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AMP pages are designed explicitly to benefit Google over the site in question. They rob the ability to use design to make a site stickier (which would of course

AMP pages are designed explicitly to benefit Google over the site in question. They rob the ability to use design to make a site stickier (which would of course make the bounce rate high for AMP pages). I also in general find AMP pages to be a bit of a UX nightmare. Outside of raw speed, I have nothing good to say about AMP pages, and the speed is nowhere near good enough to justify using them. They make the Web a worse place for the sole benefit of Google. They are abusing their monopoly position in search by forcing AMP pages down people's throats.

vorpalhex 10y ago
They do rob sites of the ability to load 14 fonts, 2Mb of javascript and a gazillion images before letting me read the two paragraphs I want. Just like they also rob you of forcing me to take a survey first, or hounding me for my email, or otherwise preventing me from doing the single thing I want to do (read your content). Your site should be sticky because you have good content, not because you've tricked me into clicking more links.
- liquidise 10y ago
  "Protect me from sites with bad UX" is a responsibility i would be surprised to see even 2% of users requested of Google. But let's pretend you are right. There are a number of solutions Google could have used to combat that very issue, such as punishing sites with long load times or exorbitant number of external assets. None of them needed to involve not sending you to a website in the name of altruism.
  - lloydde 10y ago
    I don't think Google has the usability of this correct. I don't like how awkard it feels to truly get to the article on the website and the URL. Having said that, I'm enjoying the speed and readability. Is this opt-in for the publishers? How different is this from from browser's blocking pop ups? I prefer not to using a pop up blocker, so I experience the web like the general population. But I was so sick of publishers forcing ad clicks on mobile by effectively blocking scrolling on smaller form factor devices like my iPhone SE, that I've switched to the Brave browser.
  - vorpalhex 10y ago
    1. Lots of users care. Watch any senior citizen on a mediocre PC surf the internet for twenty minutes. 2. Google did and still does. Load times were still unacceptable across the board, usually not because they had to be but often times because the people running the websites don't care enough to. Same as for HTTPS. 3. AMP is a more drastic reaction. It appears to be working. That being said, I would like to see AMP become enacted only on sites that do actually take a long while to load. At the same time, AMP is still opt in. This isn't forced altruism, but you can play nicely or be lowered in rankings in response. -- edited for formatting
- thesagan 10y ago
  Serious question: Shouldn't average users provide or retract traffic based on these preferences, and not Google as user-in-chief? Personally I'd prefer that Google not play party whip in setting behavior patterns; I'd rather it be as decentralized as possible. To me that's one of the advantages of the web over the app ecosystem: power is more atomized.
  - vorpalhex 10y ago
    In general, users do make their choice. Product designers counter by making it more difficult to leave or get content. I'm a firmly bitter user who has stopped frequenting a lot of websites because they don't load well or don't give me what I consider to be an acceptable value prop (I'll happily turn off my adblocker if your ads are well behaved, I won't take a survey to read a one paragraph article). But most users, and especially most non-technical users, aren't willing to take that same stance despite being very frustrated. It seems to vary between "well that's just how the internet is" to "I don't know any other sources". Having google prioritize non-terrible sources is a big boon to those non-technical users in my eyes, cemented firmly when I watch my mom or other older family members try to search the internet.
    - username223 10y ago
      > But most users, and especially most non-technical users, aren't willing to take that same stance despite being very frustrated. That's where you can help! The next time you visit your parents or non-techie friends, install something like Ghostery for them. It's not a long-term solution to web awfulness, but it makes the web less terrible for now.
    - undersuit 10y ago
      I'm a long time user of Google's Personal Blocklist https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist-by-goo/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist... I got so tired of sites with scraped content behind ads and logins. It's not perfect but it helps.
    - hkmurakami 10y ago
- simonhamp 10y ago
  The fact is, we shouldn't need AMP to refocus our efforts in favour of the user... we should be making lean and performant pages as a matter of course. I do agree that if Google really want to do anything to help the cause, they would more heavily lower the ranking (or completely remove from their index) any sites that don't meet basic performance and readability thresholds. AMP is clearly a play into their own walled garden.
  - fav_collector 10y ago
    > heavily lower the ranking (or completely remove from their index) any sites that don't meet basic performance and readability thresholds. This seems like a much tougher problem than AMP. From an API design standpoint, it is much easier to build and maintain an endpoint that receives data that must be in a specific, proprietary data format instead of an endpoint that allows the user to input data in any format and then attempts to parse that data after receiving it.
- throwaway91111 10y ago
  So apparently google has decided the standards of good content. Great.
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    For the people using their product, yes. If you're using Google, you implicitly trust their result ranking and presentation (else you wouldn't be using Google.) What is the problem here?
    - throwaway91111 10y ago
      The problem is that they're leveraging a search advantage to force sites to change in a way that objectively ruins my experience by optimizing page load times over displaying the result URL I can click into. It's a search engine, not a cdn, and I resent their cutting out the results to serve the content they deem superior.
- nelmaven 10y ago
  We can do all that without using AMP pages.
- Reason077 10y ago
  I understand and appreciate the benefits of AMP, but it would be great if there was a clear and consistent link/button to tap through to the original article on the source website. Sometimes I want the source article because it had more features (comments, related articles, etc), and sometimes AMP is just glitchy.
  - cramforce 10y ago
    We added that button to Google Search on the web about a month ago.
    - djrogers 10y ago
      You added an obscure icon that when tapped reveals the link, which then must be also be tapped. That's a little more obtuse and undiscoverable than 'added that button'. The fact that people here on HN are still requesting it says it's far from well implemented - I wouldn't have known about it if I hadn't read it somewhere when you added it. The more conspiratorial among us probably assume that implementing it poorly is intentional.
      - cramforce 10y ago
        It'll be replaced with a standard share button once navigator.share() API launches.
        shostack 10y ago
        Given that you are the tech lead on AMP at Google, maybe you can clarify a bit on this...but why the decision to group this interaction under Sharing? It seems like people are trying to just visit the original site, not share it, and one of the big criticisms has been that this is buried. Presumably putting it under Sharing is also a bit confusing because to many, "sharing" implies sending content to someone which describes a very different interaction than opening the original page. Is it because "Sharing" in this case us meant to imply pushing the content to another medium (such as an external browser) vs. just the implied meaning of "sharing with another person?" I'd love any context you can share from internal discussions around how prominent to make that functionality. I think it is hard to deny that Google benefits from it being harder to find, which is where the criticism from the parent is likely coming from.
- freehunter 10y ago
  The better answer to those problems is to lower their page rank, not to mirror their content and steal their traffic and then lower their rank if they don't agree to having their content mirrored and traffic stolen.
- treebeard901 10y ago
  > or otherwise preventing me from doing the single thing I want to do (read your content) Google amp could play an important role in the future if net neutrality changes significantly. It also brings up some questions about whose content you're actually reading if Google is acting as a middle man between producer and consumer. In the worst case scenario, the amp'd version of a page could be different from what the original author intended.
ForrestN 10y ago
If you work for Google, push back on this in whatever way you can. Especially now that the government is putting a fox in every regulatory hen house, developers need to hold their employers to basic standards. Connecting visibility in listings to the AMP project is classic monopoly abuse, even if they use load speed as rationale.
- AckSyn 10y ago
  All I would ask is for AMP links to have a link at the top of the page that says "press here for original article" to quickly go to the source. The only way I currently know how to do this is by going to the URL bar, which isn't that great on any mobile device.
  - timecube 10y ago
    They finally added a way to easily get the original URL (click the link button in the AMP header). Not ideal, but better than trying to get it out of the address bar.
    - AckSyn 10y ago
      I had to check moments ago, and you're right. It must have been very recent!
feedjoelpie 10y ago
I completely disagree that the speed isn't good enough to justify using them. In fact, my bounce rate is high on AMP because I can near-instantly figure out if this particular article on this topic I searched is the one I actually want to read or if it's uninformative trash. I usually flip through 2-5 before settling on the one I think is good. These are the same sorts of complaints people have made about every change to search ranking. And while, yeah, I'm sure Google's not being altruistic, the implications of most of their actions in these spaces is pretty consistent: If you want people's attention, don't ship trash.
- d0vs 10y ago
  Agreed. As a user, I couldn't care less about your bounce rate.
- christian_wilde 10y ago
  Completely agree BUT, the problem stated in the article has nothing to do with that behaviour. It refers to the inability to track the user journey correctly due to Google's AMP distribution system. It doesn't matter if you click on an AMP result an go back in 2 seconds, or if you click on an AMP result, read 30 seconds, and click on a link inside the content that takes you to the original website: both cases are considered bounces.
batmansmk 10y ago
Yep pretty much. Can a publisher choose who caches his result, and pick the ones that give him the best deal money wise? Otherwise, Google turned into a bookstore with a printer in the back and no way for the publishers to trust the reseller.
- callahad 10y ago
  I don't believe so. Google's AMP Cache is opportunistic with no opt-out for valid AMP pages. Further, according to the AMP Cache Guidelines at https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-cache-guidelines.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-c..., > In the AMP ecosystem, the platform that links to content may freely choose which AMP Cache (if any) to use. It is an inversion of the typical model where content delivery is the responsibility of the publisher.
parenthephobia 10y ago
Talk of robbing and forcing implies a level of coercion that simply isn't there. For the end user, AMP links are clearly marked, and non-AMP news results are readily available. For the content producer, Google only publishes their content via AMP if the content producer permits it. Indeed, it is up to the content producer to make the AMP version of their content.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  > For the content producer, Google only publishes their content via AMP if the content producer permits it. Indeed, it is up to the content producer to make the AMP version of their content. Content producers are being strong-armed into this by Google because AMP capable pages are being given preferential treatment in the SERPS.
  - Kalium 10y ago
    Is it possible that AMP pages are preferred because they're a better user experience?
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      Google prefers them because they give Google more power. They also: - break the web - hijack content - reduce the value for the publisher - make it impossible for the publisher to monetize their content - are a step back from an open web Pretty soon you'll be 'certified information provider' to Google rather than web publisher. Why stop at mobile?
      - SquareWheel 10y ago
        >break the web Okay, how? AMP is built on HTML5 standards. >hijack content AMP Cache is different than AMP. Do CDNs also "hijack content", by serving them from faster servers? >reduce the value for the publisher By offering them an option to make pages load faster? >make it impossible for the publisher to monetize their content Incorrect. Read up on the allowed tags in AMP. Both ads and analytics are possible; they're just delayed until after the content is shown. >are a step back from an open web Built on open web standards.
tsunamifury 10y ago
APM is making users happy and frustrating content providers grey patterns for retention. Seems like a win-win.
cramforce 10y ago
The actual answer to the question posed by the blog post is purely technical in nature. Sorry, no conspiracy theory to find here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13838756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13838756
linasj 10y ago
I am a very happy user of amp content. After all that's what amp is designed for to load clean content quickly.

vorpalhex 10y ago

They do rob sites of the ability to load 14 fonts, 2Mb of javascript and a gazillion images before letting me read the two paragraphs I want. Just like they also rob you of forcing me to take a survey first, or hounding me for my email, or otherwise preventing me from doing the single thing I want to do (read your content). Your site should be sticky because you have good content, not because you've tricked me into clicking more links.

liquidise 10y ago
"Protect me from sites with bad UX" is a responsibility i would be surprised to see even 2% of users requested of Google. But let's pretend you are right. There are a number of solutions Google could have used to combat that very issue, such as punishing sites with long load times or exorbitant number of external assets. None of them needed to involve not sending you to a website in the name of altruism.
- lloydde 10y ago
  I don't think Google has the usability of this correct. I don't like how awkard it feels to truly get to the article on the website and the URL. Having said that, I'm enjoying the speed and readability. Is this opt-in for the publishers? How different is this from from browser's blocking pop ups? I prefer not to using a pop up blocker, so I experience the web like the general population. But I was so sick of publishers forcing ad clicks on mobile by effectively blocking scrolling on smaller form factor devices like my iPhone SE, that I've switched to the Brave browser.
- vorpalhex 10y ago
  1. Lots of users care. Watch any senior citizen on a mediocre PC surf the internet for twenty minutes. 2. Google did and still does. Load times were still unacceptable across the board, usually not because they had to be but often times because the people running the websites don't care enough to. Same as for HTTPS. 3. AMP is a more drastic reaction. It appears to be working. That being said, I would like to see AMP become enacted only on sites that do actually take a long while to load. At the same time, AMP is still opt in. This isn't forced altruism, but you can play nicely or be lowered in rankings in response. -- edited for formatting
thesagan 10y ago
Serious question: Shouldn't average users provide or retract traffic based on these preferences, and not Google as user-in-chief? Personally I'd prefer that Google not play party whip in setting behavior patterns; I'd rather it be as decentralized as possible. To me that's one of the advantages of the web over the app ecosystem: power is more atomized.
- vorpalhex 10y ago
  In general, users do make their choice. Product designers counter by making it more difficult to leave or get content. I'm a firmly bitter user who has stopped frequenting a lot of websites because they don't load well or don't give me what I consider to be an acceptable value prop (I'll happily turn off my adblocker if your ads are well behaved, I won't take a survey to read a one paragraph article). But most users, and especially most non-technical users, aren't willing to take that same stance despite being very frustrated. It seems to vary between "well that's just how the internet is" to "I don't know any other sources". Having google prioritize non-terrible sources is a big boon to those non-technical users in my eyes, cemented firmly when I watch my mom or other older family members try to search the internet.
  - username223 10y ago
    > But most users, and especially most non-technical users, aren't willing to take that same stance despite being very frustrated. That's where you can help! The next time you visit your parents or non-techie friends, install something like Ghostery for them. It's not a long-term solution to web awfulness, but it makes the web less terrible for now.
  - undersuit 10y ago
    I'm a long time user of Google's Personal Blocklist https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist-by-goo/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist... I got so tired of sites with scraped content behind ads and logins. It's not perfect but it helps.
  - hkmurakami 10y ago
simonhamp 10y ago
The fact is, we shouldn't need AMP to refocus our efforts in favour of the user... we should be making lean and performant pages as a matter of course. I do agree that if Google really want to do anything to help the cause, they would more heavily lower the ranking (or completely remove from their index) any sites that don't meet basic performance and readability thresholds. AMP is clearly a play into their own walled garden.
- fav_collector 10y ago
  > heavily lower the ranking (or completely remove from their index) any sites that don't meet basic performance and readability thresholds. This seems like a much tougher problem than AMP. From an API design standpoint, it is much easier to build and maintain an endpoint that receives data that must be in a specific, proprietary data format instead of an endpoint that allows the user to input data in any format and then attempts to parse that data after receiving it.
throwaway91111 10y ago
So apparently google has decided the standards of good content. Great.
- Karunamon 10y ago
  For the people using their product, yes. If you're using Google, you implicitly trust their result ranking and presentation (else you wouldn't be using Google.) What is the problem here?
  - throwaway91111 10y ago
    The problem is that they're leveraging a search advantage to force sites to change in a way that objectively ruins my experience by optimizing page load times over displaying the result URL I can click into. It's a search engine, not a cdn, and I resent their cutting out the results to serve the content they deem superior.
nelmaven 10y ago
We can do all that without using AMP pages.
Reason077 10y ago
I understand and appreciate the benefits of AMP, but it would be great if there was a clear and consistent link/button to tap through to the original article on the source website. Sometimes I want the source article because it had more features (comments, related articles, etc), and sometimes AMP is just glitchy.
- cramforce 10y ago
  We added that button to Google Search on the web about a month ago.
  - djrogers 10y ago
    You added an obscure icon that when tapped reveals the link, which then must be also be tapped. That's a little more obtuse and undiscoverable than 'added that button'. The fact that people here on HN are still requesting it says it's far from well implemented - I wouldn't have known about it if I hadn't read it somewhere when you added it. The more conspiratorial among us probably assume that implementing it poorly is intentional.
    - cramforce 10y ago
      It'll be replaced with a standard share button once navigator.share() API launches.
      - shostack 10y ago
        Given that you are the tech lead on AMP at Google, maybe you can clarify a bit on this...but why the decision to group this interaction under Sharing? It seems like people are trying to just visit the original site, not share it, and one of the big criticisms has been that this is buried. Presumably putting it under Sharing is also a bit confusing because to many, "sharing" implies sending content to someone which describes a very different interaction than opening the original page. Is it because "Sharing" in this case us meant to imply pushing the content to another medium (such as an external browser) vs. just the implied meaning of "sharing with another person?" I'd love any context you can share from internal discussions around how prominent to make that functionality. I think it is hard to deny that Google benefits from it being harder to find, which is where the criticism from the parent is likely coming from.
freehunter 10y ago
The better answer to those problems is to lower their page rank, not to mirror their content and steal their traffic and then lower their rank if they don't agree to having their content mirrored and traffic stolen.
treebeard901 10y ago
> or otherwise preventing me from doing the single thing I want to do (read your content) Google amp could play an important role in the future if net neutrality changes significantly. It also brings up some questions about whose content you're actually reading if Google is acting as a middle man between producer and consumer. In the worst case scenario, the amp'd version of a page could be different from what the original author intended.

ForrestN 10y ago

If you work for Google, push back on this in whatever way you can. Especially now that the government is putting a fox in every regulatory hen house, developers need to hold their employers to basic standards. Connecting visibility in listings to the AMP project is classic monopoly abuse, even if they use load speed as rationale.

AckSyn 10y ago
All I would ask is for AMP links to have a link at the top of the page that says "press here for original article" to quickly go to the source. The only way I currently know how to do this is by going to the URL bar, which isn't that great on any mobile device.
- timecube 10y ago
  They finally added a way to easily get the original URL (click the link button in the AMP header). Not ideal, but better than trying to get it out of the address bar.
  - AckSyn 10y ago
    I had to check moments ago, and you're right. It must have been very recent!

feedjoelpie 10y ago

I completely disagree that the speed isn't good enough to justify using them. In fact, my bounce rate is high on AMP because I can near-instantly figure out if this particular article on this topic I searched is the one I actually want to read or if it's uninformative trash. I usually flip through 2-5 before settling on the one I think is good. These are the same sorts of complaints people have made about every change to search ranking. And while, yeah, I'm sure Google's not being altruistic, the implications of most of their actions in these spaces is pretty consistent: If you want people's attention, don't ship trash.

d0vs 10y ago
Agreed. As a user, I couldn't care less about your bounce rate.
christian_wilde 10y ago
Completely agree BUT, the problem stated in the article has nothing to do with that behaviour. It refers to the inability to track the user journey correctly due to Google's AMP distribution system. It doesn't matter if you click on an AMP result an go back in 2 seconds, or if you click on an AMP result, read 30 seconds, and click on a link inside the content that takes you to the original website: both cases are considered bounces.

batmansmk 10y ago

Yep pretty much. Can a publisher choose who caches his result, and pick the ones that give him the best deal money wise? Otherwise, Google turned into a bookstore with a printer in the back and no way for the publishers to trust the reseller.

callahad 10y ago
I don't believe so. Google's AMP Cache is opportunistic with no opt-out for valid AMP pages. Further, according to the AMP Cache Guidelines at https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-cache-guidelines.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-c..., > In the AMP ecosystem, the platform that links to content may freely choose which AMP Cache (if any) to use. It is an inversion of the typical model where content delivery is the responsibility of the publisher.

parenthephobia 10y ago

Talk of robbing and forcing implies a level of coercion that simply isn't there. For the end user, AMP links are clearly marked, and non-AMP news results are readily available. For the content producer, Google only publishes their content via AMP if the content producer permits it. Indeed, it is up to the content producer to make the AMP version of their content.

jacquesm 10y ago
> For the content producer, Google only publishes their content via AMP if the content producer permits it. Indeed, it is up to the content producer to make the AMP version of their content. Content producers are being strong-armed into this by Google because AMP capable pages are being given preferential treatment in the SERPS.
- Kalium 10y ago
  Is it possible that AMP pages are preferred because they're a better user experience?
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Google prefers them because they give Google more power. They also: - break the web - hijack content - reduce the value for the publisher - make it impossible for the publisher to monetize their content - are a step back from an open web Pretty soon you'll be 'certified information provider' to Google rather than web publisher. Why stop at mobile?
    - SquareWheel 10y ago
      >break the web Okay, how? AMP is built on HTML5 standards. >hijack content AMP Cache is different than AMP. Do CDNs also "hijack content", by serving them from faster servers? >reduce the value for the publisher By offering them an option to make pages load faster? >make it impossible for the publisher to monetize their content Incorrect. Read up on the allowed tags in AMP. Both ads and analytics are possible; they're just delayed until after the content is shown. >are a step back from an open web Built on open web standards.

tsunamifury 10y ago

APM is making users happy and frustrating content providers grey patterns for retention. Seems like a win-win.

cramforce 10y ago

The actual answer to the question posed by the blog post is purely technical in nature. Sorry, no conspiracy theory to find here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13838756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13838756

linasj 10y ago

I am a very happy user of amp content. After all that's what amp is designed for to load clean content quickly.