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> Instead of granting premium placement in search results only to AMP, provide the same perks to all pages that meet an objective, neutral performance criterion

> Instead of granting premium placement in search results only to AMP, provide the same perks to all pages that meet an objective, neutral performance criterion such as Speed Index. But who will measure it "objectively" (leaving aside no one agrees on how to universally measure load speed). Googlebot? From what location and what machine types and how often? Should I get search results based on an average of all possible variables or the closest matching my locale and device? What happens when page content changes? What happens when the page sometimes loads slow content (e.g. ads) and sometimes doesn't? What happens when SEOers start cloaking their ad loads or taking advantage of flaws in the benchmark? It's good to have a speed signal in search rankings, but this petition shouldn't pretend that's an objective replacement for something that always displays content first and loads media and third party content async

the8472 9y ago
> or taking advantage of flaws in the benchmark? Then you improve your benchmark.
- klodolph 9y ago
  That's a cat an mouse game that search engines and SEO companies have been playing for years. "Improve your benchmark" only works when you don't have adversaries. Edit: To clarify, "improve your benchmark" is not a viable strategy by itself any more than "put your opponent in checkmate" is a viable strategy. As advice it is unhelpful. You generally have to mitigate flaws in the way you rank pages, keep large parts of the algorithm secret, and attack the economic viability of your adversary's strategies. Rather than going for checkmate, you want your opponent to resign so you can do something else instead. There have been incentives for bad behavior on the web for so long that I don't think we have any hope of coming up with any kind of automated benchmark to tell us which pages have good user experience.
  - electrograv 9y ago
    > "Improve your benchmark" only works when you don't have adversaries. If this were true, then there would exist no search engines consistently capable of finding content highly relevant to the user's query -- as opposed to just returning promoted content, which according to your premise is always winning the adversarial battle. Sure, there is an adversarial element, which means there is a constant 'battle' for 'fairness' among results (or whatever your goals are as a search engine). But in reality, search engines as a whole seem to work rather well at finding what we want. Of course results are biased from adversarial pressures (and that's what we're discussing on this thread), but it does seem possible for "benchmarks" to work well in an adversarial environment.
    - klodolph 9y ago
      Search engines work by not just improving the benchmark but also making the benchmark a trade secret. That's what I was saying. And if it's a trade secret I would say that the word "benchmark" is a misnomer. Broadly speaking, a benchmark is a standardized way of measuring something, and if only one company can perform the measurement then it's not really a standard.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - drb91 9y ago
      > If this were true, then there would exist no search engines consistently capable of finding content highly relevant to the user's query -- as opposed to just returning promoted content, which according to your premise is always winning the adversarial battle. I can’t tell if you agree that google doesn’t return highly relevant content or if you just get better results than I do. Almost all my search results are dominated by low relevance high click through brands, regardless of quality. For example: quora often replaces high quality content with low quality paywalled answers researched from wikpedia or other public resources. 10 years ago you would have gotten metafilter, which is (imho) objectively a higher quality source less hostile to web users.
      - electrograv 9y ago
TeMPOraL 9y ago
Here's a potential solution for Google: just log load times for people who use Chrome and are logged in to their Google account at the browser level. All the hard work of eliminating abuse is something they've done already for those accounts. And their userbase is so big, and presence so strong, that it would generate pressure everyone would benefit from.
- stevenleeg 9y ago
  Erg, the idea of Google phoning home information about each page I visit at the browser level is a bit terrifying...
  - jstanley 9y ago
    How confident are you that that doesn't happen already?
    - Skunkleton 9y ago
      It certainly does happen already if you are opted into it.
      - pdkl95 9y ago
        It certainly does happen already without having to opt-in for the many sites that collaborate with Google, reporting your interactions with their site to GA.
        Skunkleton 9y ago
        I was trying to avoid making a controversial statement. I didn't mean to imply that you were explicitly opting in, just that you are opted in.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    It does happen already - after all, you have shared browsing history between logged in devices using Chrome. My idea doesn't require anything new except them measuring load times, which I'm guessing they're doing already for improving Chrome, and then using this data to influence search ranking. Everything else is already set up and working, and you opt into it if you're using Chrome and are logged in browser-wide.
ucaetano 9y ago
GoogleBot runs only in a few datacenters in certain locations in the world with amazing connectivity. It is a horrible predictor of load times.
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  Chrome's own dev tools can emulate slow connections for you. If their browser can do that, why not their crawler?
  - ucaetano 9y ago
    Because the user isn't sitting at a datacenter. An user in Indonesia isn't at the closest datacenter in Singapore. It doesn't matter what you do, you can't, from Singapore, try to emulate what an user on a particular ISP in a particular city in Indonesia will face. In case it isn't clear: Consider 2 websites, both have hosting in Singapore, but one also uses a CDN in Jakarta. The Google crawler running on the Singapore datacenter connects to both websites, speeds are great because they are sitting just next to the datacenter. Both get great ratings. An user is in Jakarta, and tries to connect to both websites. One of them takes a century to load, because it has to load everything from Singapore, and international cables from Singapore to Jakarta are expensive, so connections are capped. Experience sucks. The second website uses a CDN in Jakarta, located at the local coloc facility to which the user's ISP is also connected to. The website loads instantly. CDNs today are located in every single small ISP, in all countries, in all medium-sized cities in the world.
    - SheinhardtWigCo 9y ago
      The poster was arguing that negative network conditions can be simulated. If the problem is a lack of information about global network conditions, then you can deploy canary machines around the world to gather that information.
      - ucaetano 9y ago
        They can be simulated, but not predicted. > If the problem is a lack of information about global network conditions, then you can deploy canary machines around the world to gather that information. You'd need to put machines in every single city and every single ISP in the world continuously testing every website in the world. Doesn't make any sense at all. That's not how networks work.
gonational 9y ago
> But who will measure it "objectively" One potential solution that fits the theme of the letter could be logic like this: MAX = <reasonably fast load time> if page loads in > MAX: -> punish page rank Rather than the current logic: if page uses GOOG proprietary: -> show at the very top -> trick anyone that clicks -> profit else: -> ban website -> reach out to sell AdWords "Reasonably fast" could be relative to the context - for example, ecommerce results might be a bit larger on average than news results, etc., so not a static "3 seconds at 3G speed". "Reasonably fast" could also be defined more loosely as "page uses good optimization practices" (e.g., like a YSlow grade).
- londons_explore 9y ago
  Google already measures a bunch of site speed parameters (time to render start, time to render the content text the user is trying to read/search for, etc.) They factor in all that stuff to a user happyness metric which impacts rankings, probably via a bunch of machine learned models. The AMP logos and stuff are to try and force webmasters to take speed seriously. For years people have said it's important, yet big sites like eBay and Amazon, who certainly have the financial means and motivation to, still take 10x longer to load than what would maximize both revenue and user happyness.
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    > They factor in all that stuff to a user happyness metric which impacts rankings And speed is way down on the list. Try searching for lyrics to any popular song and tell me it isn't so. All they really need to do is add more weight to it. But they don't want to because that breaks the lock-in that they are striving for.
- gregable 9y ago
  > MAX = <reasonably fast load time> If you define 'reasonably fast' as ~10ms after click, the only possible option is AMP. Even a .txt file will be orders of magnitude slower. Privacy reasons mean that it is basically impossible to load the content from the publisher's server until after the user clicks on the result. If you wait until the user click event to load the content, then there is nothing you can do to avoid a full network round trip. AMP preloads the minimal content before the click, removing the round-trip. That's the whole magic, and the only way to get the 'instant' load. There are unavoidable technical requirements to do this: - Loading from Google's (or link provider X's) servers to preserve privacy. - Constraining the html so that the load itself can't break privacy or add jank to the search result page. If you aren't willing to accept these constraints, then you are always going to face a network round-trip in added latency. You can't have all 3 of: - Zero perceived latency - Privacy - Serving from the publisher server You can only pick 2. AMP forces choosing the first 2 which are what the vast majority of users care about. Then AMP goes way out of it's way to give publishers back everything they could possibly miss from the 3rd.
guy98238710 9y ago
People are already cheating with AMP by putting only introduction on the AMP page and then linking to the heavy main content at the end. Cheating is something that Google has to deal with all the time.
- SquareWheel 9y ago
  Starting February 1st they'll be blocking AMP doorway pages. https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2017/11/engaging-users-through-high-quality-amp.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2017/11/engaging-users-thr...
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  So making my own page display what I want is cheating now?
  - Operyl 9y ago
    No, serving differing content based on the source, making users double click to view it all, while trying to reap the “SEO” benefits of AMP is.
guy98238710 9y ago
Measuring page speed accurately seems like a way smaller engineering problem than attempting to convert the whole internet to AMP.
baxtr 9y ago
Google owns a browser. They should be able to measure average load times for every page on this planet from almost any location (Of course User permission must be granted, but shouldn’t that be feasible?)
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if they already have an opt-out feature which does just that.
- inian 9y ago
  They do..for over a million websites! https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/12/crux https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/12/crux This data is a much better indicator of how fast a page is vs if it is AMP or not.
underwater 9y ago
The one thing AMP does right is have a hard and fast set of rules that pages must follow. Page performance for regular web sites dies a death from a thousand cuts. Was is the web developer who added that last analytics tag that made it slow? Or was it the 12 other third-party tags that already existed? Unless you have a single self-contained team who control the entire stack, do a ground up rewrite, or have a dedicated performance team, it's hard to hold the line against a thousand little things that slow the web down.
katastic 9y ago
>But who will measure it "objectively" I recall HN being just fine with "objectively" with regard to hiding hate speech online. We'll let them judge morality, but not a simple metric of loading time?

the8472 9y ago

> or taking advantage of flaws in the benchmark? Then you improve your benchmark.

klodolph 9y ago
That's a cat an mouse game that search engines and SEO companies have been playing for years. "Improve your benchmark" only works when you don't have adversaries. Edit: To clarify, "improve your benchmark" is not a viable strategy by itself any more than "put your opponent in checkmate" is a viable strategy. As advice it is unhelpful. You generally have to mitigate flaws in the way you rank pages, keep large parts of the algorithm secret, and attack the economic viability of your adversary's strategies. Rather than going for checkmate, you want your opponent to resign so you can do something else instead. There have been incentives for bad behavior on the web for so long that I don't think we have any hope of coming up with any kind of automated benchmark to tell us which pages have good user experience.
- electrograv 9y ago
  > "Improve your benchmark" only works when you don't have adversaries. If this were true, then there would exist no search engines consistently capable of finding content highly relevant to the user's query -- as opposed to just returning promoted content, which according to your premise is always winning the adversarial battle. Sure, there is an adversarial element, which means there is a constant 'battle' for 'fairness' among results (or whatever your goals are as a search engine). But in reality, search engines as a whole seem to work rather well at finding what we want. Of course results are biased from adversarial pressures (and that's what we're discussing on this thread), but it does seem possible for "benchmarks" to work well in an adversarial environment.
  - klodolph 9y ago
    Search engines work by not just improving the benchmark but also making the benchmark a trade secret. That's what I was saying. And if it's a trade secret I would say that the word "benchmark" is a misnomer. Broadly speaking, a benchmark is a standardized way of measuring something, and if only one company can perform the measurement then it's not really a standard.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - drb91 9y ago
    > If this were true, then there would exist no search engines consistently capable of finding content highly relevant to the user's query -- as opposed to just returning promoted content, which according to your premise is always winning the adversarial battle. I can’t tell if you agree that google doesn’t return highly relevant content or if you just get better results than I do. Almost all my search results are dominated by low relevance high click through brands, regardless of quality. For example: quora often replaces high quality content with low quality paywalled answers researched from wikpedia or other public resources. 10 years ago you would have gotten metafilter, which is (imho) objectively a higher quality source less hostile to web users.
    - electrograv 9y ago

TeMPOraL 9y ago

Here's a potential solution for Google: just log load times for people who use Chrome and are logged in to their Google account at the browser level. All the hard work of eliminating abuse is something they've done already for those accounts. And their userbase is so big, and presence so strong, that it would generate pressure everyone would benefit from.

stevenleeg 9y ago
Erg, the idea of Google phoning home information about each page I visit at the browser level is a bit terrifying...
- jstanley 9y ago
  How confident are you that that doesn't happen already?
  - Skunkleton 9y ago
    It certainly does happen already if you are opted into it.
    - pdkl95 9y ago
      It certainly does happen already without having to opt-in for the many sites that collaborate with Google, reporting your interactions with their site to GA.
      - Skunkleton 9y ago
        I was trying to avoid making a controversial statement. I didn't mean to imply that you were explicitly opting in, just that you are opted in.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  It does happen already - after all, you have shared browsing history between logged in devices using Chrome. My idea doesn't require anything new except them measuring load times, which I'm guessing they're doing already for improving Chrome, and then using this data to influence search ranking. Everything else is already set up and working, and you opt into it if you're using Chrome and are logged in browser-wide.

ucaetano 9y ago

GoogleBot runs only in a few datacenters in certain locations in the world with amazing connectivity. It is a horrible predictor of load times.

ubernostrum 9y ago
Chrome's own dev tools can emulate slow connections for you. If their browser can do that, why not their crawler?
- ucaetano 9y ago
  Because the user isn't sitting at a datacenter. An user in Indonesia isn't at the closest datacenter in Singapore. It doesn't matter what you do, you can't, from Singapore, try to emulate what an user on a particular ISP in a particular city in Indonesia will face. In case it isn't clear: Consider 2 websites, both have hosting in Singapore, but one also uses a CDN in Jakarta. The Google crawler running on the Singapore datacenter connects to both websites, speeds are great because they are sitting just next to the datacenter. Both get great ratings. An user is in Jakarta, and tries to connect to both websites. One of them takes a century to load, because it has to load everything from Singapore, and international cables from Singapore to Jakarta are expensive, so connections are capped. Experience sucks. The second website uses a CDN in Jakarta, located at the local coloc facility to which the user's ISP is also connected to. The website loads instantly. CDNs today are located in every single small ISP, in all countries, in all medium-sized cities in the world.
  - SheinhardtWigCo 9y ago
    The poster was arguing that negative network conditions can be simulated. If the problem is a lack of information about global network conditions, then you can deploy canary machines around the world to gather that information.
    - ucaetano 9y ago
      They can be simulated, but not predicted. > If the problem is a lack of information about global network conditions, then you can deploy canary machines around the world to gather that information. You'd need to put machines in every single city and every single ISP in the world continuously testing every website in the world. Doesn't make any sense at all. That's not how networks work.

gonational 9y ago

> But who will measure it "objectively" One potential solution that fits the theme of the letter could be logic like this: MAX = <reasonably fast load time> if page loads in > MAX: -> punish page rank Rather than the current logic: if page uses GOOG proprietary: -> show at the very top -> trick anyone that clicks -> profit else: -> ban website -> reach out to sell AdWords "Reasonably fast" could be relative to the context - for example, ecommerce results might be a bit larger on average than news results, etc., so not a static "3 seconds at 3G speed". "Reasonably fast" could also be defined more loosely as "page uses good optimization practices" (e.g., like a YSlow grade).

londons_explore 9y ago
Google already measures a bunch of site speed parameters (time to render start, time to render the content text the user is trying to read/search for, etc.) They factor in all that stuff to a user happyness metric which impacts rankings, probably via a bunch of machine learned models. The AMP logos and stuff are to try and force webmasters to take speed seriously. For years people have said it's important, yet big sites like eBay and Amazon, who certainly have the financial means and motivation to, still take 10x longer to load than what would maximize both revenue and user happyness.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  > They factor in all that stuff to a user happyness metric which impacts rankings And speed is way down on the list. Try searching for lyrics to any popular song and tell me it isn't so. All they really need to do is add more weight to it. But they don't want to because that breaks the lock-in that they are striving for.
gregable 9y ago
> MAX = <reasonably fast load time> If you define 'reasonably fast' as ~10ms after click, the only possible option is AMP. Even a .txt file will be orders of magnitude slower. Privacy reasons mean that it is basically impossible to load the content from the publisher's server until after the user clicks on the result. If you wait until the user click event to load the content, then there is nothing you can do to avoid a full network round trip. AMP preloads the minimal content before the click, removing the round-trip. That's the whole magic, and the only way to get the 'instant' load. There are unavoidable technical requirements to do this: - Loading from Google's (or link provider X's) servers to preserve privacy. - Constraining the html so that the load itself can't break privacy or add jank to the search result page. If you aren't willing to accept these constraints, then you are always going to face a network round-trip in added latency. You can't have all 3 of: - Zero perceived latency - Privacy - Serving from the publisher server You can only pick 2. AMP forces choosing the first 2 which are what the vast majority of users care about. Then AMP goes way out of it's way to give publishers back everything they could possibly miss from the 3rd.

guy98238710 9y ago

People are already cheating with AMP by putting only introduction on the AMP page and then linking to the heavy main content at the end. Cheating is something that Google has to deal with all the time.

SquareWheel 9y ago
Starting February 1st they'll be blocking AMP doorway pages. https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2017/11/engaging-users-through-high-quality-amp.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2017/11/engaging-users-thr...
dingo_bat 9y ago
So making my own page display what I want is cheating now?
- Operyl 9y ago
  No, serving differing content based on the source, making users double click to view it all, while trying to reap the “SEO” benefits of AMP is.

guy98238710 9y ago

Measuring page speed accurately seems like a way smaller engineering problem than attempting to convert the whole internet to AMP.

baxtr 9y ago

Google owns a browser. They should be able to measure average load times for every page on this planet from almost any location (Of course User permission must be granted, but shouldn’t that be feasible?)

dingo_bat 9y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if they already have an opt-out feature which does just that.
inian 9y ago
They do..for over a million websites! https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/12/crux https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/12/crux This data is a much better indicator of how fast a page is vs if it is AMP or not.

underwater 9y ago

The one thing AMP does right is have a hard and fast set of rules that pages must follow. Page performance for regular web sites dies a death from a thousand cuts. Was is the web developer who added that last analytics tag that made it slow? Or was it the 12 other third-party tags that already existed? Unless you have a single self-contained team who control the entire stack, do a ground up rewrite, or have a dedicated performance team, it's hard to hold the line against a thousand little things that slow the web down.

katastic 9y ago

>But who will measure it "objectively" I recall HN being just fine with "objectively" with regard to hiding hate speech online. We'll let them judge morality, but not a simple metric of loading time?