
- kuschku 10y ago
  Because in some locales, that’s illegal. In Germany, for example, loading third-party scripts from foreign servers that might track users is illegal. So every "like" or "share" button is a two-click button: first click loads the button, second click activates it. Everywhere. AMP would fall under the same legal issue, if it includes tracking.
  - bduerst 10y ago
    Are you so sure about that? http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/02/google-news-starts-showing-accelerated-mobile-pages-in-6-more-countries/ http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/02/google-news-starts-showing...

chinathrow 10y ago

Forced 3rd party JS you must include... no thanks, no AMP for my sites.

benologist 10y ago

Because the takeaway from ad blocking is everyone wants their privacy and security relentlessly undermined faster.

ldng 10y ago

Can you now invalidate Google cache ? Because by the look of that issue, you don't have any control. https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/1901 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/1901 So basically you are completely at the mercy of Google's crawler.

cramforce 10y ago
Update happens independent of crawler and you can ping for it https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/update-ping https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/update-ping

pmarreck 10y ago

I'm fine with AMP as long as i can get a link to a result that is opted out of it. Which i did not see a way to easily do, recently. So basically, I'm not fine with AMP. Because SPOF's are bad. Not just from an architectural perspective, but from a privacy, independence and total systematic perspective. You want to be an agent in between me and the Internet that basically caches a fast version of everything after being pushed through your systems? Let me opt out.

__derek__ 10y ago
You can easily opt out: don't use Google.

AJ007 10y ago

There are three stories here. Each is serious and should be evaluated separately as not to bias the conclusions of any. #1 There is a big problem with mobile sites. I'm using a recent iPhone and many popular news sites, without ad blockers, are as close to unusable as the worst websites I've ever been to, dating back to using Internet Explorer in 1999. Auto playing inline video ads that slide in to view, just insane. These things clearly kill time on site and reader retention. I have theories about why publishers are ignoring this, but who knows. #2 Google is using AMP to co-opt publisher's traffic. This means users are scrolling to another story from another publisher or easily bouncing back to the Google results when they land on your content. (See the X in the story link on the animated gif example.) There goes your time on site and long term user retention. If #1 was a problem for you already, you probably don't notice. #3 AMP & Instant articles are going to put a stranglehold on third party ad networks and represent a very real anti-trust issue. There are a bunch of other privacy implications too, which have been discussed in length. Publishers should be thinking really hard about their future.

lucb1e 10y ago
> I'm using a recent iPhone and many popular news sites, without ad blockers I think I found your problem. Jokes aside, I see your point. But if those sites are shit, stop using those sites. They are currently popular but they don't have to be.

Zhenya 10y ago

Does this mean that you must enable JS for simple pages with text to load if they have been AMP'ed?

kuschku 10y ago
Yes.
- Zhenya 10y ago
  and the JS is served from a google domain?
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Yes.

wodenokoto 10y ago

As far as I can tell, there is not single link to an AMP article anywhere in the blog post. Does AMP only work from Google search results page?

bduerst 10y ago
Seems like it. What it appears to do it swap in the AMP links for supported sites when you search via mobile.

DivineTraube 10y ago

So AMP does two major things: (1) It prescribes a stripped-down version of HTML and uses a JS loader to render fast and load as much resources as possible asynchronously (2) It caches the website in the Google CDN and delivers it via HTTP/2 By applying best practices of structuring web applications and optimizing for the critical rendering path (1) can be achieved, too. The AMP loader is just an opinionated way to do this for simple pages. Everyone can get similar results without AMP by following web performance best practices like [1]: - Reducing the critical resources needed - Reducing the critical bytes which must be transferred - Loading JS, CSS and HTML templates asynchronously - Rendering the page progressively - Minifying & Concatenating CSS, JS and images And there is lots of good tooling for this (e.g. postcss, processhtml, cssmin, UglifyJS, imagemin, critical, gulp-rev-all, ...) (2) is not only harder. It is what limits the broad applicability of AMP. Cached data in the Google CDN cannot be invalidated, neither in the CDN itself nor in ISP interception caches, corporate proxies or the browser cache [2]. The effective consequence of this is that you can only use AMP when the content is mostly static. This is the case for news websites or other publications that are only changed by human editors. It completely breaks down when you try to create a dynamic site, for example a social network or a shop. That is why our startup Baqend [3] takes a different route. We say that developers are clever enough to use existing tooling to achieve (1): an efficient rendering and loading experience. And for (2) we add a caching scheme that also employs CDNs for delivery but keeps data consistent. This is made possible by a simple process: 1. When a browser connects to a Baqend-based website, it loads a Bloom filter containing all potentially stale cached URLs. 2. Every stale URL is requested using HTTP revalidation to refresh stale copies and update caches. 3. When an update operation changes a resource (e.g. an image, JSON object or even a complex query result) its URL is instantly invalidated in the CDN [4] and marked as stale in the Bloom filter. 4. When loading resource, a statistical estimation of the expected TTL (cache liftime) is made. Whenever that prediction fails, the Bloom filter and the automatic CDN invalidation compensate the difference between estimation and real lifetime. Using this scheme (developed at the University of Hamburg in cooperation with Baqend), every kind of dynamic data can be treated as cachable data and the applicability of is not limited to data that seldomly changes and even works for write-heavy resources with rich consistency guarantees (Δ-Atomicity, Read-Your-Writes, Monotonic Reads, Monotonic Writes, Causal Consistency) [5]. Of course I'm biased but you'd like to see AMP-like acceleration coupled with fresh cached data plus tooling, layout and frameworks of your choice, have a look at our Backend-as-a-Service. [1] https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/critical-rendering-path/analyzing-crp https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/c.... [2] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/1901 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/1901 [3] http://www.baqend.com/ http://www.baqend.com/ [4] https://www.fastly.com/blog/building-fast-and-reliable-purging-system https://www.fastly.com/blog/building-fast-and-reliable-purgi... [5] http://www.slideshare.net/felixgessert/talk-cache-sketches-using-bloom-filters-and-web-caching-against-slow-load-times http://www.slideshare.net/felixgessert/talk-cache-sketches-u...

massysett 10y ago

Is Google or anyone else making any effort whatsoever to explain this AMP thing to anyone other than Web developers? For weeks, I thought AMP was some sort of news service. I would get news articles that were apparently from someone else, but they said "AMP" so I figured it was some kind of syndicator or something. I tapped on the "AMP" and the lightning bolt thing and nothing happened. So I gave up on figuring out what it was and then I stumbled on some story like this one. Does Google just not care that people do not know what this thing is?

biot 10y ago

"Though most tags in an AMP HTML page are regular HTML tags, some HTML tags are replaced with AMP-specific tags" If Microsoft were introducing this, I suspect we'd see a lot of "embrace, extend, extinguish" comments.

malchow 10y ago

The evidence seems to suggest that the push for AMP us all about making sure Google gets its ad tags hardcoded on your pages. Otherwise, Google could release a YSlow type package of best practices. I believe it once considered doing this under the title Page Speed Project.

themacguffinman 10y ago
I disagree because the <amp-ad> tag [1] supports many non-Google ad networks. It doesn't force you to use Google's services at all. It seems to me that they used this particular approach because best practices are a lot easier to ignore or misinterpret than AMP's "your page will literally break if you try funny stuff". It's why something like TeX was invented rather than releasing a "best practices" package for making Word documents. [1] https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/extended/amp-ad.html https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/extended/amp-ad.ht...

shaunrussell 10y ago

The best part about AMP is it provides an incentive for major content publishers to create non-bloated pages. Without the AMP standards marketing teams start adding "all of the things" causing page loads to become much heavier.

shostack 10y ago

Any ad network folks here care to weigh in on how you view AMP and its impact on the industry? Seems like a major moat-building exercise ala FB Instant Articles since Google has all the leverage with publishers.

dvcrn 10y ago

I like amp but what is with responsive pages? I thought the best practice went towards not serving a different page for mobile users and have everything full responsive. Now with amp, the opposite seems to be the case

SubiculumCode 10y ago

I hate the Google News AMP section from my phone. I don't know if related but it seems to have also disabled opening google news results in new yabs on Firefox on Android ever since they changed the page.

michaelmior 10y ago

Has anyone who implemented AMP on their personal site actually seen the AMP result show up in search? I implemented AMP some time ago just for fun and I see no sign of it in search results for my blog. The AMP validation tool as well as the Search Console say there are no problems.

hyperhopper 10y ago
Same experience for me. Amp validates, If I go to the google cache url I can see it there as well. No AMP icon.

frik 10y ago

The end user will stay longer on Google and Facebook. That's what they want. Anyway, it feels pretty broken on iOS. Would be great if Adblockers would mangle the Google search results to replace the AMP links with proper links to the full website of e.g. WashingtonPost.