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In theory* I don't mind the idea of having a more standardised subset web page that has a consistent internal structure and that renders quickly. However, havi
by richdougherty 9y ago
In theory* I don't mind the idea of having a more standardised subset web page that has a consistent internal structure and that renders quickly.
However, having Google load this structured content and host it on its own platform is a terrible idea. Content should remain on the publisher's site. Putting too much content in one place is dangerous for competition.
* In practice there are implementation problems too, e.g. those mentioned in the linked article.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoGoogle using their search monopoly to create a distribution monopoly is also extremely worrying.
- j1vms 9y ago> Google using their search monopoly to create a distribution monopoly is also extremely worrying. Google is using any means possible to keep the web (html, js, css) relevant in the age of native apps (that includes Facebook app running on Android). If the web stays relevant, the same goes for Google search.
- matthewmacleod 9y agoIn contrast, I think google is making every effort possible to direct people away from the web and into the Google ecosystem. Searching for maps? Google. Searching for flights? Google. Searching for information? Google. The list goes on, and the technical means for delivery is essentially irrelevant.
- stekenwright 9y agoDefinitely trying, but overreaching. The public is starting to cut out Google/the middleman and it's really just forcing shoppers into Amazon's ecosystem, those searching for flights to Skyscanner etc.
- tyingq 9y agoRich snippets is the catch all for everything else. You can see a preview for what that means by checking out Wikipedia's traffic decline over the last 3 years or so.
- joshuamorton 9y agoTo be fair, at least in wikipedia's case, that's potentially a good thing. Wikipedia isn't ad-supported, so having their data hosted elsewhere isn't actually a problem (as long as credit is given and so donations continue), because it becomes less expensive for them to host.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- aanm1988 9y agoNah man, it's all good. I mean sure, we keep giving absurd amounts of power to an ad company but it's google, who doesn't love google. If it was microsoft they already would have shut this down because of the backlash. Google does it and people are fine with it.
- kilotaras 9y agoIsn't that an antitrust move by google?
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago> I don't mind the idea of having a more standardised subset web page We already had this two decades ago: WAP, its contemporaries (i-mode), and its immediate successors (XHTML Mobile Profile).
- frozenport 9y agoExcept mobile Web adoption in 2002 was poor because of form factor, among other things.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoOh sure. Though I'm not actually trying to criticise the idea of a subset, if anything I'd support it. I'm just pointing to potentially useful precedent. It's not a new idea.
- matthewmacleod 9y agoSure, and those were good solutions for the time - nothing wrong with similar approaches in a modern context.
- cramforce 9y agoBig difference was that these had custom renderers. AMP renders in any web browser since they are just web pages.
- Antrikshy 9y agoI didn't realize AMP content was hosted by Google.
- wmf 9y agoYeah, one of the biggest problems with AMP is that it works very differently than how the documentation leads you to think it works.
- ehsankia 9y agoThe original content is still on the website, Google hosts a cache server, rehosting the website's content around the world closer to the users for faster access, for free. In theory, it's a win-win-win situation. Publisher gets free hosting (with analytics and ad money still coming to them obviously), users get a faster experience and Google is happier if the users browser more content. In reality, AMP is obviously not perfect but they have been addressing common issues and improving. I may not be fully sold on it yet, but I don't understand the massive blind hatred. Saying "people can just optimize their website" doesn't mean shit. They've had years and no one has been. Sites have been getting slower every year despite browsers getting faster. No one gave a single shit until AMP came around...
- scott_karana 9y agoGoogle has, and should, downranked slow pages in favour of fast ones. But instead of simply pushing that aspect harder, they're actively promoting their own tech.
- emmelaich 9y ago> Google has, and should, downranked slow pages in favour of fast ones. They do.
- acdha 9y agoThe main problems I have are that it breaks two really important web features: sharing links and trust. Users seeing google.com URLs means they trust them more, which has helped propaganda sites and phishers. The other thing is that for me, AMP has not been faster many times. I know they're working on it but having to download and run 100KB of external JavaScript before rendering frequently meant that it was slower than the real page. It helps the stragglers but e.g. WaPo or NYT load just as fast and that should be enough.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> Putting too much content in one place is dangerous for competition Considering we're on the precipice of a global authoritarian-populist cycle, there are non-market consequences to such concentration, too.
- jdormit 9y agoWhat is an authoritarian-populist cycle?
- trueSlav 9y agoAnyone that isn't a full on left winger. I.e. crying about authoritarianism when you yourself, >by definition< of using the word "populist" in this context, are an authoritanian. Lefties don't like that people can see the bad consequences of unchecked globalism and multiculturalism, but the politicians who aligned with these ideas tend to be popular... so what do you do? Basically consider huge amounts of people idiots who don't know what's good for them and call any politicians with that uncomfortable voter base "populists". Since for every leftist, democracy is great only to a point when it starts to produce results they don't like.
- tajen 9y agoBrexit, Trump, FN, Erdogan, etc.
- zambal 9y agoWhat makes you think we're on this precipice?
- angry-hacker 9y agoI'm surprised if you think otherwise. WE are on the mercy of few SV companies and whatever they decide or push is our fate.
- bitmapbrother 9y ago>Content should remain on the publisher's site. Publishers are free to implement their own cache and host their own content. AMP is open source and they can modify it however they like.
- richdougherty 9y agoI mean that when you click a search result in Google you should go to the publisher's site, not to Google's cache of the content. It may have changed since, but that's how it was implemented originally by Google: https://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-amp-speeding-web-changing-works/ https://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-amp-speeding-web-chang... "…but there’s a big catch: if readers decide to share a link to an AMP page they’ve clicked on through a Google search, the link points to Google.com (for example, google.com/amp/yoursite.com/yourpage/amp), not to your site. A Google spokesperson confirms that there isn’t a way to both have your AMP-optimized appear in Google’s prioritized search listings without having that content hosted on Google’s AMP Cache servers."
- bitmapbrother 9y agoI was under the impression that the publisher could elect to use their own servers for their AMP content. Is this not possible anymore?
- callahad 9y agoThere's a lot of doublespeak around this. 1. You can (and must) host AMP content on servers of your own choosing. 2. Google's crawlers ingest your AMP content, validate it, and re-host it in Google's AMP Cache. Bing and other folks run similar crawlers and caches. 3. Google search results will only link to AMP content on Google's own cache. So yes, you can host your content on your own servers. And you can give people direct URLs to that content. But Google users will only ever see links to the copy of your content that Google hosts; your servers never see that traffic. There is no way to opt-out and still be considered a valid AMP page.
- jwlato 9y ago
- dragonwriter 9y ago>However, having Google load this structured content and host it on its own platform is a terrible idea. Google isn't the only party running an AMP cache. > Content should remain on the publisher's site. It does. Its also cached by aggregators, and AMP is designed to take advantage of being accessed from a shared cache. >
- kuschku 9y agoThat exact caching has to end. They can offer to do a CDN like CloudFlare, but make it optional. I want to ensure that not a single bit of my data ever runs through Google's infrastructure, while still getting all the same benefits as if it did. If Google treats sites different just for using an AMP Cache, then I'll have to send another complaint to the EU Antitrust committee. My pages actually increased their loadtime tenfold when I tried them with AMP — they're tested on a HUAWEI IDEOS X3 on 64kbps GPRS. AMP increases load time to over a minute. (On a modern phone, with a modern connection, my pages are obviously also faster — I'm also testing with a Nexus 5X on 100Mbps 4G) I can't just massively increase load time for pages just for a better ranking in search results, this shouldn't even be a choice.
- EvilTerran 9y agoSeems to me the right approach would be for sites to embrace the HTML5 semantic tags (<nav>, <article> and so forth), and browsers to offer a way to view just that semantically-marked-up content - without scripts, with restricted CSS, and maybe with some kind of filtering out of third-party content. Something like Firefox's "reader view", but including more bits of the page. So the browser would still be downloading the exact same HTML document (straight from the publisher's server, how you want it) - just then ignoring all the clutter. Compare to AMP, which AFAICT necessitates serving a whole separate version of the page with only the blessed markup... it reminds me of the bad old days, having a separate mobile site instead of a single responsive design for all devices. All seems rather antithetical to that grand ideal of separating structure and presentation.
- captainmuon 9y agoAn idea I've been floating for a while is to have two HTML profiles in the future. Call it HTML6 document and HTML6 app. HTML6 document is a restricted subset, similar to what you suggest. I would still allow complete design flexibility, and I might even allow a subset of JS, but only for presentation purposes. Definitely not turing complete, and no ajax etc.. Probably I wouldn't allow cross-origin resources with credentials. So you could include an image or stylesheet, but the browser would not send along cookies. What I'm aiming for is a replacement for PDF, something you could read on an ebook, etc.. Just a plain document. On the other hand, I'd have HTML6 app to be able to use the complete web platform.
- madeofpalk 9y agoThis sounds good as a dream, but in reality it would actually achieve anything because everyone, including the publishers, would just use 'HTML6 app'.
- codedokode 9y agoYou can make light web pages with current technologies but nobody wants a page without advertisement, popups, analytics and notifications.
- 9y ago
- zackbloom 9y agoIt's worth pointing out Cloudflare has a competing AMP serving tool: https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/accelerated-mobile-links/ https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/accelerated-...
- tyingq 9y agoI haven't yet seen a non Google hosted AMP page in Google's carousel. Does that happen? If not, it's somewhat telling.
- notatoad 9y agoNo, it does not happen, nor will it ever because that's fundamentally not how AMP caching works. A site doesn't pick an amp cache like they pick a hosting provider, with some sites cached on cloudflare-amp while others are hosted on google-amp. All amp content is on all amp caches. Google search is one AMP client, and it uses google's AMP cache. If, for example, bing wanted to serve AMP pages, they would need to choose an AMP cache to serve them from, and cloudflare's offering would be an option. One of the problems that AMP is trying to solve is individual websites hosting on insufficient architecture. If each site was allowed to choose what AMP cache it was served from, that would defeat the purpose. It's up to the client to choose the cache it uses, to ensure a consistent speed.
- tyingq 9y agoThat's pretty much the point I was making. The wording from Google to publishers doesn't make this clear. It is the implementation they chose, and it does have speed benefits. But, an edge cache that allows the end user more control, their own domain, an no hijacking header is possible, and would provide a notable speed benefit. If there were a choice between the two, publishers would likely pick the latter.
- notatoad 9y agoPublishers had a choice, and they overwhelmingly chose to host their sites on infrastructure that was too slow. That's why the AMP project exists, to take choices like that away from publishers, because they consistently make the wrong choices when you give them one.
- nialv7 9y agoEver heard about RSS? ;)
- captainmuon 9y ago> Putting too much content in one place is dangerous for competition. Only in this weird world of third-party-served-js-ads. In an ideal world, I wouldn't care about where my content is served from. I just care 1) that many people see it, and if it is commercial 2) that I get money for it. I could just add some ads as inline to my article, served in the same way as my article's illustrations are. Not sure google allows that, though. Wouldn't surprize me if not.
- madeofpalk 9y agoRight. Here's the problem and confusion with Google AMP: it's actually two seperate products. 1. There's the HTML/CSS/JS library/subset that's a good framework for building pages that load quickly 2. There's the 'CDN' that integrates with Google Search to preload and 'iFrame' the site in. Google 'has' to host/'iFrame' the content in their own google.com/amp pages because that's the only way to preload a page to make it display instantly.