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AMP does not seem like a walled garden tech. any crawler can find and use the AMP version of a page through this tag: <link rel="amphtml" href="https://www.exa

AMP does not seem like a walled garden tech. any crawler can find and use the AMP version of a page through this tag: <link rel="amphtml" href="https://www.example.com/url/to/amp/document.html"> https://www.example.com/url/to/amp/document.html"> Thus all google is doing is rewarding sites that have implemented this and as a result load fast, no? imo, its drastically different to Instant Articles because you can never ever find the Instant Articles version of a web page. its private and only fb knows it.

boramalper 9y ago
I am not saying exactly that Google is evil, and maybe they don't even have bad intentions (heck, we are talking about a corporate identity here, how far can we apply morals?). But, what I am thinking is that AMP and its rivals (such as Instant Articles) hurt the free & open Web. For instance, Google Search is invaluable, but as a side effect, a website that doesn't end up on the first page of a Google Search result for instance, is nearly non-existent. Also, the notion of hyperlinks are crucial to the Web and these projects break it. Hyperlinks originate from an article from 1945, "As We May Think"[1], and the term itself is coined by Ted Nelson in 1965 for Project Xanadu. That's how you create a web that is now called the Web. That's also what Google's PageRank algorithm depends on, at least at the beginning. Now, letting Google host your content, under a link such as `https://www.google.com/amp/www.example.com/amp/doc.html` https://www.google.com/amp/www.example.com/amp/doc.html`, you are breaking hyperlinks: it is no more linking different websites together. [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
- chii 9y ago
  i would expect that content producers will start putting in abreviated versions of their content in AMP format to satisfy the AMP requirement as minimially as possible, and then add a link back to the original site for the rest.
  - bryanlarsen 9y ago
    That's exactly what allrecipes.com used to do, and they have fairly high Google juice for random recipes. I thought they still did, but when I went to verify it didn't show up. It'd be interesting to know why they stopped.
  - ryantownsend 9y ago
    I'm going to guess Google would penalise that behaviour for showing different content, justifying it as "harming the user experience" or something. If they don't do this already, they probably will if they keep going down the AMP rabbit-hole.
  - arielm 9y ago
    I believe reddit does something like that where they include only a portion of a thread with a big “view full thread” button. I think that’s a good idea, but I fear some users won’t realize there’s more or may not understand the abrupt change in layout/design/etc.
coldtea 9y ago
>Thus all google is doing is rewarding sites that have implemented this and as a result load fast, no? No. And Google could not care less if pages load fast -- it could incenticize making pages faster with traditional methods instead. It's all about capturing more eyeballs and proxying more traffic.
- matt4077 9y ago
  But why? AMP allows other advertisers. They can track clicks just as easily with a redirect. They could quite easily change the UI of the Android browser to allow for fast switching through search results. Nobody cares what CDN the bytes are served from if the content is identical. I agree that it's somehow yucky, but I don't see how it can be ascribed to malice intent, instead of an effort to improve the user experience that maybe goes too far.
- brainfire 9y ago
  They already did that, and web "developers" did not do the work. The period in which Google incentivized faster page loads was the period of some of the worst page bloat growth.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >They already did that, and web "developers" did not do the work. It's not up to them to decide after that.
  - dspillett 9y ago
    It depends what "market" you are looking at. In some areas people understand care about such things, in those areas we did and still do see some optimisation effort. Far from everywhere of course, even within that subset, but I'd wager there was improvement overall (or at least things got worse less than they otherwise would). In other areas though the available audience either doesn't understand or doesn't care (because their connection and CPU are fast enough to cope for instance, and they aren't on an expensive metered link) or both. I say "available audience" because for these sites the "target audience" is every-human-alive-several-times-over-good-god-we-need-more-ad-impressions-and-clicks - the likes of buzzfeed and the other click-bait filled "news" and "entertainment" sites where four sentences of content can be stretched over sixteen pages of large, slow loading, auto-playing, obnoxious adverts. The people who care about load time (and/or relevant technical or privacy matters) simply don't follow those links. The people who do follow the links aren't worth making page load optimisations for because they simply won't care or notice, so from the site's PoV the time is better spent on adverts-hung-onto-into-each-morsel-of-content optimisations instead. And that was when Google ranking was the main thing that mattered, more recently the operators of such sites are more interested in distribution via social media so Google ranking you lower for a slow load is less of a concern, or if it is a concern there are tricks (not all of which Google can easily filter for - it is an on-going war of attrition) to show Google different versions of the content that does load quickly.
michaelt 9y ago
Sites that are traditionally called walled gardens (facebook, AOL, compuserve...) often combine four features; (a) all the content is hosted under the walled garden's domain; (b) the walled garden designs key parts of the navigation and layout, understandably acting in their own interests; (c) the walled garden has content policies and declines to host certain content; and (d) users must have accounts and be logged in to see the content. AMP does (a) and (b); I don't know about (c); and doesn't do (d). Still, I can see why people see echos of walled gardens in AMP.
- matt4077 9y ago
  The feature that defines a walled garden is the wall. AMP doesn't have that wall: it is perfectly usable by any other search engine/spider to replicate the experience. The website itself can link to the AMP version if that makes sense for users. Mobile browsers, or web servers, could check for and redirect to the AMP version. There's a slightly-higher wall for advertisers, I believe. But Google is rightfully afraid of antitrust issues and seems eager to get advertisers besides themselves signed up. But it is a wall in that it requires whitelisting, as far as I remember. There's a lot to criticise about AMP, but I don't think the "walled garden" metaphor fits.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    AMP has the wall. Can I get the same display in the Google Search with or without AMP? No. That’s the wall.
    - AznHisoka 9y ago
      Can you elaborate? sites that dont implement AMP still appear in google news and even above AMP results as far as I can tell
      - lallysingh 9y ago
        Try regular google search, instead of news.
josteink 9y ago
> AMP does not seem like a walled garden tech. any crawler can find and use the AMP version of a page through this tag So "any crawler" who is willing to slavishly follow whatever Google is currently doing, and currently doing in the open (who knows how long that will last), can technically get access to the same content so it's not a "walled garden". To me it sounds like Google doing yet another non-standard thing without asking the rest of the web-community for input, and using their weight as a way to push this through in their usual, hostile manner. And here on HN people are defending it as perfectly reasonable. The mob clearly has something to learn from these guys.
- AznHisoka 9y ago
  So lets say AMP was not invented. Web pages have been notoriously slow on mobile for a decade. Where is this open standard to make pages lod faster? where is W3 or Mozilla? Its been a decade. if there was a competituve open standard I would be against AMP but there isnt.
  - josteink 9y ago
    > Where is this open standard to make pages lod faster? Not filling a page of what is effectively 80KB static text-content with 20MBs of JS, fonts, tracking-code and other "assets" would be a good start. The web isn't slow. People deliberately create slow web-pages because they care more about user-tracking and "fancy" technology than they care about user-experience. And making Google a pre-requisite for any web-page is NOT the solution to that problem. That's the wrong way around. We need less tracking. Less JS. Less Google.
    - tgragnato 9y ago
      Hopefully tech people will start to ditch companies with such a bad behaviour. > https://twitter.com/aral/status/877998804678524928 https://twitter.com/aral/status/877998804678524928
    - sangnoir 9y ago
      > Not filling a page of what is effectively 80KB static text-content with 20MBs of JS, fonts, tracking-code and other "assets" would be a good start. I imagine if you expand and codify this idea, you will come up with something very close to AMP. I'm not sure if you're against the idea of AMP/AMP-like standard, or against Google's execution of it.
chatmasta 9y ago
When you load an AMP page in your browser, you never actually connect to the original publisher. That seems like a walled garden to me. Personally, as a consumer, I absolutely hate the fact that I can't quickly check my browser's domain bar to see what website I'm reading (to assess its credibility for example).

boramalper 9y ago

I am not saying exactly that Google is evil, and maybe they don't even have bad intentions (heck, we are talking about a corporate identity here, how far can we apply morals?). But, what I am thinking is that AMP and its rivals (such as Instant Articles) hurt the free & open Web. For instance, Google Search is invaluable, but as a side effect, a website that doesn't end up on the first page of a Google Search result for instance, is nearly non-existent. Also, the notion of hyperlinks are crucial to the Web and these projects break it. Hyperlinks originate from an article from 1945, "As We May Think"[1], and the term itself is coined by Ted Nelson in 1965 for Project Xanadu. That's how you create a web that is now called the Web. That's also what Google's PageRank algorithm depends on, at least at the beginning. Now, letting Google host your content, under a link such as `https://www.google.com/amp/www.example.com/amp/doc.html` https://www.google.com/amp/www.example.com/amp/doc.html`, you are breaking hyperlinks: it is no more linking different websites together. [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

chii 9y ago
i would expect that content producers will start putting in abreviated versions of their content in AMP format to satisfy the AMP requirement as minimially as possible, and then add a link back to the original site for the rest.
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  That's exactly what allrecipes.com used to do, and they have fairly high Google juice for random recipes. I thought they still did, but when I went to verify it didn't show up. It'd be interesting to know why they stopped.
- ryantownsend 9y ago
  I'm going to guess Google would penalise that behaviour for showing different content, justifying it as "harming the user experience" or something. If they don't do this already, they probably will if they keep going down the AMP rabbit-hole.
- arielm 9y ago
  I believe reddit does something like that where they include only a portion of a thread with a big “view full thread” button. I think that’s a good idea, but I fear some users won’t realize there’s more or may not understand the abrupt change in layout/design/etc.

coldtea 9y ago

>Thus all google is doing is rewarding sites that have implemented this and as a result load fast, no? No. And Google could not care less if pages load fast -- it could incenticize making pages faster with traditional methods instead. It's all about capturing more eyeballs and proxying more traffic.

matt4077 9y ago
But why? AMP allows other advertisers. They can track clicks just as easily with a redirect. They could quite easily change the UI of the Android browser to allow for fast switching through search results. Nobody cares what CDN the bytes are served from if the content is identical. I agree that it's somehow yucky, but I don't see how it can be ascribed to malice intent, instead of an effort to improve the user experience that maybe goes too far.
brainfire 9y ago
They already did that, and web "developers" did not do the work. The period in which Google incentivized faster page loads was the period of some of the worst page bloat growth.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >They already did that, and web "developers" did not do the work. It's not up to them to decide after that.
- dspillett 9y ago
  It depends what "market" you are looking at. In some areas people understand care about such things, in those areas we did and still do see some optimisation effort. Far from everywhere of course, even within that subset, but I'd wager there was improvement overall (or at least things got worse less than they otherwise would). In other areas though the available audience either doesn't understand or doesn't care (because their connection and CPU are fast enough to cope for instance, and they aren't on an expensive metered link) or both. I say "available audience" because for these sites the "target audience" is every-human-alive-several-times-over-good-god-we-need-more-ad-impressions-and-clicks - the likes of buzzfeed and the other click-bait filled "news" and "entertainment" sites where four sentences of content can be stretched over sixteen pages of large, slow loading, auto-playing, obnoxious adverts. The people who care about load time (and/or relevant technical or privacy matters) simply don't follow those links. The people who do follow the links aren't worth making page load optimisations for because they simply won't care or notice, so from the site's PoV the time is better spent on adverts-hung-onto-into-each-morsel-of-content optimisations instead. And that was when Google ranking was the main thing that mattered, more recently the operators of such sites are more interested in distribution via social media so Google ranking you lower for a slow load is less of a concern, or if it is a concern there are tricks (not all of which Google can easily filter for - it is an on-going war of attrition) to show Google different versions of the content that does load quickly.

michaelt 9y ago

Sites that are traditionally called walled gardens (facebook, AOL, compuserve...) often combine four features; (a) all the content is hosted under the walled garden's domain; (b) the walled garden designs key parts of the navigation and layout, understandably acting in their own interests; (c) the walled garden has content policies and declines to host certain content; and (d) users must have accounts and be logged in to see the content. AMP does (a) and (b); I don't know about (c); and doesn't do (d). Still, I can see why people see echos of walled gardens in AMP.

matt4077 9y ago
The feature that defines a walled garden is the wall. AMP doesn't have that wall: it is perfectly usable by any other search engine/spider to replicate the experience. The website itself can link to the AMP version if that makes sense for users. Mobile browsers, or web servers, could check for and redirect to the AMP version. There's a slightly-higher wall for advertisers, I believe. But Google is rightfully afraid of antitrust issues and seems eager to get advertisers besides themselves signed up. But it is a wall in that it requires whitelisting, as far as I remember. There's a lot to criticise about AMP, but I don't think the "walled garden" metaphor fits.
- kuschku 9y ago
  AMP has the wall. Can I get the same display in the Google Search with or without AMP? No. That’s the wall.
  - AznHisoka 9y ago
    Can you elaborate? sites that dont implement AMP still appear in google news and even above AMP results as far as I can tell
    - lallysingh 9y ago
      Try regular google search, instead of news.

josteink 9y ago

> AMP does not seem like a walled garden tech. any crawler can find and use the AMP version of a page through this tag So "any crawler" who is willing to slavishly follow whatever Google is currently doing, and currently doing in the open (who knows how long that will last), can technically get access to the same content so it's not a "walled garden". To me it sounds like Google doing yet another non-standard thing without asking the rest of the web-community for input, and using their weight as a way to push this through in their usual, hostile manner. And here on HN people are defending it as perfectly reasonable. The mob clearly has something to learn from these guys.

AznHisoka 9y ago
So lets say AMP was not invented. Web pages have been notoriously slow on mobile for a decade. Where is this open standard to make pages lod faster? where is W3 or Mozilla? Its been a decade. if there was a competituve open standard I would be against AMP but there isnt.
- josteink 9y ago
  > Where is this open standard to make pages lod faster? Not filling a page of what is effectively 80KB static text-content with 20MBs of JS, fonts, tracking-code and other "assets" would be a good start. The web isn't slow. People deliberately create slow web-pages because they care more about user-tracking and "fancy" technology than they care about user-experience. And making Google a pre-requisite for any web-page is NOT the solution to that problem. That's the wrong way around. We need less tracking. Less JS. Less Google.
  - tgragnato 9y ago
    Hopefully tech people will start to ditch companies with such a bad behaviour. > https://twitter.com/aral/status/877998804678524928 https://twitter.com/aral/status/877998804678524928
  - sangnoir 9y ago
    > Not filling a page of what is effectively 80KB static text-content with 20MBs of JS, fonts, tracking-code and other "assets" would be a good start. I imagine if you expand and codify this idea, you will come up with something very close to AMP. I'm not sure if you're against the idea of AMP/AMP-like standard, or against Google's execution of it.

chatmasta 9y ago

When you load an AMP page in your browser, you never actually connect to the original publisher. That seems like a walled garden to me. Personally, as a consumer, I absolutely hate the fact that I can't quickly check my browser's domain bar to see what website I'm reading (to assess its credibility for example).